Huh, I guess you could read my account as such, but that's a pretty narrow perspective.
Our primary goal was to ease all of us (our son, my wife and myself) into being comfortable with our son becoming 'free range'.
Mostly it was my wife and I confirming what we suspected: that he would be safe, primarily from other over-reactive parents. We'd already objectively accepted that he would be physically safe, even though emotionally it was challenging for us.
We secretly shadowed him at the park six or seven times before letting him go full solo. My account of other adult interactions with him were from those experiences.
So he became fully 'free range' at the age of 9, and has been ever since, with absolutely no problems.
So was it a social experiment? I guess that could be accurate, as a side effect. Were we trying to give strangers "teaching moments"? Far from it, though I suppose its possible somebody else learning something, I don't know, and don't much care.
I guess you could say we were pushing our own 'particular agenda'...we were pushing it on our son and ourselves. And we are all three better off for it.
I'll freely admit that I probably misread your intent, as I half suspected.
If all your goals in this situation had your kid's well being in mind, then I misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
From your wording (specially the "engineer the situation" bit) it sounded to me like you behaved differently in those situations because other adults were around. The assumption I made was that you did so to teach them a lesson, so to speak.
If your method towards overseeing your child is the same whether there were other adults around or not, then I obviously misunderstood you and I apologize for that.
I originally understood "engineer the situation" as "provoke a misunderstanding - where none would have taken place otherwise - with the goal of making other adults uncomfortable and so they may understand their mistaken view".
It seems obvious now that this was the wrong reading, but would mind explaining further what you meant by "engineering the situation"?
[EDIT] I have one other question:
> Our son, per instructions, refused to give his last name.
May I ask why? If my son got lost, or needed to ask for help from other adults, or was caught in an emergency situation at school, I would want them to be armed with as much information as possible in order to enable an adult to contact me as soon as possible.
Sure, no worries. Text is a very sub-optimal medium to transmit the intent behind potentially emotionally charged questions.
To be clear, we certainly were behaving differently because there were adults around. We were worried that they might over-react, and so preemptively guard against such entanglements.
The 'engineering' was pretty simple:
1. Instruct our son to not release any information that someone could use to file a complaint against us. Specifically, last name, address or phone number. There are, of course, other good reasons to not release such data!
2. This would force someone who wanted to take official action to call 911, or otherwise contact the police. A non-911 police contact would not pose much of a problem since they lacked any contact information.
3. This would serve to give them pause: is this situation really an emergency? Of course it's not! But the final point was...
4. Make sure our son had a functional cell phone, make sure he would be able to call us at need. So if the police were summoned, or the adult pushed him too hard, he'd call us. We live 5 minutes away, so we'd be there right away.
I'm not sure this is 'engineering' per se, but in my brain mental steps felt similar to the engineering I do in my profession.
What other good reasons? I can't find any outside of thinking that some adult intends to kidnap your child, which could be in gross contradiction with the impression I got earlier from you as a "laissez faire" rationalist type parent. Surely you are aware that the possibility of your kid being kidnapped or hurt by a stranger is infinitesimally smaller than the possibility of them getting hurt by enviromental factors while unsupervised (drowning / sudden seizure / previously undeteced allergy / wild animals... basically any non-human factor). I'd appreciate if you could explain this.
Could I ask you a hypothetical? (based on a real life experience of myself)
Imagine you are hanging out in your yard with friends at 9PM, when suddenly a shoeless, 3 year old girl you don't recognize appears out of nowhere. Upon asking her name, you only receive her first name. She seems barely able to communicate and you aren't able to get clear information about who she is or where her parents are after a few questions. What would you do?
- Send her away without a second thought
- Keep her in your house until someone shows up claiming her
- Stop what you are doing and focus on helping her find her parents (although its not clear whether she's lost or not)
Hah, I'll take 'rationalist type' any day! And I don't mind laissez faire ("a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering") much either.
My example revolved around strangers because that was the general topic. Strangers in the form of meddling, hyper-protective adults. True blue 'stranger danger' is, as you say, extremely rare.
Our son has almost always been very deliberate in action, especially with respect to his own safety.
So, the only real situation we had to guard against was the possibility of other adults freaking out that he was alone at the age of 9.
Regarding your hypothetical: as noted elsewhere, 3 years is very young. To be more illustrative, I'll disregard the specifics you mentioned, because our actual decision in such a situation would depend on so many more considerations.
My general approach would be to ensure the child is safe while minimizing my own exposure to possible unforeseen repercussions.
If the child was physically ok, I would tend toward relatively low-grade engagement. If she wandered off, I'd probably follow at a distance as long as needed.
The guiding principle is minimal intervention/interference with a baseline of protecting the child from environmental/possible human dangers.
If people arrived or she went toward people that posed a possible danger, than I would not hesitate to involve the authorities, because that is clearly moving toward an 'emergency' threshold.
These are conceptual guidelines, which might all go out the window depending on the actual specifics of a situation as I saw it.
I'm not Diederich but I'll deconstruct your hypothetical in order to contrast it with her/his example.
* 9pm. Late, approaching curfew for children in many municipalities.
* 3-year-old. I have yet to meet a 3-year-old who can handle being free-range.
* Your yard. This is your neighborhood and you don't recognize this child. This is vastly different from being at a public playground where there are many unfamiliar children.
* Trouble communicating. A typical 3-year-old should be able to communicate. If not, she most likely can't handle being alone.
* Shoeless. I'm not sure this is relevant unless weather conditions are austere or your neighborhood contains broken glass.
The cumulative of these elements leads to an out-of-the-ordinary situation. It implies neglect. A search for the parents or if you're too busy, a phone call to police non-emergency is probably the appropriate response.
I can't answer for the above poster, but I can say I would much rather my kid call me than tell a stranger his/her last name. Kids are much more manipulable than adults, and giving out identity information might be dangerous. I'd instruct my kid to call me if another adult insists on identification.
I think this is age-dependent. If I trust my kid with a cell phone, then this is reasonable. If the kid is too young, and it's a school incident or something, then sure, it's reasonable to tell a teacher or school administrator your last name. Some rando in the park, though? No.
I read it as him 'engineering' the situation to avoid over concerned parents from calling the cops / calling CPS / freaking out the child by telling him this is dangerous.
Our primary goal was to ease all of us (our son, my wife and myself) into being comfortable with our son becoming 'free range'.
Mostly it was my wife and I confirming what we suspected: that he would be safe, primarily from other over-reactive parents. We'd already objectively accepted that he would be physically safe, even though emotionally it was challenging for us.
We secretly shadowed him at the park six or seven times before letting him go full solo. My account of other adult interactions with him were from those experiences.
So he became fully 'free range' at the age of 9, and has been ever since, with absolutely no problems.
So was it a social experiment? I guess that could be accurate, as a side effect. Were we trying to give strangers "teaching moments"? Far from it, though I suppose its possible somebody else learning something, I don't know, and don't much care.
I guess you could say we were pushing our own 'particular agenda'...we were pushing it on our son and ourselves. And we are all three better off for it.
I wonder if you can expand on your implication?