I picked up my grandsons (7 and 8) at school again today.

[luvs2sing]

54. My mother was crazy overprotective, but..

We lived in a new subdivision in a small town. There was a main road and a four-lane highway nearby. When I started first grade in 1964, Mom drove or walked me the quarter mile to the bus stop at the main road or drove me if the weather was bad. By spring of that year, she and the other mothers learned they could stand in their back yards and watch us get off the bus and meander down through the vacant lots. By the next year, a fancy new school was built right in the subdivision. It was about an eighth of a mile from our house, and I walked that every day, again, with Mom watching from the kitchen window till I went in the building or arrived home.

I rode the bus in junior high. The school was three miles away, out on the four-lane. My challenge then was to be allowed to walk or ride my bike about a mile down the main road to the Stop-N-Go. All my friends were doing this by third grade, but I wasn’t allowed till I was 13, and then only if I went “the back way”, cutting through residential streets and staying clear of the main road. I didn’t always comply. 😁

In high school, I walked unless the weather was lousy, when I would take the bus. The high school was two miles away, and my best friend lived in between, so I would walk to her house, and we’d walk together. If we left early enough, we’d have time to stop at the bakery and get a pastry on the way. In the afternoon, we’d haunt the mall on the way home. I would sometimes walk home from her house but most of the time Dad would pick me up on his way home from work. Some of my best memories are of walking home from high school with my friend, singing all our favorite songs

Yes, there were creepy people, but everyone knew to avoid them, scream, and run like hell to a grown up. I always knew danger existed, but I was never afraid.

I don’t know how kids today learn autonomy or how to trust themselves.