I have also been in situations where I need to act and could not, including when I ran away from home. (I do not recommend running away as a “place to learn”). Even recently I felt I was in the “wrong” place and could not tell anyone for several hours. I lost speech as a reaction to feeling unsafe, when I NEEDED speech to communicate that I needed to leave. I also do not think that I was easily able to generalize the “not everyone just wants to buy you a hamburger” to other situations, such as dating.

My parents let us wander in the woods behind our house. Like many others who posted here I learned a lot of things about the woods, many of which do not translate to the world of work or other aspects of “adult life”, but maybe some do, in unusual ways. I teach my son about the smells of various kinds of wood, look at flowers with him, to see what they are like inside, whether pink or yellow pistils, etc.., to stop and listen to the birds, stuff like that. I still tend to freak out when he puts his hand under a rotten log down by the creek. We have copperheads. I put my hands on plenty of logs, though, and never met one copperhead as a child. I know many many parents who do not let their children get dirty, but my son is happiest when covered from head to foot with mud. So I let him unless we are going somewhere where he is supposed to be mud-free.

I learned more by being left alone to my own devices than I did in the controlled environment of a school. Plus it was more visual, more tactile (in ways I like), many more sense impressions than one can get by sitting at a desk and eating one’s eraser…

I wanted to recommend some books by Aldous Huxley. One is an essay called The Doors of Perception. It discusses perceptual filters as used by geniuses and people using LSD.

The other is a novel called Island. It is a utopian novel that features a society that allows its youth to “unsafely” learn.

Both books are extremely thought-provoking!

I think there’s a common assumption of “just world” thinking, where most people expect, or are supposed to expect life to be fair, and what’s needed to arrive. I don’t have any such expectation. There are plenty of people who don’t get what they need, and can’t do the one thing that would save them (look at the number of people trapped in floods that never learned how to breathe water), and bad things happen. This isn’t good, or right, and should be fixed as much as possible. But it is also important to know in a crisis that help doesn’t just happen, and to start look at the things that I can do to fix things, or get someone to help me, because I can’t rely on help just arriving the moment I need it.

This only works for some people in some situations, though. Remember what Amanda said here about how *needing* to do something doesn’t necessarily entail that you will be able to do it in a worst-case scenario, even when being able to do it might make the difference between life and death, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that if you don’t do it, you must really not have wanted to and were trying to harm yourself in some way.

Some warning and understanding/direction and supervision is good but it can’t go on for ever. It might be a good few starters. On occasion, supervision can actually be more harmful because one is being trained in a way that won’t match what they should normally do. I strongly believe in good “instructions”, written down/expressed very specifically and ambiguously and then letting people do fully hands on or trial runs if need be in a “safe area” but no “hand holding” (like what has been so often done with me that it has in fact incapacitated me somewhat for life)

– How to spot stinging nettles, and that the sting doesn’t hurt that bad
– How to make it over an ordinary barb wire fence
– When trying to cross an electric fence, don’t move the wire aside with your crutches; use a stick.
– Almost any amount of dirt washes off.
– If you’re alone, and something goes wrong, you can fix it, or go find help. You CAN whine, cry, pout, or lay there demanding help, but that doesn’t do anything, and you wind up back at fix it, or get help.
– There are mud sinkholes that can suck a crutch down up to the handle, but if you pull hard enough, you can get it back out. The rubber tip will probably be lost, though.
– It’s a lot easier to float downriver than up. If you can angle back to the shallows on the side, you can make it back up.
– Most snakes are actually really mellow, and will just stare at you and slither off. Nearly all of the rest will run away. Same goes for spiders; they very rarely bite.
– You can fall of some pretty tall stuff without anything worse than a few bruises.
– If you’re lost in the woods, trails probably lead somewhere. That doesn’t always work, but if you remember which direction you started from, you can use the sun to find which way to go.
– (Something I learned with my brothers.) It’s possible to be buried neck-deep in sand and still dig yourself out, if the sand’s not too packed down.

So all in all, I think unsupervised time taught me a lot more about independence, problem-solving, not being afraid, self-reliance, and being able to shrug off minor hurts, in addition to the practical stuff. If I’d been watched more, I don’t think I’d have done half as well in the long run.

In short, when I had the wherewithal to assert myself, I reacted against the restrictions that were placed upon me and saw the problems with them.

So, yes, I agree with you totally, and that it’s not just children with autism who suffer.

Are they still doing ‘stranger danger’ in schools? Good grief. We were terrified after a policeman came into our kindergarten class in the early 1980s to preach about the danger of strangers, Halloween, and Halloween candy. We didn’t find out until years later that a lot of other kids of our generation had been likewise frightened to a completely unnecessary degree about strangers, poisoned Halloween candy, razor blades in apples and similar things. We thought they’d gotten rid of it because it was scaring so many of the children, but it seems not.

Then again, my generation is now the one that’s having children of its own, and I suppose it’s possible that a good many of them never actually realized that ‘stranger danger’ was vastly exaggerated– certainly exaggerated by comparison with the far greater number of children who are kidnapped, murdered, molested, etc, by their own relatives– and are passing that paranoia on to their own children. The media’s “mean world” angle, in which the most sordid and brutal events are disproportionately played up, has led a lot of people into the belief that the world is somehow vastly more dangerous, particularly for children, than it once was. The fact is that it’s not. Murdered children turned up in ravines in the 1930s just as they do today; it’s just that such cases didn’t usually receive nationwide publicity until a few decades ago. Children, and people of all ages, have always been murdered, abused, and kidnapped; the presence of a few high-profile cases doesn’t change the actual prevalence of it. And keeping children locked up inside all day, under constant supervision, is not likely to have any effect in decreasing the actual rate of such incidents, as cases in which the perpetrator was another member of the family have always been more common, if less headline-grabbing.

It doesn’t mean that it is acceptable or “innate” for these things to happen. It just means that such things have been with us (us being human society) for a very long time. I read a rather staggering article the other day about the number of young girls (young here would be around 11-13) who were sold into prostitution by their families in Victorian London (in some cases the families did not even realize what exactly it was they were agreeing to), because customers at brothels would pay higher prices for girls who were guaranteed to be virgins. (And yeah, they actually had doctors who gave them medical examinations to certify this.) And there are still a lot of places all over the world, today, where similar things continue.

So the upshot of it is that claims that the world was safer for children in some nebulous “past” is simply wrong. I certainly am not against keeping children safe in ways that are actually reasonable and make sense, like Amanda said. Teaching children to see every stranger as a kidnapper or murderer, however, seems to me like a very counterproductive thing to do, in terms of teaching them skills which will actually help them to get along in the world.