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A children’s book from 1972 about a girl who acquires a loaner pony for the summer that she and her mother are staying in a cabin in the country.
I had thought this book was one I’d read as a kid where a girl discovers a valley full of wild horses, but in fact it’s one I hadn’t read and she discovers a herd of tame ponies owned by a neighbor. (Now I wish I could figure out what the “girl discovers a valley full of wild horses” book was.)
It’s got just enough realistic horse detail to feel believable and is full of the joy of ponies and exploring. There is the threat of horse death when some ponies get stolen to be sold for horse meat (!), but it’s okay, they get rescued.
One of the things I like about reading older books, especially ones that aren't considered classics of their genre, is the window into ordinary life at the time. I was born in 1973. I remember when I was 6 or 7, I used to walk to friends' houses, to candy stories, etc, by myself. These weren't long trips, maybe a couple blocks. But it was nothing unusual. All my friends did that too. This was in various parts of Los Angeles, mostly in neighborhoods that were not the greatest. I now never see unaccompanied children.
In this book, the heroine, who is about ten, rides her pony on trails around the countryside by herself, and is sometimes gone all day. Of course most girls would not have their own pony, loaner or otherwise, but I do remember that in the summer I could disappear and do my own thing all day, so long as I took a lunch and was back before dark. There's a lot of things about my childhood that were terrible but the chance to explore alone was one of the few I'm still grateful for.
The Valley of the Ponies
I had thought this book was one I’d read as a kid where a girl discovers a valley full of wild horses, but in fact it’s one I hadn’t read and she discovers a herd of tame ponies owned by a neighbor. (Now I wish I could figure out what the “girl discovers a valley full of wild horses” book was.)
It’s got just enough realistic horse detail to feel believable and is full of the joy of ponies and exploring. There is the threat of horse death when some ponies get stolen to be sold for horse meat (!), but it’s okay, they get rescued.
One of the things I like about reading older books, especially ones that aren't considered classics of their genre, is the window into ordinary life at the time. I was born in 1973. I remember when I was 6 or 7, I used to walk to friends' houses, to candy stories, etc, by myself. These weren't long trips, maybe a couple blocks. But it was nothing unusual. All my friends did that too. This was in various parts of Los Angeles, mostly in neighborhoods that were not the greatest. I now never see unaccompanied children.
In this book, the heroine, who is about ten, rides her pony on trails around the countryside by herself, and is sometimes gone all day. Of course most girls would not have their own pony, loaner or otherwise, but I do remember that in the summer I could disappear and do my own thing all day, so long as I took a lunch and was back before dark. There's a lot of things about my childhood that were terrible but the chance to explore alone was one of the few I'm still grateful for.
The Valley of the Ponies
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I was allowed significantly more freedom growing up than most of my friends, I think because my parents, while terrible in a lot of other ways, were twenty years older than all of my friends' parents. (They were born in the fifties, and I was born in the nineties when both of them were in their forties.) I sometimes feel like I can see the mark of that in myself as an adult versus a lot of my age group.
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I feel that having more freedom made me more independent and capable.
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I also feel like I'm less, um, petrified of making my own decisions and mistakes than a lot of my age group.
(The conversation between my evil mother, who was lazy and did not want to bother monitoring my behavior in any way she didn't enjoy, and my evil pediatric psychiatrist, who felt strongly that teenagers in partial hospitalization should be kept in locked ward conditions at home, was something to behold when I was fourteen, although it's a lot funnier now than it was then.)
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The discovery of a live foal from a breed of prehistoric wild horse thought extinct for thousands of years, enables a Wyoming verterinarian to develop a serum for a deadly new virus
Yesterday's Horses
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Re: being out alone - you know, I realize it's mostly a matter of changing social mores, but the funny thing about it to me is that it's probably not only not any more dangerous these days for young children to do things on their own, but a lot safer, because of cell phones! I wonder if we'll see a generational shift in a decade or two back toward kids doing a lot of things on their own with phones and perhaps other electronic monitoring to keep tabs on them rather than parents watching them all the time, or if it's gone for good.
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But yeah, it's not dangerous being alone if you can always call for help by literally pressing a button!
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I think I had an unusual amount of freedom growing up in the late 90s and 2000s because I was growing up in Hong Kong, which a) is incredibly safe, and b) has really good public transport. So while I didn't have the option of wandering around on a pony, up until I was 9 I was allowed to do whatever I wanted within our housing estate (which included the all important summer activity of 'going to get ice cream), and then after that I was allowed to use public transit and go hang out with my friends pretty much whenever I wanted as long as I told my parents what I was up to. I think that maybe also coincided with them giving me a cell phone (a purple flip phone! I had it for years and remember it fondly) on the understanding that I was to call them if I got into trouble, but the most trouble I ever got into was missing a bus and therefore being half an hour later than expected. It really wasn't until moving to Canada that I realised this was pretty unusual, both for safety concerns and for a lack of public transit that meant as a twelve year old you had real problems going places even if you wanted to!
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LA didn't have public transportation but I could walk around the neighborhood.
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In parts of the country that aren't California, kids do get to go around more by themselves -- it's pretty normal here in the PNW, at least in the neighborhoods I've lived in. I think in more urban areas people get a lot more tense about it. The only problems I've ever had with my kids going around on their own was visiting city people who wanted to tell me what a dangerous unsafe thing I was letting my kids do. Well, and once in a while I have to go mediate some situation involving my son and the inappropriate disposition of another kid's soccer ball, or something ("He threw my ball into the blackberries!" "Well, he kept throwing it at me, after the third time I put it over the fence.")
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Then again there was an ACTUAL news story that began something like "You may be happy to see more shiny police badges downtown!" so IDEFK.
ETA LOL, actually found it
https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Effort-to-take-back-3rd-and-Pine-begins-1246312.php
For anyone who believes City Hall plugs its ears when it comes to citizen concerns, here's evidence to the contrary.
Go down to Third and Pine, an area of downtown Seattle marred by regular doping and violence.
Take a look around.
What you see might pleasantly surprise you -- folks with shiny badges.
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I particularly remember the three connected books by Dorothy Lyons: Silver Birch, Midnight Moon, and Golden Sovereign. I think I read the last one first and hunted down the prequels after that. Several years ago, with the help of interlibrary loan, I read most of her other horse books. None of the others held up as well, though of course that might have been my not having been of the golden age to read them.
I also loved "Heads Up" by Patsey Grey, about a girl who was the meal ticket for an abusive parent or guardian (trick horse rider), and who finds a proper family.
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Golden Sovereign had a lot of plot packed into it, but the detective one was about tracking down the provenance for an abused horse bought on the cheap that turned out to be a stolen Thoroughbred (or some type of purebred). Another plot would have been creepy if it had been humans rather than horses, because it was about breeding Golden Sovereign to all these horses -- including his dam, Silver Birch -- in the expectation (for no good reason except book plot) that they would all be palominos. Oh, and the plot about Golden Sovereign (the horse) being tetchy on and off for no known reason until the end of the book.
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E.g. I think I was noticeably ahead of my older child's cohort in allowing him to walk to school alone, and (later) to walk home from school alone. To the point that I checked with the school on their policy about letting older children walk home alone and they were very "hmm, I suppose so long as we have your permission to let them go uncollected from their class". At the time child was about 9, the school covers children aged 4-11.
(And this wasn't to be a "latchkey kid" at first, this was to come home to a house where an adult would be, just that adult didn't want to take the 15-30 minutes to walk to school and hang around outside the classroom until the child came out, and walk back.)
Also e.g. that time my child got separated from me in a busy seaside town and very sensibly went into a shop and asked a member of staff to call my mobile number - this was before he had his own phone. But there was a Lost Child Policy in the town, which meant the police came and took my details and lectured me about taking better care of my children.
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I cannot even imagine anyone letting kids that small do that now.
But I agree with you about the adult buy-in being necessary. For one thing, in a world where that's common and normal, unrelated adults also tend to make allowances for it - helping a small kid through a business transaction where they're still figuring out how money works, pointing them to where they need to go and that kind of thing.
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But it works in part because the whole society is built around this being normal. Total strangers will offer assistance or comfort when the kids get confused or sit down and start crying because the bag is heavy and they're tired of walking. It isn't just a matter of how parents behave; it's everybody.
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If minors (not even just preschoolers, but teenagers) are simply not allowed to exist in society, then any interaction with them is suspect. And also those minors will be totally unequipped to deal with society when they do enter it, on account of it being unfamiliar to them and nobody making allowances, so they'll be more vulnerable in early adulthood (and the bar for "really an adult" moves from 18 to 25.)
It's so fucked up, and fucked up in such an unusual way. Most societies do not segregate the children and the elders to the extent that they're not considered a part of society!
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I suspect there are a bunch of factors that feed into it -- like, my mother never would have sent me off to the grocery store alone before I was old enough to drive, but that's because I lived in hardcore suburbia where the nearest grocery store was nearly half an hour away on foot, and that's at my adult height and speed of walking. So naturally I was never given those responsibilities as a kid, because it simply wasn't practical. Which led to a culture where walking anywhere to do anything wasn't done -- even though, in hindsight, there's no bloody reason I couldn't have walked to and from school (~10 min. each way). So the default was that kids never did anything outside their immediate environs unless a parent was available to drive them. Urban planning meant that, in the 1980s and early 1990s, kids in that area could not be given certain kinds of responsibility, and were shackled to parental assistance for any socialization not on their street -- which then normalizes that as The Way Things Should Be, and leads to a mindset where letting them roam free is weird and probably dangerous.
And that's only one strand of it. The internet led to huge fears of strangers being able to find and prey upon your children, and the local news at least used to run constant stories about THE HIDDEN DANGERS OF EVERYTHING AROUND YOU (no idea if they still do; I stopped watching that kind of thing as soon as I left high school), and as women made advances in the workforce there was an upswing in policing their parenting skills more rabidly than ever, shaming them with accusations of being Bad Mothers because they didn't do ABCQRSXYZ for their precious sprogs. College admissions got more competitive, and roaming around the neighborhood doing whatever doesn't look nearly as good on an application as volunteer work and student council and sports and independent language study. Etc. It's a whole pile of stuff that leads to a twisted situation where, as you say, kids lack the experience they need to deal with society, and childhood is extended nigh unto forever.
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No, by "had a lot to do with" I mean that this aspect of recent US culture was partially or wholly responsible for Tumblr purity culture, not the other way around!
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Unfortunately mine was Jean M. Auel's The Valley of Horses (1982), which outside of the genderqueer shaman and the baby cave lion I probably cannot recommend.
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I remember wanting to go places by myself where I grew up, but I was daunted by being stuck in suburban Walnut Creek, which at that time was so small and so suburban my memory is that you needed a car to get to Safeway or the swimming pool or any store really. You could walk and walk and walk and you'd just find endless subdivisions that were either just built or were being built or the land was being cleared to build them. (It was very E.T.) I think we were close to the foothills of Mt Diablo, but that was a state park and places near it were also being developed, and kids weren't encouraged to go there alone. Even when you got into town, you needed a car because it was all sprawl and typically traffic was heavy. There were buses downtown and I remember taking BART with my family, but BART was AMAZINGLY slow. I did walk to see my friends in nearby cul-de-sacs, but that wasn't very far at all.
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I will forever wonder if he knew what was in it.
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I remember when I was 6 or 7, I used to walk to friends' houses, to candy stories, etc, by myself. These weren't long trips, maybe a couple blocks. But it was nothing unusual. All my friends did that too.
We were talking about this last weekend and I don't even see kids outside playing anymore. We spent our whole summer just playing in the street, and the street was busy. You would just yell "Car!" and everyone would get out of the way, and then resume the game. We also got to run errands (around the corner) alone at a fairly young age (6 or 7) and I as a 10 year old got paid to walk a kindergartner to and from school (4 blocks) every day. It's just different now, and in a way that seems a little sad to me.
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I see unaccompanied kids around my neighborhood all the time, or at least unaccompanied by adults. Large and extended families are common around here, and many younger kids are supervised by older siblings or cousins or neighbors. (I wish someone had been supervising the kids age 9ish to 13ish who were tearing through the little kids' side of the playground today, grrrr.) It's a working-class neighborhood and the adults don't have a lot of time for child-minding or money for babysitters. Kids get independent pretty quickly.
One time we were walking down our block and we encountered a random toddler who didn't look particularly lost or upset but had no adult nearby; we attempted to inquire as to which house was his and were unsuccessful, but then a neighbor we knew came out of the house next door and suggested the child might have wandered away from his family's sukkah, which was behind their house. He went up the driveway and returned with the toddler's grandmother, who was annoyed at the child but not greatly concerned. If Kit somehow got away from us, I am 100% certain that someone would likewise keep them safe and help track us down. But we all really live in this neighborhood, deliberately making personal connections with our neighbors and the shopkeepers, and it's a neighborhood that welcomes that. Multiple people who live on our block or work nearby know Kit and us by sight if not by name—I started to list all the shopkeepers who wave to them on the way to and from school every day, but it's a long list! (And anyway, Kit would make a beeline for the pizza place, no further searching necessary.)
I know I was running local errands for my mom by age 7 or 8 and riding the subway by myself by age 11, and shortly after I turned 12 (in 1990) I was commuting to school on my own and so were all my classmates. We roamed Central Park or the East Village, went to one another's houses (which were often quite a long distance apart, since we went to a magnet school that drew from all five boroughs—my first long-distance relationship was with my first high school boyfriend, whose home was 90 minutes from mine by public transit), had pizza parties in the school stairwells after classes were over, and were really not supervised in any way outside of school hours. By age 15 or 16 I was going to BBS meetups in bars. This was all pretty unremarkable among my peer group. I expect it will be quite similar for Kit, especially if they go to public school in the neighborhood and make friends with neighborhood kids.
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