Most parents in American know instinctively that there is something terribly wrong in a community where so many parents feel uncomfortable taking their eyes off our kids for fear that something bad may happen to them. Many parents are often frustrated by a cultural assumption that young children can't be alone and desire for their children to experience a more independent childhood. What is most perplexing is that this intense concern for our children's safety seems to be particularly unique to America.
When I was a young girl we lived in Munich, Germany for several years. I remember those years as being carefree and liberating in contrast to childhood in the U.S. While in Germany my brothers and sisters and I could run free without our parents. I remember at 8 years old walking to the market with my Scottish friend to shop for dinner carrying a list from her mom. In contrast, just a few years earlier I remember me and my 5 siblings being picked up by a Kentucky police officer less than a mile from our home because we were picking roadside apples without our parents nearby. I remember the terror I felt. One minute I was happily exploring with my older siblings (the oldest was 9) and the next I was in a police station trying to calm down my little brother who was crying in terror while we waited for my mom to come get us. For me and my siblings those years in Germany were some of our happiest. We felt the contrast between the independence we had there and the restrictions of our American childhood.
The Atlantic article reports a reality so foreign to American kids that it seems impossible to imagine that kids in America could ever enjoy that kind of freedom. Like the Germany I remember as a kid, "in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves" which begs the question, why are kids as young as three safe in the streets of Tokyo but not in America's biggest cities? Could we make our city streets safer by changing the way we view childhood?
"Japanese kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others... This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties..." This kind of early work responsibility is seriously lacking in American society today, and in many American homes, but it hasn't always been this way. America used to excel at raising hard-working independent children. It is not to late to return to that kind of child rearing that requires that children take "responsibility for shared spaces." Being American used to embody taking "pride of ownership." In Japan these ethics "extends to public space more broadly" and children who grow up learning to trust themselves and others become adults who trust the capabilities of children and look out for their welfare. Teaching children to trust in itself is self-fulfilling in this aspect and by teaching our children today that they can't trust in others we have severed the community ties that in the past protected children. Every child "out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency."
Some might say that considering the current cultural rot we can't give our children this kind of independence because there's just too much violence to be weary of, but accepting the premise that when people grow up trusting their surroundings and learning self-reliance and responsibility for themselves and others the natural result is a less dangerous and less violent culture, requires that we we begin to shift the paradigm now before it gets worse. I believe we can begin to make our communities safer by changing the way we parent and educate our children.
