Wild and free: Why Romani parents let their children roam

Hint: It's not because they neither care nor know how to parent. Exactly the opposite.

Ani, then 7-years old. In the background, her cousins Anton and Liubcho are wrestling. | Picture by Martina Petkova | May 2021

The children from our tribe roam freely around the neighborhood. This is, in fact, one of the first things the white middle-class residents point out when they justify why they want the Roma quarter demolished and the Roma community to disappear. “They don’t take care of their children.”

Young children cross the busy streets and boulevards, play at the playgrounds, hang out at the benches, befriend and sometimes adopt the stray dogs and cats, chat and giggle, and when they get tired they go back home.

There are some socio-economic factors here that judgemental onlookers like to ignore. Our tribe lives in extreme poverty and the parents as well as most adults in the tribe go to work to make ends meet. Signing up kids to daycare has become more problematic since the mayor erased the address registration of the Roma quarter. Even going to school is filled with obstacles. But we’ll tell you about this another time.

This article is about something else.

Our tribe comprises over a hundred families. It will take forever to count the children. The neighborhood streets have had Roma kids roaming them for years if not decades. Can you guess how many times a child was hit by a car crossing the street, tricked or hurt by a stranger, or injured in any other way while out unsupervised by an adult?

Once.

In December 2021, the tribe gathered to celebrate the birth of a new baby. 10-year old Kerim, and his younger sister, snuck out, got on a bike, and rode it on one of the boulevards. They were hit by a car and had to spend some time in hospital. The story made national news and, predictably, there was a flood of “this never would have happened if Roma children were not allowed to roam unsupervised” comments.

The reality behind this incident? Kerim is almost fully blind. He seized the opportunity of his mother celebrating the birth of her grandson, to try and experience some freedom because, unlike all his cousins and siblings, he and his mother are attached at the hip due to his disability. He ventured out after dark - something that the kids in our tribe are not allowed to do. If a child or a teenager is not back by sunset, the network of the tribe activates and the phones and messaging apps of all aunts and uncles go on fire until the child is tracked down - almost always hanging out with cousins from the tribe.

So, in December 2021, a 10-year-old blind boy was riding a bike after dark on one of the busiest boulevards in our city, with his younger sister riding along for company and “protection,” when they were hit by a car at an intersection. This is the only time something bad happened to a child while out unsupervised. In other tribes, when children get lost or hurt, it is also a rare incident and the circumstances are also always an exception.

Why doesn’t anything bad happen more often? After all, these are small children, often as young as 4 or 5, with no adult in sight.

The answer lies in the wisdom of the Romani about raising children, who - from their very birth - they see not as property but as individuals. They don’t teach their children to survive by being scared. But by connecting with their senses, intuition, and strengths.

“A Roma child does not get lost. A Roma child does not get tricked.”

Pepi

Here is how this looks in practice.