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

by Lenore Skenazy

  I wrote back to her (and cc’d the principal) saying: “There are over 700 kids at this school. Three bumps in two years is not a rash of injuries. Accidents happen. If we start taking everything out that someone might get hurt on, there will be nothing left. Some kids (like mine) are short, and cannot reach the higher parallel bars, and would like to be able to play on the playground as well.”

  She responded with some, “We’ll have to agree to disagree” line. But I wanted her, and the principal, to know that not every parent thinks this way, and maybe she is over-reacting. I’m not sure if I made any headway with her, but I won’t stay silent while the paranoid moms bubblewrap my kids’ childhood.

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: Find a playground that has not been safety-retrofitted. OK, you may have to go to a Third World country (or, as we did, rural New York), but look for one with a merry-go-round or teeter-totter or even one of those now verboten horsie swings and let your kid have some prehistoric, possibly illegal fun. Feel free to ride the horsies, too. Just don’t sue if you fall off.

  Free-Range Brave Step: Try a whole day of not being prepared. Don’t bring Kleenex, wipes, Band-Aids, water, a phone, or even extra cash. This may sound extreme, but once you muddle through, you’ll probably feel a little more free. The world is not that threatening. You don’t always have to be ready for the worst. When you think like a lawyer and imagine everything that could go wrong, it gets to be a habit. Try a day of kicking it.

  Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Read the Real World box above this one and do what that Free-Ranger did. When your school or scout troop or park district proposes getting rid of a time-honored kid thing, gather some statistics and fight back. It’s worth it.

  Commandment 6

  Ignore the Blamers

  They Don’t Know Your Kid Like You Do

  “Can you believe she did that?”

  Melissa, my upstairs neighbor, is staring wide-eyed, the way you do when you want someone else to open her eyes equally wide and shake her head in disbelief, so the two of you can sit there bonding over your utter shock.

  I am having trouble doing this.

  “Well . . . it . . . it doesn’t seem so bad,” I venture, squinting apologetically.

  “Lenore! I could have taken her baby, and she would never have seen him again! She was crazy!”

  Ah, the crazy wars again. Who’s crazy: people who trust other people, or people who don’t?

  In this case, I have to say that Melissa was officially crazy. Because the person she did not trust was . . . herself. Here’s the story.

  She—Melissa—was waiting in the checkout line at Costco, the giant warehouse store, with her groceries and her daughters, ages two and five. The woman in front of her suddenly remembered she had to get something at the back of the store and asked Melissa if she’d mind watching her baby, who was in the shopping cart. Melissa said fine, and off the woman, a stranger, sprinted.

  She came back two minutes later to discover that Melissa had kidnapped and killed her baby.

  No, no! Come on. Obviously, that’s not what happened. She came back two minutes later, thanked Melissa, and that was that. One mom helping another. But even if that’s how the other lady saw it, that’s not what Melissa saw. She saw a wildly irresponsible woman entrusting her precious little boy to a total stranger who could have easily turned out to be a psycho killer buying bulk paper towels and Goldfish crackers—John Wayne Gacy in a dress.

  All of which is a pretty harsh assessment of that mom’s actions. First of all, the baby-mom did not choose just anyone. She chose another mom. One who probably would have had a pretty hard time yanking the boy out of his cart, abandoning her groceries (and place in line!), dragging him out of the store, dragging her own kids out of the store, remembering where she’d parked, unlocking the car, shoving everyone inside, strapping them into their car seats, and then gunning across the border, all while ignoring her little girls shrieking, “Mommy! Why are you stealing that lady’s baby?” and “We want our Goldfish!”

  Oh, and second of all, no one else would have noticed this little drama and perhaps said, “Uh . . . stop”?

  This eagerness to distrust each other and even to find glaring fault with each other means that it’s hard for moms and dads to relax, ever. If the only good parent is a parent who never leaves their kid’s side—not even to run to the back of the store for a can of tuna fish—then it’s very easy to spot the bad ones. They’re the ones who let their kids walk to school or stay home alone for an hour. They’re the ones inside while their kids play in the yard. They’re the ones making their teenagers get themselves to their activities, or even their jobs. Things that previous generations did without a moment’s hesitation—or tragic outcome—have become grist for the gossip mill.

  “I let my eight- and ten-year-old sons bike the three blocks to a friend’s house,” a mom named Amy wrote to the Free-Range Kids blog. “But when they returned, their friend’s mom insisted on accompanying them back home through our very safe neighborhood, ‘just in case.’ ” The lady was sending Amy a message: your mothering leaves something to be desired.

  Sometimes the message is even more direct. A woman named Jess wrote that now that she lets her fifth-grade son walk the five blocks to school—with a friend—her neighbor won’t let her children play at Jess’s house anymore. To this neighbor, says Jess, “I am not a bad mother. I try not to let it get to me, I think I am anything but. I love my children and, like all mothers, only want the best for them.” But Jess’s definition of “the best” includes sometimes untying the apron strings. Other mothers find that tantamount to child abuse.

  In fact, that’s the very term they sometimes use.

  Thirty-five-year-old Kelly McGovern is the mother of four boys and, she admits, a yard-sale junkie. She and her husband spend plenty of Saturday mornings hitting the sales in their Phoenix suburb, and one morning when they were just about to do that, their oldest son, age nine, said he felt a little headachy and didn’t want to go.

  “We’d never really left him before because you’re always so terrified,” says Kelly. “You hear these stories that if you even leave your kid in the car for two minutes, the police are on your case and the other moms will eat you alive.” Could they possibly leave their boy on the couch for an hour or two, watching a Harry Potter movie?

  “My husband and I said well, we got the smoke alarm. We got a house alarm we keep on all the time in case of the boogey man. My son’s so responsible, he’s not going to cook, he’s not going to light a match. We told him don’t eat anything, because heaven forbid you choke. We left him with the cell phone and the regular phone and we said, ‘We’ll call you every thirty minutes.’ ” And then—off they went.

  At the first garage sale, they ran into an older acquaintance who asked, “Where’s your other son?”

  “Don’t tell anybody—he’s home,” Kelly confided.

  The older woman chuckled. “I had to do that all the time,” she said. “That’s the only way I could work.”

  A few weeks later, Kelly finally got up the guts to confide in friends her own age, the moms in her son’s playgroup. “We were just yakking,” says Kelly. “And I said, ‘I left Mark home the other day,’ and the other moms were like, ‘You left him ALONE?’ One mother said, ‘What if a fire had started in the house?’ I said, ‘We have a smoke alarm. I assume he’d run out.’ And she said, ‘Someone could have broken in!’ And I said well, we have a house alarm and we left him with two phones. And she threw her head back and raised her eyebrows and said, ‘Well, SOMETHING could have happened! You could get in trouble! That’s illegal!’ ”

  Not one mom spoke up in Kelly’s defense. So allow me. Very few states—as far as I could tell, only Illinois and Maryland, in fact—have laws that specify the age at which a child can be left at home alone. In Maryland, it’s eight. In Illinois, it’s thirteen—with the caveat that this is only applicable in cases where the adult left the young
ster for an “unreasonable” period of time “without regard for the mental or physical health, safety or welfare of that minor.” Leaving a kid on a couch with a burglar alarm, smoke alarm, and his parents on speed dial just does not sound like “without regard” for his safety.

  Other states and cities have guidelines—not laws—mentioning ages ranging from nine to twelve. But what these guidelines note is that the issue is not whether a child is left alone, or even what age, but under what circumstances. If, for instance, the child left alone has a disability, that’s clearly wrong. If he’s fine but left without a way to call a caregiver or without food or heat, or left in any way that suggests abandonment or utter neglect—all that is not only appalling but also probably actionable. But all those scenarios are also very different from being left alone with a Harry Potter video and a plea to temporarily hold off on the Doritos.

  Those differences—not too subtle—are lost on a legion of parents dying to win the “I’m a better parent” game. They play fast and hard by dreaming up all sorts of scenarios in which the other parent would have a big comeuppance, a disaster about which the blamers could smugly tsk, “I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen.” And we get so used to hearing their wild what-ifs and did-you-ever-think-abouts that these start to sound almost reasonable.

  So when that playgroup mom says, “What if a burglar broke in?” no one else in the group says, “Hang on a sec! We’re talking about a Saturday morning in the suburbs. That’s not really burglary prime time.” And when the accusing mom says, “Fire! What about a fire?” No one is ready to chime in with, “Fires are rare. Not that they don’t happen, but we all know Kelly’s son. He’s not the type to light cherry bombs in the basement or stand still and watch the furniture go up in flames without running out of the house. And while we’re at it, most homes do not spontaneously combust.” No, these moms kept letting the other one grope around for some fear—any fear—to win her point: I’m responsible and you’re not!

  Fear, no matter how far-fetched, usually does win. It wins because there’s no way to totally discount it. Just because your house didn’t burn down doesn’t mean it couldn’t have. And fear wins because it is also very powerful. Once you picture coming home to a charred Harry Potter fan, it’s hard to shrug your shoulders. The problem is, if you picture the very worst outcome of every very safe endeavor, there is no way you can enjoy life. All you can do is smother it.

  The playgroup moms’ vote of no confidence shook Kelly to the core. For six months afterward, she didn’t leave her son home alone again—even though she really believed he would be fine if she did. She was just too afraid of what her friends would say (or do) to her if they found out.

  As it turns out, this is not an uncommon worry. Laurie Spoon, a mother of two in quiet Corinth, Mississippi, found herself frantically looking up the local laws on child abuse after her mother threatened to call child welfare on her. Laurie worried that she could end up being fined or even having her children taken away. What unconscionable abuse had she heaped on her sweet nine-year-old?

  “I let her and this other little girl go to the movies,” says Laurie, twenty-seven. “It was a matinee of Nim’s Island. It’s a G-rated kid’s movie. I walked them inside the door—I didn’t just drop them outside. It was a middle of a Saturday and they got their popcorn and stuff and I told them: when it’s over, stay there, I’ll come back and pick you up. Don’t go outside the building.” And that’s exactly what happened. The girls ate their popcorn, saw the movie, waited to be picked up, and went back home.

  When Laurie’s mom found out, she was livid. Laurie had put those girls in peril! And it wasn’t just grandma who was ready to call the authorities. “I have met a lot of other parents and they are appalled that I would let my child go to the movie theater, or get dropped off at Skateworld,” says Laurie. When she finally found the child welfare statutes, Laurie discovered that the law is on her side. It’s just other parents who are not.

  I’m sure these shamers and blamers probably meant the best. Most of them, anyway. But they are holding their fellow parents to an almost impossible standard—constant supervision—that also just happens to be an unthinking, unyielding standard. Even if you know your child is capable of sitting on the couch for an hour, or sitting in a matinee and staying alive, there are many who still insist, “We know better! That’s dangerous!”

  And the threats they hold out—blame, ridicule, calling the authorities—leave a lot of us unable to trust our own instincts or even to show our children that we trust them.

  And then there is that one other threat that is forcing us to reconsider every Free-Range impulse. The threat that wears suspenders. Or, as a friend once put it when we were discussing whether or not to let our preteens travel on their own: “I don’t want to be the one on Larry King.”

  What he meant was, he’s afraid of being blamed on TV, if something dreadful ever befalls his daughter.

  That fear is so powerful, it prowls behind all the others. It makes us second-guess any parental decision, because we know that public suspicion and even infamy await any of us whose child is hurt.

  When it comes to other types of tragedy, we are a lot more forgiving. We have come a long and admirable way from the days when we blamed the victim. Back then, when, for example, a woman was raped, we’d say, “She asked for it. Look at that short skirt she was wearing!”

  But over the past generation or two, we came to understand that the real impulse behind that reaction was our own fear. If we could blame the victim for her fate, we could feel safe (and smug). All we had to do was convince ourselves that she did something we would never do. “She wears short skirts. She walks home through the wrong neighborhood. She is someone bad things could happen to. Not me. I’m different. So I’m safe.”

  That was a nasty way to think, and it’s great we’ve moved beyond it. But if we have stopped blaming victims, we have totally reversed ourselves on another group: victims’ parents.

  The people we used to automatically mourn with when tragedy struck.

  Now, when, say, a four-year-old is stolen from a hotel room where she was sleeping while her parents dined nearby—an activity that 99.9999999 times out of 100 would not result in headlines—those parents are in for it. “They should be thrown in prison!” railed a typical radio talk show host. Sympathy? Empathy? Forget it. The impulse is to hate and to blame. They were bad. They deserved it. This is what happens when you’re an irresponsible parent!

  “My niece broke her arm and the first thing all the other moms wanted to know was, ‘Where was her mother?’ ” recalls Jen Singer, creator of MommaSaid.net. Those women wanted to be able to blame the mom for her negligence.

  Unfortunately for them—I guess—the mother had been five feet away, and her girl just happened to fall off her swing. Bad things happen to the children of good parents. This is so hard to accept—harsh, fickle fate is so hard to accept in an age when we believe we can control everything—that we cast desperately about for someone to blame.

  Blame and fear are like Mean Girls. They pal around together and make everyone else feel dumb and self-conscious, or at least like they’re going to end up eating alone in the lunchroom if they don’t suck up. In the movie Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan gets her groove back by—what else?—believing in herself. And in her family and friends.

  That may be a totally predictable Hollywood ending, but it’s what we have to do, too. Believe in ourselves and our kids and even in the other parents who would be on our side if they weren’t so scared. You can’t live your life worrying about what the Mean Girls are going to say.

  Or the shaming, blaming playgroup ladies, either.

  REAL WORLD

  My Son Was Picked up by the Cops

  A Free-Ranger fumes:My 14-year-old son and his friends were picked up by the cops at the train tracks near our house because it is now so uncommon for kids to be out on their own that clearly they were up to something awfully suspicious by picking those blac
kberries that grow in profusion there. None of them had cell phone umbilical cords, so they were treated like drug-dealing runaway truant thugs! They were each individually delivered to their doorsteps in the police cruiser. As a result, my 8-year-old carries a note in his back pocket that says:

  My mom knows where I am. She told me it was okay to be here and she knows I can get home on my own. If you really don’t believe me, call her.

  And then there is our number. And then I’ve signed it. This may seem silly, but so far three different parents have called me while he’s been out at the park near our house to make sure.

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: When you’re about to remind a mom or dad about some extremely unlikely danger their child might face—a danger they are probably just as aware of as you are—hush.

  Free-Range Brave Step: Volunteer to watch the kids who are waiting with your own kid for soccer to start or school to open—whatever. Explain to the other parents that you’re offering them a little free time.

  If they say no thanks, ask them to watch your kid.

  One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: The next time you make a parenting decision that you’re worried other moms or dads might find lax, see if you can get up the courage to tell them about it. Admit that you left your daughter home alone while you went grocery shopping. Admit you sent your young son out on an errand. Talk about these things so that other parents can open up, too.