(not OC, found of Quora, copy-pasted)
Are Japanese toddlers as independent as Netflix's Old Enough portrays them?
by
Ithamar Paraguassu Ramos
Webcomics, Comic book and children´s book AUthor (1996–present)
Updated Jan 2
yes, and the craziest thing is that Americans used to be too.
That thing you saw in films abouts 50s to 70s with small children hanging around in nearby woods, and working witth tools to build their own toys is not fantasy or fictions.
Untill the early 80s, tools for cgildren arent made of plastic.
They were just functional tools, just smaller, and those are view as cheap toys.
And those dont even enter in the lists of dangerous toys, they gave crazy stuff to kids play in the old times.
And the 80s, children around 9 - 11 were views as responsible enough to go home and stay there by themselves until the parents got home after work.
This thing to treat children as incapable is very recent.
Is a thing just from American Millenials and Zoomers only.
Most countrys find USa a bit creepy for that.
I was talking with a person who ask me if 13 years old kids need babysitters and I said that in may time that was the age of babysitters.
With 5 and 6, my parents called a 12 yo neighbor to look at us while they go out.
And at 13 my classmates were babysitters.
That series of books from "the babysitters club" its not fantasy, girls that age were babysitters.
In older generations we had very few people raised like incapable children and helicopter parents are very rare.
And to say the truth that happens in the majority of countries in the world.
This "protection" Americans being suffering in the last decades is actually abuse, and is clearly that the last generations create a great number of non functional adults, that show clear signs of abuse.
And wen I say "Americans" i like to let clear that we become the exception, most countries in the world kids are raised to be independent as possible.
The irony is that we see a lot of people saying how safer the old time are, but with modern projected neigborhoods and harsher safety laws on all kinds of product, we have places with a safety that dont even existed in none place of the world in the 50s and 60s.
I remember very well when the media started to profit with the fear of parents, making everybody paranoic with a wave of histories of children being harmed.
And never stopped, a case that happens in the other side of the country they maker a fuss that people feel is something that happens every day in every place.
The sad part in our times, is that there was a weird conception that raising children to be independent is equal to unsafe.
Or that to make independent children you need to make then unsafe for some reason.
I personally had a problem with this odd conception, because the reality is exactly the opposite: Being independent is to be more prepared and be safer.
Often those "protected" children end being raised to be victims, the opposite to be protected or to be safer..
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