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IPFS News Link • General Opinion

After Living Abroad, Kids Struggle With American Overparenting

• https://reason.com

In the home of the brave, a kid can't hold a pencil on the school bus.

When Jean Phillipson's family returned to Fairfax, Virginia, after living in Bolivia, the main thing her 10-year-old son complained about was the bus ride home from school. "He wasn't allowed to have a pencil out," says the mom of three, "because it was considered unsafe."

Welcome back, kid, to the land of the outlandishly cautious.

I asked children and parents who'd lived both abroad and here in the States what struck them as the biggest difference. They all said it was the lack of childhood independence in America.

In Berlin, says Tully Comfort, an 11-year-old living there now, "me and my friends will meet up and go to the market and get something to eat on our own." But a year ago, when she was living in the U.S., "the parents had to always be around."

Tully and her family lived in Costa Rica and Mexico for six years before moving back to her mother's hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, when she was 7. "I enrolled her in public school and right away we came up against this lack of freedom," says Tully's mom, Julie Comfort. "They told me my daughter was not allowed to walk to school without an adult until middle school."

Back when she was her daughter's age, Julie says, "I used to walk with my friends in this same neighborhood." But since then, fear of strangers and liability issues have ossified into hard rules. Fed up, the Comforts moved to Berlin, a city Julie picked after vacationing there and seeing "a little kid, maybe 3 years old, riding his bike down the sidewalk, and his parents were way down the street, nonchalant."


www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm