DD6 Overprotective or Reasonable concern

jungle_jane

wow. no wonder my stepdaughter is so upset - she is 11 and is not allowed to play out. Personally I disagree with that stance - we live in a quiet road that has is low crime - but I am not her parent so it's not down to me.

I feel sorry for my lovely stepkiddie because it means she spends bored hour after hour indoors online or playing x-box or hanging around with old people (me and her dad) because all her mates are...errr...playing out. When i was a kid i spent my entire life outdoors so i find the whole concept of her being alone inside on weekends really weird. It means that her social skills aren't developing by socialising with her peers and it means she isn't developing a life of her own. Spending all your social hours with adults isn't healthy - how is she supposed to learn about interacting, sharing, boundary setting etc?

I think that the play out should be encouraged within the confines of your environment. If you live somewhere safe and nice - heck let the kids out to play. keep an eye on them at first by all means but don't drive a sense of fear and overprotectiveness into them. if your area is not so safe for young kids then keep an eye on them from a distance. but above all, don't shroud them in cotton wool. It's really not doing them any favours IMHO.

*caveat: I am talking about a slightly older child here - 11*

property.advert

I guess that some kids from my era didn't make it through childhood as natural selection took its course but we didn't turn out to be social misfit lard buckets with Playstation thumbs and not knowing how to light a fire or avoid cars on a busy road.

It is a difficult call when it is your own but my gut tells me to risk some to gain more whilst doing what you can to manage the risks unobserved.

silvercar

I agree with you on this one, 6 is probably too young to play out unsupervised.

My children are older than yours and it doesn't get any easier.

I have been on the receiving end of other parents child rearing rules, as time goes on, I become less tolerant.

One 8 year old's parent didn't want her child playing in the garden on a warm day as she had a cold.

Another didn't want the children on the trampoline unless I was with them, so I said that they could stay off the trampoline. That wasn't good enough as the kid had come particularly to play on the trampoline, so the Mum was really insisting that I stay in the garden with them (at age 11!)

The most differences seem to be when an visiting eldest child is with my younger. As the kids get older, younger children seem to have more leeway on age restricted activities (films, video games) than those that are the eldest. So a 13 year old in a family of 13, 15 & 17 year old children may be allowed to watch films that are rated 15+; just because the family sits down together to watch a film. Then along comes a 13 year old from a family with children of 13, 11 and 8 and the 13 year old is allowed to see any 13+ films on principal.

So along comes parent of 13 year old, "you allowed my child to watch XX, totally unsuitable....irresponsible parent..."
Me: "They are 13, beyond the age of supervised play dates, if you have an issue with what your child is doing, you need to discuss with them."

Kaz2904

We live in a very quiet area and all of the children in our quiet cul-de-sac play out in the road. We have the added advantage of being on a fairly steep hill and a very narrow road so nobody can come up here at more than 10mph. The road is so narrow that the pavements on both sides of the road are parked on with the cars right up tight to the house walls to leave the road clear for other vehicles. People don't walk on the pavements, they walk up the middle of the road. This only works because EVERYONE does it and EVERYONE is in agreement. We all live in close proximity so all watch out for each others kids. If you see one doing something naughty/ daft/ dangerous, you will tell them. If yours come in for a drink, generally there will be 7 or 8 meandering through!
I think that really the only thing that isn't allowed (certainly by my neighbour and I) is for children to go into a house where there are no adults. We can supervise them when they are on the road but not when they go into someone's house.
My neighbour and I have children the same age, DD's 9 and DS's 7 but we have been letting them play out for years now. The DD's were 6 and their little brothers didn't really care at 4 until the summer holidays. That became hard but my neighbour and I found that we were both standing on the doorstep drinking coffee and chatting or doing a little bit of weeding in the front garden so we started to let the boys out. The boys were too scared to go too far anyway.
After a year, my neighbour and I decided that we had to go for a walk down the road with the kids and pick an exact spot for them to stop at. We got to a spot waaaaaay past where we felt comfortable and let them go to that lamp post (about 8 houses down- ha ha!). The kids police it themselves. This year, we are having to rethink because there are now more children at the bottom of the road. Those children come up to play and ours go down a bit to play but we won't let ours down to the bottom because the road's wider, it joins the main road and has a shop at the end so there are groups of teens there trying to be cool and they don't really want little kids hanging around.
We also let the kids go down to the shop unsupervised (that's not so hard now but it used to be awful!). I have left the kids at home myself once when I had to whip to the corner shop and the weather was dreadful. I felt like a terrible parent until I thought, well, I let them go down by themselves, it is the same distance and they are engrossed in a film. Wouldn't go further though and wouldn't do it if it wasn't for a couple of items.
I felt I had to let myself out of my comfort zone because our parents sure as heck couldn't have been that comfortable with having NO idea where we were! We went miles on our bikes. Deep in the countryside, exploring. It was great fun

Oh, last night we took the kids down to the skate ramps as they have just bought themselves JD bugs. All the teens and younger kids were looking at us and the kids. How uncool is it to take your parents to the skate park?! We tried to blend in and kept schtum about the exploding coke bottles and the language. Then when we left we made the kids promise they would never ever make their Grandma take them there because she'd have heart failure! They did start to fit in after a while though and get some tips from one of the younger ones. So our plan did work

balletshoes

This is a very interesting thread .

Can I just ask, does having older kids playing with the younger (ie the 6 and younger being the younger kids) make a difference to how far/long/if at all you'd let the young ones play out?

When I was about 9 or 10, my sisters would have been 8, my cousins 7 and 5. At that age we used to be literally at least a mile away from home, all day, playing (crossing a railway line at least once, playing on the rocks at the beach, climbing trees, playing on top of hay bales in barns etc). We only ventured home when we thought it was tea time. We often didn't see an adult we knew all day long.

I don't live in the countryside anymore, live in the city now, and my DD is 10. Since she was about 5, she's played out in our street with my neighbours kids (2 are older than her, one is a year younger). For the first couple of years the rules were she could go next door to find her playmates, but other than that she had to wait until they came for her from further away. If they were playing in the street rather than in one of the gardens, they had to be either in front of my house, or my neighbours. I've always been happier when the older kids were playing with her and the neighbours child, when they were that young.

For the last couple of years, she's been allowed to go on her own to her playmates at the end of the street (crescent, not a through-road to anywhere). She can play in the street or at any of her friends houses/gardens, as long as she doesn't leave our street. She has to be home before its getting dark, and in the summertime I tell her she has to be home before such-and-such a time, and she must tell her friends parent this when she gets there to play.
Now I must admit, most of the time all the kids end up in my back garden long before its time for DD to come in, but they have the freedom to pretty much come and go as they please in 3 or 4 gardens along the street, and this seems to suit them all well.

I feel really sorry for the 11-year old another poster mentioned who doesn't get to play out, that seems like such a shame to me .

My DD started popping to the shops around the corner when she was just turned 8 years old (in preparation for her walking home from school by herself) and she found it all very exciting at that age. I had kittens the first couple of times she went - but she was fine, and now she knows she can do it, she rarely volunteers, because its just not that exciting anymore :rotfl:.

Sweet_Pea_2

When my DD's were that age I let them play outside, but we live in a small cul de sac. To be honest though, I didnt really feel very comfortable about it and kept a close watch. They only went out the front when "called for" by the other children in the street. If either of my DD's had friends round to play I would warn them before hand that they were not to ask to play out in the cul de sac when friends were here, they were to stay in the back garden. If ever they did go out the front of the house to ride bikes and scooters etc I went out with them and stood and watched. This is because I had no idea how the friends parents would feel about their child playing out, so whilst they were my responsibility I would prefer to take the cautious approach. Equally I would be very annoyed if they had gone to visit a friend at that age and been allowed to play out in the street unsupervised. Luckily this did not happen.