I was going through the polls and saw the 2 asking if I was allowed to play wherever I wanted to when I was a kid & if my children are allowed to play wherever they want to. My answers to both of these: No.
When I saw that the majority of people said that they were able to go outside wherever they wanted to play as kids, I was surprised. I mean, seriously, your parents let you loose and you had absolutely no boundaries as to where you could go? Ever?
Now, my husband is a MN boy who grew up where their house was surrounded by farms and he claims the same. So, maybe it is where I grew up. We were 10 minutes from downtown Chicago and my fear was that they would change the high school boundaries - meaning I would go to the school where I was quite certain I would be beaten up on a regular basis. Maybe the majority of people in the Twin Cities really didn't have that going on.
In my neighborhood: a woman was raped across the street, about 4 houses down from ours, during the day when we were outside playing; my brother was the victim of an attempted abduction when he was 4 years old playing outside, 2 doors down from our house; I ran all the way down our dark street to my house in fear after Girl Scout meetings because our leaders told us to watch out that we weren't abducted on our way home.
So, seriously, my parents had boundaries for us. We were allowed to go out a certain distance. And, certainly, as time went by that distance increased and by middle school we roamed our city streets pretty freely. But didn't everybody have boundaries for awhile? Or was it just my neighborhood where bad things did happen?
And I have continued to have fun for the 20 years that have followed, but I really never felt like I had aged that much until this year. Inevitable, right? I have a teenager daughter who will be driving soon and starting to create her own life; separate from our immediate family, but still connected to us.