Wondering

[were_gopher]

What is wrong with this world that makes me even slightly nervous that I've let a 12YO and a 9YO go to the park at the end of our road on their own for an hour. Ok the 12YO isn't as savy as most kids his age but it's still something I don't think our parents would have thought twice about in the 60s or 70s.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know.

I started walking home from school by myself when I was six or seven. About a mile through the Council estates on which I lived with one difficult road.

At ten I was cycling on A roads up to five miles from home. I also went to the speech therapist by myself, which involved two bus routes and an awkward change. The speech therapist thought nothing of the fact that I came by myself.

At eleven we all went to school by bus or walked - mine was four miles away, with two major difficult roads and a half mile walk at the end of it. By this time I knew all the paths through the woods and fields and golf courses within a couple of miles radius of my house, and often walked them by myself.

And I wasn't even a particularly self-sufficient child, and my parents were intelligent and loving and careful.

[pwl1.livejournal.com]

When I was 10 I was walking home from school at lunch time - starting a fire in the wood stove, and heating up a can of soup for lunch.

Mind you, our village was very small, and I was related to approximately half of it.

And we are talking over 4 decades ago.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but with me we are talking five decades.

[aunty_marion]

Quite.

I walked the half-mile to and from INFANTS' school pretty much from the day I started, except for the occasional day when I met one of the teachers (who went the same way) and walked with her. One semi-main road to cross (it was a T-junction onto the slightly more main road). I took the bus to junior school - about 2-3 miles - but often walked back, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend. It involved crossing the main road outside the school with the crossing warden, then the main road at the bottom of our street, as well as several minor roads. At eleven I walked the mile and a half to grammar school as a matter of course, apart from the couple of years when I cycled.