In Letter #52 I described three categories of rights that have been rather thoroughly taken away from kids in the U.S. over my lifetime. These are (1) the right to travel freely in public spaces; (2) the right to adequate time for leisure; and (3) the right to privacy. The letter generated many interesting comments and questions and quite a number of personal stories. You will have to go back to the comments section of #52 to read the stories, but here I’ll respond to what seem to me to be the most significant comments and questions, or at least the ones for which I have something to say.
• “Not so sure about privacy for kids”
In response to my point that kids need more privacy from their parents than they generally have today, this reader commented that they were not so sure about that and added: “Every day in the news we hear of another story of a child abducted by a stranger they befriended on social media (right under the noses of their parents).”
This comment led me to wonder how common child abductions by strangers through the Internet are. I couldn’t find very recent data on this or any data specific to abductions initiated online. Wikipedia references one source indicating: “Fewer than 350 people under the age of 21 have been abducted by strangers in the United States per year, on average, between 2010 and 2017.” And another source indicating that “only about 100 cases per year can be classified as abductions by strangers.” I can’t find any source indicating how many of these stranger abductions were initiated online. Of course the total number of child abductions is much greater, but the vast majority of them are from relatives (most often the child’s father or mother) or by another person well known to the family. And there are many more “missing children,” who were not abducted but are runaways or, tragically, “throwaways.”
Let’s assume (without evidence) that the number of kids abducted by strangers has gone up considerably since 2017. Hypothetically, let’s say there were 1,000 such cases in the past year. That is enough that if you scoured the news, or more likely scoured the Internet, you might find at least one every day. But that is still very rare. There are roughly 44 million kids ages 10-19 in the U.S. 1,000/44,000,000 = 0.00002. This works out to roughly 2 cases for every 100,000 kids. That is still concerning, but if we ran our our children’s lives in such a way as to prevent such statistically rare events we would pretty much not allow them to do anything.
Having said that, I am nevertheless a big believer in teaching kids about dangers. When I was a kid in the 1950s, parents didn’t prevent us from going outdoors on our own, but they did teach us safety rules. They taught us how to cross streets. They told us, “If someone you don’t know asks you to get into their car, especially if they offer you candy or other treats promises, leave immediately.” Today we should be doing the comparable thing regarding the Internet. The Internet is an extraordinary valuable tool for so many reasons, but there are some dangers. One of them is the danger this commenter describes. Kids can understand the danger if clearly explained to them.
We often assume kids are stupid. They are not. If they were we would not have survived as a species, as until recent times most kids were free most of the time to make their own decisions moment to moment. living in a world far more filled with danger than ours.
• Tracking
As another example of invasion of kids’ privacy, I noted that a growing number of teens—and even a growing number of college men and women (that’s what we used to call them)—are being tracked by their parents with GPS technology. One commenter wrote:
“Virtually every one of my former high school students now in college has Life360 tracking them for their parents—it’s the norm.” The person also described asking a high school student if she is tracked through Life360. She said she is and that she had no complaints about it. She said it proved her parents “cared about her.” When asked if she would delete it when she went to college in a couple years, she said “No, my parents probably wouldn’t let me.”
To me, this prolonged moment-to-moment tie of teens and young adults to their parents is deeply disturbing. It seems to be indicative of lack of parents’ trust of young people and young people’s own beliefs that they are in constant danger, are untrustworthy, and/or are unable to meet life’s challenges without constant help from parents.
But I am interested in what others think of this. Please comment. If you track or are tracked, tell your story. If you believe that tracking is a good thing or a bad thing, what are your reasons? I’m also wondering if tracking goes both ways. If parents can trach their kids, even “kids” of college age, can kids also track their parents?
I’m trying to keep an open mind on this. Maybe privacy is a thing of the past and maybe lack of privacy is good for us all. I can’t believe I wrote that sentence. I’d like some fodder here to gear up for a future letter on this topic.
• Neighbors intervene when kids roam free
One person wrote: “We live in a neighborhood that is … safe for kids. But every time we let our kids roam freely, there is inevitably an adult (that neither we nor our kids know) who intervenes and tries to put a stop to it. Even if you try to give kids basic freedom, even if you live in a place where it's possible, the culture completely disallows it. As a parent of young kids, it's very disheartening. … I'm more afraid of random neighbors calling CPS than I am of actual kidnappers or car crashes.”
I have heard stories like this from many parents, and my colleague and friend Lenore Skenazy, of Free Range Kid fame, has documented many more of them. The Let Grow organization, founded by Lenore, me, and two others has been working with state legislatures to at least partly deal with these problems. So far eight states have passed what we and some of the states call “reasonable independence laws.” Basically, the law says it is up to parents, not the state, to judge what is safe or not for their kids, and that parents cannot be charged with neglect unless any reasonable person would perceive it as that.” It’s not a perfect law. It doesn’t necessarily stop neighbors from intervening, but it is protection against CPS charges. You can find out more about this and see what states have this law here.
I suggest that when you let your kids run free have them carry a note signed by you saying they have your permission to do what they are doing . Include your cell number in case they want to call. (If someone calls, thank them for their concern and explain why they are safe and say something about the great benefits of such freedom for kids.)
•Legal actions to assert children’s right to play
One person wrote: “Peter, I wonder if you know of any legal actions that have been taken to assert children's right to play (or do anything else, for that matter). I'm looking for support for an appeal to my city's Human Rights Commission that children actually be allowed to behave like children in public spaces. A relatively narrow, legal argument against suppression might be the most effective since it would put the situation in a light adults could relate to. Any previous legal work along these lines would help me hone my argument against this suppression and make my case to the commission.
I do not know of any successful legal actions of this sort. Courts and legislatures in the U.S. have consistently avoided the idea that children have rights of their own, independent of parents’ rights, beyond a right not to be abused physically or sexually or neglected as judged by child protective services. The “reasonable independence” laws I mentioned above are framed in terms of parents’ rights, not kids’ rights. They state that parents have the right to decide what is safe or not for their kids. Texas (where this commenter apparently resides) is one of the states that has adopted the reasonable independence law.
One index of our reluctance to specify rights for children is this. We are the only United Nations member that has not ratified the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. That treaty includes the child’s right to leisure time and play. The other 195 member nations have all ratified it, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they are enforcing it.
For more on kids’ rights, check the website of the National Youth Rights Association, a nonprofit organization run by kids and young adults.
Further Thoughts
The comments to Letter #52 also included several concerned with what seems to be inordinate amounts of time their kids spend on “screens” or specific digital devices, and there was also a question about pornography so easily available to kids. I want to take these concerns seriously and will give some thought to a future letter on them, going beyond what I have already said in previous letters.
This Substack series is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, and sometimes especially when they do. You will notice in reading comments on previous letters that everyone here is polite. Your questions and thoughts will contribute to the value of this letter for me and other readers. Perhaps you would like to add to my short list here of kids’ rights and adults’ wrongs, or elaborate further on one or another of them.
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I'm flabbergasted by the tracking. I still refuse to track my family members or have them track me. If you need to know where I am, there are a multitude of ways to reach me.
“I’m trying to keep an open mind on this. Maybe privacy is a thing of the past and maybe lack of privacy is good for us all. I can’t believe I wrote that sentence. I’d like some fodder here to gear up for a future letter on this topic.“
On the topic of tracking, I think it totally depends on the context of the relationship. In my household, every device in the house can track every other device. My kids don’t have devices (yet) but when they do, I imagine that will be the norm.
My husband and I trust one another implicitly, so tracking is not used as a dishonesty-detection system (which would be futile anyway, since it’s too easy to work around.) Instead, I might see if he’s left work yet without disturbing him in case he’s still in a meeting, and he might quickly check to see if I’ve arrived at a location safely. We’ve used tracking to meet up with each other in a busy location, or even to find a phone that’s gone missing. We don’t track one another often, but when we need to, it’s handy. I think tracking should be mutual, too, so if parents track kids, kids can also track their parents.
In my view, this use is very different from a parent (or spouse) who compulsively tracks their child or partner, or tries to use it as a tool to prevent harm of some kind occurring. I think the issue is the relationship, however, not the tracking per se.
As a separate point, I think tracking can sometimes make parents feel more comfortable in giving their child more freedom to roam than they otherwise would allow. A parent might feel more comfortable with a child playing in the woods for hours, for instance, if they knew they could track and find their child if needed.
I think the questions such as do you want to raise a child who has instincts, confidence, and trusts his or her self and instincts or someone who is always looking to others for validation?
Having studied education, worked with children, and developed products and educational materials for them; I know that true self-esteem, esteem that comes from the inside out and true self-confidence (confidence from the inside out) does nor come from compliments or praise. It comes from learning by doing. That means you give the building blocks early on and soon both the adults and children are seeing, believing, and trusting more. These are skills to be built. You can look at these skills as tools in the toolbox of keeping your children safe.
Children without confidence or self-esteem will believe what others tell them about who and what they are and that’s a danger in childhood and adulthood.
Each child, even siblings, will require a custom set of tools to build these lifelong skills.
The fact that we are the only UN members not on board with the rights of children says a lot. It is hard to know how much the surveillance issue has to do with reality or is about our inflated fears due to sensationalization of events. When we hear about an abduction or other child safety issue ten times, it registers as ten events. Perhaps we need to listen to the news once a day and listen more to our children and also teach them about safety, as in how to cross the street and not to accept things or get into a car with strangers. I saw a mother and 4yo daughter in the pool the other day. The child had on a life vest and was going away from her mother into the deep end of the pool. The mother told her that she needed to stay in the shallow end (which is a pool rule, children have to show their swimming skills before going into the deep end), the child said she wanted privacy. And her mother said that you don't get privacy in the pool. All of these issues of safety and privacy are situation specific. It can be tricky to discern what is necessary for the child's safety and what a frightened parent needs to feel safe themselves. Sometimes parents have unresolved childhood trauma that they need to heal so they are not parenting from the position of the wounded child. (I know this first hand).
Hi Peter, I appreciate your responses and your posts. Regarding privacy and kids, this is an area that I find important for kids and also very different in the smartphone/social media age than in my childhood.
I've shared my smartphone location with my kids and had them share their smartphone location with me. The older ones always carry phones the younger ones don't because their phones are more limited. When my daughter went off to college a few hours away I stopped sharing my phone's location with her and stopped her from sharing with me. My reasons for sharing location are largely logistical: we are trying to get kids places and figure how where kids are and which kids can help other kids (and us) by handling pickups.
I've also tried to teach them that the use of smartphones enables the elimination of privacy more effectively than it enables preservation of privacy. When they are on a platform, every thing they do is monitored and recorded. Messages they send can be screenshotted and shared instantly, without effort, by anyone who receives them no matter their technical sophistication. Every video they watch is recorded, how long they watch it is recorded. Every image they like is recorded. My kids had been sharing read receipts with their friends, so their friends could know the exact moment they read each others texts.
[EDITED] Current technology can result in increased privacy with respect to parents, while resulting in the elimination of privacy with respect to their friends and with respect to the largest, most socially influential companies on earth, and potentially with respect to friends of friends or even to complete strangers. The access that complete strangers have to my children is far greater, in some significant senses but not all, than ever. Someone from around the world can interact with them under false pretenses. This was simply not possible in the pre-smartphone era.
Given this, reasonable monitoring of smartphone use is entirely appropriate. We've told our kids that we reserve the right to check their messages even, though we rarely do that. People can definitely go overboard, but they can definitely go "underboard" as well in completely failing to monitor media consumption. I've told them that if they need to have private conversations, they need to meet with their friends face-to-face, the way I had to do it, which is still the best way for multiple reasons: like privacy, but also to get the friends full corporeal communication, which is particularly important for more sensitive conversations.
During the summer, the UNCRC was incorporated into Scottish law 😊 so children's right to play - as well as all theit other rights - is now on the statute books. It remains to be tested, but Scotland has long had a play strategy, there's a strong lobby for play-based learning in the first year (or two) of primary (elementary) school, up to at least age 7, and children are taught about their rights from the start. I recently attended a reception at the Scottish Parliament championing children's health rights - including the right to play in hospital and/or when they're sick (I'm a Health Play Specialist). There's still much work to do but we are on the right path.
Re. children's independence/free movement, this summer I was in Ireland and Italy and was struck by the groups of children (some very young) out and about on their own - chatting on street corners, at the park or the beach. We see less of that here ... but it's probably too cold! 😉
Thanks for the letters Peter. I've been sharing them with my teen daughter who's just applying to study Psychology at university.
Kids are not stupid. But they are inexperienced. We have this romantic notion that throughout most of human history, kids were "free range" and got along ok without adult supervision. But people who live as humans used to, in bands or villages of around fifty people, say, including kids, don't separate themselves by age group: the adults don't "go to work" leaving kids at home alone, or in the "neighborhood" alone. Adults are usually sort of around, if not actively surveilling kids. Also, older kids are hanging out with little kids. So there's always somebody with a bit more experience around.
My son and some of his friends did something pretty stupid when they were in high school: they made a cardboard car, like a Flintstones car, that they took downtown and "drove" by holding onto the cardboard body of the car and running around with their feet (like Fred Flintstone). There was nothing wrong with this per se, but they decided it had to have working lights, so they rigged up a car battery to some headlights...and put the battery in a backpack on my son's back! The battery acid leaked out and burned a hole in the skin on his back!
This is an example of a stupid thing that some inexperienced people did. If an adult had been hanging around on the edge of this project, he or she might have said, "The battery in the backpack is a very bad idea." But no adult did that. Luckily all my son got was a weird scar.
I just realized that an adult must have given them a ride to the downtown area to "drive" their car, or at least somebody with a driver's license. Maybe this person didn't realize that the battery was going to go in the backpack. I didn't hear about this until it had already happened, as my son was staying with his grandparents in another city when it happened. It could have been much worse. I have heard of much worse accidents that occurred simply because kids don't understand physics and chemistry very well yet.
At least he wasn't permanently disabled. IT was a great idea to make that cardboard car; they just needed the input of somebody who understands that car batteries should stay well away from human bodies! That person wouldn't have needed to interfere with the basic idea, just give them some input. I'm sure they could have figured out some other way to have headlights, maybe using flashlights or something.
Of course you are correct. I chose to address the general concept because it’s easier to dismiss something that is about someone else. By pulling back and seeing from a wider lens instead of a closeup, more information is available. Have you ever reread a book or seen a movie a second or third time and seen more and different things? Life teaches us when we are not looking.
Here's another example of "adult input needed," much more serious. In our community, last year, on two different occasions, a boy shot another boy dead after an argument. So two boys died. and two more boys may go to jail for a long time. Adults are not doing a good enough job of keeping guns locked away from minors. Society in general is doing a terrible job of keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of minors.
You said it yourself: “Did the Tennessee legislature do anything to limit gun access after this tragedy? Hundreds of people, mostly women and kids, have been lobbying the legislature constantly since that day. We showed up and yelled. We got arrested. But the legislature expanded access to guns instead.”
Guns are valued over the lives of children and women. Schools are populated by children and women outnumber men in schools.
Who is society most angry with? Mothers/women.
Power over is an illusion that we will hopefully free ourselves of. Power as dominator, the patriarchal view has been sublimating and silencing the feminine model of power with and sharing power. “You are only as strong as your weakest link”.
When our culture and society gives power and authority to a gun and the rights of the gun over humans and their rights, children of all ages mistake the gun for power.
That’s a tragic message with a tragic outcome.
I am curious about how many children have been shot by parents, siblings, or themselves in homes where the sole purpose of owning guns was to protect their families.
How many more people will be murdered because the gun lobby pays politicians to serve them instead of the people?
This multilayered problem deserves multilayered and complex approaches to heal the deep wounds and to protect all innocent victims.
I’m going to sit with what you shared. The first thing that comes to my heart is how do we hold our hearts open for Fear and Anger in ourselves and others?
What aren’t we giving or what are we withholding from our children or childhood that gives a safe space to explore this?
The answer is in what is usually cut from school budgets, diminished, and demonized?
The Arts—music, literature, dance, drawing/painting/sculpting all give children ways to create their own worlds, respond or react to the past and the present. They all offer multiple ways using multiple modalities to experience and express the truth of human and humanity’s complexities in a way that touches the heart and gives a glimpse of the soul.
This is where profound human expression began and without repressing this aspect of our true nature, it is where it will end.
It's the guns. It's that simple. Why make it complicated? No other country allows its citizens unlimited access to virtually any gun, and ammunition. Most of these shootings are with pistols, but we all know that semi-automatic assault rifles also enable small people to kill a lot of other people very fast.
In Nashville, in March of 2023, a very small person barely over a hundred pounds murdered 6 people in a private Christian school in less then fifteen minutes. This person could do this because they had an AR-15, which has very little recoil, and a 30-round clip. These guns were developed during the Vietnam War era so that small Asian soldiers, male and female, could shoot people easily. They also had a pistol. This person was a very young trans man, who had attended the same school where they murdered people.
Did the Tennessee legislature do anything to limit gun access after this tragedy? Hundreds of people, mostly women and kids, have been lobbying the legislature constantly since that day. We showed up and yelled. We got arrested. But the legislature expanded access to guns instead.
Bullets fly in my rural neighborhood every day, as men are "practicing" for...something. They shoot at human silhouettes tacked to wooden palettes, no back stop. Boys copy that. It's part of masculinity to settle even a trivial argument with a gun.
The arts are great. I'm a retired art teacher. But it's the guns. And the adults who fail to exercise our duties as adults to protect children.
On tracking - at first, my sisters and I were opposed to the idea of being tracked. It seemed like an invasion of privacy (not that my parents didn’t already know where we were.) My parent’s reasoning is we were of driving age and out at night without parental supervision.
The tracking app because so useful to us because I could get home to an empty house and check the app to see where everyone was. Between sports, work and friends everyone had separate schedules. My sister would set an alert for when my mom left work so she would have the perfect amount of time to finish her chores before our mom arrived home. When I was in college, my mom would check the app to see if I was at my dorm before she called. If I was out somewhere else, she wouldn’t call me.
We’re all adults now and still share our location. It’s so useful. My friends and I even share our locations with each other. My friend went on a first date with a guy that she didn’t know so she texted our friend group and shared her location with us. She’s also chronically late, so it keeps coming in handy.
Also my husband and I share locations. I have an alert for when he leaves work, leaves the gym and arrives at home. So useful since I usually make dinner
For us, in the Islamic tradition, we would like to treat "Adulthood at 14" as an aspirational goal to aim for as parents. Meaning, they will know responsibility by then. We would likely track them until around 14 and if not end it then, then maybe until 18. Only for peace of mind, not for control, but for safety.
I'm flabbergasted by the tracking. I still refuse to track my family members or have them track me. If you need to know where I am, there are a multitude of ways to reach me.
“I’m trying to keep an open mind on this. Maybe privacy is a thing of the past and maybe lack of privacy is good for us all. I can’t believe I wrote that sentence. I’d like some fodder here to gear up for a future letter on this topic.“
On the topic of tracking, I think it totally depends on the context of the relationship. In my household, every device in the house can track every other device. My kids don’t have devices (yet) but when they do, I imagine that will be the norm.
My husband and I trust one another implicitly, so tracking is not used as a dishonesty-detection system (which would be futile anyway, since it’s too easy to work around.) Instead, I might see if he’s left work yet without disturbing him in case he’s still in a meeting, and he might quickly check to see if I’ve arrived at a location safely. We’ve used tracking to meet up with each other in a busy location, or even to find a phone that’s gone missing. We don’t track one another often, but when we need to, it’s handy. I think tracking should be mutual, too, so if parents track kids, kids can also track their parents.
In my view, this use is very different from a parent (or spouse) who compulsively tracks their child or partner, or tries to use it as a tool to prevent harm of some kind occurring. I think the issue is the relationship, however, not the tracking per se.
As a separate point, I think tracking can sometimes make parents feel more comfortable in giving their child more freedom to roam than they otherwise would allow. A parent might feel more comfortable with a child playing in the woods for hours, for instance, if they knew they could track and find their child if needed.
I think the questions such as do you want to raise a child who has instincts, confidence, and trusts his or her self and instincts or someone who is always looking to others for validation?
Having studied education, worked with children, and developed products and educational materials for them; I know that true self-esteem, esteem that comes from the inside out and true self-confidence (confidence from the inside out) does nor come from compliments or praise. It comes from learning by doing. That means you give the building blocks early on and soon both the adults and children are seeing, believing, and trusting more. These are skills to be built. You can look at these skills as tools in the toolbox of keeping your children safe.
Children without confidence or self-esteem will believe what others tell them about who and what they are and that’s a danger in childhood and adulthood.
Each child, even siblings, will require a custom set of tools to build these lifelong skills.
The fact that we are the only UN members not on board with the rights of children says a lot. It is hard to know how much the surveillance issue has to do with reality or is about our inflated fears due to sensationalization of events. When we hear about an abduction or other child safety issue ten times, it registers as ten events. Perhaps we need to listen to the news once a day and listen more to our children and also teach them about safety, as in how to cross the street and not to accept things or get into a car with strangers. I saw a mother and 4yo daughter in the pool the other day. The child had on a life vest and was going away from her mother into the deep end of the pool. The mother told her that she needed to stay in the shallow end (which is a pool rule, children have to show their swimming skills before going into the deep end), the child said she wanted privacy. And her mother said that you don't get privacy in the pool. All of these issues of safety and privacy are situation specific. It can be tricky to discern what is necessary for the child's safety and what a frightened parent needs to feel safe themselves. Sometimes parents have unresolved childhood trauma that they need to heal so they are not parenting from the position of the wounded child. (I know this first hand).
I predict the police will get involved, bring the kids back home, ask to verify the note, and then scold the parents.
Hi Peter, I appreciate your responses and your posts. Regarding privacy and kids, this is an area that I find important for kids and also very different in the smartphone/social media age than in my childhood.
I've shared my smartphone location with my kids and had them share their smartphone location with me. The older ones always carry phones the younger ones don't because their phones are more limited. When my daughter went off to college a few hours away I stopped sharing my phone's location with her and stopped her from sharing with me. My reasons for sharing location are largely logistical: we are trying to get kids places and figure how where kids are and which kids can help other kids (and us) by handling pickups.
I've also tried to teach them that the use of smartphones enables the elimination of privacy more effectively than it enables preservation of privacy. When they are on a platform, every thing they do is monitored and recorded. Messages they send can be screenshotted and shared instantly, without effort, by anyone who receives them no matter their technical sophistication. Every video they watch is recorded, how long they watch it is recorded. Every image they like is recorded. My kids had been sharing read receipts with their friends, so their friends could know the exact moment they read each others texts.
[EDITED] Current technology can result in increased privacy with respect to parents, while resulting in the elimination of privacy with respect to their friends and with respect to the largest, most socially influential companies on earth, and potentially with respect to friends of friends or even to complete strangers. The access that complete strangers have to my children is far greater, in some significant senses but not all, than ever. Someone from around the world can interact with them under false pretenses. This was simply not possible in the pre-smartphone era.
Given this, reasonable monitoring of smartphone use is entirely appropriate. We've told our kids that we reserve the right to check their messages even, though we rarely do that. People can definitely go overboard, but they can definitely go "underboard" as well in completely failing to monitor media consumption. I've told them that if they need to have private conversations, they need to meet with their friends face-to-face, the way I had to do it, which is still the best way for multiple reasons: like privacy, but also to get the friends full corporeal communication, which is particularly important for more sensitive conversations.
During the summer, the UNCRC was incorporated into Scottish law 😊 so children's right to play - as well as all theit other rights - is now on the statute books. It remains to be tested, but Scotland has long had a play strategy, there's a strong lobby for play-based learning in the first year (or two) of primary (elementary) school, up to at least age 7, and children are taught about their rights from the start. I recently attended a reception at the Scottish Parliament championing children's health rights - including the right to play in hospital and/or when they're sick (I'm a Health Play Specialist). There's still much work to do but we are on the right path.
Re. children's independence/free movement, this summer I was in Ireland and Italy and was struck by the groups of children (some very young) out and about on their own - chatting on street corners, at the park or the beach. We see less of that here ... but it's probably too cold! 😉
Thanks for the letters Peter. I've been sharing them with my teen daughter who's just applying to study Psychology at university.
Kids are not stupid. But they are inexperienced. We have this romantic notion that throughout most of human history, kids were "free range" and got along ok without adult supervision. But people who live as humans used to, in bands or villages of around fifty people, say, including kids, don't separate themselves by age group: the adults don't "go to work" leaving kids at home alone, or in the "neighborhood" alone. Adults are usually sort of around, if not actively surveilling kids. Also, older kids are hanging out with little kids. So there's always somebody with a bit more experience around.
My son and some of his friends did something pretty stupid when they were in high school: they made a cardboard car, like a Flintstones car, that they took downtown and "drove" by holding onto the cardboard body of the car and running around with their feet (like Fred Flintstone). There was nothing wrong with this per se, but they decided it had to have working lights, so they rigged up a car battery to some headlights...and put the battery in a backpack on my son's back! The battery acid leaked out and burned a hole in the skin on his back!
This is an example of a stupid thing that some inexperienced people did. If an adult had been hanging around on the edge of this project, he or she might have said, "The battery in the backpack is a very bad idea." But no adult did that. Luckily all my son got was a weird scar.
I just realized that an adult must have given them a ride to the downtown area to "drive" their car, or at least somebody with a driver's license. Maybe this person didn't realize that the battery was going to go in the backpack. I didn't hear about this until it had already happened, as my son was staying with his grandparents in another city when it happened. It could have been much worse. I have heard of much worse accidents that occurred simply because kids don't understand physics and chemistry very well yet.
There’s also a lot of creativity and ingenuity in his approach. There’s not one profound discovery that didn’t have lots of failures and or mishaps.
At least he wasn't permanently disabled. IT was a great idea to make that cardboard car; they just needed the input of somebody who understands that car batteries should stay well away from human bodies! That person wouldn't have needed to interfere with the basic idea, just give them some input. I'm sure they could have figured out some other way to have headlights, maybe using flashlights or something.
Of course you are correct. I chose to address the general concept because it’s easier to dismiss something that is about someone else. By pulling back and seeing from a wider lens instead of a closeup, more information is available. Have you ever reread a book or seen a movie a second or third time and seen more and different things? Life teaches us when we are not looking.
Here's another example of "adult input needed," much more serious. In our community, last year, on two different occasions, a boy shot another boy dead after an argument. So two boys died. and two more boys may go to jail for a long time. Adults are not doing a good enough job of keeping guns locked away from minors. Society in general is doing a terrible job of keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of minors.
You said it yourself: “Did the Tennessee legislature do anything to limit gun access after this tragedy? Hundreds of people, mostly women and kids, have been lobbying the legislature constantly since that day. We showed up and yelled. We got arrested. But the legislature expanded access to guns instead.”
Guns are valued over the lives of children and women. Schools are populated by children and women outnumber men in schools.
Who is society most angry with? Mothers/women.
Power over is an illusion that we will hopefully free ourselves of. Power as dominator, the patriarchal view has been sublimating and silencing the feminine model of power with and sharing power. “You are only as strong as your weakest link”.
When our culture and society gives power and authority to a gun and the rights of the gun over humans and their rights, children of all ages mistake the gun for power.
That’s a tragic message with a tragic outcome.
I am curious about how many children have been shot by parents, siblings, or themselves in homes where the sole purpose of owning guns was to protect their families.
How many more people will be murdered because the gun lobby pays politicians to serve them instead of the people?
This multilayered problem deserves multilayered and complex approaches to heal the deep wounds and to protect all innocent victims.
I’m going to sit with what you shared. The first thing that comes to my heart is how do we hold our hearts open for Fear and Anger in ourselves and others?
What aren’t we giving or what are we withholding from our children or childhood that gives a safe space to explore this?
The answer is in what is usually cut from school budgets, diminished, and demonized?
The Arts—music, literature, dance, drawing/painting/sculpting all give children ways to create their own worlds, respond or react to the past and the present. They all offer multiple ways using multiple modalities to experience and express the truth of human and humanity’s complexities in a way that touches the heart and gives a glimpse of the soul.
This is where profound human expression began and without repressing this aspect of our true nature, it is where it will end.
It's the guns. It's that simple. Why make it complicated? No other country allows its citizens unlimited access to virtually any gun, and ammunition. Most of these shootings are with pistols, but we all know that semi-automatic assault rifles also enable small people to kill a lot of other people very fast.
In Nashville, in March of 2023, a very small person barely over a hundred pounds murdered 6 people in a private Christian school in less then fifteen minutes. This person could do this because they had an AR-15, which has very little recoil, and a 30-round clip. These guns were developed during the Vietnam War era so that small Asian soldiers, male and female, could shoot people easily. They also had a pistol. This person was a very young trans man, who had attended the same school where they murdered people.
Did the Tennessee legislature do anything to limit gun access after this tragedy? Hundreds of people, mostly women and kids, have been lobbying the legislature constantly since that day. We showed up and yelled. We got arrested. But the legislature expanded access to guns instead.
Bullets fly in my rural neighborhood every day, as men are "practicing" for...something. They shoot at human silhouettes tacked to wooden palettes, no back stop. Boys copy that. It's part of masculinity to settle even a trivial argument with a gun.
The arts are great. I'm a retired art teacher. But it's the guns. And the adults who fail to exercise our duties as adults to protect children.
On tracking - at first, my sisters and I were opposed to the idea of being tracked. It seemed like an invasion of privacy (not that my parents didn’t already know where we were.) My parent’s reasoning is we were of driving age and out at night without parental supervision.
The tracking app because so useful to us because I could get home to an empty house and check the app to see where everyone was. Between sports, work and friends everyone had separate schedules. My sister would set an alert for when my mom left work so she would have the perfect amount of time to finish her chores before our mom arrived home. When I was in college, my mom would check the app to see if I was at my dorm before she called. If I was out somewhere else, she wouldn’t call me.
We’re all adults now and still share our location. It’s so useful. My friends and I even share our locations with each other. My friend went on a first date with a guy that she didn’t know so she texted our friend group and shared her location with us. She’s also chronically late, so it keeps coming in handy.
Also my husband and I share locations. I have an alert for when he leaves work, leaves the gym and arrives at home. So useful since I usually make dinner
For us, in the Islamic tradition, we would like to treat "Adulthood at 14" as an aspirational goal to aim for as parents. Meaning, they will know responsibility by then. We would likely track them until around 14 and if not end it then, then maybe until 18. Only for peace of mind, not for control, but for safety.
Excellent points to ponder!