Jinxed Jobs /Teachers in the WW/ What standards are we using... LONG

[lagattalucianese]

No: HPFGUIDX 144347

> 
> Do you know how incredibly surprised I was when I came to USA to 
> learn that kids are not allowed to stay home by themselves without 
> adult looking after them till they are twelve or thirteen years 
old? 
> Erm... I was staying home by myself when my mom needed to go 
shopping 
> since I was five or six years old and erm... that was very NORMAL 
> situation, you know for many kids. When I was a preteen ( eleven? 
> twelve? is still a preteen, right?) I was hopping on a bus, then 
on  
> a subway, then on the bus again by myself to go visit my 
grandmother 
> which lived in suburb of the city.
> 
> So, maybe by the standards of american kids wisarding kids seem to 
be 
> more independent, that is true, but I really see nothing unusual, 
> honestly.
> 
...
> 
> Alla
>
Alla, I think this protectiveness (overprotectiveness, IMHO) in 
American parents is a relatively late development, and I'm not sure 
where it came from. When I was a kid, I not only stayed home alone 
but baby-sat my sister when I was seven or eight years old. I walked 
to school by myself (seven or eight blocks). And we actually went 
outside and played, without adult supervision or arranged play dates 
or anything. And I don't recall that any of us suffered anything 
worse than a skinned knee or elbow.

The logic put forward for protecting children every waking minute is 
that there are predators and perverts Out There, just waiting to 
pounce on an unsupervised child. Well, maybe, but I don't think they 
were any more or less prevalent when I was little. Sure, our parents 
warned us about accepting candy from strangers or getting in a car 
with someone we didn't know, but they weren't particularly 
pathological about it.

Maybe the underlying cause of all this concern is the fragmented 
state of our society. In my childhood, we were in and out of each 
other's homes and everyone knew everybody else's parents, and if 
there had been a threat to us, we had plenty of places to run to and 
plenty of alert, at-home parents to deal with the situation. If 
somebody "weird" had moved into our neighborhood, they would have 
been scoped out in nothing flat and discussed over back fences all up 
and down the block. These days, with both parents working long hours 
outside the home and kids on the latch-key, people often don't know 
their next-door neighbors to speak to. So naturally they are leery of 
turning their kids loose to run around in a neighborhood of unknown 
quantities. Sad commentary? Sure, but what's a parent to do?

Maybe it's the closed nature of the Wizarding community, in which 
everybody knows everybody and what to expect from them that accounts 
for the relative independence of Wizarding children. Sure, there are 
times when Hogwarts goes on red alert, and students are confined for 
their own safety (it was partly the speed with which Dumbledore 
reacted when Sirius Black turned up in the vicinity that made me 
suspect there was something fishy about Black, over and above his 
escaped-convict status). But by and large, the only unknown 
quantities in the Wizarding world are Muggles, and any Wizarding kid 
ought to be able to deal with a Muggle with one hand tied behind his 
back. ;D

--La Gatta