“I’m a fierce believer in children’s ability to pull on their boots and go outside on their own,” says Fredrika Mårtensson, the environmental psychologist who conducted the study. “There’s an enormous difference between walking and getting a ride somewhere. I believe you have to let transportation take its time in order to gain appreciation for the way the world works. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a scenic walk. Nature is everywhere when you’re outside, even just the wind blowing in your face.”
Free-Range Days
* * *
I grew up in Dalsjöfors, a small town with around three thousand residents, about a ten-minute drive from the Shack. Our burgundy brick house was located in a middle-class ’70s subdivision just a two-minute walk from a spring-fed lake, where I spent most of my summers. I learned how to swim in that freezing water, and how to catch crayfish after dark by blinding them with a flashlight and plucking them from the water with my bare hands. Behind our house was a big hill with a few more houses scattered around it, including my cousins’ home, then endless forest consisting of mostly pine trees, but also some birches, oaks, and maples, with a few meadows and clear-cut areas scattered in between. We didn’t know who owned this forest, but since Swedes have the right to roam over private land, it didn’t matter anyway.
Like most other kids our age, my two cousins and I roamed freely in these woods from a young age. Here, we made up our own games, played horse, skinned a few knees, and spent countless hours racing our pet rabbits—a popular pastime among Swedish kids at the time. Most of the time we were savvy. We knew that we were supposed to stay away from cow moose with calves, red mushrooms with white spots, and uprooted trees. But inevitably we sometimes pushed our boundaries. One summer afternoon, the three of us deliberately decided to explore one of the marked trails that meandered through our woods. I’m guessing I was around eight at the time, which means my cousins would have been six and ten.
There were three trails: red, yellow, and green, each color representing a different distance. We started following the green trail, thinking that it was the shortest one, at only about one and a half miles. We walked deeper into the woods, trudging along old logging roads, over hills, and across rocky creeks. After a couple of hours or so we were far out of our comfort zone, realizing that we had no idea where we were and wondering why the trail hadn’t taken us back home. Then it dawned on us that we had gotten the trail markings mixed up and in fact had embarked on a six-mile hike into strange territory. Tired, we kept walking, careful to stay on the trail, thinking that we eventually would come upon a residential area. Finally, a yellow brick house appeared along a rural dirt road and we knocked on the door. An elderly lady opened it and was nice enough to explain where we were and let us borrow her phone to call home. Shortly thereafter, my dad showed up in our green Volvo and put an end to our misadventure.
We didn’t lose any privileges over this episode, probably because our parents figured that we had already learned our lesson. They were right—we never did it again. Besides, stretching your boundaries and making mistakes was considered par for the course. Interestingly, my parents hardly remember the event when I bring it up with them thirty years later. If they were worried sick at the time, what happened was clearly not traumatizing enough to leave a lasting impression. Since they were used to us playing outside for hours on end, I’m not even sure they realized that we had gone missing until they received our phone call. “It does ring a bell now that you mention it,” my dad says when I tell him the story. “But it doesn’t really stick out as a big deal.”
Just about any of my friends can tell similar stories. During a trip to Stockholm I stay for a couple of nights with my friends Björn and Jeanette and their eighteen-month-old daughter, Clara. Cecilia, another mutual friend of ours, joins us for dinner one night. As the subject of risky play and the freedom to roam comes up, we take turns telling stories that reek of equal parts childhood nostalgia and awe of our parents’ nerves of steel.
Cecilia, whose family owns a summerhouse on an island in the archipelago outside Stockholm, knew how to drive her parents’ motorboat by herself by the time she was six. In the summertime, she and her brother, who is three years her senior, would take the boat out to a smaller island together, where they would grill hot dogs and hang out on their own.
“Mom thought it was better for us to go to the small island rather than somewhere on the main island, in case we accidentally started a fire,” she says, and laughs.
Her own daughters, who are eight and six, have not learned to drive the boat on their own yet, but it’s a matter of time.
“We’re working on it. They’re going to learn how to whittle and use an axe too. I think it’s important to know those things when you’re in the country,” she says.
Björn recalls how, from when he was six years old, he and his classmates would spend their lunch breaks cross-country skiing for several miles in the woods behind their elementary school, unaccompanied by adults. At home, they raced their sleds over a steep cliff and sometimes landed in the middle of the road. As a five-year-old, while riding his bike on the gravel roads around town with his older cousins, he once raced down a steep hill, lost control of his bike, crashed, and flew over the handlebars. Afterward, the doctor had to use tweezers to get all the rocks out of his face. He remained unfazed.
“I think it’s healthy for kids to try things, have some responsibility. Sometimes you scrape an elbow or bruise a knee, but you learn from your mistakes,” Björn says.
However, his wife, Jeanette, begs to differ.
“You still get hurt all the time, so you obviously didn’t learn a damn thing,” she retorts curtly. “I never want you to tell Clara these stories.”
Later, after Jeanette goes to bed, Björn wants to clarify his position. In hindsight, he realizes that he was probably lucky not to have gotten seriously injured performing some of his more spectacular stunts. But he also believes that the freedom he had to experience different things on his own early in life was ultimately what had given him the confidence to broaden his horizons and eventually leave his small hometown to study in Australia for several years, setting the stage for a career in the media world that would eventually take him to London and then back to Stockholm, where he currently works as the head of digital advertising sales at a big publishing house.
“Will you give Clara the same freedom that you had?” I ask him.
He rests his dimpled, bearded chin in his hand and is silent for a moment.
“I don’t know yet. I guess that depends on Clara.”
With Clara only being eighteen months old, he still had some time to ponder all of this. I, on the other hand, was already in the middle of it with my girls.
The Tree House
* * *
Somewhere in the woods behind our house, as a child, I had formed a lifelong bond with the natural world. The subtle scented vapors from those pine trees and the crystal-clear freezing water in the lake forever made an imprint on me. They became part of my fabric, or what Richard Louv likes to call those “special places in nature that we pick up as children and carry around in our hearts for the rest of our lives.” Louv believes those are the places that shape us, that make us take ownership of the natural world and, ultimately, give us a desire to protect it.
After I moved to the US, I had returned to this place every time I visited my dad in the summer. When I myself became a mom I started visiting more often—in my mind’s eye and through my memories—because as I was trying to figure out what kind of childhood I wanted my daughters to have, I kept returning to my own. I must have talked to the girls about these woods more than I realized, because one day, when Maya was six and Nora three, the inevitable happened.
“I want to do what you did when you were little, Mommy.”
Maya was standing in the hallway at my dad’s house, fully decked out in rain gear and ready to enjoy the Swedish summer.
“What do you mean?”
“I want to go to the woods. By myself, like you did.”
“Uhmmkay.”
“Can I? Please!”
“Me too,” Nora chimed in, and started to put her rain gear on.
I normally wasn’t a worrier and I purposely tried to be a hands-off type of parent. I let Maya and Nora push their limits on the playground equipment. I gladly let them climb trees and boulders and take reasonable physical risks whenever we were outside. I had even let Maya play unsupervised from a fairly early age in our unfenced wooded backyard in the US. I had preached about my own free-range childhood to anybody who cared to listen. I knew Maya was reliable and they were both savvy for their ages. Yet I hesitated when faced with letting Nora out of my sight in this forest for the first time. On the one hand I felt that she was ready for more responsibility and freedom, but on the other hand I didn’t know if my nerves could handle letting go. My parents had done it, sure. In the ’80s. As my friends and I had also established, it was widely known that parents back then either must have been popping Xanax to cope with our antics, or simply hadn’t known better. They gave us a lot of freedom to explore and play on our own, which made us independent, confident, and resilient. They also put us to sleep on our stomachs, didn’t care much about bike helmets, and let us roll around in the back of the family station wagon like a bunch of human-size bowling balls while chain-smoking Marlboros (which, by the way, we were able to purchase from the store, no questions asked, by age nine approximately).
I looked at my dad for guidance. He just shrugged.
“Why not? What could go wrong?”
I didn’t really know. But I didn’t know if I could trust the guy who used to smoke his pipe in our Volvo either. This neighborhood was about as safe as it gets and there was very little in the woods that could realistically hurt them. They knew not to eat mushrooms or pick up snakes. (Maya had learned this the hard way when she was four and tried to pet a harmless water snake.) I doubted they would be able to climb very high in any of the trees and if, against all odds, one of them got hurt, it would be easy enough for the other one to come and get me. My biggest fear was probably that my kids would do exactly what I had done with my cousins that one time—simply decide to walk off—the difference being that they were not at all as familiar with these woods as I had been at their age. Then I remembered that Nora hated walking and demanded to be carried whenever I tried to take her on a hike that lasted for more than a quarter of a mile. Her walking anywhere that wasn’t in the direction of home seemed highly improbable.
“Okay. It’s okay,” I said, more to myself than to the girls. “Just don’t go any farther than to the tree house.”
The girls had found the tree house the year before, when we were out in the woods together. It was a rather elaborate structure that had been put together by two of the neighbor boys and their dad. A short ladder led up to the main floor; then another ladder provided access to a rooftop, which was enclosed with pieces from an old picket fence. The tree house even had a real window and its own mailbox. Although it wasn’t visible from my dad’s house, it was within shouting distance, less than three hundred feet away. It seemed like a sensible enough place for them to start practicing a little freedom with responsibility in the forest.
“Promise!” Maya said.
Then they were gone.
My dad was right, of course. Nothing was going to go wrong. But just to be perfectly sure, I went out on the front step every fifteen minutes or so, to make sure I could still hear them chattering among the trees. When they came back, about an hour later, they were wet, happy, and emboldened by the experience. Pretend play had taken them to a land far, far away, where there were giant snakes and monster dinosaurs. Luckily, they had fought them all off, and now they were in need of ice cream, they told me.
A while later, I noticed a little boy standing in the street outside my dad’s house, straddling his bike. He didn’t look like he intended to come knock on the door, but he didn’t look like he was planning to go away either. If stares could open doors, he would have barged through ours long ago. Finally, I opened the door to make sure everything was all right.
“Can the girls come out and play?” he said before I had the chance to say anything.
“I’ll go ask,” I told him.
His name was Colin, and, as it turned out, he and his older brother lived down the street and were the proper owners of the tree house. He must have spotted the girls when they were outside earlier. Maya and Nora got dressed to go outside again and approached him, shy at first, but clearly excited. I looked around for adults or other children, but there was nobody else in sight.
“Are you by yourself?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Four.”
For a second I felt like I had stepped out of a parallel universe. Here was a four-year-old searching for playdates while biking on his own down the street, and yet nobody was as much as batting an eye. The boy’s confidence and matter-of-fact behavior told me this was far from the first time he’d been out on his bike alone, but I decided to let his parents know where he was, just in case. Maybe he had sneaked out without telling them, and maybe they were worried and looking for him. While the girls and Colin disappeared to the tree house, I walked down to his house and found his dad, Magnus, ambling around in the yard with some tools. He seemed unconcerned. If he was looking for anything, it was his power drill, not his son. Magnus, a friendly thirty-something with a shaved head, explained that the neighborhood had gone through a rejuvenation phase lately, bringing in a lot of families with young children who all played together.
“We’ve got a bunch of kids in this neighborhood, two in the house across the road, the neighbors over there have two girls, and then it keeps going that way,” Magnus said, pointing toward the road.
“How much freedom do the kids have?” I asked.
“Well, they have this zone, where they’re allowed to move around on their own,” he said.
The perimeter of the zone consisted of the road that looped around the neighborhood. In all, the loop was probably a little over a quarter mile long, and since it ended with the cul-de-sac by my dad’s house, it had little traffic. As the kids got older, like Colin’s brother, Charlie, who was eight, they graduated from the zone and were allowed to expand their range, eventually exploring the town independently. “In the summertime we sometimes don’t see them all day. But often the neighbor kids all come over here, since we have a pool. It turns into a bit of a day care,” Magnus said, and laughed.
I hadn’t expected it, but at least in this middle-class suburb, children seemed to have the same freedoms that we had enjoyed in the ’80s. They had two things going for them: little traffic and a high level of what researchers call “social trust,” which is generally defined as “a belief in the honesty, integrity and reliability of others,” according to Pew Research Center. In communities with a high level of social trust, children are generally given greater independence and mobility. “Having social trust means that if problems arise, we trust that we solve them together, as a community. In places where the attitude is that everyone minds their own business, children have less mobility,” says Mårtensson, the environmental psychologist.
In some ways, it seemed like time had stood still in the neighborhood where I had grown up, the main difference being that all the kids now wore bike helmets and some of the older ones had cell phones. Soon, Maya and Nora were the ones running down the street to ask if Colin could come out and play. Both girls were clearly proud to have made a new friend on their own, without any assistance or intervention by adults. I, too, made a friend, as Colin’s mom turned out to be an old classmate from seventh grade. By the end of our visit that year, we had all grown. I was no longer (or at least was less) nervous about letting the girls play on their own in the woods or down the street. Maya became a lot more confident about meeting new people and started asking if they could “go and find new friends” whe
never we went someplace new. And even if it was only for a few short weeks that summer, the girls had gotten a taste of what it was like to live in a neighborhood where kids still stay out and play until it is time to come in for dinner.
Risk and Resilience
* * *
As parents, we’re wired to worry. But today, in many places, allowing children to play outside on their own has become a controversial parenting choice or, worse, criminalized. A 2014 survey of a thousand American parents showed that 68 percent want to ban children age nine and under from playing unsupervised at parks, and 43 percent want a law prohibiting children who are twelve years and under from doing the same thing. This represents a radical shift from attitudes just a couple of decades ago, illustrated by another widely cited study that notes that although 70 percent of American mothers played freely outside daily when they were young, only 29 percent of their children do. Instead, many children have become part of a “backseat generation” that spends a significant amount of time getting transported to various organized activities and has little time for unstructured outdoor play. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the most dangerous place for a child to be is neither the playground nor the woods. It’s in a car, as motor vehicle accidents are the most common cause of death among the more than twelve thousand American children who die due to unintentional injury every year (followed by drowning, the majority of the time in the family pool).
There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather Page 18