Is there anywhere in the world where people still practice "free-range parenting" — I can't believe there even has to be a term for that — on a cultural level? Where being a "helicopter parent" would be seen as ridiculous and uncouth by the locals? A community that's intentionally trying to set things up in such a way that their kids can be given historical levels of freedom to roam?
I know about the Nordic countries, but they still don't hold a candle to even how free kids were all over the world up through the 1970s.
Maybe some kind of cultural enclave? Maybe a tiny island nation? A commune? A cult? Anything?
I live in Canada, and that's where my experience comes from. Argument refuted! :P
But to be serious: yes, I've been outside of North America. I've been to Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia, and a few other places. None of them are as bad as North America is with this expectation/nigh-on legal requirement of helicopter parenting... but they're all still far worse than what basically-everywhere in the world was like 50 years ago.
To be clear, my expectation for a place that is better, isn't just that kids there can walk to school on their own; but rather that kids in such a place would be allowed — and enabled, by considerations of forestry and wildlife management — to just walk/bike out of the town or city they live in to play and have adventures in the fields and parks and maybe a little bit of thornier wilderness around them, all on their own, for hours at a time. A.K.A. "just be home for dinner."
That's really how things used to be! Recently enough that anyone over 50 can tell you stories about their own solo wanderings of forests and mountains and streams as a child, in search of bugs to catch and birds to watch. Anyone under 50, though? Not so much. Not even younger people from supposedly rural areas in supposedly developing countries (that I've talked to, at least) have had a chance at this kind of youth. They might go out exploring — but parents insist that it be done with a group of friends, that they stay in cell-phone service range, and a dozen other things that mean that they have zero opportunity to clear their mind and actually take in nature for even a single minute.
If you really do insist that "most of the world" has this opportunity, though, then maybe the particular set of countries I've visited (and the people I've talked to on my travels) represent a bubble of experience? I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor? Did the Brits invent helicopter parenting and then carry it with them wherever they went?
> to just walk/bike out of the town or city they live in to play and have adventures in the fields and parks and maybe a little bit of thornier wilderness around them, all on their own, for hours at a time. A.K.A. "just be home for dinner."
It sounds like you've never been to Japan. It's exactly like that here.
>I think the countries I've visited have all been Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth nations. Maybe that's the common factor?
I feel like the Anglophone nations have all been following America's lead in many ways.
I know about the Nordic countries, but they still don't hold a candle to even how free kids were all over the world up through the 1970s.
Maybe some kind of cultural enclave? Maybe a tiny island nation? A commune? A cult? Anything?