Yeah, I think that's part of why this bugs me. I mean, I consider myself to have been quite well-brought-up by my parents, and there's not much I would have changed.
And yet, I get the sense that if you tried to raise a child that way today, you'd get a call from social services, for everything from traveling in the way-back reading comic books, to the fact that I was taking care of myself in the library across the street after school by age six (? something like that -- before eight), to being employed by my father with relatively adult expectations and responsibilities at 14, to being exposed to alcohol early enough to have a serious respect for its power and risks.
By and large, I think those were all positives for my life and development -- and yet I hear all of them frequently decried (and sometimes declared illegal) in modern society.
It produces a constant sense that we have catastrophized childhood with an underlying expectation of "Of *course* keeping a child safe is always an overriding concern". I worry about the side-effects of that assumption...
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Date: 2012-08-23 12:34 pm (UTC)And yet, I get the sense that if you tried to raise a child that way today, you'd get a call from social services, for everything from traveling in the way-back reading comic books, to the fact that I was taking care of myself in the library across the street after school by age six (? something like that -- before eight), to being employed by my father with relatively adult expectations and responsibilities at 14, to being exposed to alcohol early enough to have a serious respect for its power and risks.
By and large, I think those were all positives for my life and development -- and yet I hear all of them frequently decried (and sometimes declared illegal) in modern society.
It produces a constant sense that we have catastrophized childhood with an underlying expectation of "Of *course* keeping a child safe is always an overriding concern". I worry about the side-effects of that assumption...