Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)
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Elmo! Well, not just Elmo. But that Sesame Street shill is a lot less innocent than he appears. How could something as cute as Elmo be killing play? Easy. He is one of the vast army of “Look at me” toys—toys that basically function in the same way as a TV screen. They are there to be passively consumed. When a kid presses the button, Elmo sings or dances or laughs himself silly.
Who’s having all the fun?
You’d think that because the little red guy hails from an educational TV show, he must be an educational toy. And in a way, he is: he’s educating kids to sit there and press a button and wait for something entertaining to happen. It’s an easy lesson to learn—but it’s the opposite of play.
Organized activities. I don’t want to sound like an absolute killjoy—especially when I’m here trying to resuscitate joy—but organized activities have also cut down on old-fashioned play. Not that these activities don’t have a lot going for them. They do. They can be fun and something to look forward to, and they teach kids a lot of cool things, from singing to skating to my childhood passion, rug hooking. (What can I say? It was the seventies.) In neighborhoods where it really is too dangerous to hang out at the local playground, organized activities are a godsend, keeping kids safe and social while offering them new interests. But the one thing that kids in supervised programs generally do not do, whether in the suburbs or the inner city, is just plain play. They follow instructions, they listen to the leader. It’s like a pleasant form of school. But play turns out to be something almost totally different from that. And if we are going to try to wrest it away from all these powerful forces, we need to take a look at why we should even bother.
“You can take the play out of learning, but you can’t take the learning out of play.” That’s what a Minnesota educator named Brock Dubbels likes to say, and it just about sums up what makes play so fun—and essential.
We spend a lot of time trying to fill our kids with valuable lessons, especially in the classroom, but we forget all the valuable lessons they can learn on their own, at the playground, out in nature, or even within the comfort of four cardboard walls.
Make-believe play actually teaches kids to think outside the you-know-what. The reason you always hear parents marveling, “I bought him that walking, talking, Star Trek mega death ray, but he was more interested in the box,” is that the box is more interesting, in some ways (after one has pretended to shoot one’s little brother several times with the mega death ray and sent him wailing from the room). When a kid has a box, it can be anything, right? A house, a castle, a cave. So already it’s more flexible than most of today’s fancy toys, which not only “do” things (like Elmo) but are also often tied to a movie or TV show. The problem with those licensed toys is that they come preprogrammed in a child’s mind to do whatever the character does on TV or in the movies. You don’t give Darth Vader a high-pitched squeaky voice if you already know exactly how he sounds. So creativity gets a bit crippled.
But a box—ah. It abides by the simple “good toy” principle, which is that it gives all the make-believe power to the kid. A good toy, they say, is 10 percent toy and 90 percent child. So, as Linn points out in my favorite example in her book, if your kid wants to be Harry Potter, he could make a wand from a stick or a straw. Magic! He has created something from almost nothing. Or you could give him an official Harry Potter Magic Wand—no imagination required.
Naturally, a lot of parents think it is far better to give him the “real” wand than to have him make do with a stick. (Which, admittedly, would look pretty cheap under the Christmas tree.) And, naturally, the kid thinks so too. So good-bye innovation—and thrift.
Unlike the stick or straw, however, the official wand is one thing and one thing only. So now when the child also wants a sword or an arrow, he believes he needs those “official” toys too. The stick could have been all of the above. The official wand is just an official wand. So good-bye flexibility and imagination. And thrift? Foiled again. (Come to think of it, tin foil is foiled again too.)
A ball is a “good toy” because a kid can play with it any which way. Ditto, paint. A basic doll is good because a child can decide if it’s a nice doll or a naughty doll, or a crybaby or whatever. She uses her imagination. Therapists love toys like this in play therapy because if they see the kid screaming, “BAD DOLL! BAD DOLL!” for an hour or so, they suspect something’s going on at home. Kids use these blank-slate toys to work out their problems, but also to become more patient and resourceful.
“A kid who can’t get a sports car puts a bunch of pillows under the dining room table,” says Dubbels. That kid has figured out how to satisfy himself without begging grandma for a $130,000 Toys R Us gift card. That’s not a bad lesson to learn, right? If you can’t get what you want, make do with what you have? So make-believe play increases patience, problem solving, and the ability to entertain oneself. It’s worth its weight in batteries. And that’s just when kids are playing alone.
Now let’s look at what happens when kids play together. That’s what Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration, did in a preschool for a year, using microphones to catch all the children’s little mutterings and negotiations. At the sand table, said Sawyer, you might hear one child taking a toy giraffe and burying it. “He’s dead.”
Then the other kid, rather than bursting into tears or running away, announces, “Then there was an earthquake! And now the giraffe is alive again!” And she unburies the beloved toy.
They didn’t come to blows over the fate of the giraffe. They came up with stories instead. Call these stories “narratives,” and you’ll realize that when they play, kids spontaneously work on the very lessons a whole lot of their school day is devoted to, such as writing. Moreover, this give-and-take among the kids is what grown-ups call “negotiation”—another good skill to have. Also involved is compromise, which is what you have to do when you want to play the all-powerful wicked witch and your friend wants to play all-powerful Batman. The witch cackles and threatens Batman. Batman flies from bed to bed and tries to scare the witch. (Impossible.) That’s what Joel Barnett and I did after school for about a million years. Now I hear he’s some super-successful real estate developer in suburban Chicago, and I’m sorry if I have just embarrassed him, but that’s what witches do. Besides, he’s a super-hero, so he can take it. In any event, that kind of game made us compromise, communicate, create, negotiate, and jump around. It also honed my ability to cast spells. All good.
As we got older, the kids on my block got together for kickball games. And it turns out that in these run-around games—as opposed to make-believe games—a whole new set of skills come into play (so to speak).
“I grew up in the Bronx, and when I was eight or nine, I’d go out to the street corner and there were no adults and we’d have to be creative enough to come up with our own games,” says John DeMatteo, thirty-four. He and his buddies would declare the telephone pole first base, or safety, or whatever, and then they’d play running bases or some new game they’d invent. They’d decide the rules, they’d change them if the game got dull, and, inevitably, they’d deal with disputes. “That kind of creative thinking is lost when adults are dictating what kids are doing every second,” says DeMatteo. So it may be surprising to learn that he grew up to become one of those very adults who watch over kids as they play. He’s a gym teacher.
However, he is a gym teacher who is already considered among the most innovative in New York City. The public middle school where he teaches is in Chinatown, across from a housing project, and it didn’t have any after-school sports when he came on board six years ago. Now it has twenty-one sports and thirty-eight teams; 70 percent of the students participate, making his the largest middle school sports program in the city. And in 2007 he was invited to Hong Kong to work his magic, getting the sluggish kids there back into physical activity. How did he do this?
Same way he does it back home. He had them come up with their own games.
Such as? “Oh, we have a game, Capture the Farm Animal, that I don’t think any adult in their right mind would have come up with. It’s a combination of, like, four different games. They also play Football Frenzy, Tickle Ball, Ultimate Team Wall Ball, and games that haven’t even been named yet.” When he leads work-shops for other gym teachers, DeMatteo teaches them those student-made games, which the visiting teachers then bring home to their own schools. But mostly they go back eager to get their own students doing what DeMatteo did as a child. Inventing games. Having fun. Being creative. Running around.
The running-around part goes a long way toward addressing another consequence of too much kid time spent sitting inside: obesity—a word that makes it sound as if “fat” is too dirty even to say. The fact is, our kids are getting fatter, and this is happening, curiously enough, right in tandem with the largest growth of childhood sports programs in history. What’s different about most supervised sports programs as compared to kids just playing by themselves is that the playing kids seem to run around more. At my sons’ old show-up-and-you-get-a-trophy baseball league, the coach spent the first fifteen minutes or so discussing good sportsmanship. After maybe an hour of play—with a lot of kids practically sleepwalking in the outfield because, barring a miracle, no ball would ever reach them—there was another fifteen-minute pep talk about how everyone’s a winner. Even the losers. Especially the losers. The last ten minutes were devoted to nutritious snacks, on the assumption the kids would die if they ate a Chips Ahoy instead of well-washed grapes.
My kids barely worked up a sweat. But put them into a yard with their cousins playing, yes indeed, a made-up football game called Fumble-Roosky, and they tumble in with cheeks so rosy we have to run and get the camera.
We revere that kind of “real” fun because it’s not always easy to get our kids outside. Put another way: it’s almost always hard to get them outside. But we’ve started trying to make it a priority. Play gets everything going: the mind, the body, the will to live. It is so crucial to child health that the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote a landmark report on it a few years back, recommending that grown-ups stop adding hours to the school day and shrinking recess and supervising all childhood activities. It begged parents to remember that even if we desperately want our kids to “succeed,” play does not take away from that pursuit. “As parents prepare their children for the future, they cannot know precisely which skills they will need for the workforce,” wrote the docs. But confidence, competence, creativity, tenacity, fairness, decency, and the ability to have a little fun will surely help.
So will the ability to cast spells and vanquish superheroes as they jump from bed to bed. But kids are going to have to learn this on their own, as did I.
REAL WORLD
We Thought of Everything, Including Boards
with Nails in Them to Fight off Alligators
Free-Range Parents push their kids to play and create on their own. But we still tune in to what’s going on—and even intervene, when necessary. Here’s an example from Pablo Solomon:I am now an internationally recognized artist living the good life. But as a kid, I lived in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Houston. So it was always a treat to spend time in the summers with my cousin who lived in the country. We would look for arrowheads and petrified wood. We would catch snakes and play with our chemistry sets.
One summer when we were about nine years old, we decided to build a raft to go down the Brazos River to the Gulf of Mexico—about a 200-mile trip from near College Station. We worked and worked. We thought of everything, including boards with nails in them to fight off alligators. We had a storage box for our food and drinks. We were ready to launch. Of course, I expected my uncle to flip out and say, “You kids are crazy! You will sink and drown.” Instead, he put our raft on a trailer and hauled it and us to the river.
It was bigger than we remembered. And the current was going fast. We were a bit afraid, but could not chicken out now. My uncle put life jackets on us, told us to get on the raft, and then he gave us a shove into the current. We were terrified and excited at the same time. We tried to control our raft with our homemade paddle with no luck! Just as we were beginning to panic, we realized that my uncle had tied a very long rope to our raft. He had it tied to his car and he was driving along the river bank parallel to us. He had picked a spot where a dirt road ran along the river for several miles.
By the time he began to reel us in, we were ready for dry land. But I will never forget the confidence I got from that adventure and the lesson that you can give your kids a lot of fun and still have a long rope to keep them from drowning.
Going Free Range
Free-Range Baby Step: Next birthday, get your child a toy that doesn’t require batteries. (Then run.)
Free-Range Brave Step: Send your kids out with their friends and promise to let them teach you whatever game they make up. Accept that this may well involve some minor humiliation.
Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: This is an idea I got from Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, a beautiful plea for more nature time for kids. Since one reason kids are not outside is that parents are afraid of what might happen to them, Louv suggests contacting the neighbors and organizing what he calls a “play watch group.” Everyone takes turns sitting on the stoop a couple hours each week, being the eyes of the neighborhood. Yes, this does involve some community organizing. But lately we’ve seen how far community organizers can go.
Commandment 14
Listen to Your Kids
They Don’t Want to Be Treated Like Babies (Except the Actual Babies, of Course)
How do you bake an Independence Cake?
A construction-paper poster in a sixth-grade classroom explains the steps. The poster is enormous, because the girl who made it decided that such a cake involves a whole lot of things. Walking to the grocery—alone. Shopping for the ingredients—alone. Walking home—alone. Etc., etc. When the cake is finally baking, it fills the air with something sweeter than devil’s food. Can you smell it?
Independence.
Natalie Kolba went through all that for extra credit in her social studies class at a New York City school called, bizarrely enough, NEST + m. (That’s New Explorations into Science, Technology & Math, in case you were wondering.) The class is taught by twenty-something Joanna Drusin, who had read about Izzy’s solo subway ride and had her students read about it too. When they were done, she told them: OK, now it’s your turn. Go do something Free Range.
The eleven-year-olds jumped into action and tried everything from making dinner to running errands to walking to school—all the kinds of sweet, simple things they would have been doing without a second thought if they’d been born in 1957 instead of 1997.
What was different was their heightened sense of adventure—and trepidation: “I thought they were going to abduct me,” wrote a young man who took the subway by himself to Saturday morning soccer practice. A girl who made a sunny-side-up egg all by herself admitted, “I was scared out of my wits that I was going to burn the apartment down.” Another boy proudly walked the five blocks to and from his local grocery, only to learn that his mom had been trailing him the whole time. Though he lives in one of New York’s safest, fanciest neighborhoods, he understood her impulse: “She was just worried.” Yet despite these fears on everyone’s part, the kids all loved their projects.
“I made it to the field with a grin on my face,” said Nikhil Massand. He’s the one who was afraid he was going to be abducted.
I visited Drusin’s classroom the day the students—five classes’ worth—handed in their assig
nments. Dozens of essays, posters, and mini-books festooned the room, describing Free-Range adventures with a lot of photos and exclamation points. One girl, Emma Evans, wrote up her visit to the vet as a TV news report:
Reporter 1: “Our top story of the day is about a young girl who thought taking her dog to the vet by herself would be one of the big responsibilities of having a dog. Her parents believed the same. Then came the big day and when she went to the vet she was ignored, harassed and humiliated! Charlotte is live there at the scene. It’s all yours, Charlotte.”
Charlotte: “All right, if you remember we were in the middle of our live broadcast about a young girl at the vet’s.”
The shot goes live to an examining room, where the door opens to reveal, at last, the lady veterinarian. And at this point Emma abandons TV script form and switches into traditional story mode, like so:
“The vet searched the room for someone, ignoring Emma almost like she was not there. ‘Good morning,’ Emma said and the vet turned sharply around.
“ ‘Hi. Where is your mommy, little girl?’ Her sharp voice echoed against the green walls. A little surprised by the vet’s tone, Emma answered that her mom was at work. The vet looked troubled. ‘Do you have your mom’s phone number with you? I might have to give her a call.’ She quickly dialed the given number. ‘Hi! This is Dr. S. Your daughter is here. Can I actually give her instructions?’ ”