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

by Lenore Skenazy

  Francisco and I have a room to ourselves now and some people call us “swells.” Ciguciano always said that we should be great men. Francisco bought a gold watch with a gold chain as thick as his thumb. He is a very handsome fellow and I think he likes a young lady that he met at a picnic.

  I often think of Ciguciano and Teresa. He is a good man, one in a thousand, and she was very beautiful. Maybe I shall write to them about coming to this country.

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: Watch Sesame Street: Old School with your Sesame Street-age child. Try not to weep for days gone by.

  Free-Range Brave Step: Help your child, age nine or up, find an “apprenticeship.” If you can find a neighborhood business or volunteer organization willing to give your child some regular responsibility, fantastic. But because this has been hard to do for the last century or so, you might have to try an apprenticeship inside the home. Starting as young as age two, kids can help sort the laundry into “colors” and “whites.” (It may be the last time they find this fascinating.) By four they can help clear the table. Come age five or six they can sweep (but not totally into the dustpan), and by second grade they can start making their own lunches and taking out the garbage. Third grade or so? They can do the dishes. Maybe you’re already on the ball with this, but we didn’t start serious (or even simple) chore-requiring until just this year—grades 5 and 7. Secretly, we’ve been shocked at how meekly our sons assumed the yoke. If we’d known that being taskmasters was going to be this easy, we’d have started about half a decade earlier. (Oh, and did I mention we pay them a dollar a day, just to do things they really should be doing anyway, including make their beds? Still—we’re glad they have “jobs” now, and so are they.)

  One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: When you find yourself thinking, “Gee, I’d like my son to get to choir practice by himself, but what if he gets lost?” or “My daughter thinks she’s ready to baby-sit, but what if there’s an emergency?” remember Rocco’s story—how much he went through, how young. It will give you a surprising jolt of courage.

  Commandment 9

  Be Worldly

  Why Other Countries Are Laughing at zee Scaredy-Cat Americans

  Would you hire a nanny who is five years old?

  Perhaps not. Yet around the world (not to mention throughout history), study after Ph.D.-garnering study has found that 40 to 80 percent of all toddlers are cared for by their older siblings. Siblings who may just be a year or two older than the kids they’re bringing up.

  It works like this. One day the baby is king of the roost, suckling at the breast, and the next day—wham. Mom has to go back to work picking coffee or pounding maize, or maybe she’s about to give birth again, so dealing with the baby is more than she can handle. She rubs hot pepper balm on her nipples—really, that’s the way they do it in some parts of the world—and a very startled baby suddenly realizes, Whoa! The good ol’ days are gone forever. Now he’s a toddler, and toddle he must—away from Mom, off to his new life with the other kids.

  Indeed, says David Lancy, a professor at Utah State University and author of The Anthropology of Childhood, in more than one culture, “a mother is chastised if she is overly fond of her child.” Her job is to reject the child so that the child has no choice but to join the group of youngsters who take care of each other and keep themselves occupied so their parents can work. Think of it as on-site day care, without the baby wipe warmers.

  “The adored small child must suffer the trauma of growing into an object of contempt,” is how Lancy rather baldy describes it. And although that’s probably not a technique you’re going to find front and center in most parenting magazines—“Top Tips for Banishing Baby,” “Hot Pepper Balms Your Breasts Will Love,” “Ready, Set, Reject!” —it just happens to work really well in about half the world.

  The older siblings, usually girls, teach their young wards the basics: how to eat, go to the bathroom, start fetching things. In fact, they don’t really teach. They don’t have to. It’s not diagramming sentences. The toddlers mostly learn by observing. And by the time they’re two, maybe two and a half, they’re full-fledged playmates. In the Liberian village where Lancy lived for a while with a tribal chieftain and his four wives (the tribal chieftain’s four wives, that is; Lancy was single at the time), Lancy had a hard time figuring out which child belonged to which mother, because the children mixed and mingled so much. Also because they had so little to do with their moms. (The dad barely knew their names.)

  Outside, the village children would all end up at the “Mother Ground,” a living-room-size lot that was the unofficial park, where they’d play all day. Although there’d usually be some older person nearby—a granny spinning, for instance—“days would go by without any adult intervention,” Lancy said.

  The kids were all right. “On average,” he observed, “village children seem more consistently ebullient than their privileged suburban counterparts.”

  You knew that was coming, of course. The kids who figure out how to play with each other always do seem happiest. And then there’s that other inevitable irony: material wealth cannot win versus actual, kids-running-around fun.

  When my son Izzy and I were watching that Sesame Street: Old School video the other day (to review it for this very book), there was a scene of about eight kids playing follow the leader. They climbed on a picnic table and skipped through construction material.

  “Did you ever play that?” I asked.

  His head shook, and my heart sank. It’s only about the oldest game in the world, and he’d never even been exposed to it—the freewheeling fun of following a goofy leader or, better still, the joy of being a small but potent dictator: follow ME! All of you! Now! Onto the fence!

  Then again, my children have never been exposed to the joy of beriberi, either, or the joy of hunger or oozing sores or dragging brackish water from a faraway well and subsisting on cornmeal mush with little stones in it. So maybe I’ll stop romanticizing childhood in impoverished villages (and Sesame Street) and get to the point:

  What we think of as normal child rearing is not the way a lot of other countries do it. And activities we consider far “too risky” for our kids do not make the smallest blip on other countries’ risk radar screens. Even the ones rich enough to have radar screens. Let us go to some of those more affluent spots on the globe to see how they, too, differ from us. In fact, let’s start with a really affluent one: Sweden, land of the midnight sun. And gummy fish.

  Rita Sunden’s husband is CEO of a company that makes the blades for the windmills that make electricity. Naturally, this is something those clean-living, bike-riding Swedes would like, so a while back, Rita’s family moved there. The Sundens have four children, and when their oldest daughter was thirteen, in eighth grade, her class went on a field trip from their town of thirty-five thousand down to Stockholm, the country’s biggest city. After a morning of supervised sightseeing, “the teacher said, ‘Okay. Come back in three hours,’ ” recalls Sunden. And that was the remainder of the field trip: we’ve taken you around for a few hours, now go take yourselves. Have fun. Explore. And get back on time. Which is what everyone did.

  A few years later, the Sundens were back in the United States, living in Lake Forest, Illinois. Lake Forest is where they set the movie Ordinary People. (A movie, my friend once memorably noted, that was not called Ordinary Incomes.) The place is beyond upscale suburban lovely. It’s mansion filled. It’s hushed. It’s where Jennifer Aniston and what’s-his-name were looking for a house, when they were a couple. (Then they costarred in The Break-Up, and did.).

  By this time, another of Rita’s daughters had reached eighth grade, and she too went on a field trip—to the local park. “They were playing games and team-building outside, and it was on the street we lived on, about half a mile away,” says Rita. Rita herself was an hour away, having lunch with friends. Then her cell phone rang.

  It was the school calling to say that her daughter had
had a nose bleed and needed to go home to change her clothes. “I said, ‘Well, just send her home. She’s got a key. She can change and come right back.’ They said, ‘Nope. Can’t be done. Someone has to come get her.’ ” Rita ended up calling a neighbor who came by to pick the girl up, escort her home, and then escort her safely back to her teacher.

  Two different countries. Two different ideas of what a thirteen-year-old can do.

  If we can’t understand the freewheeling folks in other countries who let their kids out of their clutches, they sure cannot understand us. “I am living in Germany and from here it looks like big, strong America has vanished,” wrote Thomas Prosi, a dad of two tweens. “When we were young, we looked up to America. We liked that freedom, the opportunities and the rights people seemed to have over there. But now? The land of the free? The home of the brave?”

  Insert Germanic guffaw here. (Then insert, from me, a little dig about how maybe we’re overprotective, but at least we don’t start world wars.) Anyway, how is modern-day childhood in Germany different from childhood in the United States?

  Christine Hohlbaum is a Boston writer transplanted to small-town Germany with her German-born husband. They have a boy, seven, and girl, nine, and they were recently visited by Christine’s sister, who still lives in Boston and has children almost the exact same age.

  “My daughter and son met up with some friends to go to the tree for chestnuts,” says Christine, talking about the local tree the way we talk about the local Starbucks. “It’s probably a five-minute walk from my house, but my sister could not believe that I felt comfortable enough to have my kids actually go out by themselves.”

  But off Christine’s kids went, free as squirrels (and with the same objective), because walking and nature time are both given top priority in Germany. Fresh air rules. Driving the kids everywhere? Nein.

  Car culture contributes to a lot of the differences between America and the rest of the world, especially when it comes to how kids spend their time. Americans are in their cars more than most everyone else because we’ve got a huge country, and we just keep filling it up (not unlike our backseats). As the suburbs continue to expand, so does the amount of time kids spend in the car, and it just keeps getting worse.

  One of the reasons for this is that maxed-out homeowners haven’t wanted to spring for sidewalks. So in newish town after newish town, it is almost impossible—or at least, extremely scary—to walk or ride a bike where you or your kids might want to go. The result? Even more car rides: to the store, to karate, to that increasingly common destination, the school bus stop. (Parents don’t want their kids walking anywhere.)

  This car cocooning struck not only Anne Bell upon her return from a stint in Dusseldorf, Germany, but also her four-year-old daughter, who was already used to walking freely.

  “One day,” says Anne, a news show publicist, “she literally sat down in front of me and she looked over her shoulder like a driver and said, ‘I’m the mommy and you’re the little girl and you’re bored because you’re just waiting to get somewhere.’ ” This was her way of protesting the chauffeured life she’d suddenly been buckled into. “It’s such a nice day, Mommy. Can’t we walk to school?” she asked—over and over. But the answer was always no. Her family lives on a busy Virginia street with no shoulder, much less a sidewalk. Ride she must.

  In the rest of the world, most children do walk to school, and they start at age five or six or seven. Their parents do not accompany them. By age ten or sometimes even before that, kids may board a public bus to get to school, and no one looks at them askance. The other riders know that children are capable of getting around, and they don’t consider this a rogue activity.

  “Kids are expected to exert independence very early, initially in minor ways,” says Abi Sutherland, a San Francisco software designer now living with her family in a small town in The Netherlands. “Many stores have a kinderhoek—a kid’s corner—where children can play while their parents shop. Adults are frequently out of sight of their kids for long periods of time.” And that’s not only true at the store. Abi’s four-year-old is allowed to go to the playground down her street, unaccompanied, if she tells Abi where she’s going first. Who’s there? Other friends. Says Abi, “There are almost never any parents at the playground accompanying their kids.”

  That’s the kind of freedom Anne Bell’s preschooler was pining for.

  Unsupervised playgrounds seem to be the norm in most countries, freeing up parents to do other things if they choose. Another parenting perk in some parts is unofficial child care. Mothers in Mexico, Hungary, and Vietnam all told me about their delightful experiences with kids and the kitchen help in local restaurants.

  In Hanoi, says Megan Deveaux, a Canadian who had spent the previous year in Vietnam with the United Nations, part of restaurant workers’ pay often comes in the form of housing—usually right above the restaurant. This works out nicely for any parents well off enough to dine below, because if their kids get bored or start to cry, “They take them upstairs,” says Megan. “They” being the kitchen help. “Upstairs” being their apartment.

  “They play games or let them look at the kitchen or look at their bedroom. They see it as a service they’re providing while the parents eat,” Megan says. Because service is unhurried anyway, and there’s usually more staff than necessary, parents linger as different waiters play with the children. The basic assumption on the part of the diners is that their kids are safe. The child care is great. Let’s have another glass of wine.

  Parents in other countries just seem to trust their children and their fellow citizens more. Or at least, parents in non-English-speaking countries seem to. Parents in Britain and Canada and Australia all seem to be just about as worried as Americans about stranger danger and abduction. The English even insist that anyone who is going to work in any capacity with children—be it as a scout leader, school volunteer, or cupcake-baking class mom—undergo a police check first. No official OK, no contact with kids. The underlying assumption appears to be that because you are suspiciously interested in young people, you’d better prove you are not a convicted pedophile.

  So it’s not like the entire world is more happy-go-lucky than Americans when it comes to kids. But most of it is. What happens if you’re torn between both outlooks, unsure of what really makes sense? Sophi Gilliland, a missionary living in Eastern Europe, is dealing with that right now . . . and starting to lean toward one side.

  “I am a mom of four. I have two blue-eyed, light-haired girls ages four and five, and two dark-featured boys ages nine and thirteen,” she wrote to Free-Range Kids. “Until recently, we lived in Los Angeles. While we were there, the probation officer who lived across the street made a comment to me that I should watch my kids closely because I had a ‘pedophile smorgasbord.’ ”

  That one remark turned Sophi into a nervous wreck. She didn’t want to let her children play outside anymore, even with each other, without her standing right there. Smorgasbord. Smorgasbord. She kept envisioning the worst (and Swedish meatballs). And then she moved to Lithuania. I gave her a call. “They leave their baby carriages, with the baby inside, outside the stores where they shop,” Sophi reports from her new home. Children walk to school along the busy freeway. On school vacations, when both parents have to work, the kids stay home, alone. They cook for themselves and play. They ride their bikes over to their friends’ homes. All of which had Sophi reeling.

  “When I was here the first year, I read a book—every chapter was on a different child abduction and how that child was able to escape. It was basically how to childproof your kid from being abducted, and my friends here were saying, ‘Stop reading that! You’re freaking yourself out!’ ”

  But when she lived in California, Sophi continued, “We watched so much TV, and the news is always talking about this child being snatched, and that one, and this kid went into the bathroom and some guy killed him, that you become very scared someone is on the prowl for your children. And
you think you are being instinctively protective. But then you come to Lithuania and nobody’s being like that, and you realize: what I thought was ‘instinct’ was sheer cultural fear.”

  Now, Sophi says, she is still afraid for her children’s safety, but . . . less so. She’s feeling a little more Lithuanian. For instance, normally she picks her kids up from school. But recently she let her nine-year-old son, Ezra, take the bus with his friend to that friend’s home for the weekend. She gave her son her cell phone “just in case,” but he didn’t use it. He just had fun with his buddy, and the families reunited in church on Sunday morning. “A whole weekend out of my sight in a foreign country!” says Sophi. “It’s hard to let go, isn’t it?” But she did.

  As Sophi tries to sort it all out—what’s sane, what’s safe, how much supervision makes sense—she’s doing what I hope this chapter does: throwing some cultural assumptions into the air. You may recall a time all of America was asked to do that, about ten years ago.

  It happened when a Danish woman on vacation in New York did as the Danes (and, apparently, Lithuanians) do: she parked her sleeping daughter in her stroller outside a restaurant and then went in to have dinner with the baby’s father, a New Yorker. Next thing you know, the parents were under arrest for child endangerment.

  Endangerment? The mom thought she was giving her baby exactly what all babies need: nice spring air!

  The incident became raging tabloid fodder for a week—sane mom? crazy mom?—as the baby was whisked off to foster care and the parents were whisked off to prison. Three days later they were released on the following condition: don’t do this again within six months, and we won’t press charges. The Danish mom didn’t stick around to test the system. She rushed back to Denmark, daughter in tow.