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

by Lenore Skenazy

  These days, we buy into two basic assumptions. One, that children are wet clay at birth and dry out pretty fast, so we’d better sculpt them into something really good, really fast, or we’ll be left with a lump. And two, that for some reason our children need more attention than any other generation, ever, if they are going to end up smart, well adjusted, and successful.

  Let’s examine the early childhood assumption first.

  “If neuroscience has taught us anything, it’s that people are resilient and they can learn across the life span,” says John Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation and author of The Myth of the First Three Years. Although a little baby is indeed ready to learn language and expressions and how the world works, that does not mean it needs to have everything crammed into its cranium before the gate slams shut at age four. So when parents worry that they’d better teach their kids the alphabet or their colors or any of the info you can find on, ugh, a Baby Einstein educational placemat (lest your child waste crucial learning minutes idly waiting for his Cheerios), that’s just wrong.

  “There’s this crazy notion that we can affect brain development,” says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Temple University Infant Language Laboratory and coauthor of Einstein Never Used Flash Cards. Parents who think that teaching their child this or that skill ahead of the game or giving them the right educational tape or puzzle will make their children brainier have bought into a false worldview.

  “Everywhere we’ve looked, the children are not gaining any advantages from these extra edutainment activities,” says Hirsh-Pasek. So long as your child is not deprived of normal stimulation—that is, you don’t lock him in a toy chest (even with educational toys!)—his brain is going to develop just fine.

  So now let’s look at how your parenting does affect your child.

  Naturally, the environment you give her is going to have some bearing on the person she becomes. If she grows up in a house with a lot of books, it’s more likely she’ll be a reader than if she never encountered one. If she grows up in a home where all the girls learn to sew, she’ll learn to sew too. But will this be her passion? Will she be great at it? All you can do is expose your kids to things you love and believe in.

  In our home, we are raising one son who is crazy about manga—those Japanese comic books with all the swords and slashing. My husband and I had never seen manga till he brought it home. We are raising another son who is crazy about football. My husband and I had never watched football till he turned it on. We exposed them to literature and music. They fell for violent comics and guys ramming into each other. Like I said: we do not make our kids into who they are.

  That doesn’t mean we can hurt them or abuse them without consequence, obviously. So please don’t. It just means that we don’t have to hover so much and fret about our every parenting move. The small stuff is not worth the sweating, and maybe not the medium stuff either.

  Why, then, do so many of us find ourselves worrying whether we’re doing the right thing by our kids with each Chiclet-sized decision we make? It’s not just the influence of therapy and talk TV. A big new influence is the Internet.

  “The thing that blows me away is how judgmental these mothers are,” says Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps. She’s talking about the mothers on mommy (and sometimes daddy) Web sites, who delight in taking potshots at each others’ parenting.

  The rise of these sites began in the mid-nineties, notes Marano, which dovetails almost precisely with the spike in helicopter parenting. Quel coincidence. Take a look at a typical exchange on a popular blog called Urban Baby and you’ll see how Internet, inter-parent swiping provided this movement with its rocket fuel:

  One mom—call her Bea—writes, out of the blue: “It’s the formula that makes all these children obese. They get addicted to the sugar young. You don’t see many long-term breastfed children who are obese.”

  This is the equivalent of throwing a bucket of Kentucky Fried mice into the cat wing of the local pound.

  “I was a formula baby and I have been thin my entire adult life: 5’7” and 105,” a mom writes back, unable to resist the bait.

  “Topic is fat kids, not thin, defensive adults,” zings another.

  “Actually, topic is whether formula-fed babies are automatically obese, not your pathetic need to snark.”

  Back and forth, back and forth:

  “Eat something, you defensive anorexic.”

  “This is stupid! Many kids are formula fed and not obese!”

  “But most obese children are formula fed.”

  God, who cares what other people’s kids are fed? Why are they even discussing this? Finally, one lady tells Bea that if she feels so strongly about it, why doesn’t she just go donate her breast milk? Bea responds that she already did. Take that.

  You might think that would be the end of it, but one more mom sputters that Bea is a “looser.”

  Breasty Bea says, “Learn to spell if you are going to attack.”

  “Don’t waste time spell checking,” the attacker tells her. “Get to work bottling up that boob milk!”

  All the women in this exchange are now ready to clobber each other with high chairs. It’s like World Wrestling for lactating moms. And what we have just witnessed repeats itself over and over, all day long: parents who only want to do what’s right—no one was proposing bringing up baby on Mai Tais, after all—are now at each other’s throats. And breasts. The idea that, formula fed or not, most kids turn out fine does not occur to them.

  No wonder parents feel so insecure and second-guessed all the time. Someone is always second-guessing! And usually those some-ones can find a study or expert that supports their side. It’s as if parenting has become the topic at a huge, nationwide debate tournament. And that’s exactly the problem: too much focus.

  “Children just used to be seen as a part of life,” says Nancy McDermott, a parenting blogger on the British Web site Spiked. They were something you had, not something that defined you. Now? They’re like publicly available report cards, documenting all our parental successes and failures. They embody our beliefs and who we are.

  I’m pretty sure that’s why the media are so obsessed with celebrity parents, and never let up on the hunt for that holy tabloid grail: a star’s “baby bump.” Is it there? Is it bigger than last week? Is it twins? The tabloids are just mirroring society’s obsession with parenthood, from the moment of conception (was it IVF?) onward. So now Angelina Jolie isn’t first and foremost a movie star. She’s a mega mama who happens to be an actress.

  “Jolie’s new family has come to define her,” writes USA Today. Yeah, we noticed. She’s got about seventeen kids. Pictures of Jolie in W magazine show her breastfeeding. Can you imagine a movie star from any other era—Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, even Jane Fonda—posing in flagrante parentis like that? Of course not. But that was before parenthood became the pinnacle of accomplishment.

  Being defined by our role as parents not only makes the “job” seem bigger but also presents a potential pitfall (or, if you’re Angelina, a Pitt-fall): we’d better be doing a great job. Everyone’s watching! And that’s where the exaggerated worry and fear come in.

  “One reason parents feel under so much pressure to get their kids into the ‘right’ school and do all these things is because parents’ esteem is really bound up with their parenting,” says McDermott. It’s my child/my self. Or, as Laura Schlesinger, host of a super-successful radio talk show, so irritatingly introduces herself: “I am my kid’s mom.”

  Because “mom” and “dad” have become such public roles, the public feels free to weigh in on parenting subjects that used to be private. Whether we feed our kids Fritos. Whether we hire tutors. Was yours a vaginal delivery, boss? And, of course, whether we are watching our children closely enough.

  Free-Range Parents try to resist this kind of constant carping and comparing, even as they remember there is no one right way to raise a kid. There’s not even one ri
ght way to figure out whether or not that kid should have a donut. In theory, knowing that most of our decisions don’t matter all that much should help us relax, as should realizing how much of a child’s fate is determined by his genes anyway.

  So when you find yourself wondering, “WWAD?”—What Would (perfect, beautiful, constantly breastfeeding) Angelina Do? Ask yourself this instead: “WWIDIIJSWTICRMKRHAN?” (“What Would I Do If I Just Stopped Worrying That I Could Ruin My Kid Right Here and Now?”)

  Maybe we need a catchier slogan. But I think you get the idea.

  REAL WORLD

  If You’re Sick of Playing Patty-Cake . . .

  You may think one of your jobs as a parent is to get down on your hands and knees and play with your children, no matter how exhausted you are, because they need the “stimulation.” But as anthropologist David Lancy discovered, a lot of the rest of the world finds this utterly bizarre. In most non-Western societies, the idea of parents playing baby games is as wacky as parents eating baby food.

  As recently as 1914, this was the official view in the United States, too, with a government pamphlet urging mothers not to play with their children, lest they overexcite them.

  So if you’re sick of playing patty-cake but think you’d better keep patting or the dullard you create may be your own, it seems that history and the rest of the world are willing to give you a pass.

  Going Free Range

  Free-Range Baby Step: When you are worried about how you’re shaping your child, think back on the Unabomber. I know—thinking about a murderous technophobic madman might not sound soothing, but it works for me. Somehow, the same parents who raised a nut who sent bombs through the mail also raised his brother: a guy who read the Unabomber’s rants, thought to himself, “That sounds like someone I know,” and, with a very heavy heart, called the FBI. Same parents, same house. Clearly, there is more at work on our kids than how we raise them. (All right—if you don’t want to think about the Unabomber, think about the Baldwin boys. One’s a born-again Christian, and one is Alec.)

  Free-Range Brave Step: Visit relatives or friends who are raising their kids in a way you abhor. Maybe the fridge is filled with junk food, or the children are forbidden to watch The Simpsons. Talk to those kids one-on-one and see if you can’t find a shred of humanity left in them despite their parents’ best efforts. You will.

  Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: If you’re really worried that your actions are going to screw your kids up and send them straight to therapy, beat them to the punch. Go there first. Get yourself a shrink and talk about your fears and inadequacies. Not only will you feel better, but by the time you’re done and can really relax, your kids will be grown and out the door anyway.

  Commandment 12

  Fail!

  It’s the New Succeed

  Stephen Haberman edges close to the stranger’s car and looks up the street. He looks down the street. No one is watching the sixty-five-year-old grandpa, so as best as he can, he yanks off the bumper sticker MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT . . .

  Nowhere! Not anymore. The big brag has been torn off.

  Call it guerilla therapy.

  “I think it’s a bad thing to do to kids,” says the Dallas psychotherapist about the stickers. “It says to the child, your value is this grade average, and your job is to do things that will please me and make me look good so I can put a bumper sticker on my car.”

  It is not a child’s job to make her parents look good, and it is not a parent’s job to make her child look good. Both of them have the responsibility to do the best they can, and when that’s not good enough, to fail.

  A responsibility to fail? Yup.

  Failure isn’t very popular, especially when you live in a society geared not just for success but for super-success, like “Harvard” or “Thoracic Surgeon.” Or, better yet, “Harvard Thoracic Surgeon (and Part-Time Sex Columnist).” The same society that decided a couple of decades ago that everyone should wear brand names all over their clothes also decided along the way that only brand-name colleges will do. Polo, Nike, Princeton, Brown. Same deal. Instant confirmation of one’s worth. That’s why a ninety-second video called “Big Failures” went viral last year. It was the equivalent of mooning our success-obsessed culture.

  As the camera pans a typical schoolroom in this mini-film, a man’s voice intones: “A teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything and he should go into a field where he could succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality. (Pause.) Thomas Edison.” The man’s voice continues: “His fiancée died, he failed in business twice, he had a nervous breakdown, and was defeated in eight elections.” A penny spins around to reveal (pause) “Abraham Lincoln.” Now we see a high school gym. “Cut from his high school basketball team, he went home, locked himself in his room, and cried.” It was (pause) Michael Jordan, naturally, and the (pause) Beatles were turned down by Decca Records because their music wasn’t catchy and guitars were old hat. The video, by a company called Bluefishtv on the site Wimp.com, concludes, “Life = Risk.” Then it shows a little boy riding his bike down the street.

  “He should fall,” said my husband.

  But the boy doesn’t. Even the folks who make videos about failure know how hard it is to watch in real life, especially when it happens to a kid. But the whole point is that if you’re not willing to fall, you’re not going to learn how to ride a bike.

  Why, then, is failure such a taboo topic when it comes to our own kids? We all know it’s part of life. We know it builds character. Why, to get straight to the point bothering me, do I feel guilty for letting my older son, Morry, quit electric guitar after just three months, and then letting his younger brother, Izzy, do the same thing after three long years of piano?

  Because parents are supposed to encourage their kids to succeed, that’s why. Let them discover their inner Hendrix/Horowitz (after years of us exclaiming, “Why aren’t you practicing!!!?”) Quitters never win, and . . . we quit.

  “Is there a rule that says your child has to play soccer or piano?” asked psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld, coauthor of The Over-Scheduled Child, when I told him my parental sins. “I don’t think they’re any more required than jai alai,” he said. “A lot of times parents say, ‘You have to put up with this torture for some time in the future when you’ll appreciate it.’ But do they say, ‘Marry this guy. It’s going to be torture for seventeen years, but then it’s going to be good’? It’s a silly notion. It’s puritanical.”

  Wow! A well-respected shrink is on the record saying you can let your kids up and quit something they’re not good at—or just plain hate—and it’s not the end of the world. They can fail at the activity, you can fail at producing a prodigy. Or even a child who can plunk out “Für Elise.”

  So why does that reasonable attitude feel too easy to be right? Blame our wiring.

  Parents come pretty much preprogrammed to help their children survive. We feed our progeny, shelter them, teach them. And back when their survival depended on outrunning hungry hyenas, we’d shout, “Don’t quit! Atta boy! Show ’em what you’re made of! Run!” Because when atta boy didn’t run quite fast enough, it was a pretty crushing defeat. The hyenas went home with the trophy, if you catch my drift.

  Unfortunately, that same deep desire to preserve our young from death and dismemberment is what we now bring to the SATs. “That preservation mechanism is good for survival, but it has a very sensitive trigger,” says psychologist Wendy Grolnick, coauthor of Pressured Parents, Stressed-Out Kids. “And these days it’s set off all the time, because we are getting cues that say, ‘Your child is in trouble! Your child is going to fail! Your child is not going to make that play, that soccer team. Your child is not going to be able to get into that magnet program!’”

  The cues come from guidance counselors, from test prep brochures, from ads that appear when a baby is born and hint that if you don’t sign up for a mommy-baby bouncy ball class, fast, your kid can kiss that hand-eye coordination (and MLB contrac
t) good-bye. Hungry hyenas have been replaced by their modern-day equivalent: mere averageness. Mediocrity is nipping at our children’s heels, and if they ever trip or fall, our current culture delights in warning us, their future is grim indeed.

  This fear for our children is so visceral that it actually causes heart palpitations and sweating and all the other physical symptoms of panic and grief. It’s the wave of nausea that crashes over you when you hear the other parents talking about the play their children in the “gifted” third-grade class are writing while your child’s third-grade class is scheduled to sing the Band-Aid jingle. The anxiety lasts all throughout childhood because the goal of “survival to adulthood” has morphed into “getting into a good college.” However far off it looms, college admission is the ultimate source of our emphasis on achievement—and our attendant fear of failure.

  “Please list your principal extracurricular, volunteer and family activities and hobbies in the order of their interest to you,” reads the Common Application—an online college application accepted by many colleges. “Include specific events and/or major accomplishments such as musical instrument played, varsity letters earned, etc.”

  Surely your seventeen-year-old has plenty of “major accomplishments” to list? Not that most of us adults do (how’s that cancer cure coming?), but there are seven empty lines for your child to fill with seven different activities, including “positions held, honors won or letters earned.” Don’t tell me your kid just comes home and draws all afternoon, Mrs. da Vinci!