Parents protect kids from 'real life' but let them roam freely online
- Joanne Jacobs
- May 13
- 1 min read
America's kids get few restrictions on screen time, lots of restrictions on outdoor activities, according to an Institute of Family Studies report. The normal American childhood is supervised by adults: Sixty-one percent of 17-year-olds aren't allowed to leave their neighborhood on their own.
Starting on the first day of kindergarten, I walked to school with my six-year-old sister (and a horde of other Baby Boomer kids). That was the norm. Many of our mothers had younger kids at home. They didn't have the time to be "helicopter" or "snowplow" parents.
Parents with more education are more likely to limit their children's screen time, and somewhat less likely to think 8- to 12-year-olds need constant supervision, the study found. However, "even parents who would describe their parenting style as low tech and who encourage free-range play allow their three-year-old children, on average, 3.5 hours per week of time on internet-enabled devices," concludes High Tech, Low Play. "Three-year-old children of parents who encourage tech average 6 hours per week using such devices."
Nearly half of three-year-olds use a Tablet, iPad or Kindle, often with few or no restrictions. By 11, more than 60 percent of children have a smartphone, which they use to access the Internet with few restrictions.
I'm trying to remember when I was allowed to walk my bike on the road around a fenced yard that was at the corner of a neighborhood with streets. The road I lived on was two-lane connector and near the end of a long straightaway so the speeds were high. I would lay in bed on Fri/Sat nights and often heard someone miss the curve just down from us. Next day there would be car size hole in the bushes. I believe I was allowed to do that at 9 or 10. Odd since I had been standing alongside the road in the winter early morning darkness since I was 6 years old.
At 12 I was stuck in the…
I didn't walk in K-1 because the school was too far away, but then the summer before 2nd my dad got relocated to a different state, and the new school was right (ish) behind our house. The walk was 0.2 miles through the woods on nice days and 0.7 miles around the block on rainy ones. I did that walk from ages 7 through 13. Not only did we all walk to school, but in the afternoons, we would all get on our bikes and ride the back streets to what we would now call a strip mall and buy candy and Matchbox cars at the drugstore. Just us kids, in a pack ranging from age 7 to age 17.
I think that I had hit the ripe of old age of 5 (around 1963) when my mom sent me down to the little neighborhood grocery with $5 to get something. It was 4 blocks away.