Leaving kids unsupervised

1. An article in Salon mentions in passing that Parents Today now wait for the school bus with their kids instead of the kids waiting at the bus stop unsupervised.

This made me think of Erica.

Erica was a neighbourhood girl a year ahead of me who would sit on the mailbox. She'd climb up on top of the red Canada Post mailbox and sit there waiting for the bus to come. I don't know why, that's just what she did.

Obviously, you're not supposed to sit on the mailbox. But there were no grownups around to stop her, so she sat on the mailbox. It was a harmless way of breaking the rules.

A lot of harmless rule-breaking went on at the bus stop. If someone had seen SNL or the Sunday Night Sex Show, they'd tell us all about it. If someone knew a dirty joke, they'd share it. People would apply the make-up their parents said they were too young for. People would eat the junk food their parents had banned from the family home. People would remove the toques their parents had insisted they wear. All against the rules, all ultimately harmless.

We'd also do other things that weren't against the rules, but you just couldn't do in front of grownups. We'd take a "Who's your ideal celeb crush?" quiz in Y&M. We'd bitch about our English teacher. We'd concoct elaborate plans for one of our number to Talk To A Boy. Harmless, not against the rules, but not for the ears of parents or teachers.

The bus stop wasn't utopia. The bullies were there too, and for this reason I wouldn't have minded if it was normal for parents to wait with us. (I wouldn't have wanted my parents there if it wasn't normal, but if everyone else's parents were there - or even if there were just a few supervising grownups to keep the bullies down - I wouldn't have minded.) However, I didn't feel any less safe than at school, and I do see its value as an unsupservised public space for kids.

So this makes me wonder what effect it has on kids to be closed out of unsupervised public space. When they can't sit on the mailbox, how does their adolescent rebellion manifest itself?

2. A Globe and Mail writer blogs about the difficulty of butting out of her kids' post-secondary education.

This makes me think of the value of OAC (i.e. Grade 13).

OAC students were generally over 18, and the OAC courses were managed with that assumption. Students who were over 18 could sign themselves in and out of school rather than needing a note from their parents for every absence. As legal adults they were accountable for their own education, and the teachers actually couldn't talk to the student's parents without the student's permission. As a result of this OAC classes didn't have the custodial element of other classes and didn't presume to be accountable to the parents. (It's possible that the parents of a minor OAC student might have been allowed to go talk to the kid's teacher, but it just Wasn't Done.)

Many students in my school started taking OACs in Grade 12 or even Grade 11 (for various reasons that I can get into if you're interested but are irrelevant to this blog post). I started taking OACs in my Grade 12 year, and becaue I was born in December I was 16 years old when I started my first OAC class. Starting at the age of 16 I had courses where if a teacher was absent, the class was cancelled. Where the teacher wasn't expecting a parental signature on my report card, and wouldn't give a parent-teacher interview without my permission. Where I wouldn't be disciplined for missing class, I'd just better damn well catch up and not accrue 20 unexcused absences. I was still in high school, still living at my parents' (and still expected to be), I just had full legal and personal responsibility for my own educaction.

For one year, half my classes were like this. For the next year, all my classes were like this. Then the next year I was in university, by which time it didn't even occur to me or my parents that they might possibly have any business interfering with my academics.

This may vary for people who are more mature or people who are old for their year, but for me OAC was a valuable transition and a key part of preparing me to take responsibility for my own university career.