i know i am just probably living under a rock, but i was kind of surprised that i didn't hear a deafening howl from Australian parents after the visit from that new york mother whose kid rode the subway by himself. I heard her speak a few times, once well on 702 radio and again on a morning show and then again on Q&A. She was, in my opinion, pretty convincing. May be she convinced others as well because the uproar I expected was not obvious in my world. Like I said, the rock I live under does not include talk back radio apart from the ABC (go on call me elitist), so I might have missed the hysteria, but I didn't hear it. The woman was sane, firm, a little shrew and sounding a little harsh I admit, but on the whole not a nutter. she did something the rest of us would not do unless forced by circumstance.
She spoke sensibly about the statistics of crime. She detailed the extreme unlikeliness of crime against our children. She spoke about how the prevalence of violent crime is completely exaggerated by global news broadcasts. How Maddy McCann looms large in our consciousness when she is only a single very tragic incident amongst a huge billion people population.
Her interviews made me relax a little, yes it is Ok to let the eleven year old stay in his house with his eight year sister for an hour alone. No, I don't have to justify it. They can walk to school without me watching them the whole way and they should be able to go into a shop by themselves to look at stuff while i do something else. They also should be able to sit in movies without me. They should also be able to explore some bushland near our house and stay in "coo-ee" distance. I don't need to feel guilty about that either. Isn't parenting hard?
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I didn't even register hearing the story, so that either means I am further under my elitist rock (!), or that it seemed such a mundane thing that I just let it wash over me.
ReplyDeleteThe myth of crime and the fact that it appears to 'sell' better than sex in the mainstream media (eg: the oft-inane comments made by Adam in the police segment on 702 Breakfast... crime as entertainment) seems to be becoming more pervasive.
I was babysitting (childminding?) at 12 years old, and discussing this with friends, no one would trust a 12 year old babysitter, let alone a male one, after all "...look what happened to that Jamie Bulger in England".
I'd really like to see the proper stats given an airing, rather than Don Wedderburn's politically motivated reports on or the ABC/2GB/2UE/SMH/Telegraph, replete with social commentary about how we need more police.
Resilience and failure and risk (and risk of failure)are more than interlinked, and I think we risk raising generations of cotton wool kids who have never failed at anything and who fall apart at the first sign of failure...
That said... not sure I'd trust my 12 year old to catch the train to Sydney... not through worry, but the fact that she'd probably end up in Grafton by mistake!
More posts on this topic, please!