Mom and Dad would sometimes leave my brother and me alone in the car while they took care of some unspecified business downtown. They would tell us they would be back in just a few minutes and under no circumstances were we to leave the car. That few minutes turned into a full hour. During that time, Loyd and I would get in the front seat and start going through the glove compartment. Once, I started playing with the levers and buttons on the steering wheel and turned on the emergency flashers. But the button got stuck and I couldn't pull it out. I tried, but it wouldn't budge. I quickly got out the owner's manual and it said that to stop the lights from flashing, I had to step on the brake. I did that and the lights did stop flashing. However, they were stopped in the "on" position. No matter how I timed it, I couldn't get the lights to stop when they were "off." (I didn't know this at the time, but the brake lights were going to stay on no matter when I stepped on the brake.)

Loyd and I were afraid people would see the flashing lights and wonder what was going on. I'm surprised that no one seemed to notice that something unusual was going on.

Finally, Mom and Dad came back to the car. My foot had been on that brake for about 15 minutes. We told Dad we couldn't turn off the emergency flashers. He reached in and was able to pull the button out and turn them off. Mom and Dad got really mad at us for not staying in the back seat.

In recent years, Mom has apologized for leaving us in the car like that and that they should have come out to check on us once it was apparent that the business they were conducting was not going to take five minutes. She said that today, parents wouldn't do something like that. But also today, kids have video games, cell phones and tablets to keep them entertained and out of trouble. We didn't even have any comic books to read. However, an hour is definitely too long to leave a couple of kids in a car all by themselves.

But this is what gets me: To this day, I have no idea what it was they were doing. (Mom and Dad didn't remember, either.) Whatever it was, it was so important that it required both of them to be there, children were not allowed, and once they were inside, neither parent was permitted to leave.

Maybe they were looking into a timeshare.

It's ridiculous how children are expected to remain tethered to their parents at all times. Here's my eighth-grade story. I started at a new school in the eighth grade, which was about five miles from where we lived. During exam weeks, I was often done with my exams by 11 AM. Having to sit around all afternoon, waiting for my mom to come get me, got old pretty fast. So one day I decided to walk.

This involved not only walking a couple of miles down a main thoroughfare in Chattanooga, but I also had to walk through the Brainerd Tunnel, a 900-foot traffic tunnel. I also had to walk under an overpass of Interstate 24 and cross its exit ramps and another main road. My mom was pretty nervous about all of this. She didn't say no exactly, but she didn't want me doing it.

One exam day, it just got too boring, so I set out to walk. Through the tunnel, dodging entering and exiting traffic on the main road. Walking under I-24 and hearing the traffic roar. Crossing streets, until I got to our neighborhood, and I made it to the apartment.

I didn't have a key, but no problem. We lived in a second-floor apartment and the balcony door was never locked. I climbed on the railing of the first-floor balcony, pulled myself up, and over the rail to our balcony. Then I went in, and back out the door to retrieve my books where I'd left them in the breezeway. No problem

I called my mom at work to tell her I was home and to not bother going to the school. She didn't seem very surprised. From that day on, that become my way of getting home whenever I was done with school early, until I got my driver's license. Never had a problem. How much trouble would parents be in today if one of their kids did that?

Given the child safety seat laws these days, those kids were probably all strapped into car seats in the back seat.

If I'd grown up in modern Texas, I probably would have been in a booster seat in high school:

https://www.dps.texas.gov/director_staff/public_information/carseat.htm

What trouble are they going to get into in 10 minutes strapped into the car?

Now parents are also told that they can't have the kids jackets on while the kid is strapped into the car. So, imagine it being 30 out, and you have to take the coats off of 3 kids each time you put them into the car...and then put them back on when they get out. I'd leave the little buggers in there too.

We are creating a society where parents have no option other than to be servants to their children, leaving both parents and children with no autonomy.

It's ridiculous how children are expected to remain tethered to their parents at all times. ~ Cousin Dave at June 7, 2019 6:36 AM

By requiring non-stop parental oversight, we've made raising children an expensive and time-consuming proposition. We've priced "proper" parenthood out of reach of all but the well-to-do.

What Conan said. My mom jokes that she wouldn’t have had kids if she had to raise them today. Both my parents used to drop my sister and me in the kids reading area at the library (starting when I was in 3rd grade), and we’d read while they ran errands! I saw this as a privilege and was a quiet little angel to avoid having this revoked. Or we’d read in the car.

I see my friends going batty because they are expected to be constantly tethered to their kids, and it’s so isolating.

Yes, my folks did the same all the time. In the 60’s I would throw my baseball glove on my monkey handlebars and pedal my bike 2 miles to little league, several days a week.

I had a friend in Detroit who, in junior high, who’s parents would give him $5 and be told to take the downtown bus to Tiger Stadium, and spend the day watching baseball. This was his “day camp”.

P.P.S. The world has gone cuckoopants.

Even more cuckoopants: You can get in trouble if you leave the kinder in the car and nothing happens to them ... but if you "forget" (wink!) and they cook in there all day, you're likely to get off scot-free with the "suffered enough" trope.

Power post + thread.

Per Haidt and Twenge et al, the teen suicides in the past ten years are up 25% for boys and 70% for girls. Adolescents are delaying experimentation with dating, sex, alcohol and even driving. There's some evidence that after college, they're increasingly likely to move back in with their parents. Haidt talks about the pattern discussed in this blog post specifically. I was sent out for groceries six or ten blogs away with three dollars in my pocket when I was 8. I've recently talked to younger fathers at work who still won't let their high school freshman move through the community without Mom or Dad.

We can blame John Walsh and teevee producers, but Americans desperately wanted to be a afraid of something, so they brought that stupidity into their own lives, quite willingly.

We've turned our children into wimps... Not if a metaphorical way, but actual wussieehood. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as our own attachment to the machinery of wealth creation and achievement is diminished in our senior years.

I strongly encourage people to listen to recent speeches and podcasts from Jonathan Haidt, who discusses Nassim Taleb's thoughts about anti-fragility in a conversational way.

This is probably good.

There are certain advantages to having kids SUPERVISED as much as possible (not necessarily by the parents).

Namely, the kids are less likely to get into trouble with the law - and when their unsupervised friends get into trouble, the supervised kids can prove they weren't there and thus avoid getting caught in cases of mistaken identity.

Sadly, as anyone who follows the news can guess, many is the time that packs of young people commit felonies that they would never have committed as individuals. This is why parents can't take it for granted that their straight-A kids will obey the laws when they're frequently unsupervised. (It's also important for kids to be truly AFRAID of their parents' bitter disappointment - and any punishments they might deal out. Teaching kids the law is simply not enough, whether they are 5 or 15.)

This isn't all about kids - it's about the police state mentality, where everything that isn't mandatory is prohibited.

On LivePD©, you can see the cops take a stick away from a homeless bum who wasn't doing anything more than walking - as if he can't find another stick - and I'm sure you've seen the English hysteria about knives.

We can't recover from this. There is nothing too trivial for the offended to insist the State prosecutes, and any idiot who feels unimportant will leap at the chance to have POWER!