Top 10 Worst Helicopter Parenting Moments of 2018

[EasyAce]

Aborted snowball fights, unused playground equipment, baseless child trafficking panics, and more.
By Lenore Skenazy
http://reason.com/blog/2018/12/13/top-10-worst-helicopter-parenting-moment

Kidnapping, Halloween, and snowballs—in 2018, we freaked out about each of these things and many others. Here are the year's ten most vexing moments for the free-range parenting movement . . .

. . . Thankfully, not all the news was bad. This spring, Utah passed America's first Free-Range Parenting Law, which decreed that parents cannot be considered negligent simply for letting their kids run errands, play outside, wait briefly in the car (under some circumstances), or come home with a latchkey. It's a start, at least. See you in 2019!

[EasyAce]

Let's see:

* I walked back and forth to school alone when I was in the first and second grade---in the Bronx.

* For crying out loud, I sledded in the Bronx down the single worst road drop in the borough---the wicked big drop from Sedgwick Avenue down to Bailey Avenue on Kingsbridge Road.

* I walked back and forth to school when I was in third through sixth grades, junior high school and high school, the latter two when I didn't feel like the bus--on Long Island.

* I never met a snowball fight I didn't like.

* If I went to the stores on my own, sometimes my mother might happen to be driving by and she'd stop and I'd hop into the car. I wasn't exactly being kidnapped.

* The worst thing about any trick or treat candy I ever got was black licorice, which I still can't stand.

* My parents thought nothing worse than I was being adventurous playing on 5-and-up playground equipment when I was three and four. Except maybe for a couple of scraped knees. (The flip side: they were absolute basket cases if they saw me riding my bike out in "the gutter" as we used to call it, even if I knew what I was doing out there, which I did.)

* We didn't have cell phones when I was a kid, and walking around the woods or the lakes on summer vacations was a freaking rite of passage when I was a kid.

* So I once had messy hair while wearing shorts in the summer. What did that make me, neglected? Name one kid who didn't get his hair mussed up a bit playing baseball and other summer games or going to the beach to swim, for God's sake. (And I'd go to the beach alone when I was like nine or ten to meet friends there, since I lived walking distance from it after we moved out of the Bronx. Oh, the horror!)

* I got kissed on the lips all the time from my parents, my grandparents, assorted aunts, uncles, cousins. Nobody thought they were trying to make out with or molest me. Including me. (If they'd go wild in the media now over one football player just being a loving father, they'd have hung my family.)

* I've had dogs most my life, from age seven. I walked my first dog alone all the time. Jeez Louise, you'd think someone might rub two brain cells together and figure out that a seven- or eight-year-old kid walking man's best friend kind of has built-in security protection.

[mystery-ak]

Worst thing.

My father career USAF stationed Nouasseur Air Base in the late 50's...we lived on base, every so often someone from the base would go around in a small tanker truck that sprayed for bugs, snails etc..my sister and I and other kids would follow that truck on our bikes all the while inhaling and being saturated with whatever was in that tanker....

To this day my sister laugh about this..all our children and grandchildren are all normal and no birth defects....or so it seems..lol

[Wingnut]

Survived.  Lost some ass skin on occasion


Survived



Survived but not without a few stitches in my chin

[Hoodat]

Worst thing.

My father career USAF stationed Nouasseur Air Base in the late 50's...we lived on base, every so often someone from the base would go around in a small tanker truck that sprayed for bugs, snails etc..my sister and I and other kids would follow that truck on our bikes all the while inhaling and being saturated with whatever was in that tanker....

To this day my sister laugh about this..all our children and grandchildren are all normal and no birth defects....or so it seems..lol

It was probably DDT - the safest pesticide ever made.  I've seen people eat spoonfuls of DDT powder.

[Wingnut]

It was probably DDT - the safest pesticide ever made.  I've seen people eat spoonfuls of DDT powder.

[Hoodat]

[EasyAce]

Worst thing.

My father career USAF stationed Nouasseur Air Base in the late 50's...we lived on base, every so often someone from the base would go around in a small tanker truck that sprayed for bugs, snails etc..my sister and I and other kids would follow that truck on our bikes all the while inhaling and being saturated with whatever was in that tanker....

To this day my sister laugh about this..all our children and grandchildren are all normal and no birth defects....or so it seems..lol

@mystery-ak
When I was still a Bronx kid, once a month the old fuel oil tanker would come down the block and refill our apartment building's supply. That was one of the most distinctive stenches of my childhood, and I can still remember the refill point being right smack on the front of the building as I turned left out of the building to walk to school. Right into it. I'm pretty sure that didn't affect my brain or other internals.

[Sighlass]

Heck, we used to walk to the store (for candy or snuff) during lunch time at school if we had pocket money. I lived close enough to home to walk home (briskly) and back to school during lunchtime. I am talking Middle school years.

[mountaineer]

As an 8-year-old, I walked through a college campus full of who knows what ?!?!? to get to school. In fact, I wasn't forced to ride a school bus until my junior year of high school (not sure why, as the distance was the same sophomore year as it was a few months later).

[mirraflake]

It was probably DDT - the safest pesticide ever made.  I've seen people eat spoonfuls of DDT powder.

It did it's job well but was destroying the bird populations.

@Hoodat

[Wingnut]

It did it's job well but was destroying the bird populations.

@Hoodat

That was fake science. DDT was the world's greatest public-health success stories, saving millions of lives by preventing insect-borne disease. Unfortunately for those in areas still infested with mosquitoes and other flying bugs, DDT is also the world's most-misunderstood substance, the target of a decades-long scientifically ignorant and ideologically motivated campaign that has vastly limited its use and applications.

[musiclady]

Survived.  Lost some ass skin on occasion


Survived



Survived but not without a few stitches in my chin

Stitches are a rite of passage.  No childhood is completely successful without them. 

Had many myself, as well as 7 broken bones, and a friendship ring that had to be cut off with a hacksaw because it caught on a nail on the tree I was dropping out of, and an upper lip filled with gravel when I went head first off my bike on a neighbor's driveway.

I had FUN.

Our home is in a wooded area with lots of room to roam that includes a creek and a lake.  Our kids turned out to be more adventurous than their peers because we told them to go outside and play, and they did.

There's not going to be a single kid with an ounce of courage or creativity if this helicopter parenting doesn't stop.

[mountaineer]

There's not going to be a single kid with an ounce of courage or creativity if this helicopter parenting doesn't stop.

There is/was a poster at TOS whom some of us may know who works at the USMA. She told us that incoming cadets are less and less familiar with the great outdoors and get freaked out when they have to do rugged stuff like hiking. And these are future soldiers. 

[EasyAce]

Stitches are a rite of passage.  No childhood is completely successful without them. 

I managed to avoid stitches as a kid and didn't suffer my first broken bone until I was 36, but I'm sure I took enough skin off my knees and my can from roller skating and playing baseball to graft onto one complete head-to-toe burn victim, I'm sure.

There's not going to be a single kid with an ounce of courage or creativity if this helicopter parenting doesn't stop.

Down with helicopter parenting . . . but up with airplane parenting, which I was, in the summer of 1964, when my father took me for my first such trip aboard . . .



(We flew from New York LaGuardia to Richmond, Virginia; it was a business trip for my father that was supposed to be four days, but he knocked his business off in two days and we spent two days bumming around Richmond and Petersburg and swimming in the Holiday Inn pool before flying back to New York aboard a similar plane on the same airline. It was the best time I ever had with my father, God rest his soul.)

[DB]

It did it's job well but was destroying the bird populations.

@Hoodat

The banning of DDT likely killed millions of people through malaria and other insect spread diseases.

[mystery-ak]

It was probably DDT - the safest pesticide ever made.  I've seen people eat spoonfuls of DDT powder.

Probably...or whatever the USAF got their hands on...

[mystery-ak]

That's what we did..a whole bunch of kids on our bikes..

[Wingnut]

That's what we did..a whole bunch of kids on our bikes..

We rode in an out of the fogger's fog every summer evening at dusk.  It was a right of passage.

[Hoodat]

It did it's job well but was destroying the bird populations.

@Hoodat

Only if you consider mosquitoes to be birds.

[Fishrrman]

I was only about 8 or so, and I used to walk two miles down the main road from Weston to Georgetown (CT) to watch goings-on at the railroad yard there. No one said anything.

Got my first ride on a railroad engine switching cars there (should have quit while I was ahead!).

At the time they were rebuilding the road between Weston and Westport, and the trains would bring in hopper loads of bluestone that were loaded in Mack Thermodyne diesel dump trucks. The truck drivers would give me a ride home from Georgetown. What a thrill for a little kid! They'd drop me right off in front of my house.

Imagine an 8-year-old doing things like that today...

[mountaineer]

Stefan Molyneux  Verified account @StefanMolyneux
Nov 26

You can get in serious trouble in America for letting your 10-year-old child walk home from a park unaccompanied - or ride a bike without a helmet - but if you drag a helpless toddler to a very dangerous border invasion, you are a hero.