Health & Fitness
At What Age?
Things have changed since I was a kid, and it's hard to know when your kid is old enough to do certain things.
The recent Patch article asking about what age you would let kids go to the pool unsupervised made me start thinking. I'm one of those parents that is always wondering "at what age..." and wondering if I'm too smothering.
My son is going into 3rd grade, and just in the last couple of weeks I let him ride his bike around the neighborhood by himself. Now, before you think that he's off riding around all day, I should clarify. Our neighborhood consists of one tiny street intersecting a street with a culdesac at each end, and our total neighborhood is only 24 houses. And when he rides around the neighborhood, he rides it once and then has to come right back, and I wait at the end of the driveway to watch for him and make sure he stops before crossing the one street that he needs to cross. It takes about 4-5 minutes for him to make the whole trip. We do live on a somewhat major cut-through street that gets a lot of traffic heading to the MARC station, so I don't let him out there by himself.
He wants to be able to go around the neighborhood whenever he wants, and my 4-year-old wants to be able to play outside in the driveway by herself. Both of them get a big, fat NO. I may have been able to have the run of the neighborhood when I was 4-year-old, and I did, but times are obviously a lot different now then they were 30+ years ago. And I feel like the kids have to pay the price for these crazy times by having to have so many restrictions on their independence.
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When I was a kid my parents or grandparents would go into the grocery store to do a fairly significant shopping trip while my brother and I would stay in the car, now I won't let them stay in the car while I run into the post office. I babysat for my younger brother when I was around 9 and he was 4, now I'd be hauled away to jail if I left my kids home at that age. Obviously there are laws around some of those things that make it easier for parents to make the determination of whether their kids are old enough or not. But others are really left to the discretion of the parents, and I always fall on the side of caution.
So at what age would you let your kids stay in the car while you run into a store for five minutes? Or for 30 minutes? At what age would you let them play at a playground out of your sight? Or walk to a friend's house a couple of blocks away?
