nothing has more energy than an unsupervised Kid Sparky!  If he were a cartoon, he'd have little dust clouds behind him.

Yeah, I know they weren't talking about toddlers.  I know I spent a lot of time wondering around in the woods, and around my neighborhood, just using the time to explore and think.  Supervision would have hampered that.  

been at the forefront of that in our neighborhood.  When we first moved here 2 1/2 years ago, the kids on our street never went out.  That said, they were younger then.  But I remember hearing about it from the other moms... "I saw your kid riding his bike in the court alone.  Is he allowed to do that without you?".  "Aren't you afraid he'll be abducted???"  He was in kindergarten, and the court runs behind our house.  I could see him pass by back and forth from my kitchen window.  I trusted him not to wander further.  

Then, as the year went on I was told that it was frowned upon to just send a kid over to a neighbor's house... you had to call first so that the neighbor could be looking out for your child.  Ugh... that's not the way I grew up.  My kid rides his bike up and down the street just like I did as a kid.  Again, I trust that he will not wander miles away.  

I told my neighbors to just have their kids come over and knock on the door if they want to play with my kid.  Now, the whole call ahead thing has gone out the window.  Kids show up at my door whenever and vice-versa.  The neighbors have relaxed considerably.  Part of it is due to the fact that their kids are older, and part of it is just them realizing that all this over-protection is unhealthy.  

I think there's a happy medium between constantly monitoring your child's whereabouts and letting them wander whenever and wherever they want.  

My boys are 5 and a month shy of 4.  We have a large lot (3 1/2 acres)on a very quiet cul-de-sac.  The boys need much more "run around time" than I can really give them, if I'm directly involved all of the time. My friends are horrified, but I've started letting them play outside without me, with a lot of limits in place.  If they want to ride bikes or play in the cul-de-sac, I bring out work I can do on my laptop or some laundry to fold and sit on the front porch.  If they're in the backyard, as long as they stay in the yard, I feel pretty comfortable staying inside and getting stuff done, while checking on them every once in a while.  They're louder than a pack of banshees, so I usually have a pretty good sense of where they are and what they're doing, without them being directly in my line of sight.

I've just reached the conclusion that while I could spend all of my time obsessing about abductions and accidents, it's in my best interest to just get a grip.  They could fall off of the monkey bars just as easily with me sitting on the bench right next to the play set as they can with me prepping dinner.  Anybody willing to walk into my backyard and try to abduct a child would need to be working hard enough to orchestrate that, that I don't think my letting them play outside or not would really be the major preventative factor.  At some point in time, my child IS going to be greater than two feet away from me, ya know?  They have too much energy and get too bored in the house and I'd rather not clean up after it and be mad at them constantly for something they can't really control.

What is it about our generation? Did we all know someone who was abducted as a child? You would think that it happened routinely to everyone I know.

I apologize to anyone who DID have this happen in their childhood, but it really bothers me the way that children now seem to live under a microscope and I am concerned about the impact it will have on them when they get older.

Here are my memories of childhood: long solo bike rides, playing in the woods, long summer days when I left in the morning and didn't report back until dinnertime. I used to go swimming with my friends with no adults present. We had an entire universe that the adults did not know about.

I let my children play in the fenced backyard by themselves. I can see them from every window at the back of my house. I am unusual among my friends for doing this. I know that as the older boy starts to want to walk around the corner to his best friend's house, I will want to let him, and the other boy's mother will think I am crazy. I really, really, really hate the fact that I feel so alone in wanting my children to have (with of course reasonable boundaries) some time when I am not tagging along two feet behind them.

And of course, what I often think is that as kids are kept indoors and supervised all the time, the one thing they seem to be allowed to do with complete freedom is watch whatever they want on TV, play whatever video games they want to play, and go online to find who-only-knows what there. IMHO, playing outside alone is much more risk-free.

Sorry to rant a bit, but this is an issue of spent a fair amount of time stewing over (can ya tell?).

I had the exact opposite as a child.  I wasn't allowed to ride my bike out of the driveway until I was too old to want to ride my bike anymore.  Wasn't allowed to wander or go anywhere.  The result was that I had NO friends in the neighborhood and was slightly overweight as a child.  I HATED it!  I did have free reign in the yard and my mom encouraged me to stay outside all day (there was a little girl abducted by a stranger in my city when I was a baby, and I think it really scared my mom).

I have vowed never to do that to my kids (almost 4 on still in utero).  We are moving to a house with a fenced yard next month, and as soon as it is warm enough, I will let DS play outside alone, with me checking on him a lot, and rules about wandering in place.

Allowing him to have the freedom he needs is sometimes a struggle for me.  My degree is in criminal justice and I work in media, so I am admittedly a little more paranoid than I need to be.  But I am trying!

I dream of living in a neighborhood of other mommas like the people on this board!  Neither "alpha" nor "beta", willing to let their kids play and gasp occasionally eat a cookie off the floor!  I know they must exist here, I just can't find them.  If I could, I would want us all to move to the same neighborhood so all the kids could play outside and we could ALL keep an eye on them.

Although, wandering aimlessly was exactly how I spent a good deal of my childhood.

That was me.
Not only that, if we came inside during the day my mom would say "what are you doing inside? Go outside and play.".
We went all up and down our street and in the alley.
All that was required was being in yelling distance.

That has pretty much been the way we've raised our son.
Just be in yelling distance.
He has played outside by himself since he was about 5. I will admit that it helps he was not a kid prone to wander off (kinda a fearful child) and we live on a cul-de-sac in the country on 2 acre lots with woods behind us.
My husband and I decided when Josh (now 15) was little that we would not parent in fear and that he would have as much freedom as possible. Kids need autonomy and for the most part the way they find it is being left the hell alone by their parents for large parts of the day.

Even now with his daily gaming/computer ritual being his priority, he still shoots out into the yard/woods for an hour or so every day.
No not smoking weed.
;-)
He is actually "acting" out all the new scenarios on his video games.
(and I think it is sweet that my teen is still "play acting" even if he hides from the other guys so they will not make fun of him and it is mostly violent video games.)

DS is 4 and a half, still hasn't the sense to look when he crosses the street, but he will be 5 in May and start kindergarten in the fall of 2008--and that's when I will start letting him go places by himself a little more. We live in a great neighborhood with lots of kids his age and open public spaces--there's a school and playing fields and playgrounds a block from our house. All the kids his age in the 'hood are still accompanied by adults-- except for one family, whose kids we call the Ferile Children because there is simply NO supervision at all. In a couple years I anticipate it will start to change. The kids are all pretty little now.

I spent most of my childhood wandering aimlessly in the woods by myself or with a neighbor girl. I was probably allowed to do that starting in second grade or so.

Kids - at least some of them - do play outside unsupervised, including my kids.  I sometimes sit outside, or otherwise look out the window periodically and keep an ear out to see if I can still hear them.  We are on a fairly quiet street although there is occasional through traffic.

It's really nice to have that, and from walking around town and not seeing a whole lot of other kids out I know how unusual that is.  

I mourn for the loss of freedom in modern childhood.  Kids need to be with kids.  

When I was a kid adults never supervised play.  I remember playing in the "woods" (actually a large clump of trees) behind a neighbor's house with the neighborhood kids.  Next to a pond, not visible from the house.  At 7 I was often the eldest, and we older kids were responsible for keeping an eye on kids as young as 3.  By age 11 my best friend lived 2 miles across town and I was simply expected to tell my mom before biking over and be home by dinner.  This was universally considered normal.

I admit the pond thing at age 3 (!) seems a bit lax to me now. But I wish my kids could have the kind of healthy childhood we enjoyed.  This term I had two free afternoons a week, but I let my son stay at his afterschool program all five days.  What's the point of bringing him home early to be with mommy?  He hates it - after care is where the kids are, a place for him to run with his posse.  They don't have true freedom but they at least get to hang out under the neutral supervision of the staff.

We do have some real issues here - I trust her to stay off the road now but there is the river to worry about. Fortunately there's also a creek that is too shallow to be dangerous in summer.

But yes, I think outside muddy dirty play is essential.

Go read Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins for an example of how little freedom we allow our kids. Henry was riding a bus and going to the store in town on his own.

I had a relatively free reign to wander when I was a kid (tailored to age), and DH was totally allowed to go wherever, whenever. He and his brother got into a lot of things, so I'm not sure a policy of "just be home by dinner" is exactly the best, but there's got to be a happy medium to find.

The neighborhoods are rather deserted around us after school and on the weekends.  I think part of it is that in many of the families, both parents work, so most of the kids are in afterschool programs.  

They are mostly deserted during the day too now that I think about it, which leads at-home moms to have to join groups and the like to see other adult lifeforms during the day.  Kind of a pain.  

And then I think there are so many structured activities now, even on the weekends, that there just isn't a lot of time for kids to run around.

I spent hours and hours and hours running around unsupervised.  I think it was good, definitely makes one creative in coming up with things to do.

On the other hand, I could have used a few more structured activities too.

my kids won't go when I send them out to play.  Or they go, but stay for a whopping 10 minutes and then want to come back in. We have a wonderful yard, nifty toys, no traffic to speak of, and enough space for a serious soccer/ kick ball/ obstacle course experience.  They just don't know how to do it without me out there showing them what to do.    Or maybe it's an age thing- DS is 6 and DD is 4- they end up torturing each other until someone cries (most likely DD- she cries when I sweep snow off the car because I'm breaking up the snowflake families).

Drives me nuts- especially since they have no trouble entertaining themselves inside- without the TV.  It's like those first few years we spent living in places where outside simply wasn't an option (beyond organized trips to the park) have permanently handicapped them.

I remember my mom telling me very specifically, "Go outside and play and don't come back in until I call you."  I'm afraid DCF would come to the house if I did that now.  Well, in the summer...*I'd* call DCF if I did that now.  Brrrr!