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AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
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h helicopter parent is one who hovers over his or her cchild. It’s a pejorative term, inasmuch as such parents are viewed as a smothering influence on their little ones. And their little ones aren’t always so little: the term has perhaps most often been applied to parents of college students who call their children’s dorm rooms for morning wake-up calls and their professors to complain about low marks and lobby for upgrades. Not that helicopter parents always take quite that long to take flight: an informal poll of Augusta area teachers this week making final preparations for the 2014 school year reveals that their biggest headaches are frequently not the class bully or the learning-challenged child; it’s the helicopter parents. Child psychologists, family therapists and other so-called experts tell us that the helicopter parents of kids in preschool and kindergarten are carefully and meticulously, albeit inadvertently, breeding those college students who can’t get out of bed at age 20 without long-distance help from mommy. Think for a moment about your childhood and compare it with your children’s (or grandchildren’s) current situation. In my own case, summertime was a long period of almost uninterrupted adventure. We couldn’t wait to head out the door after breakfast to play until lunchtime. And do more of the same afterward until supper. And then it was back outside until the streetlights came on, and it was a chore for our parents to round us up. We came inside reluctantly. Our field of play was immense: blocks upon blocks of nearby neighborhoods and streets. Schoolyards and their baseball fields and playgrounds which, but for us, were vacant for the summer. We built forts in uncharted woods that seemed vast to us (but that were less than two acres in size); there was a river less than a block from my house; railroad tracks a five-minute bike ride away; markets that seemed unbelievably distant where we would ride our bikes with nickels and dimes to spend on candy bars or ice cream. I believe my parents did an outstanding job of raising me and
my three brothers, but whatever the opposite of helicopter parents is, that’s what they were. When summer was over, we walked to school, something I did through high school, even though with each new level of education the school was farther and farther away. I would liberally estimate getting a ride to school maybe two dozen times total between day one of kindergarten and my final day of high school. The column to the right is a local/regional snapshot of something that’s happening all over the country. That is to say, things that we considered to be perfectly normal — and safe — are now being viewed as criminal behavior. Walk to school? Who does that anymore? If you manage to make it without being attacked by a deranged sex offender or child molester, you could still be picked up by police, who might arrest the parent who sent you off on foot before binding you over to the custody of Child Protective Services. Of course, we live in a different era today. We are inundated with news 24/7, so we hear all the terrible stories. It seems like a truly reckless act to allow a child to walk to school or play in a park without direct adult supervision. Far better to deliver them directly to the schoolhouse door, wait in the car-line to scoop them up in the same spot afterward, drive home and into your garage and automatically close the door before exiting the vehicle. Then settle in for some TV and Wii until bedtime. And we wonder where this epidemic of childhood obesity comes from! One disservice of the 24-hour news cycle is the sensationalizing
AUGUST 8, 2014
MOTHER CONFESSES TO DROPPING CHILD OFF AT PARK, IS ARRESTED • A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park for hours at a time. Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead. Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied. The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother, who confessed to leaving her at the park. The girl is in the custody of Social Services. KIDS JUST FINE; MOTHER ARRESTED ANYWAY • An Atlanta mom of four kids, ages 1-6, had them wait in the car for 16 minutes while she ran into the grocery store. One version of the story says the windows were rolled down. The kids might be sticky — it was 90° — but so was everyone in Atlanta just a generation ago. Another report says the windows were rolled up, but doesn’t say if the AC was on. WSBTV reported that the woman would appear before a judge to face four counts of reckless conduct. The children were given water and evaluated, but determined to be fine. “They were checked out by EMS and are OK, thankfully,” Sgt. Gregory Lyons told WSBTV. “(Mosley) has been charged with four counts of reckless conduct and she’ll be going to Fulton County Jail this evening.” Mosley is being held on $8,000 bail. MOM LETS SON WALK TO PARK, IS ARRESTED • Florida mom Nicole Gainey let her 7 year old walk to the park, and on the way, some adults feared for his safety and called the cops. Police scooped up the boy and drove him home. Then they arrested the mom because “there are sex offenders all over the place,” + according to news reports. +
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