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

by Lenore Skenazy

  Finkelhor adds, as a practical matter, that he would equip teenage girls, especially, with pepper spray. And he’d have kids carry cell phones, so that they can alert you or another adult, or call 911. Make sure they know about 911.

  “It’s not enough to talk to them thirty minutes a year,” says Allen, on the subject of safety instruction. “You need to role play. You need to practice, so when the time comes, they can act. And you don’t do it in a scary way, because scary doesn’t work. You try to scare the kids to death, what you end up doing is you paralyze them. So the whole essence is you empower children.”

  Although I had my misgivings about Allen’s center because it has made abductions the main focal point of parental fears and has led to all sorts of unintended consequences (like parents driving their kids to school and keeping them cooped up afterward, isolated, and usually glued to a screen), I ended up with great respect for his organization. It has helped countless children, even if it scared the bejeezus out of a bunch of us too. As it turns out, Allen and I actually share the very same goal: happy, safe kids who are confident out and about in the world.

  Free-Range Kids, in fact.

  REAL WORLD

  The Whole Time He Was in There I Was Sweating

  Gaelle, a Free-Range Mom, writes:My son is 5 years old. A couple of months ago we were at the airport and he needed to use the restroom, but he insisted on using the boy’s one. I gave in—the line in the ladies restroom was pretty long.

  The whole time he was in there, I was sweating out of fear that a child molester had been waiting for that opportunity and was in that same bathroom, about to hurt my child. It seemed to take forever for him to come out, so I asked a gentleman walking out if he had seen a little boy in there. He smiled at me and replied, “Yes. He is washing his hands at the moment. He needed help to reach the soap.”

  WOW! My 5-year-old actually remembered to wash his hands?

  He came out of the restroom, clean hands, a huge smile on his face. And I started breathing again.

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: Let your school-age child go into a public bathroom alone. Wait outside.

  Free-Range Brave Step: Do what the safety teachers all say to do: teach your children never to go off with someone they don’t know. Then practice this. Have them throw their hands up as stop signs, scream “Get away!” and literally run off. Try to make it kind of fun. After my friend’s daughter was on a public bus where a guy grabbed another girl’s behind, my friend had the gaggle of schoolgirls practice shouting, “Get your hands off of me!” at the top of their lungs. She made it into a sort of cheer. Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be cool if real cheerleaders started practicing cheers like that? “Two, four, six, eight! Back off or I’ll amputate!” “Hey hey! Ho ho! Copping feels has got to go!” I would love to hear a whole stadium cheering along. Talk about empowerment.

  Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: If abductions are still gnawing at you, do something to make the world a safer place. Call your local police and volunteer to host a safety meeting at your home. Enroll your kids or the whole family in a self-defense class. Or at least make up a new cheer. Taking action breaks down the fear.

  While you’re at it, teach your children a lesson about how to get help if ever they need it: by talking to strangers.

  Conclusion

  The Other Problem That Has No Name—and Its Solution

  “ The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American children. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that children suffered. . . . Each suburban child struggled with it alone . . . afraid to ask even the silent question: Is this all?”

  So begins the revolutionary classic, The Feminine Mystique. Except that I have taken the liberty of substituting “child” and “children” for “women” and “wife.”

  As you may recall, The Feminine Mystique first introduced us to “the problem that had no name”—a problem that boiled down to housewives going bonkers with boredom. They knew they were supposed to find fulfillment in their lovely homes and gleaming appliances—and many did. But many others longed to get out in the world, use their talents, stretch. They wanted to be treated like competent human beings, not helpless kittens. But at the time Betty Friedan was writing, 1963, just twenty years after women had rolled up their sleeves and riveted the bombers that won World War II, they were told, Sweetheart, what are you talking about? It’s a man’s world out here. Too dangerous for you. Too difficult. You’ve got everything you could possibly want right there at home. So stay there. Inside. Safe.

  Same thing we are telling kids now.

  Yes, of course, there is a difference between grown women and young children, but there is also something strangely familiar about the idea of suddenly deciding that the outside world is way too dangerous for a certain segment of the population. A segment that had been doing just fine in the outside world until that point. A segment abruptly informed that it could no longer do anything on its own—and that all this restriction was for its own good.

  As I’ve said throughout this book, childhood really has changed since we were kids. I know all middle-aged people at some point start saying, “In my day . . .” That’s how you know they’re middle-aged. It’s like a verbal paunch. But in our day, kids did walk to school. Parents did not drive them home from the bus stop. Kids did play in the park without anyone hovering, and they did stay out until dark.

  That has changed not just in the United States, but throughout the English-speaking world. Australian children get stared at when they ride the bus alone. Canadian kids stay inside playing video games. I heard from a dad in Ireland who lets his eleven-year-old play in the local park, unsupervised, and now a mom down the street won’t let her son go to their house. She thinks the dad is reckless. And there was a great article in the English paper The Daily Mail, “How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations.”

  The reporter interviewed four generations of the same family. The eighty-eight-year-old great-grandpa, George, used to walk six miles to his favorite fishing hole, alone, at age eight. His son, now sixty-three, played in the woods a mile from his home when he was eight. His daughter, at that same age, walked half a mile to school. Now her son, age eight, is driven to school. He is not allowed to leave his block, and neither are any of his friends. Most of them don’t even leave their yards.

  And here’s a letter I got over Christmas break from an American:I’m fifteen right now and get pretty much no freedom. I’m limited to what’s inside the house and the backyard. I can’t even go as far as the sidewalk—I might be “abducted or killed.” I used to walk to a bus stop, but my dad said it was too dangerous, so he started driving me there (it’s a five-minute walk!), and eventually he just started driving me to school. Today, after playing video games for two hours or so, I went downstairs and realized that the only things I could do there were eat and watch TV. Watching TV, playing video games, and eating junk food are fun and all, but after even just a few days, it gets old. (I’ve been on winter break for half a week now.) I don’t want my kids (if I ever even have kids) to live like me at all.

  It is the problem that has no name.

  Childhood is supposed to be about discovering the world, not being held captive. It’s not about having that world pointed out to you by a DVD or a video game or by your mom as you drive by. “See, honey? That’s called a ‘forest.’ Can you spell forest?”

  We want our children to have a childhood that’s magical and enriched, but I’ll bet that your best childhood memories involve something you were thrilled to do by yourself. These are childhood’s magic words: “I did it myself!”

  It is time we gave them back to our kids.

  Childhood independence has become taboo, even though our world is no less safe than it was twenty or thirty years ago. The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept further from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when
most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

  Like the housewives of the fifties, today’s children need to be liberated. Unlike the housewives of the fifties, the children can’t do it themselves.

  Though I’d love to see hordes of kids gathering for meetings, staging protests, and burning their baby knee pads—and maybe they will—it is really up to us parents to start renormalizing childhood. That begins with us realizing how scared we’ve gotten, even of ridiculously remote dangers. Overheard, for example, at the American Museum of Natural History: “Hurry up, kids, stay right behind me! I don’t want you kidnapped!” That’s the kind of thing we have to get over.

  We also have to get over the fear of letting our children fail. They don’t have to spend every moment getting good at something. They don’t have to be pro soccer players for us to love them. And if they actually go ahead and lose at soccer, they don’t have to receive a trophy. One midwestern dad had to explain to his daughter why the award she brought home was for “Second Winner”! A second winner, dad gingerly explained, is what we used to call “the loser.”

  We have to be less afraid of nature and more willing to embrace the idea that some rashes and bites are a fair price to pay in exchange for appreciating the wonder of a cool-looking rock or an unforgettable fern. And I say this having gone through a huge bout of poison ivy with one son that had his legs looking like a relief map of Mars.

  When we watch TV, we have to remind ourselves that its job is to terrify and disgust us so that we’ll keep watching in horror. It is doing an excellent job on both fronts.

  We have to be willing to stand up to equally terrifying “experts,” even the self-declared ones in our own parenting groups, who bring in the latest study as if it’s a moose they just shot. “Look! I just found out that [fill in the blank] is extremely bad for children /babies/nursing moms/pets.” We have to remember that we live in safe times with lots of safeguards and laws and medical advances that have made childhood less dangerous than at any other time in the history of human beings.

  We have to learn to remind the other parents who think we’re being careless when we loosen our grip that we are actually trying to teach our children how to get along in the world, and that we believe this is our job. A child who can fend for himself is a lot safer than one forever coddled, because the coddled child will not have Mom or Dad around all the time, even though they act as if he will. Maybe that’s even the plan. Maybe they don’t mind raising a kid who thinks he’s helpless without them.

  And on top of all this, we have to give our kids the tools they need to go Free Range. Teach them about bike safety and bad guys and traffic signals and how to ask for help and how to handle disappointment and what to do if they get lost and all the things parents have always had to teach their kids. Or at least they did until recently, when they decided they could just do everything for them instead.

  I write this in a kind of shaky mood because I just got a call from the police. I put Izzy, now ten, on a half-hour train ride out to his friend’s house this morning. It sounds like I’m a recidivist, but really: his friend’s family was waiting at the other end to pick him up, and he’s done this a dozen times already. It is a straight shot on a commuter railroad. This particular time, however, the conductor found it outrageous that a ten-year-old should be traveling alone, and summoned the police, who arrived as my son disembarked.

  When the officer phoned me at home, I told him the truth (while my heart stood still): we had actually inquired of the railroad what age a child can travel alone and were told there was no specific regulation about this.

  The officer said no problem and wished me Merry Christmas, because that’s what today is. And off my son went with his friend’s family.

  But this is the world we’re living in. One where a ten-year-old can’t do anything by himself without it being cause for alarm, or even arrest. Later I looked up the official rules: a child only has to be eight to ride alone on the railroad or subway. Good rule.

  Independence should be cause for celebration. Recall the story in Commandment 8 of the Italian orphan Rocco, a kid growing up a hundred years ago: how he escaped a Fagin-like taskmaster at age eleven and found his way to a family of fishermen and worked for them until he got himself to America—all by age sixteen. You can bet no conductor arrested him for traveling on his own. Adults knew then what we have forgotten today. Kids are competent. Kids are capable. Kids deserve freedom, responsibility, and a chance to be part of this world, not cooped up like, well . . . chickens.

  In our enlightenment, we have finally returned to some lucky, clucking, real, live chickens the old-fashioned, God-given freedom to range. Our children deserve no less. Long live Free-Range Kids.

  Sources

  Dear sources aficionado: As a longtime newspaper reporter, I gathered much of my information the old-fashioned way, through interviews (and the less old-fashioned way, through e-mail chats). If I did not identify a book or a study as the source of my facts in the text, it’s because I got the information from a human being. The published sources I used are as follows.

  Introduction

  Baker, Al. “Crime Numbers Keep Dropping Across the City.” New York Times, Dec. 31, 2005, Section A, p. 1.

  Crimes Against Children Research Center (http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/).

  Crimes Against Children Research Center crime trends statistics (http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/Trends/index.html).

  Crimes Against Children Research Center kidnapping statistics (http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/kidnapping/).

  Finkelhor, David. “The Great Interpersonal Violence Decline.” Presentation at the American Psychological Association Interpersonal Violence Summit, Bethesda, Md., February 2008.

  Finkelhor, David, Heather Hammer, and Andrea J. Sedlak. “Nonfamily Abducted Children: National Estimates and Characteristics.” Prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice. (http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/196467.pdf).

  U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Crime in the United States.” 2007. (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_01.html).

  Commandment 1: Know When to Worry

  Clements, Rhonda. “An Investigation of the Status of Outdoor Play.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2004, 5(1), 68-80.

  Crimes Against Children Research Center (http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/).

  PedNet Coalition (www.pednet.org).

  Russell, Cheryl. Bet You Didn’t Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts About Living in the USA. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2008.

  Commandment 2: Turn Off the News

  Cairns, Warwick. How to Live Dangerously. London: Macmillan, 2008.

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Water-Related Injuries: Fact Sheet.” (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/drown.htm).

  Gardner, Daniel. The Science of Fear. New York: Dutton, 2008.

  Gill, Tim. No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007.

  National Highway Traffic Administration Safety statistics (NHTSA.dot.gov/ People/PeopleAllVictims.aspx).

  National Highway Traffic Administration Safety statistics, crunched by Fatality Analysis Reporting System (http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/PeopleAllVictims.aspx).

  Commandment 3: Avoid Experts

  Barrett, Stephen, MD (quackwatch.com).

  Deerwester, Karen. The Potty Training Answer Book: Practical Answers to the Top 200 Questions Parents Ask. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2007.

  Dimerman, Sara. Am I a Normal Parent? Long Island City, N.Y.: Hatherleigh Press, 2008.

  Fields, Denise, and Ari Brown. Baby 411. (3rd ed.) Boulder, Colo.: Windsor Peak Press, 2007.

  Gomi, Taro, and Amanda Mayer Stinchecum. Everyone Poops. La Jolla, Calif.: Kane/Miller, 2001.

  Karp, Harvey. The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and
Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old. (Rev. ed.) New York: Bantam, 2008.

  McDonald, Libby. The Toxic Sandbox: The Truth About Environmental Toxins and Our Children’s Health. New York: Perigee Trade, 2007.

  Murkoff, Heidi, and Sharon Mazel. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. (4th ed.) New York: Workman, 2008.

  Spock, Benjamin, and Robert Needlman. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. (8th ed.) New York: Pocket Books, 2004.

  Swartz, Jillian (http://thefamilygroove.com).

  Commandment 4: Boycott Baby Knee Pads

  Babies R Us (babiesrus.com).

  Baby-Safe Inc (http://www.babysafeamerica.com/BSA_About.html).

  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Child Passenger Safety Fact Sheet.” (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/childpas.htm).

  Linn, Susan. The Case for Make Believe. New York: New Press, 2008.

  Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: Protecting Our Children from the Onslaught of Marketing and Advertising. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.

  Christoper, Maura. “Let’s Rock!” Parents Magazine, Oct. 2008, pp. 136-142.

  Onestepahead.com.

  Paul, Pamela. Parenting, Inc.: How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers—and What It Means for Our Children. New York: Times Books, 2008.

  Thudguard.com.

  U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. “CPSC Warns: Pools Are Not the Only Drowning Danger at Home for Kids—Data Show Other Hazards Cause More Than 100 Residential Child Drowning Deaths Annually.” May 23, 2002. (http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml02/02169.html).