‘Free-range children’ taken into custody again in Maryland

[hunter]

46. In good humor I claim to have been a feral child...

... and in comparison to these kids I truly was.

By the third grade I was allowed to freely wander anywhere I could get to. Past fifteen I was wandering everywhere, not even confined to the U.S.A.. My younger sister was disappointed that she and her friends didn't quite have the same freedom. She and her friends once drove up to Canada but the Canadians wouldn't let a car full of fifteen and sixteen year old U.S.A. girls pass.

In fifth grade I remember staying with my grandma in Los Angeles and she bought me a three day bus pass, and the only rule was I had to be home for dinner.

When my dad was a kid in Los Angeles and San Diego he'd head out to the ocean alone before dawn to go fishing, sometimes on boats of fishermen his grandma only knew in the slightest most casual way. (She liked to fish too.)

My wife's Mexican-American dad was out hawking newspapers in Los Angeles at the same age. His parents were working in the canneries, and then when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they went to work in the shipyards. My mom's parents were shipyard workers too, both of them welders, and my mom's "daycare" providers were hookers by night.

I know a few people my age bad things happened to. One of my friends was gay and killed himself.

Another childhood friend of mine was raped at thirteen by an upstanding and untouchable "leader" of our community. For a long time she thought it was her fault for drinking the booze he offered her and then "coming on" to him.



He later got removed from free society, but not for getting underage girls drunk and raping them. Embezzlement was a greater crime. The message was damned clear to all his victims. Money is important, girls are not.

My wife and I were much more sophisticated parents, wary, and more experienced raising our kids, holding them a little closer, but we did our very best not to interfere with their personal autonomy, which included a lot of grimacing and biting our tongues when they were teenagers.