{"id":3354,"date":"2009-01-27T09:44:09","date_gmt":"2009-01-27T09:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/01\/27\/how-far-did-you-roam-as-a-chil\/"},"modified":"2009-01-27T09:44:09","modified_gmt":"2009-01-27T09:44:09","slug":"how-far-did-you-roam-as-a-chil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/01\/27\/how-far-did-you-roam-as-a-chil\/","title":{"rendered":"How Far Did You Roam as a Child?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Kathryn Cramer<\/a> (on Facebook, of all places), an article from the Daily Mail about how kids these days don’t get around much<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.<\/p>\n

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.<\/p>\n

He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m sort of curious about how widespread this phenomenon really is. I know I’ve had a few “kids these days” moments, watching the neighbor kids be driven three blocks to the local school, but at the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of kids walking to and from the high school when I’m out walking the dog.<\/p>\n

I know my readers span a wide range of ages, so I thought I’d throw this out for a totally unscientific four-question poll:<\/p>\n

\n

1) When you were a child, how far were you free to roam unsupervised?<\/p>\n

2) Was the area urban, rural, or suburban?<\/p>\n

3) If you have kids or young relatives, how far are they allowed to roam unsupervised?<\/p>\n

4) Is the area urban, rural, or suburban?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’d probably also be nice if you could note the approximate time frame (e.g. “the early ’80’s” or “the late 90’s”), but that’s optional.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I suspect that my childhood was a little anomalous, in that we lived out in the sticks. We didn’t think so at the time, because there were plenty of kids in school who lived way the hell out in the hills, but it was a pretty rural area.<\/p>\n

As a kid in the early 80’s (age ten-ish), I used to routinely wander over to the Depression-era flood control dam<\/a>, and a bunch of neighborhood kids spent whole days playing on the far side of the dike (where there used to be a lot more trees than are in the photos on that site). That was probably a mile or so, depending on where we went. Our parents would walk over to the top of the dike and yell for us when it was time for meals.<\/p>\n

A little later, I used to routinely walk to and from school, both the middle school down in town (maybe two miles away) and the high school half a mile from the house. I also remember riding my bike to the local library (three miles, maybe), and walking to a summer day camp at the park on the other side of the lake (maybe three miles).<\/p>\n

I don’t think I ever walked all the way around the north end of the lake by myself, but I did spend a few afternoons stomping around in the woods up the road, where there were a couple of abandoned houses. That was later on, though, when I was in high school.<\/p>\n

As for kids, well, SteelyKid can’t even crawl yet, so she doesn’t get far. She wants very badly to be walking, though, so I’m sure she’ll be hard to contain when the time comes…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Kathryn Cramer (on Facebook, of all places), an article from the Daily Mail about how kids these days don’t get around much: When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he… Continue reading How Far Did You Roam as a Child?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}