I went to the wedding of a childhood friend the other day, and in reminiscing about the old days, it struck us how different things were back then. For example:
1) When I was six or seven years old, I would walk to school every day with Alice, a neighbor girl who was only a year older than me. The school wasn’t that far away, but it was at least a half a mile, across a major street. Perhaps things are different in rural areas, but I can’t imagine letting my daughter walk to school with only another kid her age, even now, and she’s nine, not seven.
2) We used to play sports in the street for hours after school. At the wedding my childhood friend Joe said, “We played until the street lights came on–that’s when you knew it was time to go home and have dinner.” How often does this happened anymore? I wouldn’t let my kid, at age 6 or 7, go out of sight to play ball on some other kid’s street for several hours. Even my soon-to-be 15-year-old son is on a constant cell phone leash.
(One other reason why this couldn’t happen today is that the schools pile so much goddamn homework on the kids that there’s no time to spend hours running around and playing after school. Instead, it’s come home, have a snack and then sit down to do homework. And if I sound bitter, that’s because I am…)
So what is it–are things really more dangerous today, or are we just more careful? I suspect it’s the latter, but maybe I’m wrong.
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