Childhood is the precious time when worries are about getting home on time for dinner and which game you should play with your friends next, those carefree days were the best years of my life.
I watched a documentary about a cold case in Australia which featured 3 missing children who went to the beach and never came back. That happened in the 60’s. At a time when parenting and being children are so vastly different from present times.
It transported me back to my own childhood where like those kids we were pretty much allowed a lot of freedom to roam about and just had to make it back home before dinner was laid out on the table. I had a blast being a child and growing up, I was most of the time outside playing with other kids even when I was an only child for a long while , it was never ever lonely.
T’was during those years I learned about interacting with others and learning who are the bad people to be avoided. Parents in those days, at least for my friends and I, gave a curfew when we should be home and not to talk to strangers or take things from them, and then we were free to run around having fun. However it was also a time when adults are respected and children are seen and not heard. It surprised me when I found out that it was the same way in other parts of the world.
My neighbourhood I grew up in was a poor one. The government built low cost projects that are affordable. This meant sharing living space with people from troubled pasts to the nicest helpful people around. We had a neighbour who had such a big family and living in a single bedroom flat, I didnt question it then but thinking back it must have been very packed with no personal space whatsoever. Here I also got to know a mentally retarded teenager , I found him strange but not scary and found a way to communicate with him. On the other end of the block were a Eurasian family I used to hang out with, their mom cooked the best curry! Several floors down my best friend lived with her mom as the resident tailor and also the place where people congregate to chat and gossip.
There was a mini post office with a very old man manning the shop. He gave me the chills every time I saw him. He had clear gray eyes peeking out from an extremely wrinkled face. He would stare intensely at us kids whenever we went there. As a child it was a gut feeling to avoid him and only went in when his wife was there. I found out yesrs later that he was caught for raping his own daughter. I had chills when I heard.
A few doors away lived a family with problems , my young mind could not process what exactly was wrong with them specifically. There were 5 children all in all 2 girls and 3 boys. The younger boys had a tendency of stealing and once even grabbed my school bag as I was opening my gate to the flat. I chased after him and snatched my bag back. Of course now reflecting back, its really stupid to snatch things from a neighbour thst knows exactly where you live. But it was a troubled family who after some years the daughter died and it was rumoured that it was due to abuse from the mother!
The experience I would never forget was when returning from school one day and taking the elevator , i was surrounded by a group of boys not older than I was and they threatened me with a knife to hand over my money. My adrenaline kicked in and when the elevator door opened i rushed out and ran home. Instead of being traumatised after it, I became angry that people take such liberties to extort money that didn’t belong to them. My mother was way more shocked and waited every day for the school bus to accompany me back home. Luckily for me that did not mean the end of my freedom or that I had to stay cooped up in the safety of my house. Of course bad or worse things could have happened but like most cases its being in the wrong place at the wrong time that is the problem.
In my colourful old neighbourhood there were also plenty of helpful and selfless neighbours who come to your aid when you need it, instead of locking their own doors like the rich neighbours do. Looking back it was a privilege to live there. I developed a knack for reading people and also some street smarts and turned out all right (more or less …) 😀
Moral of this long tale is bad and sick people like paedophiles, rapists, killers, abusers all existed long ago. What changed is probably the amount of news outreach we get these days and every time you pick up a newspaper it increases the sense of paranoia. Its a real pity that children these days are cooped up in the house with ipads and video games in the name of being kept safe. Childhood years are the best to live through , these are also the informative years where you mske mistakes , learn from them and shapes characters. If a big part of keeping kids safe at home with little freedom to experience independence, is due to increased information then maybe ignorance is really bliss.
