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

by Lenore Skenazy

The problem with trying to parent that way is as simple as it is ironic: “Attempting to control everything actually increases anxiety,” says psychotherapist Cohen.

  So now we’re back to worry.

  Think of a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, says Harvey Roy Greenberg, a Manhattan psychiatrist. That person gets up in the morning and has to arrange the pillows on his bed just so or, he worries, something terrible will happen. He has to avoid touching the doorknob or something terrible will happen. He has to eat his Grape Nuts out of the Flintstones bowl or something terrible will happen. He has all these little things he believes he has to do or—poof—the world will fall apart.

  “All of this is driven by a kind of insane feeling of omnipotence,” says Greenberg. It’s a belief “that you can exert all power over all things.” And when it comes to your children, “you think you can lay down a magic carpet and conjure up spells that will guarantee your child absolute security. Good luck to that!”

  This desire to control our children’s lives is so similar to obsessive compulsion, which in itself is so similar to phobias (fearing for our kids, fearing our power to ruin the world, fearing . . . everything else) that Greenberg actually recommends that anxious parents try some of the calming exercises he uses on his patients.

  “For instance, when we’re treating somebody for a dog phobia,” says Greenberg, “we ask them to visualize the dog from a mile away. Then half a mile away. Then across the street.” The whole idea is to confront a fear steadily but gradually, until the person becomes “desensitized” to it.

  In terms of parenting, the way to gradually desensitize ourselves to the fear of letting our kids go is to—you guessed it—gradually start letting them go. With input from us, natch, and oversight too. So for a week you walk your child to school, reminding her to take note of the streets and always to look both ways. When you see her doing that successfully, you walk her halfway, if that’s what feels right. When even that starts to feel unnecessary, you let her walk the whole route, with a friend or solo. Peter Stearns, the Anxious Parents author, recommends letting kids walk to school without you starting in first grade. And he has eight children.

  “I told one parent, ‘Dig your fingernails in if you have to!’ ” says life coach Rebecca Kiki Weingarten, remembering a client who was afraid to let her son go on his first sleepover. But after the client talked it over with Weingarten and with the other boy’s mom, the time came. “She showed me the marks in her palm,” says Weingarten. Deep. But she sent her boy off.

  Worrying is not an unreasonable thing for parents to do, adds Resnick, the psychiatrist. After all, something could happen. The problem is the out-of-proportion worry. If you can just put the risk in perspective, the fear gets put in perspective too. To do that, many shrinks suggest making an actual, pen-and-paper list of twenty things that could possibly go wrong during the activity you’re worried about and then coldly contemplating the list. Which things are really likely? What can you do to prepare your child for them?

  Remember the mom in Commandment 1 who was terrified to hear that her ten-year-old was at an ice cream parlor with a lot of friends and parents, but no adult directly chaperoning her? Resnick would counsel her to think of specific bad things that could happen to the girl: Is she going to overeat? Is she going to run out of the restaurant and get hit by a truck? Is she going to talk to some sleazy guy who comes over and tries to pick her up?

  Nothing worse than a tummyache will transpire from overeating, and the mom knows the girl won’t up and run out into the street, so those worries are off the list. But what if, strangely enough, some guy actually does harass her daughter?

  “Say he’s a gross guy,” Resnick proposes. “So she comes home and says, ‘Mom, this, like, really weird guy came over, and he said dirty words.’ You give her a hug and let her have an extra scoop of ice cream, and it’s not that bad.”

  So now, instead of just dreading “something terrible,” the fear is very specific and, as it turns out, not that scary after all.

  OK, OK—what if that mom’s deepest, darkest, most unshakable fear was really that the gross guy would convince her daughter to come out to his suspiciously windowless van, and that was—the end? That’s when the mom has to do three things. One: believe in her daughter’s good judgment. Two: believe in the odds. (Statistically, her child is forty times more likely to die in the car ride home from Friendly’s than at the hands of a murderous stranger.) And three: believe in herself. As a mom, she has undoubtedly given her girl some lessons about life and safety. She must believe she has had some effect.

  An exercise like this reminds us that we always have a chance to prepare our children for the outside world. If we say to them, all along, “Don’t go off with strangers” (a much more helpful lesson than “Don’t talk to strangers”), they’ll know not to. Remind them that you’ll love them no matter what, and they won’t feel embarrassed to tell you about the sleazy guy. And please do teach them not to run out into the street.

  One mom I heard of told a friend that she didn’t feel she had to teach her daughter any of this stuff because “I’ll always be with her, so she doesn’t need it.”

  In other words, Mom thinks she’ll always be in control.

  Right.

  Really what this means is that any time she’s not with her daughter, she will worry, because she has done nothing to help her child fend for herself. Her child will worry, too. That’s not fair. Walk a kid to school, she has transportation for a day. Teach a kid to walk to school and she has transportation for a lifetime. (But with any luck she’ll graduate by age eighteen.)

  It should be obvious that our goal is to raise young people who can eventually get along without us, but clearly, we are living in weird, warped parenting times. Work on banishing the fantasy of always being in control, and, ironically, you’ll feel less worried. But first, let’s go have that drink. And the latte. And the giant brownie.

  REAL WORLD

  I Know a 6-Year-Old Who Still Rides in a Buggy

  From Dr. Jo, a Free-Range pediatrician in England who tries to help parents get a grip on their worries:There’s a preschool just down the road in my small country village with a stone wall round it. None of the children can get over it, and there have never been any accidents, but lots of people are clamoring to have a 6-feet-high fence round it so that the boogey man can’t snatch their children.

  We lived in an even smaller village with a garden at the front of my home when I was growing up. One woman wanted to buy our cottage, but her sister advised her not to in case someone snatched her daughter from the garden.

  A 7-year-old had the best party ever in July—a camping party. The girl lives on a farm in the midst of fields, but one child was not allowed to go unless her mother came too . . . and shared a 2-man tent with her, rather than allowing her to share it with her friends.

  And I know a mother whose 6-year-old daughter rides in a double buggy with the 4-year-old. They’re under what looks like a giant see-through tent, just in case the darlings get a drip on them in the rain. This mother also covered up all the oak flooring in their barn conversion in case one of the children slipped. She has large pieces of foam under all the coffee tables in case one of the children, when they were younger, went underneath, sat up, and bumped their heads.

  See? We are just as neurotic as you Americans!

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: Warn your family beforehand, then turn off your cell phone for a day. Better still, leave it on the night-stand so you won’t be tempted to press “On.”

  Free-Range Brave Step: Do that list exercise the shrinks endorse. Think of one activity you did as a child that you are unwilling to let your own sweetheart do at the same age (baby-sitting, biking to a friend’s), and make a list of twenty things that could conceivably go wrong. If there are any worries that strike you as realistic, help your child prepare for them. Teach your baby-sitter basic first aid. Teach your biker how to signal his turns. Y
ou’ll feel better because you’ve helped them and they’ve demonstrated they’re ready.

  Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Try to actually think about fate. It’s a hard concept to deal with, but if you can make peace with the idea that we cannot control everything that happens in life, you will feel less personally responsible for every breath your child takes, and you will be able to breathe easier, too. I’m not saying you don’t need to take care of your children and prepare them for life (see above!). I’m saying you need to remember that you are not God. Or even Bobo.

  Commandment 11

  Relax

  Not Every Little Thing You Do Has That Much Impact on Your Child’s Development

  “ wonder how badly I will screw up my kids,” begins a post on a parenting blog. “I know my kids will blame me for something. Pushing too much, or not enough. Being too strict or not playing with them enough, or how they want. Man, there are so many things they may have issues because of. Maybe instead of a college fund, we should start saving for a therapy fund.”

  Or maybe we should just shoot ourselves.

  Sorry—that’s just what it sounds like a lot of the time when parents start stewing about the job they’re doing. So many of us are sure that despite our best intentions, we’re making bad decisions that will have bad repercussions that will result in bad childhoods that will lead to bad adulthoods because we’re bad. Please note the operative word in all this. It is not “good.”

  But is it really necessary for children to have an ideal childhood? That they be raised by a set of sterling, intensely hands-on parents who do everything just right at every stage of the game, even as they read all seven volumes of Harry Potter out loud (with funny voices)?

  God no. Think of all the happy, successful people who did not have that “perfect” childhood. Barack Obama’s dad abandoned the family. Ronald Reagan’s father was an alcoholic who kept losing jobs. On the nonpolitical, personal heroine side, Julie Andrews’s mom was an alcoholic, too, with the added surprise of one day telling Julie: That man you think is your father—isn’t.

  And on and on and on.

  This is not to suggest that if you want to raise a superstar you’d better throw a red-hot monkey wrench into their childhood. Just that there’s a lot more leeway than we think when it comes to raising good kids. Or even great ones.

  The whole Free-Range idea is that the twin notions of constant supervision and perfect parenting are not necessary. Obsessing about every emotional, intellectual, and psychological boost we could give our kids is not necessary. Even being 100 percent Free Range is not necessary. Our kids are not solely formed by our input, nor will they be irreparably harmed by our bumbling oh-so-humanly along.

  So relax.

  “Where I live, they lay such a trip on you about how you have to have dinner with your kids every night,” says a mom in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. “The schools are telling us that families who eat together have children who are less prone to getting into trouble. So if anything bad happens, it’s because you didn’t sit down to dinner with them. I’ll tell you it’s a huge issue for me because I’m a single mother, and I have a rather taciturn son who’s sixteen, and he’s always had a sort of chip on his shoulder.” Is it because she’s divorced, this mom wonders? Or because she can’t make it home to dinner every single night?

  Well, if either of those were really what makes a person taciturn, Obama should be a sullen slacker. But he’s not. Because we are not just the results of how our parents raised us. (Or left at age two and didn’t raise us.) And even though it feels as though our children are ours to make or break—and it certainly sounds that way from all the advice we get from magazines and TV—a growing cadre of anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, educators, and all-around child development types are saying it ain’t necessarily so. Yes, we parents have a lot of influence over our kids. But so do their friends, so do their siblings, so does their environment, and, especially, so do their genes.

  “There’s evidence for so much genetic influence in determining what children are like,” says Kirsten Condry, an assistant professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “It’s going to be amazing the number of things that turn out to have a genetic component to them.”

  You don’t have to look very far to see how genes, rather than parenting styles, influence children. Try this simple three-part experiment:Part I: Have or adopt a child and see how your amazing empathy and good cheer turn him into a bouncing bundle of smiles. Or, alternatively, watch how all your pathetic neuroses turn him into a total pain. See? You and your behavior created a particular type of child.

  Part II: Have or adopt a second child. See how your amazing empathy has no visible effect on this constant whiner. Or watch how your pathetic neuroses just can’t seem to upset your bouncing bundle of smiles.

  Part III: Give ‘em another hug and just do your best.

  “Certainly kids learn how to be human from their parents, and what is expected of them. But all these fascinating differences among people don’t come from parents,” says Condry. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, if every parent does this, they will get the same child out or this behavior or that.’ Even with the same input, children are fundamentally different.”

  Maybe that’s not a big news flash: Children Born Different! But when we worry about getting every little aspect of child rearing “right”—the right snacks, the right toys, the right amount of TV time (my personal bugaboo)—we forget the bigger picture, which is that individually, these decisions don’t end up mattering that much. And possibly even collectively they don’t end up mattering quite that much.

  Whenever I hear a mom or dad copping to some parental lapse and saying, only half jokingly, “I’m sure she’ll be talking to her shrink about it in twenty years,” I want to say, “If she does, it’s not your fault! She is who she is!”

  Personally, I spent years in therapy—really helpful ones—but I don’t think it’s because my loving parents raised me wrong. I think it’s because I was born with the same glum, self-berating outlook as my mom and needed help realizing how not terrible I am. (Then I put my son on the subway and—surprise! Everyone told me how terrible I am. Back to square one.)

  Judith Rich Harris made a huge splash a few years ago with her book The Nurture Assumption. It questioned whether parents have much of an impact on their children’s development at all. Harris had been, of all things, a child development textbook writer. She wrote chapter after chapter on every which way parents bond (or don’t) with their children, and how this shapes (or ruins) them, until one day she realized that she didn’t believe a word she was writing. If children really get their entire way of dealing with life almost undiluted from their parents, she wondered, how could we explain something as simple as the fact that the children of immigrants speak the local language accent-free—and better than their parents? Clearly, kids pick up language from people other than mom and dad. Language is so crucial and basic that Harris realized kids probably pick up a lot of other crucial and basic characteristics too. Peers as well as parents are responsible for shaping the child.

  Meantime, here was her other big realization: when we see the calm, quiet children of calm, quiet parents, we tend to assume that those parents used their superior parenting skills to make their children placid too. Lucky them. But isn’t it just as possible that those calm, quiet parents had calm, quiet genes that they passed down, and that’s the secret? How can we ever untangle what is nature and what is nurture?

  One way, of course, is to look at twins, which Harris does. She finds one set of identical twins reared apart, both named Jim, who both “enjoyed woodworking, drove the same model Chevrolet, smoked Salems and drank Miller Lite.” They both named their sons James Alan (well, one of them put a second l in Alan), and they were both volunteer firefighters.

  Harris found another set of twins, one who was raised by his Catholic grandma in Germany, and one who was raised by his Jewish dad in Trinidad. Both
of them flush the toilet before they go to the bathroom. Both read magazines from back to front. When they met for the first time, they were both wearing wire-rim glasses, short mustaches, and blue double-pocket shirts with epaulettes. It sounds like they were not only identical twins, they were identical dorks.

  The chances of their parents in separate countries deliberately raising them both to be this dorky? Pretty slim. They got the dork gene from birth.

  It is only in the last century or so that we started to believe that parenting, especially during the first few years of life, determines how a child turns out. A survey of Parisian moms back in 1780 found that 95 percent of them farmed their babies out to wet nurses—that is, to other women who would take in their babies and breastfeed them until the parents picked them up when they were weaned. Oftentimes, the moms didn’t even visit very much. The idea that that first year was a crucial time for a child’s intellectual development (not to mention bonding) was unheard of. For most of human history, parents believed a baby needed milk and a place to sleep, not, as many of us believe today, board books, soft books, story tapes, light-up rattles, and musical mobiles playing Mozart. Even Mozart didn’t grow up hearing Mozart. (But his kids did, and whoever heard of them?)

  Then along came Freud, who delved deep into childhood memories and found the root of a lot of our adult “issues” buried there. Freud revolutionized the way we look at parenting, because he saw children as blank pages that parents could, however unintentionally, scribble all over and crumple and tear and then, for good measure, use to wipe up spills. Or at least that is how his ideas have filtered down to pop culture.

  Freud was a genius—who could deny his idea of the unconscious? Even unconsciously? But his theories had the unforeseen consequence of making parents very worried that a harsh word, a lack of encouragement, or even the opposite—extra-high hopes—could cause a child a lifetime of resentment and pain. It made parenting seem like a completely daunting, almost unnatural act. You had to be on guard all the time, lest you accidentally squash the emerging psyche.