I drank out of the hose but didn’t die

By Scott St. Clair | The Save Jersey Blog

When I was a kid, I drank out of the garden hose but didn’t die. I did it because I was hot and thirsty after having roamed all by myself on my bike throughout the neighborhood and a goodly portion of Phoenix, where I spent my pre-teen years. We all did – kids drank out of hoses and roamed, and they still do because it’s in their nature to explore and take risks.

But God forbid they do so these days or some nosy busybody will call the cops on them and they’ll be forced to sit in the back of a squad car for three hours while their parents are subjected to an inquisition-style interrogation without regard for their rights or common sense, which is exactly what happened to the Meitiv family in Maryland recently.

Summer HoseAs if it was the crime of the century, the police apprehended a dangerous 10-year-old boy and his 6-year-old partner-in-crime sister as they walked a few blocks from a local park to their home.

Now, because they let their kids play outside without a leash or surrounded by a barbed wire fence, their parents have been tagged by the state as guilty of “unsubstantiated” child neglect, whatever that is.

As kids,  we went to the local grade school most summer days to play work-up, a form of baseball that didn’t require two full teams, or peddled our bikes to the local pool or movie theater. We built forts in the woods and played army in vacant lots. We scraped our knees, got cut to where we needed stitches, hunted for snakes and scorpions, smoked cigarettes stolen from our parents, played with illegal Mexican fireworks and generally learned how to grow up. We got into situations and learned from experience how to get out of them – we learned how to solve our own problems.

Okay, so some of what Boomers in the 50’s and 60’s did, and kids do today, doesn’t demonstrate the soundest judgment, yet the vast majority of us turned out to be semi-responsible adults (I don’t smoke today, but I still cut myself with power tools requiring stitches), and so will the current crop of crazy kids.

We even ate calorie-laden school lunches, but because we were constantly active and on the go from morning to night, a fat kid was the exception, not the rule. First Ladies Mamie Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy had better things to do than regulate our dietary intake. Heck, we were always hungry, even after seconds and thirds of those buttery, grade-school-cafeteria mashed potatoes.

But today we have a horrendous combination of government bureaucrats who know better than parents how their children should be raised and “helicopter parents,” or moms and dads who so hover over their children’s lives that they never learn how to be independent or even make their own beds.

Yes, there are legitimate threats to kids – hasn’t the world always contained threats to kids? – and state child protective services agencies should respond to them. But no, life and the associated risks that come from playing outside or sitting in a car unattended for five minutes while mom goes into the 7-11 for milk don’t qualify. Yet, too often in our over-regulated society, that’s what happens.

Like the self-justifying, often anal-retentive regulators they are, it’s in the nature of CPS types to go to DEFCON 1 full-nuke mode over the insignificant while ignoring the truly serious. Show reluctance over their insistence that your kid go on Ritalin because he’s typically ants-in-his-pants and they’ll haul you into court, while in the meantime real abuse cases are ignored.

This isn’t a new phenomenon.  In the 1980’s and 90’s, a nationwide false hysteria over satanic-ritual sexual abuse of children in day cares swept the country, then went international. Reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials, hyper-zealous authorities coerced what turned out to be made-up testimony from impressionable kids that resulted in scores of innocent adults being sent to jail (For one of the worst cases, go here). While most of the cases were subsequently overturned either on legal grounds or when key witnesses recanted their testimony, some remain in prison.

But the urban legends created thereafter continue to roll on throughout the culture becoming a staple of TV crime dramas with kids abducted from the park and ending up dead. But the statistics belie the script. About one-percent of all missing kids fit the stereotypical pattern of being scooped up by some stranger. Most are missing because they lost their way home or ran away.

No lie: kids are much safer now than we were when I was a one.

If anything, the dangers to kids aren’t out in the big, bad world, but rather in an abusive home where those who shouldn’t be parents, but are, injure and even sexually assault their own kids.

It’s time to tell the so-called “experts” at CPS to back off because they provoke more problems than they solve.

That leaves messed-up parents, who are raising a generation of messed-up kids.

Again, when I was a kid, my mother taught me to be careful and not to talk to strangers, which, for the most part, I didn’t do – kids intuitively know enough to be wary of creepy people. The rules she laid down for me were simple: Let her know where I was going, with whom and generally what we were going to do. Be home within a reasonable time, and don’t do anything I didn’t want her to know about later or that was stupid. Aside from that, there wasn’t a need to chain me to the radiator for fear I might get snatched.

It’s one thing to monitor what your kids see on TV or watch on the Internet, but it’s another thing to shield them from anything that might even remotely be disquieting. No wonder kids get sent to college demanding that they not be exposed to ideas with which they’re unfamiliar or movies that might hurt their feelings.

If you micro-manage little Susie’s life to the point where you’re beside yourself with fear that her life is ruined because she didn’t get into the “right” pre-K school or she wasn’t invited to some parentally well-connected playmate’s fifth birthday party, then you ain’t seen nothing yet – wait until she becomes a teenager demanding the car keys.

Growing up, I was told that if I got into trouble in school, whatever they gave me I would get double at home. Now days, parents get defensive because their darling misbehaved by starting a fight or sassing a teacher to the point where teachers want to quit. “If I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can’t deal with parents anymore; they are killing us,” one principal was quoted as saying.

The other extreme are those who send their children to Christian schools, or even home school in order to insulate them from worldly influences (DISCLOSURE: My five adult children attended a Christian school through 9th grade). The key is why, not where, you’re sending them. If sheltering them from the world is your goal, not helping them escape an educationally-deficient school system, then you’re doomed because kids are to worldly influences like a magnet is to iron filings. If you send them to equip them to deal with worldly influences, then you have some chance of success.

We’re too worried about how our budding scholars will perform on government-mandated standardized tests than whether they develop the skills necessary to live and function in the world. As a result, they grow up to be good little automatons but functionally incompetent human beings.

Over-protective helicopter parents become so obsessed with eliminating even theoretical, temporary or miniscule harms that they ignore real and present dangers that they then embrace. Maybe the best example of this is in the anti-vaxxer community where the fear of a modest discomfort from a shot causes some parents to risk serious disease.

We’ve become a culture of chickens so paranoid over what someone else might think or paralyzed by fear of a bogeyman under each bed and lurking in each corner that we’ve lost the sense of life’s adventure and embracing the risks that go with it. These days, wanting to be Huckleberry Finn is no longer acceptable – you must take to your bed and be emotionally and intellectually sickly like The Secret Garden’s Colin Craven.

Raising an entire generation of kids who are forbidden from free-ranging the neighborhood or drinking  out of the hose – every once in awhile won’t kill anybody –  is a lot worse than them getting lower math and science scores than their foreign counterparts.  You can always retake a test, but you can’t relive a childhood.

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Scott St Clair
About Scott St Clair 127 Articles
SCOTT ST. CLAIR: Earning a J.D. from the University of Puget Sound in 1975, Scott is a communications professional who has worked as a freelance journalist/writer as well as a political operative.

11 Comments

  1. Absolutely, I let my kid walk to the corner store. I did it younger than her. A little freedom and a few mistakes teach them. Take the school bullying policies for instance. They separate the kids, and talk to them, counseling them. Almost lime telling them only government can solve their problems Hell, we’d have a fight back in the day, and a week later we be best buddies, because we learned how to work it out.

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