Damn, kb beat me to the badge, but this is a hell of a read. I'm the same age as Kip, and I can't tell you how vivid the memory of this story and of Columbine is (plus a dude from my own class killed his sister and planned to kill more before coming to and giving himself up). They precipitated vast changes in the freedoms we were allowed during school hours, which basically changed from a minimum to a medium security prison overnight. Reactionary instead of trying to have any understanding of deeper meaning. The 90s were a decade when nothing meant anything, and that was a hard time to be in high school (not that there's ever a good time). However, I'm afraid that even with our consciousnesses of race and metal illness being raised much higher over the interceding two decades, that not much has really changed. We're still reactionaries.
Lenore Skenazy documents the advent of "stranger danger" pretty exhaustively in Free Range Kids. What started out as the ABC Sunday Night Movie about White Women in Peril transmogrified into White Child in Peril as soon as Fox gave John Walsh a place to imply children were being abducted on every street corner and then left him there for 25 years. As soon as kids started shooting each other you couldn't save the kids from the kids. Graduated in '92, should have been '93. We had gun racks. .22s were fired in the hallway a couple times. We went out to lunch wherever we wanted and if you were going to ditch, you were going to get in your car and leave. They gave us ID cards and we, the senior class, threw them vertically so they stuck into the ceiling tiles in front of the office. Then they tried to make us make up for the four weeks of afternoons we lost because of bomb threats and we all walked out. Next year's senior class was told that campus was closed and that they had to show picture ID to get into the parking lot. And because they were pussies, there were metal detectors by '97. What freaked me out when I went back to community college in 2017 was all the drilling and signage around "your classmate is going to come to school with an AR-15 some day, here's how you be ready." It's as if the administrations collectively decided that the best way to deal with locking the chicken coop was to teach the chickens to hide at a moment's notice. The 30-year infantilization of American children is one of the greatest, most terrible trends nobody talks about. The fact that "adulting" is a thing tells you more than you need to know about the harm generated by 'boomer "protective custody."They precipitated vast changes in the freedoms we were allowed during school hours, which basically changed from a minimum to a medium security prison overnight.
A-fucking-men. I have two toddlers. I watch them closely enough. They are safe. They are fine. My mom, a boomer extraordinaire, has flipped out on me on multiple occasions for letting them be in the yard by themselves, because "Weirdos are out to abduct cute blonde kids." Never has she stopped for even a moment to reflect on whether the weirdos are actually out there and if they are, are they really more interested in blonde children than any other type? They are stuck in that mentality and there's no way out. Eventually they will all be gone and I hope we can disinherit their tendencies toward paranoia.
I wholeheartedly recommend Lenore Skenazy's book. It's funny. We let the kid stay home when we go running or whatever. I've let her be by herself in the house for, like, 90 minutes while I was out dropping off a package. She has at least three different ways to get ahold of a half-dozen adults. For her to not be in communication she would need to lose an iPad and a laptop or have wifi go out, at which point there are two or three neighbor kids she could run to. She's eight. And we're terrible parents for doing that to her. I was latchkey from kindergarten onward. No one was home until 6:30pm. Most of my friends were in a similar situation. Often times we'd just go get into trouble and no one said a fuckin' thing.
You are excellent parents for fostering a sense of responsibility and emotional strength in your daughter. My Dad, a long time public elementary and middle school teacher gave my wife and I a copy of Skenazy’s Free Range Kids before our son was born. We laughed an scoffed at it initially. Skenazy is brilliant. She makes the fact based case of how poorly developed so many of our fears are. Toddlers in the yard are more likely to have a tree fall on them or get squished by a meteorite than abducted by the scary man in the van. Put the guns away folks. That boogeyman doesn’t actually exist and you’re teaching your kids to make habits of anxiety producing thoughts. I think I’ll read it again.