Ted Audio Collective So, the lean last season on Am I normal?
I wound up spending a lot of time talking to my mum, who was an obstetrician and gynecologist.
I didn't spend much time talking to her.
I did, who practiced for many, many years as a pediatrician.
And I think the fact that he was a doctor played a really big part in our upbringing obviously, but maybe not in the way that people might expect.
So I would say that we were raised a little bit weirdly.
Weirdly how? So compared to, I would say pretty much every single one of my friends, we had fewer rules growing up.
I think my parents really believed that we would figure out a lot about the world by trial and error kind of on our own.
And that doesn't mean they weren't there to catch us when we fell or providing guidance, but it did mean that we had a lot of independence.
So I'll give a kind of weird example.
A bunch of my friends had some kind of rules around food, particularly when they were really, really young, right?
So, you know, if you want to eat some candy, you have to eat your dinner first and then you can have some candy later.
Or maybe you're only allowed like one candy bar per day and not seven.
We had a cup of that had candy in it.
And the idea was just, I don't know, eat until you make yourself sick and then you'll know what makes you feel sick.
Did it work? I don't know, I've kind of got a bit of a sweet tooth.
But you know, and also I actually had like nine fillings as a child, which is pretty intense.
I think it was nine. I had like a crazy number of fillings.
But I do feel like both me and my sister had this like feeling of like, can-do-ness that came from this belief that we would figure it out.
And we could figure it out on our own without somebody telling us exactly what to do.
So that kind of got me onto this part of like looking for weird and interesting data about childhood independence.
It's obviously a really difficult thing to measure, right?
Like how do you measure something as kind of vague and subjective as parental style?
But what I did find was one report from 2015 that was all about children's independent mobility.
It was published by a nonpartisan British think tank called the Policy Studies Institute.
And this particular study looked at 16 different countries and found that Japan had one of the highest rates of independent mobility for children.
Oh, I have so many questions.
I mean, first of all, when I hear that there's data about kids mobility, I've got to know how do they measure that.
So the researchers were tracking 18,303 children, the wage between 7 and 15, which is obviously a pretty big spread.
So what they did was that they asked the children and their parents a series of questions to better understand the degree of freedom that those children had.
And more specifically, they were interested in the freedom that kids had to travel and play in their local neighborhoods without adult supervision.
And I think that is a really interesting metric of this idea of independent mobility.
You know, it's funny. I have kind of a double-sided relation to this question in more than one way.
So I have my memories of being a kid.
For me, I grew up in a house that had kind of just a mashup of strictness and not strictness.
Weird rules, like you could never eat a sweet cereal unless it was mixed with an other sweet cereal as well.
So we were all eating weird mashup cereals.
And yet, you know, I was a latchky kid so I came home at 215 and just did whatever I felt like for a few hours every day, you know?
But I've also got two children now and I'm deciding every day what to let them do or not do.
And I'm actually specifically interested in Japan.
I lived in Japan for years and my family's mixed Japanese and you do see it in Japan.
Have you seen the show all the enough by any chance?
You know what that is? That is the very first thing that I thought of when I was looking at this data because I absolutely have watched that show and thought it was incredible.
And also, honestly, a little bit terrifying to watch.
Like it stressed me out because it's such a high degree of independent mobility.
Did you mind describing what happens on the show?
Yeah, so all this show, very tidy children.
Sometimes as the youngest two are given their first errand.
And they have to do things like pick up something from the seafood market or go deliver lunch to their parents at work.
And because they're tidy children, they make mistakes along the way.
I think there's an episode where a child drops a fish.
It is heartbreaking what it happens.
You're fully there. And you're going to see a recover and they do it.
They actually pull off these errands as children, which I don't think I ever see in the US.
That's also what so mind-blowing about it is how young these kids are.
I think it kind of blew up in America because every parent was like, hey, aside from the shock factor, I think it raised so many questions of how much should I be letting my kid do?
Should my kid be doing more?
So I'm getting the vibe that the right person to talk to is a Japanese parent.
Yes, please, Elaine. Go find one.
Mission accepted. I'm going to have that conversation.
I'm Celine Resshawala and this from the Ted Audio Collective is a special season of a Bidorable.
My neighborhood, everybody knows everybody.
It's almost too much, you know?
This is Yoko Inoue. I'm from Japan and I'm a freelancer photographer.
Yoko and her husband have two kids, Motoki and Kato.
Their oldest Motoki was actually born in New York City, where Yoko spent around 15 years.
Now though, they live in a smaller town in the countryside of Japan, outside of Okayama, where everybody knows everybody.
Like I walk and talk everyday in the morning and then my dog poop and then I always think about it.
That's a lot of social pressure to have eyes on you all the time.
But there's also upsides.
If I'm raising a kiss, it's helpful because they're always watching and they always say, oh, you're saying it's very nice because he does greetings.
I'm like, oh, really? Because he doesn't do that to me.
Thank you for letting me know.
Since Yoko has this dual perspective of having lived in a big city in the US and a small town in Japan, I was really curious about how that's affected how she thinks about parenting and independence for her kids.
I have two boys, one is eight and fifteen.
So my older son just got into high school in Japan.
His name is Motoki. We decided to move back to Japan.
He's half and I wanted him to be able to speak Japanese and also learn Japanese culture.
And the interesting thing is that my youngest son, he was born in Okayama, but his personality is very American and he's very independent and he knows exactly what he wants and he has no problem expressing himself with his older son even though he was born in New York, he's very Japanese.
I was curious, what changed in your life as a parent when you moved from New York to Japan?
The most difficult thing was the Japanese school, I mean give kids so much homework and then it's just they judge kids by mostly only by the scores of the test.
And that was the hardest thing for me because after school kids come back and the only time when we fight is about the homework myself, I don't care about the homework but the society expect the kids to do this homework.
How much independence do you think your kids have?
I think they, as long as they tell me where they're going and what they come back, I think they're pretty much, I think, have freedom.
But I don't think mentally, I don't think I mean have freedom at school because my kids told me that they have the answers, the expected right answers.
I talked with my older son, his experience living and going to school in Japan, he also said that they're teacher trying to make everybody the same.
So it's boring, it's not fun, and basically trying to make I feel like trying to make a sheep, but obviously me and Sansa are goats.
I hadn't really thought of goats as opposite of sheep but that's a really interesting metaphor.
I love that. I'm especially interested because you're an artist yourself and I have heard other people talk about the kind of standardization or what might be called the lack of independence in Japanese education.
At the same time, when I think about Japan, I think of so much creativity.
There's a couple stories that I always stick in my head, the designer of Super Mario.
He tells stories about being a kid and being free to go into little caves around his neighborhood or I was just listening to a story about the inventor of Pokemon constantly catching bugs.
I think that's a really common activity.
It's not common in the US, but in Japan it's very common.
That's true. I thought that was so cool.
When we moved to Japan, my older son, he never seen worms before.
He was so surprised. We lived the house where surrounded by the rice fields.
Every day, just the kids themselves go to catch cicadas or frogs or fish.
They do a lot. I think they have a lot more imagination than I think.
Maybe that's what makes people think of the creativity.
Being a kid themselves alone so that they can get into their own world because they're seeing it's probably way different, imaginary world.
It might help being more creative, being away from parents.
I'm really into the idea that giving them time to have their own secret world might be important for creativity.
I hadn't thought of it phrased that way, but I love that idea.
What was the first time your older son did something by himself?
How old was he and what did he do?
Or is there a line? Is it that clear?
Is it more gradual? Right.
Definitely gradual. The distance is just this area you can be free and as they get older, the area is getting bigger and the high school is bigger.
As they get older, the distance of freedom is much larger.
And your younger son, what kinds of things is he allowed to do on his own?
He from first grade, he walked to school.
Not himself, but with two other neighborhoods.
Just the kids alone, they walked to school.
Before that, we drive him to kindergarten school every day and just to run them, just the kids alone walked to school.
That's what I remember the first day, that's great.
And he walked back just to kids alone home, it's a huge difference with that parents.
Yeah, my son is just really a few blocks from school, but he's actually not allowed to walk there on his own yet.
What would happen? Well, it really surprised both my wife and I, realizing that it was against school rules for kids his age.
Okay, I should jump in here.
I actually checked with a teacher at the school and they might make exceptions if parents write a letter to the school.
So it's not quite as often as I assumed, but still it's not the default option to let kids my son's age walk to school on their own.
And hearing Yoko's reaction made me reconsider some of these social dorms around me, even though she thinks Japan has a more restrictive education system and less independence for kids in some areas, she thinks the US is more cautious when it comes to the physical kind of freedom.
Her husband and her youngest son, Kato, were actually spending a few months in the US when I spoke to her and her husband told her about this interesting encounter.
My husband told me the other day he was trying to let Kato, like writing bicycle a few blocks away from by himself and then the other parents said no or something.
But I don't know, we kind of have to stand up for our kids.
I think if we go back to the US and I would still probably try to give them more freedom as long as I think it's safe.
Why do you think that people in the US are afraid to let their kids walk to school, for example, or be a little more independent?
What do you think causes that?
In general, people I think they don't really think themselves or they don't question anymore, they just do because always has been done.
It's America, why you think it's dangerous and I don't know the answer.
I don't think it's that dangerous to myself.
I think it's okay to walk kids themselves a few blocks.
What do you think would happen?
Yeah, it's a good question.
People think about why?
Why not? When I think about why sometimes I'd be hesitant to have my child do certain things alone, it's a little bit because of the US.
I'm scared that another parent might react negatively or call the school or I actually feel a little bit of social pressure in that direction around.
Yeah, agree, agree. I think it's a time now for parents.
We have to think ourselves what's right for us, what's right for kids and to stand up and be confident ourselves and that's what the kids watching.
I don't want my kids to be always scared or feel the pressure from society and follow the society.
I don't want my kids to do that.
I want my kids to be responsible.
Their own happiness, their own safety, for that reason I have to be the one who take responsibility, my own happiness.
I stand up for my thoughts and I take responsibility for all decisions I want that kids to watch that.
Yoko wants her kids to see her thinking independently.
I love that idea. There are so many facets of independence.
I wanted to talk to Yoko about the physical kind, like letting your kid go run errands on their own or walk home by themselves, but she really wanted to talk about mental independence.
Like how much creativity kids have in school or how much time they spend out in nature on their own.
And there are social norms about both kinds.
All of it may be wonder how much independence do my own kids have.
How much do they want? What do they even think independence is?
So after a short break, we're going to talk to an expert on that specific topic, my four year old, Javid.
What things are you allowed to do by yourself?
I sometimes play with niggles by myself and that kind of thing.
How far can you go outside of our house without any adults?
Like if someone is looking at me at the door or outside of the house, I could go to Katherine and someone's house.
Yeah, for watching you, you're allowed across the street, right?
So if I go over to their house, I could see the fish and talk to them.
Like the walls of their house.
Climb the walls of their house.
Well, I mean like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oh, the gazebo they call the COVID-19 pandemic.
Okay, it's called the COVID-19 pandemic because we were allowed to be hanging out there even when COVID was really bad because it's outdoors and safe.
Yeah, so I might have been doing that for like 13 days or so.
I think you've been doing that for over a year.
Yeah, I mean maybe like 40 days or more.
Is there anything you're not allowed to do that you wish you were allowed to do?
Come closer, come closer.
Um, you might wish that I could thrive to Lila's house by myself or something like that.
You wish you could drive by yourself to Lila's house?
Yeah, or Lila's grandparents' house by myself?
Do you know why we don't let you drive?
Um, because I'm still a kid.
That's why. That's right.
Do you think we have too many rules for you?
I don't know. Well, maybe.
What rules do you think are too much?
Um, like working to a friend's house by myself?
You want to do that more?
Um, like yeah. Okay, well I think there's about the end of our interview about independence.
Is there anything else that you think people should know about what it's like to be a kid doing things by yourself?
Not really anything but just whatever I, wherever I go by myself is fun.
Spoiler alert, I'm not letting him drive a car at any time soon.
But it is interesting to hear about the tiny things that he loves to do on his own.
And I can imagine changing things a little so he's allowed to go a bit further out into the neighborhood.
And maybe him walking a little further will be something that starts shifting the neighborhood norms around what little kids do.
What tidy four year old step at a time.
And my normal is part of the Ted Audio Collective.
This special series was hosted by me, Selim Reshamwala.
This episode was produced by Daphne Chen and edited by Sarah Nyx.
Our team includes Joanne Deluna, Constanza Gayardo, Michelle Quint, Van Banceng, Roxanne Highlash and Jimmy Gutierrez.
Jennifer Dub is our researcher and fact checker.
Original theme song by Sasami, Sarah Bruguer is our mix engineer.
And huge thanks of course to Mona Chalibi for bringing all this data scavenger hunt.
Do you want me to show you how to do a backflip?
I can do. I did a backflip.
Thank you.
