Megan McArdle recently wondered why parents have become so paranoid of late, freaking out at the sight "children walking down the street alone." Alarmed enough to call out the cops to "rescue" kids from—nothing, actually.

"Why," McArdle asks, "has America gone lunatic on the subject of unattended children?"

Because the 24-hour news cycle fools us into treating national totals of rare events as the numerator in calculations of risk. Human beings are really bad at statistics, and when the denominator is a third of a billion, we discard it and substitute in Dunbar's number.

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

In other words, the maximum number of people we're honestly capable of caring about, between 100 and 250. Populations larger than that become abstractions. So a single commercial plane crash is a national tragedy while 32,719 (in 2013) auto fatalities earns a shrug.

Stalin summed up the paradox when he observed that "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."

Plus a much greater investment in fewer children that boosts their marginal value to infinity. Hence the impulse to lock them away in padded rooms until age thirty or so.

But not necessarily. Although even fewer kids are being born in Japan, they start walking to school by themselves in elementary school. If the school is too far away to walk, they'll have bus and train passes. This is reflected in popular culture, like Non Non Biyori.


It's true that the crime rate is lower in Japan, but the American parents who worry the most live in middle-class suburban communities that have about the same crime rate as Japan.

Crime isn't the real risk anyway. Japanese kids are more likely to get killed in freak traffic accidents (streets outside city centers in Japan often have no shoulders or sidewalks). But with a denominator of 120 million, they're as rare as school shootings in the U.S.

And they trigger calls for better traffic enforcement. And sidewalks. Maybe Japanese are better at math. They don't panic at the sight of small children walking someplace by themselves.

A good illustration of this comes from the NTV reality show, Old Enough! (「はじめてのおつかい！」), literally "My First Task."

In the show, children aged six and younger are given a task to accomplish and set out on their own. To be sure, there's a camera crew and a producer no more than a couple of feet away, and we don't see the kids who get lost along the way.

I'm sure there's helpful hinting and herding and location scouting going on too. But it's pretty impressive that they're allowed to tackle these tasks at all.

We're talking about walking to the store, picking the right item off the shelf, standing in line, and paying for it. Or taking a train to another stop and walking several blocks to find daddy's office. And then making it back home. By themselves.

The real payoff is the reaction of some of these kids when they realize what they've done. One little girl, upon finding the right item on a supermarket shelf, jumped up and screamed, "Yatta!" We did it! Like she'd just won the gold medal at the Olympics.

That's the pure delight that comes from accomplishing something concrete on your own.

George W. Bush was onto something with that "the soft bigotry of low expectations" line. I don't mean the "tiger mom" stuff, but getting to try (and fail) at the simple things, the increasingly rare privilege of not being treated like a Fabergé egg in everyday life.

Here's an excerpt from an original broadccast of Old Enough! It's pretty self-explanatory (and usually the camera crew does a better job staying out of sight; in recent episodes the cameras are all but invisible).

The show has been airing since 1991. Netflix has two seasons of more recent episodes edited down to fifteen minute segments.

Related posts

Land of the paranoid
Free-range kids
Free-range kids (1940's edition)
L.M. Montgomery's free-range kids

Labels: anime, education, free-range kids, japanese culture, politics, social studies

I'd never gotten around to the last two novels in the Anne of Green Gables series. My brother Joe recently did. He didn't think much of Rilla of Ingleside or Kevin Sullivan's adaption (Anne of Green Gables: The Continuing Story).

I'd seen the latter too, which was in no way encouraging. Sullivan's Anne of Avonlea (also known as Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel) is a good example of how to deviate from the source material while keeping true to its substance and spirit.

The Continuing Story is a good example of getting it all wrong. Sullivan manages to turn Anne, as Kate puts it, into a "bucolic female James Bond." Yes, it's supposed to be about Rilla, but the lead had to be Megan Follows. Like I said, it's a mess.

Rather, Joe points to Rainbow Valley as the standout in the post-Green Gables books. So I clicked over to Project Gutenberg and downloaded it. And he was right. Rainbow Valley is a real gem.


As Joe points out, Rainbow Valley is less about the staid Blythe kids than the wacky Merediths. They're the offspring of the eccentric and widowed minister. Following the death of his wife, the children mostly raise themselves (not a social worker in sight).

Things only get dicier when Mary Vance shows up, the orphan girl they take in like a lost dog.

Mary Vance is the alternate universe version of Anne. While Anne coped by filling up on literature, focusing her mental energy inwards and fueling her imagination, Mary Vance turns hers outwards, with the goal of controlling the chaotic world around her.

Not surprising, given an upbringing that makes Anne's pre-Green Gables life look comfortable by comparison. Nowadays, Mary Vance would be cast as the pitiful victim on a Law & Order episode, a serial killer's childhood flashback on Criminal Minds.

"My grandfather was a rich man. I'll bet he was richer than your grandfather. But pa drunk it all up and ma, she did her part. They used to beat me, too. Laws, I've been licked so much I kind of like it."

Or pumped full of Ritalin and handed over to Child Protective Services. But a century ago, a tough childhood gave a kid "character." Indeed, Mary Vance isn't looking for excuses. To be a "victim" is to not be in control, and that's that last thing she wants.

Mary tossed her head. She divined that the manse children were pitying her for her many stripes and she did not want pity. She wanted to be envied.

With her considerable wit focused so long on day-to-day survival, the attendant niceties long ago went by the wayside. And so unconstrained by a still nascent superego, her id leaks out all over the place. She definitely gets all the good lines.

"Mr. Wiley used to mention hell when he was alive. He was always telling folks to go there. I thought it was some place over in New Brunswick where he come from."

"I haven't got anything against God, Una. I'm willing to give Him a chance. But, honest, I think He's an awful lot like your father, absent-minded and never taking any notice of a body most of the time, but sometimes waking up all of a sudden and being awful good and kind and sensible."

"Give me Daniel [in the Lions' Den]. I'd rusher have it 'cause I'm partial to lions. Only I wish they'd et Daniel up. It would have been more exciting."

"If one has to pray to anybody it'd be better to pray to the devil than to God. God's good, anyhow so you say, so He won't do you any harm, but from all I can make out the devil needs to be pacified."

As Miss Cornelia puts it, "If you dug for a thousand years you couldn't get to the bottom of that child's mind."

But Mary Vance hardly has the story all to herself. In the second half of the book, the misadventures of the untethered Meredith kids take over the story, along with the emergence of a possible romantic companion for their father (a sweet note to end on).

Reading Rainbow Valley is like listening to a gossipy small-town newspaper read aloud, the chronicler now and then stepping back from the narrative to offer an aside or two about her subjects. But always with the best intentions--and honest empathy--in mind.

Although I shy away from the omniscient point of view, Montgomery's relaxed command of the narrative is such that the "head hopping" never bothers me, and even imbues the story with a touch of magical realism that places it apart from the real world.

Though with the Great War just over the horizon, the book briefly breaks the reverie at the very end with a haunting bit of foreshadowing.

This was certainly a great part of Montgomery's appeal in Japan. Hanako Muraoka completed her translation of Anne of Green Gables during WWII. The Japanese edition was published in 1952. "Reality" was one thing they didn't need any more of.

Though as far as reality goes, Rainbow Valley hews closer to my own childhood (considerably less than a century ago) than the nanny state reigning today. Back then, the only parental constraint imposed on us as we flew out the door was: "Be home by dinnertime."

Labels: anne, book reviews, free-range kids, kate, social studies

My mom offers the following reminiscences about her "free-range" childhood (and the limits when it came to my kid sister):

All that freedom! It was the same when I was a kid. Until I was nine years old I pretty much played in my neighborhood, but from 1941 until college I wandered all over Provo [Utah].

When I was a teenager, I regularly rode horses in the foothills. (I now wonder what I would have done if the horse had thrown me.) I rode my bike all over, even down to Utah Lake. Finally, my dad asked me to stop riding to the lake because tramps hung around there. But he didn't stop me from riding elsewhere. The only rule we had was "Be home before sundown!" We ate our main meal at noon.

The one time I didn't get home on time, I was scolded. I recall, one time, leaving my girl friend's house too late and running, running home as I watched the sun sliding down behind the trees.

But by the time Kate was eleven I was more apprehensive--possibly because she was a small child, and possibly because of the times, I don't know--but when she asked permission to ride to the 7-Eleven store [about a mile from our house], I wouldn't let her go. I let Daniel do so and she objected. But she was small and a girl and one never knew what kind of guys might be hanging out at the store!

I do think kids are overprotected now. Times have changed, but not as much as some parents think.

However, I do approve of seat belts. I recall that Ann and Beth used to stand on the front seat while I drove. When I stopped I would fling out my arm to keep them in the seat. One day I was driving with my sister Eleanor in the passenger seat. I had to stop suddenly and I flung my arm out and whacked her in the chest!

When I think of Kate sitting in the back seat while I drove to pick up kids at high school, I shiver. She was so small that if I had braked suddenly she would have flown out the window!

According to just about every statistical measure available, life is safer than it was a quarter century ago. Utah Lake where the tramps use to hang out? It's now a municipal airport and a state park.

As Seth Godin puts it, "The things we have the most abundance of caution about are rarely the things that are actual risks. They merely feel like risks."

Labels: autobiography, free-range kids, history, social studies

Subtract the smoking references and expand the time frame to take in the late 1960s through the late 1970s and this list compiled by Jenny Isenman turns into a pretty accurate description of my childhood.

1. Thinking the middle seat in the front was the best seat because I could get crushed into the dashboard, I mean, because I got to control the five radio stations.

On vacations, the seating arrangement in our ginormous Ford station wagon was three in front, four in the middle, two in the pop-out rumble seats (above the spare tire) in the back.

2. Being totally inaccessible from after school until dinner. Now, we would call that being lost.

"Be home in time for dinner," my mom said as we ran out the door.

3. Having an equal intake of air: 50 percent oxygen, 50 percent second hand smoke.

My parents didn't smoke, thank God. We didn't have air conditioning either. By my teenage years, my dad had installed a whole-house fan that helped a lot.

4. Thinking that SPF 4 was responsibly using sun block.

SPF didn't exist as a concept for most of my childhood.

5. Thinking the haze of Solarcaine I was engulfed in was a healthy way to heal the 2nd degree burns I inevitably got from using SPF 4.

But Solarcaine did.

6. Getting excited when someone had a pick-up truck because that meant the kids got to ride on the flatbed.

7. Sitting on my dad's lap and manning the steering wheel.

8. Eating salami straight from the log.

And lots of raw cookie dough.

9. Playing on a rusted swing set where that one leg always popped out of the ground threatening to propel into space and then came back with a thud.

I know exactly what she's talking about. Remember jungle gyms and monkey bars and dodge ball? All those elementary school delights have since gotten sued into extinction.

10. Helmets? No one wore them and if you did, you were super geeky, protecting your nerdy brain and all.

Another safety concept that didn't exist for most of my childhood.

11. Being a latchkey kid by seven years old. The first couple times I stayed home. I parked a chair right inside the screen door and just sat there staring out, so I could see my mom pull up (also, the world could see I was alone with an open door, brilliant).

12. Fearlessly scaling fences, climbing trees, playing in the woods, and jumping streams without a parent in sight to save us (hell, we used to ride our bikes through a cemetery).

Several vacant lots and a swamp, in my case. We could travel as far as our bikes would carry us. My brother broke his leg playing in a house being built on one of those lots. Nobody got sued.

13. Running into the store to buy an adult cigarettes.

14. Nerf Shmerf—oh, we had them, but cap guns and BB guns were way more likely to shoot your eye out, and we preferred them.

I made a bow and bought real arrows to shoot. Could have killed somebody with one of those. During my chemistry phase, my mom bought me a pound of sodium nitrate. The pharmacist sold it to her, knowing damn well what I was going to do with it.

I bought a canister of calcium carbide at the Army Navy Store without an ID or nothing. Annoyed the hell out of the neighbors making milk carton bombs.

15. Car seats? Bahwawawahaha. My dad drove me around on the back shelf of his convertible in a Moses basket. "Oops, she was here a minute ago, must of hit a bump."

16. And forget seat belts—I barely sat in the seat at all, lying across the back windshield of my mom's Mercury Marquis or popping up and down from the floor was way more fun.

We seatbeltless kids managed to survive the real-time experiments in Newton's First Law of Motion: an object in motion stays in motion unless acted by an outside force. The outside force being a parental arm, not the dashboard.

We were lucky. Ubiquitous seatbelt use is the best public-health idea our safety-obsessive society has produced of late.

17. Jumping on beds until they collapsed. I was once under a bed when that happened.

18. Babysitting at eleven years old. In my town, once you were able to dial 911, you were considered a candidate for babysitting jobs.

19. Eating unwrapped things people handed you in stores—like pretzel logs from the bank.

And everything we could rake in on Halloween. The razor-blades-in-apples myth had just begun to gain traction in the suburbs, but that didn't stop any kid from snagging all the edible loot he could (parental escorts not required).

20. Being left in the car to wait for my mom do the grocery shopping because I didn't feel like going in.

Hey, I've got a book and the radio. I'm fine right here.

21. Running around until sundown without a care in the world, a phone in my pocket or shoes on my feet.

Again, "Just be home in time for dinner."

Related posts

Land of the paranoid
Free-range kids (1940's edition)
L.M. Montgomery's free-range kids

Labels: autobiography, free-range kids, history, politics, social studies

BYU-TV is BYU's satellite/cable outlet. When it's not broadcasting BYU sports and Mormon-specific religious events, it tries hard to be a generic, family-values, Christian broadcaster that anybody interested in generic family values would watch.

The programming includes reruns of syndicated "family-values" shows like Doc (with Billy Ray Cyrus), Wind at My Back (from Kevin Sullivan), old Disney flicks (and clones of same), and PBS-style science/nature shows.

It also creates original in-house content, some of which is surprisingly not generic and even pretty good, like American Ride, Story Trek, and Audio-Files. The latest BYU-TV production is a first, a scripted drama series called Granite Flats.

Here, though, they started with a good idea and executed it so clumsily that I couldn't stop being fascinated by the cinematic train wreck that followed.

Granite Flats is a period piece that takes place in 1962 at and around an army base in Colorado. The night Arthur and his mother arrive in town (his father, we are led to believe, was a test pilot killed at Edwards) he sees a comet [sic] falling out of the sky.

The next day at school, he's befriended by Madeline, the school's Lisa Simpson, and Timmy, the youngest son of the town's chief of police. Timmy's not a brainiac like Arthur and Madeline, but makes up for it with sheer gregariousness. The Scooby Gang is thus formed.

At this point, I was pretty sure we were in for a cross between Encyclopedia Brown and Mad Scientist Club, with a little Detective Conan thrown in for good measure. And indeed, they soon set off to track down the comet [sic] that Arthur saw.

Incidentally, that "comet" is indicative of an underlying flaw in the show. These kids understand complex trigonometry. They can build a metal detector out of spare parts. They darn well know the difference between a comet and a meteor. Alas, the writers don't.

The Scoobies are tracking it down when an explosion levels the motor pool shop on the base, killing a mechanic. Frank, a patient at the base hospital where Beth (Arthur's mom) is a nurse, rushes to help. He comes back with hands burned "turning off the gas." A clue!

That evening, in the best, most intense scene in the whole series, Sergeant Jenkins, the guy in charge of the motor pool, shows his son (Wallace) how to clean his .45 while rambling on about a firefight that wiped out his platoon in Korea and getting steadily drunk.

Wallace slips the gun off the table and is walking away with it when Chief John Sanders (well-played by Richard Gunn) and MP Major Slim Kirkpatrick arrive to question Jenkins about the day's events. Jenkins immediately confesses to blowing up the motor pool.

Jenkins's confession is good enough for Kirkpatrick but Sanders isn't convinced and wants to dig further. The kids resume their hunt for the "comet."

Meanwhile, Beth's boss skulks around the hospital like the Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files, involved in a top-secret conspiracy that involves Frank. And future Al-Anon member Wallace gets taken in by one of the nurses at the army hospital.

Read more »

Labels: BYU, free-range kids, granite flats, religion, television reviews

Lenore Skenazy　(she who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone) writes about raising "Free-Range Kids":

We all want to raise children who are self-confident and independent. And we all want them to be safe. What's happened in the past generation is that our fear for their safety has overwhelmed any old-fashioned notion of the benefits of letting them knock around and make their own fun. Even make their own mistakes.

When I was growing up, my parents' two unbreakable rules were: "Go outside and play!" and "Be home in time for dinner!" What we did in the meantime was pretty much up to us. Perish that thought nowadays! Skenazy goes on to point out that

since its peak in the early '90s, the crime level has plummeted by about 50 percent. Crimes against kids and adults are back to the levels of 1970. Here in New York, they're back to the levels of about 1963. So if you were growing up and playing outside in the '70s or '80s, your children are actually safer than you were.

To be honest, I am a little surprised that none of my adventures sent me to the ER (like some weird, medieval curse, my younger brother seemed to be the designated injuree, though he's still alive and kicking). Except that the general public hasn't processed these facts because

when you go to CNN, there's another wide-eyed child staring out at you—a cold case they'll plaster on the screen if it's a slow news day (i.e., a day when no white girls were abducted). Leave CNN and you're back to CSI or Law & Order SVU, where it's the same story, served up with a bow of duct tape.

This isn't only a U.S. phenomenon. NHK recently ran a time-filling news story about two teenage girls who stole a scooter and snatched a purse. It included a CSI-type photo of the neatly-arranged evidence (the scooter, the purse, some junk they bought with the money in the purse).

This being a national news broadcast, I waited for the other shoe to drop. Something like: "Teenage girl admits killing dad with ax." But no. That was it. The crime spree lasted all of an afternoon. As it turned out, the police didn't even bother pressing charges.

This kind of paranoia gets Japanese in as big a tizzy as it does Americans. Scowling juvenile delinquents currently populate Japanese TV dramas like castoffs from a West Side Story revival. As Peter Payne puts it, "Once the Japanese people decide they're going to freak out about something, everyone gets on board."

Except that Koichi Hamai, professor of law at Ryukoku University, found that "rates for crimes by juveniles are not increasing as a percentage of overall crimes; nor do they show any tendency to occur from an earlier age." Moreover, there's "no evidence that Japan's law and order situation is deteriorating."

Of course, we don't really believe the world is ending in our own back yard. It's always the fault of those bums in Shelbyville.

According to Hamai's research, fifty percent of his respondents believed that "crime has increased nationwide over the previous two years." But only four percent thought it had increased in their own neighborhood. Americans say the same thing about the politicians they elect (well, maybe not if they're from Illinois).

Related posts

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L.M. Montgomery's free-range kids

Labels: deep thoughts, free-range kids, japan, nhk, politics, social studies