independence emerging through the haze

One on my reading list reports that his wife sent their 6-year-old daughter on an errand to the local shop, about 2 minutes' walk away on a quiet street.

That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.

As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.

I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.

And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.

There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.

The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)

Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.