Children have more autonomy about what they eat or wear, but less independence in real terms
Children once spent long hours in the company of other children. Now they spend long hours on their phones. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty ImagesWhat year marked the end of the free-range child? Born in a different century in the countryside, I cycled to school along narrow, winding country roads from about the age of 10 on my own.
Long before the age of 10, I spent hours evading work by the simple expedient of disappearing up the fields in the direction of the cliffs. I suspect that today even in the country, if an eight- or nine-year-old with a penchant for wandering along headlands went missing for two or three hours, search parties would ensue.
My farmer parents just silently indicated the work I thought I had dodged when I returned. I glumly completed it. It did not stop me from trying the same trick the following weekend. It was pre-internet, pre-smartphones, pre-social media. There is not a single child in a primary or post-primary school who ever lived in those conditions and they would probably shudder in sympathetic horror at the prospect.
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