The Danish newspapers were outraged. After all, leaving kids outside unattended is common practice there, a sign of good sense, not neglect. But as New York’s commissioner of child services remarked, it was not up to America “to make inquiries about whether this is acceptable in Denmark.”
But maybe it is. Maybe by looking at the way other countries treat their children—the freedom they are given, the responsibilities those kids assume, the way adults trust each other—we can figure out which parts of our parenting culture really make sense, and which parts are just strange cultural quirks, like eating marshmallow bits in our cereal or getting a bikini wax on the way to Tibetan meditation class.
Or, come to think of it, reading books about child rearing that say, “Don’t read books about child rearing.”
REAL WORLD
After a Week of Spying, I Finally Relaxed
Angelina Hart, a Free-Range Mom, writes:When I was living in Japan, everyone on the street let their kids go to the park alone. My daughters were 3 and 5 and just ran off with the other kids. I followed, ducking behind cars so they couldn’t see me, and watched from a distance. They were all fine. After a week of spying I finally relaxed enough to enjoy the time that they were at the park.
My brother grew up in Germany in the ’60s and three years old was the official age when a child was old enough to go to the corner bakery in the morning to pick up the bread. Today, three years old is still thought of as infancy! Many people still have a 3-year-old in a high chair!
One other story: A family I know traveled to Southeast Asia with their 2-year-old still in a stroller. All the local people thought the child had stumbled across a landmine. When the child got up and walked around they were amazed, but confused: Why would a healthy child need a wheelchair? Good question!
Going Free Range
Free-Range Baby Step: Ask a friend of yours who is from another country to tell you what he or she finds odd (or deranged) about child rearing here.
Free-Range Brave Step: Give yourself an International Day. Have your first-grade (or older) child walk to school, as she would in most of the rest of the world. Or, at the grocery store with your grade-school children, have them go get you things from other aisles. Just let them know where you’ll be so you don’t keep missing each other. They will feel proud and independent and, as the mom living in the Netherlands pointed out, so will you. This isn’t quite as dramatic as dropping them off in a kiddie corner the whole time, as she does, but it’s a start.
Meanwhile, if your children are in their teens, visit another city and let them explore on their own for a couple of hours. Give them a map, some cash, and a time and place to meet. (But don’t be an idiot: make sure they write down that info.)
Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: If you can afford it, travel outside the country with your children and try going native a little. If the local kids go marketing, let yours. If the kitchen help are willing to entertain your children, let them. Or go to restaurant in Denmark or Lithuania and park your child outside next to someone else’s. Have a lovely meal!
Commandment 10
Get Braver
Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn’t Work Anyway
You remember the Steven Wright joke: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”
Same thing goes for control. You can’t have total control. What would you do with it?
Say that somehow, one day, you meet the Parenting Genie (no relation to the Diaper Genie), and for a few wild weeks, she grants you TC—Total Control. Control of your kids, their school, their time. Maybe even how they answer the phone.
So you use your TC to make sure your scrawny son gets a place on the football team. Works like a charm! (Because it is a charm.)
The big game comes, he gets tackled by a 220-pounder, and—SNAP—he breaks his leg. By golly, your TC didn’t work! So you press TC Rewind, and this time you make your son absent the day of the big game, so he doesn’t get tackled. Your TC is working!
But without a broken leg, your son never ends up in the emergency room, where he would have fallen in love with medicine and healing and decided right then and there to become a doctor at the Albert Schweitzer Clinic in Gabon. Or at least a lobbyist for big pharma.
So you use TC to let him break that leg and find his true calling, but by the time he gets back to school he has missed his English class when they were teaching the word hirsute, so he screws up on his SATs, thereby missing the cutoff for his college by one point and so the TC worked . . . and didn’t work . . . and it worked and it didn’t and . . . it’s complicated, isn’t it?
Luckily for us there’s no such thing as Total Control, since it would drive us absolutely crazy.
Unluckily for us, we act as if there were.
There is an idea in the air that somehow, if we just involve ourselves enough in our children’s lives and think ahead and make a lot of plans and decisions, our children will be able to sail through their days, happy and successful.
As we shall see from the rest of this chapter, which involves sage advice from a lot of smart, psychologically minded professionals, this idea is, to use the technical term, “nuts.”
I know I said don’t trust experts, but these folks I do trust, because they’re not “parenting” experts. They’re parent experts. People who understand and empathize with us. Helpful folks. Especially when it comes to the big kahuna of parenting. Yes. Control.
Control is a figment of our imagination. Seeking it only makes us more anxious. It certainly isn’t required for good child rearing. And to the extent that we do manage to solve all our children’s problems—or keep those problems from ever even popping up—we are doing them a disservice. Not a fatal one that will stunt our children forever. But still, we are steering them away from the real source of confidence and independence, which comes from navigating the world and its surprises. Especially the unpleasant ones.
Since it is hard to suddenly give up an illusion as cherished as control, this chapter will discuss not only how to start letting go of it but also how to feel less awful as you do. And it’ll discuss letting go of worry, too, since that’s just another form of control. (You know how you bend sideways when you’re worried that your bowling ball is about to fall into the gutter, and you think you can will it back on track by leaning and twisting? That’s worry-as-control. Futile, but natural.) As you’ll see, what helps the most in all of this is helping our kids prepare for the big, wide world.
Finally, at the end of this whole psychological journey, you and I will join each other for a beer or latte or giant brownie—if only metaphorically—because we have been dumped into these weird parental times, and it’s hard getting sane, and we deserve a goshdarn break. The kids can go watch TV.
For starters, are we really more worried than our parents? Haven’t parents always worried?
Of course they have, says historian Peter Stearns, author of Anxious Parents. But what we’ve seen in just the last fifteen or twenty years is a leap off the charts. “Extravagant worry” is what he calls it. Extravagant in that it inflates remote possibilities into looming threats that we think we have to watch out for. Whether we’re fearing for our children’s physical safety or their psychological well-being (“How dare that teacher give his dinosaur diorama a D?!”), our job as parents has become much more demanding. We have to be on our toes all the time.
If we really think that a child could be abducted at any minute, for instance, we can’t just let our kids walk to school the way we did. We have to drive them there or wait at the bus stop with them, both of which take up a lot of time, even while ratcheting up the very anxiety they’re supposed to allay. Why are we at the bus stop that kids used to wait at alone? Because now it’s way too scary. Why is it too scary? Because if it weren’t scary, why would we all be waiting there? We’re all at the bus stop because we’re all at the bus stop. Worry is contagious.
As it escalates, so does the definition of “good parent.” Chan
ces are, your parents didn’t attend absolutely every soccer practice or gymnastics lesson, but now a lot of us do. Sometimes it’s fun—we get to watch the kids frolic, and also to gossip with the other parents. But sometimes we’d rather be doing something else. Anything else. Cleaning the oven. Flossing. Pulling hair wads out of the drain. Yet there we are, freezing (or baking) in the bleachers. Our job is to be ever present: encouraging, witnessing, and, often enough, electronically documenting. Then, depending on personal parenting style, we either make a keepsake scrapbook with an adorable felt cover or forget to download the photos for a year. But still, we were there. And any time we can’t be? At the very least we can always go back to Parental Plan A: worrying.
My best friend from Chicago has confessed that whenever she and her twelve-year-old daughter are shopping at the mall but go to separate ends of the food court to get lunch, “I’m nervous the whole time till she comes back.” That’s usually about five minutes.
“Why?” I’ve asked. “Your daughter is as tall as I am. She’s smart. She’s in a public place. She’s not going to go off with some guy offering her free candy.” (Free Abercrombie shirts? Hmmm.)
“I know,” said my friend. “But I just feel comfortable worrying.”
How can worrying feel good?
“The idea is that if you’re worrying, then you’re doing the right thing,” says Lawrence Balter, a professor at New York University and editor of the encyclopedia Parenthood in America. Worrying “is like a demonstration to yourself that you’re being responsible,” he says. It has become our national pastime.
Then there are the other, more active ways we are expected to protect and direct our children. One of the ways most of us do this from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed is: we keep our cell phones on.
As discussed a bit earlier, I am a big fan of cell phones, yet ambivalent about them too. My boys are out with one right now, so they can call and tell me where they’re going after they finish up helping out at the school’s bake sale. (Why is Mom not helping out at the bake sale, you ask? She is writing this Free-Range book, trying to take her own advice and let them have a little adventure on their own. Albeit an adventure in a familiar place, supervised by a lot of other moms, and probably involving the vast ingestion of cupcakes.)
Where were we? Oh yes. On the phone. The point is this: when people wonder, How did parenting become so much more child-intensive so fast? one of the answers is, “Simple. We signed up for that friends and family calling plan.”
The cell phone means we are always connected to (and attempting to control) our kids.
“In the middle of a session,” reports New Jersey psychiatrist Steve Resnick, “people will answer their phone. Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Honey, I’m in the doctor’s office, I’ll call you back in 50 minutes. ’ But some will say, ‘I’m going to be home around six, I’ll pick up some milk and do you want me to get pizza?’”
Most of these calls are from their kids, says Resnick. And far from feeling embarrassed that they have interrupted what was supposed to be the one part of the week devoted to their own mental health, most of the phone answerers feel they did the right thing. They were “there” for their kids.
Contrast this with Resnick’s own lower-tech parents and childhood: “If my parents wanted to find me they’d have to call around to three or four houses and say, ‘Is Steve over there? I need to remind him of this or that,’ ” recalls Resnick. “It was a hassle for them to do and it was an imposition on the other families, and there was a good chance I was outside anyway. So it forced them to be more hands-off and trust my choices.”
That struck Resnick as so psychologically sound that these days he often forgoes his own cell phone and only uses a beeper. With a beeper, someone has to call him, leave a phone number, and wait for him to call back when it’s convenient.
“I don’t want it to be that easy to get ahold of me,” says the shrink. “I want people to be aware that it’s a little hassle for them and for me. If it’s important enough, they’ll do it. But if it’s a little thing, it makes them not call me.” That’s true even for his daughters, ages twelve and fourteen.
I still remember the time my older son, Morry, who was maybe ten at the time, called me just after I’d left for work to ask if he could have banana bread for breakfast. “Sure!” I said. But what I should have said was, “Heck yes! Have whatever you want! I’m not there. If I get home and find the dregs of a vodka smoothie in the blender, I’ll know you need more supervision. Otherwise, you know how to make breakfast, and you’re old enough to decide what to eat.”
The cell phone keeps the parent-child relationship back where it was when the kids were very young and needed constant supervision. When parents are always available to tell their kid what to do, they will, even when otherwise the kid would start making decisions himself. And wailing on the banana bread.
The assumption behind constant availability is that there are problems facing your child that must be solved, immediately, by you. The assumption behind that assumption is that you, the parent, are capable of solving all problems. And the secret assumption behind the assumption behind the . . . whatever, is that your child is helpless without you. So if you don’t solve each and every problem, he’s sunk, and you haven’t done your job.
In other words, we are back to the issue of control.
The belief in control is the belief that if we do the right thing or make the right decision, everything will turn out fine. And if we don’t, there will be hell to pay.
In real life, it’s that feeling we get when we see the shortest line at the grocery and stand in it and breeze through. We took control! It’s also responsible for the apoplexy we feel when we choose the shortest line and the lady in front of us turns out to be returning a tin of anchovies and she doesn’t have the receipt and the cashier has to call the supervisor, who saunters over while chatting with her friend and then no one can find the cash register key and if only you’d gotten in the line to your right, you’d be halfway home by now and life does not seem one iota fair. We planned . . . the grocery laughed.
The more nice things we have in this world, the more we believe in control. So if we have a decent job, we believe that we made it happen. If we have a decent house, same thing. If our kids are doing fine, we assume that’s under our control too. In fact, when things are pretty much humming, it looks as if we can control everyone else’s lives as surely as we control everyone else’s windows from the driver’s seat.
But that’s where we’re wrong. We are not really, actually, always in the driver’s seat. Or at least there’s a driving instructor next to us with his own set of brakes, and his name is Luck or Fate or God or Bobo. (But probably Luck or Fate or God.) And the reason we even believe we’re the ones in control is that we’re in a very nice car called the First World.
It’s an SUV.
The First World has air bags—literally and figuratively—and it has eradicated so many of the horrors that used to harm children, from lead in dinner plates to concrete under jungle gyms, that we don’t think anything awful is supposed to happen to children anymore, at least not to children whose parents are taking care.
“Since the nineteenth century,” says historian Stearns, “we’ve progressively come to believe that if something bad happens to a kid, parents have to have done something wrong. That’s a huge trip. And ironically, it got worse when children stopped dying. When it became so rare for children to die, it became absolutely unacceptable for them to die. And even though it was unlikely, now you had to worry: Maybe they will.”
Got that? The more safe our children became, the more we started to worry about them, because now if anything dangerous did happen to them, it would clearly be our fault. Fate has gone out the (electric) window, replaced by parental omnipotence. And it is this belief in control combined with the fear of screwing up that is driving us mad.
“Trying to control everything is impossible,” says Allison Cohen, a p
sychotherapist in California. “It’s like a hamster on a wheel, running, running, running. You’re trying to know what’s going to happen next and manage it perfectly.” Yet you can’t. Life is not chess, something where you can plan seventeen moves ahead, and even if it were, chess is really hard and requires utter concentration. Think of those weirdos who become chess champions. Now try thinking like them:
Your daughter is going to cheerleading practice after school, and she’s usually hungry after that, so you should probably have a snack ready for her, agreed? But if she eats at five, she may not be hungry for dinner. That means she’ll be hungry right before bed, so bedtime gets delayed by a late-evening bite, which means she’ll be tired the next day, and tomorrow’s a math test so . . . no snack after cheerleading practice? Or say you do give her a snack and she blows her math test—was it your fault because of everything you did or didn’t do that led up to it?
That may sound like a convoluted example, but I know I find myself thinking that way sometimes (and driving my husband up the wall, especially when it has to do with pickup arrangements). In any event, it’s just part and parcel of what we’ve been led to believe: that if we’re smart enough and on the ball, we can smooth the way for our kids. This isn’t just helicoptering—watching from above. In some countries (the colder ones), it’s the phenomenon of the curling parent. So-called because in the game of curling, players frantically sweep the ice in front of a stone as it glides on its way. God forbid it should hit a bump or a scratch or a snowflake and go any direction but straight toward its goal.
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