The Wandering Kids

Published by

Clarissa

January 16, 2015

Everybody is having a fit of hysteria over the kids who were stopped by police as they were walking alone.

It’s easy to dump on the police and the mean strangers who called the police when they saw the kids walking alone. But you know what? I read the story of James Bulger and of the 38 strangers who saw him being led to his death by two kids and didn’t call the police. Something tells me that those 38 strangers have cursed their decision not to call the police a thousand times since then.

After reading about James Bulger, I’m totally calling the police if I see small kids just wandering around. I don’t want to be that stranger who didn’t call and then has to live with the guilt.

And as for the parents, they should be happy to live in such a caring society where everyone wants to look out for their kids.

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16 responses to “The Wandering Kids”

Stille (@aperfectbalance)

January 16, 2015

I don’t think it’s a good idea to make decisions about common situations based on one-in-a-billion events. The vast, vast, vast majority of children walking with no adult supervision aren’t going to murder the youngest one in the group.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 16, 2015
  
  It’s better to be on the safe side and just check. If the parents weren’t so unhinged, this could be a really great, helpful experience for the kids. The parents could have used the situation to tell the kids: everybody cares, you matter to everybody, you are so important to the world, you are safe because everybody is looking out for you. This would have had an enormously beneficial impact on the kids’ vision of the self. But these parents don’t care about the kids. They only care about sticking it to the symbolic parent in the form of governmental agencies. They still haven’t gone through their pre-teen rebellion. And now they are feeding this trauma with their own kids. And that’s just wrong.
  
  We all know that on the subject of abusive parents I can’t react calmly. I hope these particular parents have somebody close to them who cares enough about the kids to tell the parents that they are really messing this up.
  
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cliff arroyo

January 16, 2015

I can understand people calling the police if they’re not sure what’s going on. That makes sense.

But I don’t get threatening the parents for not signing on to a helicopter-parent-in-training program. Parents who won’t let their children out of sight when they’re 6 and 10 end up moving to college with them.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 16, 2015
  
  From the story it’s already obvious that these are very problematic parents. The CSU people were there and saw the situation with their own eyes. If they saw something disturbing – which it seems like they did – it’s their job to address it. A caring parent would easily find a way to present this as something positive to the kids. And these people are turning a normal, good situation into some political cause. That’s not helpful to the kids.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  January 16, 2015
  
  And there is zero difference between these parents and the ones who follow them to college. Both kinds of parents don’t see children as human beings with their own needs and interests. In both cases, a child is a prop used to manufacture a parent ‘ s comfort.
  
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3. Shakti
  
  January 17, 2015
  
  To a person, my Facebook friends all are decrying this as helicopter parenting gone amok while giving examples of their childhoods and decrying crime and news shows like it’s some recent phenomenon.
  Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted(“and then she was never seen alive again”) have been on tv in some form since I was in elementary school and the Law and Order franchise has been on for decades. It’s contextual but they don’t want to figure out why American society and their generations have collectively decided that children are not to wander around freely with unstructured time. That’s why you don’t see children in neighborhoods anymore. They also don’t tolerate other adults coming up to their kids outside of some structured environment. For those reasons, the adults called the cops — the kids stuck out like sore thumbs. Without any irony, they’re declaring everybody else to be fearful fools while they schedule their children for dear life and collectively freaked out about terrorism for 14 years. And this is a mostly suburban middle class discussion. Ask them about how they feel about expanding transit and they blink at you like cows or go NIMBY at the idea. Ask them about talking to their neighbors and they don’t. The viewpoint “I need a gun for personal protection against home invasion” and “I’m a free range parent” in the same person is especially funny, especially in suburban libertarians.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    January 17, 2015
    
    Great comment, Shakti, thank you. All I see in these parents and their supporters is extreme immaturity. They are throwing an enormous tantrum over something really trivial. Spoiled, overgrown, sleltered drama queens.
    
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    1. Evelina Anville
      
      January 17, 2015
      
      I agree that if CPS was concerned enough to investigate, something else might be happening. And some the details of the story do seem like the parents made some questionable judgement calls. For instance, having a 6 year and a10 year old walk to school together strikes me as reasonable since a parent will know immediately if the child didn’t “make it” to school. But having a 6 year old and a 10 year old walk to a park or somewhere unstructured (as these parent did) seems less reasonable. Although, I will say that a 10 year old and a 13 year old should have the freedom to walk to a park alone.
      
      Overall though, I believe very very strongly that children need some independence. Walking to school or a short distance to somewhere safe (babysitter, friend’s house etc.) are good things. And once children are a bit older (10-14 or so), I think the need for independance is even greater. The world (in the US) anyway, is– at basis– a safe place and children need to see it that way if they are going to become healthy adults. If parents are questioned or threatened with lawsuits every time children are given a bit of independance, then I don’t it’s trivial at all. Instead, I think it think it creates a sad culture of danger and To me, keeping children chained to an adult at all times is far riskier than letting them having a bit of unsupervised time. I don’t know. I don’t think the parents necessarily did the right thing here. But I’m still troubled by the investigation.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        January 17, 2015
        
        ” The world (in the US) anyway, is– at basis– a safe place and children need to see it that way if they are going to become healthy adults.”
        
        Yes, absolutely. But there is nothing that makes a child feel more precarious and unsafe than a situation where the kid thinks, “I went for a walk and now strangers are coming to the house, upsetting Mommy and Daddy, Mommy and Daddy are sad and unhappy, I’m to blame, it’s all my fault, etc.”
        
        “To me, keeping children chained to an adult at all times is far riskier than letting them having a bit of unsupervised time.”
        
        And I agree entirely. However, there is something worse than both these things: a parent who sees a child as an argument in a discussion, as a pawn in the parent’s fight for a cause. Even if that’s the best cause in the world.
        
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Shakti

January 16, 2015

See if I saw small children wandering around, I’d talk to them (assuming they can talk) before contacting their parents or the police on the assumption that they are lost not that the older children are junior psychopaths. Do adults not ever talk to kids in public anymore?

I wouldn’t let a 10 year old supervise younger siblings like that not because the kid might not have gumption but just because I’m not going to place a bet on the 10 year old’s presence of mind if an accident happens.

The Bulger case really does highlight that the assumptions that people make that siblings won’t bully siblings.

The parents are hilarious: “I grew up wandering around 1970s’ New York City and I turned out fine!”

You mentioned before that you raised your younger sister. I never supervised my brother like that mainly because we’re only a year apart.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 16, 2015
  “You mentioned before that you raised your younger sister.”
  
  It’s only with the help of my analyst that I realized that the story of a six year old staying at home alone for hours with a newborn is not a cute story. When you grow up inside an unhealthy model, it takes a long time to understand that it was unhealthy.
  
  The reason why I was put in charge of my sister is that it was a way of controlling me, making sure I had no friends. And it worked.
  
  But that’s a very different situation from the story discussed here.
  
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el

January 17, 2015

At the age of 6, Israeli kids go to the first grade. After school, if both parents work, many kids go alone home, open the door with a key and put meals in microwave. Should parents pay somebody to walk kids home and stay with them till evening? Some do, but f.e. most immigrants didn’t have money.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 17, 2015
  
  In the US, kids are taken home in big yellow school buses. It’s not a very walking friendly society.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    January 17, 2015
    
    Oh it depends on how close the children live to school. In my neighborhood, a lot of kids live close to the local junior high and I see them walking home (or wherever they are going) all the time. It’s so cute to see them walking in a gigantic group– all with their big back packs, making unearthly amounts of noise. 🙂 I would be very sad if kids no longer walked home from school together.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 17, 2015
      
      We also have a school nearby and kids walk home all the time from there. And I also feel very happy whenever I see them.
      
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Jones

January 17, 2015

“I WANT SOME RIZLAS PLEEASE!”

“Wot you take me for …”

There used to be a Flash game called “Off Licence” where the trick was that you had to carefully manipulate your voice with a voice changer so it would sound adult-like as part of obtaining a series of adult purchases …

“I WANT SOME RIZLAS PLEEASE!”

“Right, here you go.”

The problem with the Bulger case is that Venables and Thompson may have sounded very convincing to the adults.

For all we know, they might even have had some Rizlas — at least the courts appeared to treat them as if they did.

Also, my “idyllic free-roaming childhood” example might scare you a bit, but let’s put this to the test: how would you react to the local kids having distance shooting rifles for valid survival purposes?

[sinister grin]

“oh look it’s a tasty little human that can be eaten OW OW OW TASTY LITTLE HUMAN HAS HIGH-POWERED RIFLE SO MUCH PAIN MUST GET AWAY …”

OH WAIT YES, the game still exists:

http://mantlepies.com/viral_content/offlicence.html

🙂

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