While I’m not suggesting that it’s advisable to let your kids go feral for a summer, I suspect that if “Don’t Tell Mom” were remade in 2022, one moral of the story would be about how negligent the mother was. The kids wind up having to navigate plenty of obstacles on their own - even broken bones - and ultimately learn self-reliance, becoming confident in skills such as holding down a job, cooking and cleaning. Sorry for the spoiler, but as the title suggests, early on, the babysitter dies. She leaves her kids with a random babysitter who’s approximately 9,000 years old, whom she meets roughly five minutes before she departs. The premise is that a single mother of five kids, from grade school to high school age, goes to Australia with her boyfriend for the summer, and that’s depicted as a very reasonable thing for a stressed-out mom to do. My reaction to “Old Enough!” was similar to my reaction when I recently rewatched 1991’s “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.” I doubt it could or would be made the same way today, and not just because of all the smoking in it. According to a 2012 analysis of a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American adults believed, on average, that a child could be left at home alone at 13, bathe alone at 7½ and bike alone at around 10.Īmerican norms seem also to have become more protective over time. Though I knew American parents were more protective than some parents in other countries, I was surprised by the extent of the protectiveness. In the Netherlands, for instance, Kois said that kids rode their bikes to school by themselves. Dan Kois, who wrote a book about traveling the world with his 9- and 11-year-olds, said, “Our experience in most of the places we lived in the course of that year, children, especially middle-grade children, were given enormous amounts of freedom that were totally incomprehensible” to the average American. In much of the rest of the world, kids are allowed to do more solo at earlier ages.
In Japan there’s a focus on “teaching children to pull their own weight from an early age, having these expectations that they’re capable of being independent, being left at home alone or cooking or using knives or walking to school at 6,” she said. “In school and parenting, all the assumptions of what children can do and should be learning - it’s almost inverted,” she said.
That means kids have to cross the street a lot - but also keeps drivers going slow, out of self-interest if nothing else.” But even given these differences, we should at least entertain the idea that Americans have overrotated on protectiveness in the past few decades and need to reconsider letting their kids do more by themselves.Ĭhristine Gross-Loh, the author of “Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us,” who has lived in Japan and the United States with her kids, said that she had culture shock in both directions: first when she moved to Japan and again when she moved back to the United States. Neighborhoods have small blocks with lots of intersections. As a University of Tokyo professor explained to Slate’s Henry Grabar: “Drivers in Japan are taught to yield to pedestrians. But sadly, we know that the presence of an adult doesn’t necessarily protect children from that horror. One glaring example is gun violence, something that’s rare in Japan and alarmingly predictable in our country. You’re probably thinking: America is not Japan. If there were an American version, parents who allowed their children to appear would probably be framed as irresponsible, or the kids would be shown to need parental support at every turn. In addition to being utterly charmed by how cute the show is, I thought: This wouldn’t fly in the United States.
And the kids are brimming with pride after accomplishing their tasks.
But the narrative is basically the same every time: A child overcomes fears or hesitations by running an errand, learning to politely ask questions of supportive and kind adults when help is needed to figure out how to pay for lunch or cross a busy street. Sometimes they get distracted from their appointed mission and start playing, and they often notice and interact with the camera operators, who appear in the background of many scenes. (The show’s original title is translated as “My First Errand.”) These tiny children are shown toddling by themselves to the grocery store, to their grandmother’s house to pick something up or to a local farm to yank an enormous cabbage out of the ground. It is called “Old Enough!” and depicts Japanese little ones, some as young as 2, taking their first solo journeys. An aggressively adorable reality show that’s been on for decades in Japan recently hit Netflix.