Where's Your Kids?

Discipline your children while you still have the chance;

indulging them destroys them.

Proverbs 19:18

There are two young boys who live around the corner from me.  I'm not very good at guessing ages, but they both got on the school bus last year, so I am going to guess that the youngest will be a first grader and the oldest will be in 3rd or 4th grade.  I think they are brothers, but I'm not sure.  They live with at least one adult woman, perhaps two, but she does not look like she could be the mother of these boys, although it is certainly possible.  The younger boy has an angelic face; the older boy has a devil-dare look in his eye.  They fight and scrap and carp at each other as brothers are want to do.   

As soon as the sun is up, they are up and outdoors, riding a 3-wheeler bike or zipping about on a scooter or skateboard.  No one in the house appears to care where the boys are or what they are doing. Consequently, they spend the majority of their time playing in the street.  This wouldn't bother me so much if either of these kids paid any attention to what is going on around them, but they don't, and there have already been too many near-misses with cars that come roaring around the corner.

I have tried to reason with these kids, but to no avail.  It's not that they don't understand me.  I know perfectly well that they both get the gist when I talk to them about staying out of the street.  But their attention spans are short, and I'm not Mom (just the neighbor), and before I know it, they are playing Dodge the Automobile again.  I would really like to go to their home, knock on the front door, and  yell at whoever answers about the wisdom of letting children play unsupervised, especially in the street.  But I have a strong feeling that it would not do any good.  There is a disconnect somehow between these boys and their caretakers.  Someone is not minding the store, and I certainly hope they do not pay the high price that would result if one of the boys was struck by a vehicle.