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Published on 02/08/1999 All articles from this issue

Child's play

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By Bill Walsh

Other Voices

In the fall of 1949, Paul Carison and I attended Mrs. Pickard's kindergarten class at Washington School, a short five-block walk from our homes on Lexington Way. Burlingame and Howard avenues were the busiest streets to cross by ourselves, so Paul and I were admonished to look both ways and to be careful before we crossed.

To the best of my recollection of my early childhood, that was the strongest caveat I was given by my parents about the world outside of home.

For the next five years, my father continued the practice of leaving the house unlocked 24 hours a day. By my 10th year, I had neither seen a front door key, nor assumed one existed. But, during that year, my father chaired a rare household meeting and announced a door-locking policy, provoked by crime reports comparatively timid by today's standards. It seemed like the innocence of the 1940s and 1950s was eroding.

Today, at 54, I am parenting my second family. It has occurred to me that this affords me a rare view into three generations of 5- and 6-year-olds: my own, my three grown children's, and my 6- year-old Katie's. While parental caution steadily increased through the 1960s and 1970s, my children still had free run of the entire street, and often played unsupervised at the neighborhood park.

Today, the neighborhood dynamic has totally changed, twisted by the sense that there are more villains out there, doing more despicable things to more children than one could have even imagined 40 years ago. Images of Polly Klaas and Christina Williams fill the media, while we paranoid viewers, readers and listeners are sickened and horrified by what perverted adults are capable of doing to innocent children.

Today, my daughter is escorted five doors down to visit a neighbor's child. Parents of older children stand in the street and monitor the movement of their children to their destinations.

There seems to be as many parents on the playgrounds as children. There is even a name for the choreographed union of children from adjacent neighborhoods, "play dates." The "never talk to strangers" moniker has been expanded to course work at local schools.

Unanswered questions hang in front of us: Are we being over protective? Has the media magnified what are really extremely rare occurrences? Even if so, are we willing to take that chance? Was it really statistically better or worse in the 1940s and 1950s, 1960s and 1970s?

Did the parents of those times take unnecessary risks with their children out of ignorance? What does this mean for the children of the 1990s and beyond?

Can they grow to be independent, confident, adults? Does this erosion of trust get better or worse? And, how did we let this happen?

Bill Walsh, a Los Altos resident, is president of Cornish & Carey Commercial in Santa Clara.