Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile.
I turned five in the Summer of 1952, and started kindergarten that September at Maywood Avenue School (where Mom would later become a beloved third- and fourth-grade teacher for many years). The walk from our house on Edel Avenue to the school was .7 miles:
On the first day of Kindergarten (Mrs. Roth’s class), Mom walked me the whole way, noting landmarks I should remember, because I couldn’t yet read. Over the first week, she would walk me progressively less of the way, so I could walk the rest alone. At the end of the week, I walked the whole way myself, sometimes alone, sometimes with other kids. (This was early in the Baby Boom, and there were a zillion of us. We often moved in herds.)
In 1953, we moved to Woodland Avenue, on the right side of the map above. I walked from there too. After school we’d often go play in Borg’s Woods, on the right edge of the map. It wasn’t a nature preserve then; it was just the Borg family’s woods, and they liked to let kids play in it. Mr. Borg lived on Summit Avenue in Hackensack and ran what was then the Bergen Evening Record, our region’s newspaper. (It’s now just The Record.) The Borgs also let kids sled on their steep backyard, which sloped down into the woods.
My point is that kids then were raised to raise themselves, kind of like wild animals. Parents were attentive and caring, but valued freedom for, and from, their kids.
It wasn’t much different when my oldest two kids were small in the 1970s. We lived in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, mostly). When they were small and could walk to places alone, they just did. Nobody freaked out. (We lived out in the country, so I did drive them to schools.)
It’s different now, in too many ways to describe. We live in a far more information-rich environment: one in which there is far less privacy, and an infinitude of digital distractions. Parenting is much more of a project. Schooling is almost totally different, except that most schools still sort kids by age into grades and test the shit out of them.
I don’t have a lesson to impart here. I’m just noticing the changes, the differences, the way lives knit together, then and now.
Leave a Reply