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

by Lenore Skenazy

  Is it really necessary to take any of these antigerm precautions? And could any of them actually backfire and end up doing more harm than good?

  First things first, says Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt and a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (which sounds like a society where Mad Cow Disease and TB go to kick back and swap war stories, but is actually an association of about eight thousand members who study disease and how it is spread).

  To the question of whether or not one should carry around hand sanitizing gels or antibacterial wipes, Schaffner replied, “It’s like, ‘Did you buy the blue Ford or the red Chevy?’ It’s really a matter of choice.” Parents who exhibit what he calls “hygienic exuberance” may feel reassured using the wipes and gels, and these products generally do go to work on the germs kids are so intent upon picking up and disseminating. But so do soap and water, for the most part. On the other hand (I guess the dirty one), we live in a microbial world, and all of us are covered with microbes. “That is the human condition,” says Schaffner, not something new and awful to suddenly get worked up about.

  In any event, far more important than wiping our kids clean, he says, is this: make sure they get vaccinated against infectious diseases.

  Now, as for whether we are becoming too clean for our own good, that is a still a matter of debate.

  The debate began in 1989 with a report by David Strachan, a researcher who had been studying a sample of 17,414 British children all born during one week in 1958. One of the things Strachan noticed was that the younger children in bigger families were less likely than the other kids to develop eczema and allergies like hay fever. He speculated that maybe this was because their older siblings brought home so many infections that this somehow gave the younger brothers and sisters immunity against some illnesses.

  What’s more, as hygiene has improved over the last fifty years and family size has shrunk, kids are getting less exposed to infections when they’re younger, and that may be why we are seeing rising rates of things like asthma and allergies. Strachan’s conjecture is now known as the “hygiene hypothesis,” and it dovetails with the fascinating fact that children in less-developed, frankly dirtier countries have less asthma.

  Other scientists intrigued by this idea developed other experiments whose results seemed to suggest the same thing: the more exposure an immune system gets when it’s very young, the stronger it seems to grow. A 1999 study in Wisconsin comparing rural kids who grew up on farms to rural kids who did not grow up on farms found that the farm kids—especially the ones exposed to cattle—had 50 percent less asthma. Another study found that infants six to twelve months old who go to day care are 75 percent less likely to develop asthma than their stay-at-home counterparts.

  So does that mean, to keep our children safe, we should slather them in dung and pack them off to Tiny Tot Town?

  Uh. Maybe not just yet. But do we need to slather them in Purell and perch them in shopping carts liners? That’s probably not necessary either. But as Dr. Schaffner reminds us: vaccinations are.

  Halloween Candy: Hershey’s Kiss of Death?

  If you want to read all about how Halloween has become a fearmonger’s dream, since it’s the perfect storm of parents, children, independence, food, and would-be fun, go read Commandment 7. (And why, may I ask, did you not read this book in traditional front-to-back fashion? Just please don’t tell me you’ve skipped other chapters, too!) But if you just want to know if it’s safe to let your kids eat their candy before you inspect it—before you even lay eyes (or hands or teeth) on it—the answer is yes.

  Let them eat all those slightly ragged Reese’s packs and even that shiny red apple. (As if they’d ever eat an apple when they’ve got a bag of candy in front of them.) There has never been a single substantiated instance of any child dying from a stranger’s poisoned Halloween candy.

  But there are some other very scary trends I can substantiate for you.

  Some American towns are moving Halloween to the Sunday before October 31 so kids can trick-or-treat during the afternoon, and afternoon only. So much for a centuries-old nighttime holiday.

  A growing “Green Halloween” movement in Seattle is campaigning against any sweets that are not 100 percent straight from the hive. Normal candy bars would be verboten.

  And in California (where else?), a woman who didn’t want her children to be scared by a nearby lawn covered with tombstones and scary-looking monsters called the local police to report a “hate crime.”

  Who, precisely, does she believe the lawn decorator hates? Children? Moms? The protoplasmically challenged?

  Unclear. But eating Halloween candy? All clear.

  Internet Predators and Other Skeeves Online

  Maybe you’ve seen that big ad campaign that says one in seven youths will receive a sexual solicitation over the Internet. So should you pull your PC’s plug right now?

  No. Especially considering that one of the researchers who came up with that statistic, David Finkelhor, says the problem is not that simple or—thank goodness—that bad.

  Finkelhor is a professor at the University of New Hampshire and founder of the Crimes Against Children Research Center. In an effort to figure out whether the Internet is making life more dangerous for kids, he and his colleagues conducted two studies of about three thousand youths, ages ten to seventeen, to find out if they had been harassed or solicited for sex online.

  The one-in-seven statistic turns out to be referring to young people, mostly teens, who received “an unwanted kind of sexual remark or comment or overture online,” says Finkelhor. These were not necessarily propositions or even anything explicit. Most, he says, “were the Internet equivalent of wolf whistles.”

  That includes annoying but basically nonthreatening questions like “What’s your bra size?” and “Are you a virgin?” Two-thirds of the youths who received these comments reported that they were not upset by them, and almost all of them handled the solicitations “easily and effectively,” according to the study. They did this by either ignoring the question, telling the sender off, blocking the sender (I wish I knew how to do that!), or simply leaving the site.

  Moreover, the two studies suggested that the kids who end up attracting more of these remarks and getting into more serious trouble are not simply random young folks who have taken out a MySpace account or who go online to chat with their friends. They are kids who are:• Communicating online with a lot of people they don’t know.

  • Going to sexually oriented sites.

  Finkelhor also believes they are appearing online in a “sexualized persona.” They’re using sexy names or decorating their network sites with suggestive stuff. They are, in short, the online versions of the offline provocative kids most of us are familiar with. (And if you’re not, kindly observe 90 percent of the characters on Gossip Girl.)

  Predators, meanwhile, turn out to be smart shoppers. They don’t just click on random cuties hoping to seduce them. “That would be a bit like trying to get a date by phoning people from the telephone book,” Finkelhor says. Instead, they treat the Internet more like the Yellow Pages. And in a sense, the young people they are looking for advertise, by being very sexual.

  Whom do they attract? A year-long study by The Internet Safety Technical Task Force—a group created by forty-nine states’ attorneys general to look into online predators—found that the people trolling for underage sex are usually not dirty old men, but people of roughly the same age as the people they’re soliciting. After all, most of the liaisons born on the Web promise some sort of satisfaction. A sixteen-year-old girl going off to meet her pixilated paramour who said he’s eighteen will not be eager to switch her affections to the forty-five-year-old waiting for her with cheese fries at Denny’s.

  The real Internet danger lies in your child thinking that she has found someone who cares about her, when actually that “caring” person is a scumbag. The child may even continue to
“love” the scumbag and not feel exploited at all.

  How can you keep your child from falling into the arms of such slime? It all starts at home. And not with Internet filters.

  First of all, you should strive for a fairly open relationship with your children, so you can talk to them about online relationships, including the downside to a relationship with a stranger, particularly if the stranger is older (and still addicted to cheese fries). Always remind your kids that they have the right to say no to anything that makes them feel bad or uncomfortable . . . except for sitting there, listening to you.

  You also have to talk to them about how they’re presenting themselves on the Web. Degrading pictures attract degrading relationships. Worse: those pictures never disappear. A good way to bring this point home is to ask your child, “Would you feel bad if dad/grandma/the local news team saw what you posted?” Squirming is all to the good.

  One thing many parents worry about that turns out not to be true is the myth that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook make children more vulnerable to online predators. They don’t. The worst places to hang out online seem to be public chat rooms where anyone can “wander” in and talk about anything. Which they do.

  In short, the Web turns out to work pretty much the same as the “real” world, with some sexual soliciting, yes, but mostly just a lot of socializing, some of it dumb, some meaningful. Moreover, the majority of predators are on the prowl for troubled youth who have a tendency to take risks offline too.

  On the bright side: at least they know how to type.

  Lead Paint, Lead Toys, and Lead Everything from China

  Lead really is bad for kids. So bad that one economist hypothesized that the American crime rate has been dropping since the early nineties thanks to the laws restricting lead in gasoline starting in 1975 and nixing lead paint in 1978.

  As children grew up with less and less exposure to lead, fewer and fewer of them grew into addled young adults. And because lead tends to cause problems with impulse control (among other awful things), less lead meant better-behaved kids. At least so goes the theory, by a guy named Rick Nevin, who found the same crime drop in other countries when they outlawed lead too.

  Anyway, thanks to those antilead laws, the average level of lead in Americans’ blood dropped 90 percent from 1976 to 1996. Now fewer than 2 percent of U.S. kids test positive for elevated lead, so unless you’re in a deteriorating home or a particularly polluted part of the country, you’re pretty far out of the woods. And yet, these days it just doesn’t feel like Christmas without a massive recall of lead-painted toys from China.

  Those toys really don’t pose a very serious problem if all your child does is play with them. But a lot of toddlers do that toddler thing of sticking toys in their mouths, and that is a problem (and gross), because they absorb way more lead by sucking on it. So if a toy has been recalled for lead and you have small children at home, just chuck it. You probably have way too many toys anyway. Meantime, China has promised: no more lead paint on toys it’s exporting to the United States. We shall see.

  Sydney Spiesel, a professor of pediatrics at Yale, says that toys usually aren’t the problem anyway. “Almost every case I’ve seen of high lead has been a result of either remodeling or painting, where someone wanted to do a really good job and scrape down to the old paint,” he says.

  The curse of watching This Old House. Once old paint is flaking off your pre-1978 walls for whatever reason, you should have your child or home tested for lead. If the level is high, you have to have the paint removed or sealed up, probably professionally. Not fun, not cheap, not easy. But you know what they say: “Get the lead out.”

  Licking the Batter off Beaters While They Are Still Plugged In

  I realize this item may not be of keenest interest to that many readers, but it will be of GREAT VALUE to someone who is normally so smart and responsible but who was apparently overcome by an irresistible urge for peanut butter cookie batter and COULD HAVE SLICED HIS TONGUE OFF THE OTHER NIGHT! You know who you are!

  Don’t do it.

  Plastic Bags and Why There Are Warnings All over Them

  One of the many joys of watching Mad Men is seeing how worried—not—the parents were about their kids, at least in this fictional portrayal of the early sixties.

  In one episode, a girl of about six or seven twirls into the kitchen and announces she’s a fairy or space monster or something. Her costume consists of a dry cleaning bag.

  The mother is horrified! “If I find those clean clothes on the floor, young lady, you are in big trouble.”

  Visions of crumpled clothes, not imminent death, dance in her head.

  So I looked up the stats on plastic bags. Are they really so bad, or are we just paranoid? Must we really keep them away from our kids?

  Yes and no.

  Yes, about twenty-five children do die each year, suffocated by bags. Horrible. But according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, most of these are children under the age of one. They rolled into a bag and couldn’t roll out, or a plastic bag of clothes fell on them and they couldn’t get out from underneath and suffocated.

  These are terrible stories, but they have nothing to do with a six-year-old twirling around in a bag she can yank off whenever she wants. They are really stories of babies suffocated by babyhood—by not being able to crawl away yet, or even lift a head.

  So by all means, keep plastic bags away from infants. Keep bags out of cribs, and do not use them as cheap waterproofing sheets (which is what parents used to do, which is how dry cleaning bags got their bad rap). And don’t store big plastic bags of stuff where they can fall on your children. In fact, best not to store anything where it can fall on your children, right?

  Once your child is capable of movement, however, plastic bags seem to become a lot less worrisome—just one of the many life lessons we can all learn from Mad Men. (The other biggie being that men look better in hats.)

  Playground Perils

  Playgrounds today are so safe, they may be missing a lot of the things you used to like about them: merry-go-rounds, tall slides, children having fun. Our local school is not the only one I’ve heard of that literally prohibits kids from running on the playground, at least in certain areas, at certain times. (Last check, children were still allowed to skip with joyful abandon, if they insisted.)

  Despite all this funning down, it still makes sense to get kids out to a playground, because being outside and getting exercise beats the infinitesimal dangers they might encounter there. In England, even the head of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents—a guy whose job is pretty self-explanatory—declared, “A skinned knee or a twisted ankle in a challenging and exciting play environment is not only acceptable, it is a positive necessity to educate our children and to prepare them for a complex, dangerous world.”

  I don’t think he’s saying that a twisted ankle is positively necessary for each child, but you get his point. Anyhow, what are the chances of your child getting seriously hurt on the playground?

  Jolly slim! The odds against dying from a playground injury are four million to one. What’s more, of those very rare (fourteen a year or so) deaths, most come as a result of injuries on home play sets. Public playgrounds, most of them reequipped since the early eighties when safety guidelines were first drawn up, are an excellent place for children. And if you find one where the kids are still allowed to run, so much the better. Break a leg! (Just an expression, folks. Just an expression.)

  Pools and Water and Kids and Toilets (Not the Fun Part)

  Pools are dangerous, especially the ones at home, simple as that. Drowning is the second leading cause of death for kids (after car accidents), and 75 percent of the pool drownings occur at home.

  So?

  So don’t let your children swim unattended, obviously. Prevent them and any other neighborhood scamps from getting in without your knowing it by putting a secure fence around the pool and making sure the back door l
eading out to the pool has a safety lock too. In and of themselves, these measures could prevent 50 to 90 percent of childhood drownings, according to Safe Kids Worldwide. And do not depend on water wings to keep your kid afloat! The kind I bought for my kids cost $.99. Garbage! (So why did I buy them? Well, they were cute. And they did work . . . for a while. But I kept my eyes on the kids when they wore them.)

  While we’re on the cheery subject of drowning, remember never to leave a baby or young child in the bath alone, either, not even if they’re in some device like a bath chair. Those are the tub equivalent of water wings. As for whether or not you need a toilet lock: about four kids die in toilets a year. Less than one in a million. To me, keeping the door closed seems good enough. (With the kids outside of it. Duh.)

  Raw Dough’s Raw Deal

  Countless kids have been warned not to eat raw cookie dough because of the eggs. But in our home, dough is one of the four major food groups. Imagine my delight, then, upon finding a U.S. Department of Agriculture report from 2002 that determined that, indeed, some raw eggs do carry salmonella. How many of them?

  A whopping 0.003 percent of the sixty-nine billion eggs produced every year.

  That’s about one egg in every thirty thousand.

  Say you’re unlucky enough to eat an infected egg raw. What are your chances of recovering without going to the doctor? Ninety-four percent. What are your chances of not recovering and, in fact, dying of this diarrhea-producing disease?

  Your chances are 0.05 percent.

  The Centers for Disease Control report that seventy-nine people died from egg-born salmonella from 1985 to 1998. That’s about six people a year—out of three hundred million.