When I was growing up, parents were parents. You addressed them with Mr. or Mrs. (there was no such thing as Ms.). If one parent disciplined a child, you supported them. You didn’t question the trust we had in our parents.
Nowadays, of course, we know that blindly trusting adults can be dangerous. It was probably wrong way back when, but we didn’t hear about it. But there’s another side to the story, especially for those of us who are fathers.
The Online WSJ has an excellent article about how men parenting kids need to be more careful these days, especially if you are alone with a child, and especially if that child is not your own. Statistics showing that most predators are men create the fear that any man alone with a child is “A Bad Thing”, and often prompt questions. You certainly don’t want to be a sole male chaperone for an activity, for an example. One complaint, true or not, and there goes your life and reputation.
It really is a fascinating article, and makes me wonder if our society has gone too far. Certainly, the days where we let our children just wander and explore are gone. As parents, we want to know where they are at all times, that they are safe from predators. We take the potential predators, and put them in isolated areas where we don’t see them (and corespondingly, don’t see what they are doing), in order to protect our kids. I know that things I did as a kid in the 1960s (just going off and riding my back for hours at end, wandering around the Ballona Wetlands, which we knew as the Gas Company Swamp) I would never let my daughter do these days.
Makes one think as to whether our society is overprotective, or were these problems always here, and we just didn’t know about them.
