Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)

by Lenore Skenazy

  Which is not to say I haven’t done a lot of helicoptering myself. My God—I’m at least part Sikorsky. I’ve hired tutors for my kids and, this being New York City, shrinks, too. I brought in a football coach to run a simple birthday party, and what really fun, carefree door prize did I give out? Protective mouth guards. Woo-hoo! Plus I made my kids spend one summer doing math sheets every day after camp, and another summer writing an essay a day. That’s when they were eight and ten. If anyone needed a chill-out movement, it was me.

  So I launched the Free-Range Kids blog to espouse the notion that maybe it’s time to start giving our children the same kind of childhood we enjoyed. Not that the sixties, seventies, and eighties were so great, but at least our parents didn’t spend all their time worrying that we were about to be abducted. And neither should we. As you’ll read throughout this book, the crime rate today is just about on par with 1970 (and—I’m already repeating myself—down since it peaked in the early nineties). I know it doesn’t feel that way. We’ll look into that later, too. But my point is: we got to explore the world on our own; we got to do things without adult assistance and make mistakes and even play on teeter-totters. (Which I never liked. But still.) Our kids deserve no less.

  The response to the blog was overwhelming. Tens of thousands of folks logged on and wrote comments about their own scrappy childhoods. They said they’d like to raise their kids Free Range, but are feeling a little nervous about it. Or they’re already doing the Free-Range thing, but are sick of the other parents thinking of them as slackers, or worse. Usually worse.

  All around us, parents are clutching their children close, and it’s easy to understand why. This is what pop culture is telling us to do. Stories of kidnappings swamp the news. Go online, and you can find a map of local sex offenders as easily as the local Victoria’s Secret (possibly in the same place). Google something as ridiculous as “Kid drowns in ketchup,” and you can usually find a terrible story about just that. (Wait—no. I just tried. But Google “drown” and “kid” and you won’t be able to sleep.) Meantime, if you do summon the courage to put your kids on a bus or a bench or a bike, other parents keep butting in: an unwatched child is a tragedy waiting to happen!

  The warnings are so rampant that we have been brainwashed with fear. Here’s a typical letter I got at Free-Range Kids:I understand that you probably don’t want your children to grow up afraid and not able to survive as independent adults. On the other hand, I think you’re also teaching them that there is nothing to fear and that isn’t correct. It’s survival of the fittest and if they don’t know who/what the enemy is, how will they avoid it? There are many, many dangers to protect them from and it does take work—that’s what parenting is. If you want them to run wild and stay out of your hair, you shouldn’t have had them. Think about those girls in Oklahoma, walking on a dirt road in a small town. Within a few minutes of leaving home, they were brutally murdered possibly by a thrill seeker. Free Range didn’t work there, did it?

  I know she’s only trying to be helpful (in a really snippy, nerve-grating way), but this woman thinks the job of parenting boils down to instilling terror. The Oklahoma girls she mentions are the one-in-a-million-and-a-half example. Literally, that’s the statistic: 1 in 1.5 million children is abducted and murdered by strangers. We have to put those crimes in context, or we’ll end up locking up all our kids like Rapunzel. (And look how well that worked.)

  However, I do agree with the letter lady on one point: it makes sense to teach your kids about danger and how best to avoid it. Just like you want to teach them to stop, drop, and roll if they’re ever in a fire.

  And then? You have to let them out again, because that lady is wrong about one basic thing when she says, “There are many, many dangers to protect them from.”

  No! Not true. Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world where the weirdest, worst, least likely events are given the most play. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.

  OK. So, what if you’re a parent like me, who thinks there’s got to be another way, but you don’t want to move to Mongolia (where at least you won’t be scared by the nightly news because you can’t understand a word they say, not even “Up Next: When Yaks Attack”)?

  That’s what this book is about. Yaks. No. I jest. Really, it’s here to help tease out the real dangers from the hype, to show you (and me) the things that are worth guarding against, as opposed to all the parental warnings based on fearmongering, bad information, and modern-day myths. The book also aims to figure out how we got to be so scared in the first place.

  You’ll find a skeptical look at the hovering advice we’ve been given, an equally skeptical look at the devices designed to help us do that hovering, and all sorts of support and facts and (God willing) fun boiled down into the Ten Free-Range Commandments.

  Well, that was the idea. But then it turned out there were a whole bunch of other issues I wanted to get to, from how to ignore media hysteria to how to stop worrying about every little parenting decision, to how to get our kids to actually put down the Wii and go outside (if that’s humanly possible), and pretty soon, there were Fourteen Commandments. So think of it as Ten Commandments . . . with four free with purchase.

  After these comes an easy-to-use A-to-Z review of all the things you may not have to worry about, from BPA in baby bottles to raw eggs in cookie dough. Plus a whole chapter on the truth about abductions that should help you dial down your anxiety meter a few notches. And throughout, there are stories from parents who are starting to let go. Here’s one:

  My friends’ daughter Carrie is a special needs kid. She goes to a special school, a special camp, special therapists. But recently she asked her mother, out of the blue, if she could go get a slice of pizza on her own, here in Manhattan.

  Her shocked mother said, “Uh . . . OK, but why not get the pizza and bring it home to eat?” “NO!” said Carrie, who’s sixteen. “Other people eat at the pizza place, and I want to, too!”

  So, bless her, my friend said OK, and Carrie went off by herself a block or two away. When she returned, her mother was waiting for her outside, but couldn’t even see her coming. She’d been so worried, she’d run out of the house without her glasses. Then Carrie zoomed into view, glowing, grinning, and gave her mom a hug.

  “What made you want to do this?” her mother asked.

  Carrie had seen her friend Izzy on TV, talking about his subway ride.

  “I thought if he could do it, I could do it too.”

  Darn tootin’.

  And that’s really what we’re talking about here. Carrie came home joyful. The world had become a less scary place, and she had fun along the way. All our kids need those opportunities to roam, to fall, to fail, and, finally, to fly.

  You don’t have to be very brave to start thinking about all this, and you don’t have to put your kid on the subway tomorrow, either. Or ever. (Ann Curry doesn’t.)

  Small steps are fine; mulling is fine, too. Not all kids are ready to go Free Range at the same age. You know your sweet one’s unique abilities (and quirks), and you know your own comfort level, too. But if you find yourself half psyched, half wavering: remember Carrie! Her mom wasn’t quite ready, but Carrie was. And her mom was smart—and brave—to listen.

  In truth, it wasn’t until I was blogging away about bravery this, bravery that, that I finally had to face my own primal fear: the Concussion on Wheels. Or, as kids call it, the skateboard. My boys had been begging for one for five years, but I only finally gave in because after yakking about it on the Free-Range blog, I had to buy one or lose all credibility.

  Long story short: they played with it a few times and got bored. (Hooray!)

  All these little mini-adventures we’ve started phasing in—skateboards, subway rides, taking ou
t the garbage—have not changed our boys, Izzy and his brother Morry, twelve, in any big ways that I can see. Yet. But the whole new thinking about happiness (and maturity) is that these qualities come from actually doing things. Creating. Exploring. Being independent. The catch phrase is self-mastery, and you’ll note that this term and self-confidence and self-esteem all start with self, not parent-assisted. So now that’s my goal, and perhaps yours, too: to teach the kids what to do and then stop assisting quite so much. After all, we can’t do everything for them forever. Raising happy, responsible, independent young people is parenting’s goal.

  Go Free Range and I can’t promise immediate happiness, responsibility, and independence. But I can say that the fears so rampant in our society aren’t in line with reality anymore, and lately a lot of us seem to be realizing that. It’s time to give our kids a different kind of childhood.

  They say the first step toward change is realizing that you really want to change, at least a little bit, so kudos to you for picking up this book. A bigger kudos to you for reading it. (Picking up a book only gets you so far.) Join me in the Free-Range Movement and you won’t regret it.

  Just as soon as you get that toilet seat unlocked.

  Part 1

  The Fourteen Free-Range Commandments

  Commandment 1

  Know When to Worry

  Play Dates and Axe Murderers:

  How to Tell the Difference

  It was one of those chaotic parenting moments. The ones when you have to make a decision—fast.

  Isabelle, the twelve-year-old daughter of my friends Jeff and Sue, had just been in the middle school play. She was going with the cast to the local Friendly’s for ice cream, along with several dozen kids and parents. Clearly this was the suburban equivalent of the Vanity Fair Oscar party, which is why Isabelle’s little sister, ten-year-old Kaitlin, begged to go along too.

  My friends said yes, even though they’d promised to look after Kaitlin’s friend, another ten-year-old. Let’s call her Baby M.

  Sue had to peel off, so Jeff dropped all three girls off at Friendly’s, gave them money for ice cream, and told them he’d come back to pick them up in half an hour.

  So now, instead of going straight to Kaitlin’s house as planned, Baby M was at an ice cream shop with her friend and another fifty or sixty riotously happy schoolchildren she knew. Being a responsible girl, she called her mom to tell her where she was.

  “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?” screamed Baby M’s mom. “You’re WHERE? By YOURSELF?” She slammed down the phone and called Sue to yell, “How dare you do this to my child!”

  Now look, I’m a mom too, and when plans change, I’d like to get a call. But there’s a difference between being mildly annoyed and hair-standing-straight-up hysterical. The crazed mom barely had time to hang up the phone before she ran out to her car and sped over to Friendly’s. She scooped up her kid—yes, leaving little Kaitlin by herself—but not before declaring to the world (or at least to a whole lot of ice cream eaters): “This is NOT how I’m raising my daughter!”

  No indeed! She’s raising her to be a hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguisher—just like she is. (Which, by the way, is why I’ve changed everyone’s name in this story. I don’t want to make a crazed mom crazier.)

  Days went by, and this mom refused to answer any of my friends’ apologetic e-mails. Why would she? To her mind, Sue and Jeff had done the moral equivalent of dragging her daughter into a forest filled with wolves, snakes, and unshaven guys lurching around with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a pickax in the other.

  Baby M’s mom thinks her daughter is just very lucky that nothing bad happened to her that scary, scary night. She also thinks that, as a mom, she was doing the only rational, caring thing: making sure her ten-year-old was supervised every second, every place, every day by a preapproved adult.

  How dare anyone subject her daughter to that unscheduled ice cream shop experience? Mama didn’t approve of it beforehand, she was not consulted, she didn’t check the menu for appropriate foods, she didn’t know who the girl might talk to—and it’s quite possible that while there, her daughter might have had to go to the bathroom. God knows what would have happened to her there! (Cue the unshaven lurchers.)

  Anyway, my point—and maybe I’m starting to sound as wild-eyed as that mom—is this: a lot of parents today are really bad at assessing risk. They see no difference between letting their children walk to school and letting them walk through a firing range. When they picture their kids riding their bikes to a birthday party, they see them dodging Mack trucks with brake problems. To let their children play unsupervised in a park at age eight or ten or even thirteen seems about as responsible as throwing them in the shark tank at Sea World with their pockets full of meatballs.

  Any risk is seen as too much risk. A crazy, not-to-be-taken, see-you-on-the-local-news risk. And the only thing these parents don’t seem to realize is that the greatest risk of all just might be trying to raise a child who never encounters any risks.

  Not that I’m a fan of taking crazy risks. I hate them! They make no sense. Riding a bike without a helmet strikes me as about as sensible as riding a roller coaster rated MP for “Missing Planks.” My love for seatbelts borders on the obsessive. And car seats? One of those saved my life when I was two and our car somersaulted off the highway. That was before car seats were even required, so I come from solid, safety-loving stock. Safety is good. But if we try to prevent every possible danger or difficulty in our child’s everyday life, that child never gets a chance to grow up.

  Or eat ice cream without a chaperone.

  Now, if “The Incident at Friendly’s” were unusual, this book would end right here. It would be about one overworried mom, and who cares about that?

  But unfortunately, Mama M is not alone in her fears. Millions of moms and almost (but not quite) as many dads now see the world as so fraught with danger that they can’t possibly let their children explore it.

  Sometimes they regret having to rein their kids in, but rein them in they do. A woman who wrote me from quiet, suburban Atlanta won’t let her daughter go to the mailbox by herself. That’s right. The mailbox. In her mind, there’s just “too much that could happen” between the door and the curb.

  Another dad informed his daughter that he was going to follow her school field trip to make sure nothing happened to her. Why? Could he stop the bus from plunging off the road?

  Then there was the New Jersey radio talk show host who interviewed me after the now infamous incident of my letting Izzy ride the subway by himself. How could I do such a crazy thing, the host demanded. He believes in safety. He loves his son. That’s why he won’t let the boy, age eight, play basketball in his own driveway. Too many creeps out there!

  Yes, there are many creeps in this world of ours. Some of them even have bombastic radio shows and speak in italics. But some of them are creeps of the classic kind: pedophiles and murderers and guys who feel compelled to show kids what’s under their raincoat. Creeps are a sad fact of life. The fact that many parents seem unable to process, however, is that

  THERE AREN’T ANY MORE CREEPS NOW THAN WHEN WE WERE KIDS.

  Hard to believe, but that’s what the statistics show. Over at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, they track these things (as you might guess from their name). David Finkelhor, the founder of the center and a professor at the University of New Hampshire, says that violent crime in America has been falling since it peaked in the early nineties. That includes sex crimes against kids. He adds that although perhaps the streets were somewhat safer in the fifties, children today are statistically as safe from violent crime as we parents were, growing up in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.

  So when parents say, “I’d love to let my kids have the same kind of childhood I had, but times have changed,” they’re not making a rational argument.

  Times have not changed. Especially not where childhood abductions are concerned. Those crimes a
re so very rare that the rates do not go up or down by much in any given year. Throw in the fact that now almost everyone is carrying a cell phone and can immediately call the police if they see a kid climbing into a van filled with balloons, a clown, and automatic weapons, and times are, if anything, safer.

  The problem is that we parents feel that childhood is more dangerous for our kids than it was for us, and over the course of this book, we’ll look at where those fears come from and which ones are utterly baseless and why they’re so hard to shake. But if you (like, sometimes, me) only read a chapter or two and then “forget” to read the rest of a book, or “accidentally” leave it on the bus, let me just state clearly before it’s too late that we have it all wrong. Our kids are more competent than we believe, and they’re a whole lot safer, too. We are extremely worried today about exceedingly unlikely disasters—or, as the experts put it, “negative outcomes.” (Like death would be a “negative outcome” of gum surgery.)

  Dr. F. Sessions Cole, chief medical officer at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, one of the Midwest’s biggest medical centers, put it this way: “The problem is that the public assumes that any risk to any individual is 100 percent risk to them.”

  What he means is that if people hear about one child who died from falling out of a crib, they immediately assume that their child is at risk for that same thing. When one child gets a rare infection, they think it’s likely that theirs could too. When they hear about one child abducted from a parking lot, they assume their child could well be next, even though, in reality, those chances are so slim that actual, factual statisticians have a word for them: de minimis. Risks so small that they are virtually equivalent to none. I’m not saying that the abducted children are equivalent to none. No! I’m saying that the risk is so small, it’s almost impossible to guard against. Just like it’s almost impossible to guard against the possibility of being hit by an asteroid.