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

by Lenore Skenazy

  Is it?

  In many neighborhoods, it doesn’t have to be. The two big fears of parents are that their children will be hurt by traffic or snatched by a predator. There is a way to prevent both of these. It’s called the “walking school bus.”

  A walking school bus is like a carpool without the car (or pool). You and some other parents get together and agree that you will each take turns walking to school and, like a bus, pick up the kids in your group along the way. Thus there is always a parent around to supervise street crossings and keep those pedophiles at bay. (Read the chapter Strangers with Candy to see how few pedophiles are actually lying in wait.)

  Your job is to find a safe route and to teach your children how to cross streets. But as the weeks go by, it is not unusual for the children to start walking by themselves, the way we did way back when. It’s not that big a deal!

  Then there are a couple of other things parents can do to make the route safer that parents didn’t do in my day. And these would have really helped my sister.

  In our quiet Chicago suburb she was often tormented on her way to grammar school by two neighborhood bullies who teased her, sometimes sexually, may they rot in hell (along with everyone else’s bullies). Pedestrian safety researcher David Levinger suggests that a way to cut down on this kind of threat is to not entirely bow out of your child’s commute when she goes by herself. Sometimes, on no particular schedule, join your child. Let all the kids in the neighborhood see that you are part of your child’s life. Lend your heft.

  Second, you want to let your children know that they can talk to you about any problems they have along their route. I don’t recall my sister ever confiding her misery to my parents, or my parents asking her, “Everything cool?” That might have made a big difference.

  All of these suggestions, by the way, work just as well with letting your child walk to and from the bus stop.

  Free-Range Parents are not hands off. We give our children the tools to be safe and independent, and we listen to them too. And then, once all the stars align, we let them walk (or skip or bike or hop) to school.

  But the hopping gets old fast.

  Zoo Animals (in Cracker Form and Otherwise)

  If you’re worried about zoo animals as cookie or cracker snacks, please see, “Choking on Food and All the Other Little Things Around the House.”

  If you’re worried about zoo animals and children as snacks, please see “Animals, Being Eaten By.”

  If you’re worried about lead in zoo animals from China, please read “Lead Paint, Lead Toys, and Lead Everything from China.”

  But if you’re worried about whether your child is allergic to zoo animals, you’re on your own. Sorry.

  Strangers with Candy

  Even the Folks Who Put the Faces on the Milk Cartons Aren’t Too Worried

  Death by abduction. It is the mother of all worries—and the worry of all mothers. And dads.

  If you have skipped straight to this topic, don’t feel bad. That’s what the TV news does too. Anyway, there are no penalties for not reading this book in order (other than one brief “What would your English teacher say!? Is this how you read The Scarlet Letter, too?”).

  On the other hand, if you have come to this chapter the old-fashioned way, by reading the words that led up to it, hello again! You will have heard a couple of the abduction statistics before, but this is where they all come together as we confront the great fear. Starting now.

  The grandmother was sitting in the allergist’s waiting room, reading her paper with a magnifying glass. A boy, around age three, came up to her.

  “He was just this darling little boy and he wanted to look through the magnifying glass,” recalls the grandma, Rochelle Jewel Shapiro. She was about to hand it to him when his mother rushed over and scooped him up, exclaiming, “He has to learn fast not to talk to strangers!”

  What. An. Idiot.

  Sorry. I’d like to be more sympathetic to that mom, who was only trying to keep her child safe, as are we all, etc., etc., etc. But has she given one iota of thought to the lesson she’s teaching him? A lesson that boils down to “Don’t trust anybody, ever, under any circumstances”? It’s like those airport screeners who make the ninety-five-year-old with the bun and the cane stand there and get wanded.

  That’s not the way to keep anyone safe. And that “Don’t trust anyone!” lesson could conceivably end up making that little boy less safe (not to mention terrified of old ladies). Imagine if, against all odds—and I’m about to tell you just how long those odds are—some horrible guy does come up one day and say, “Hi, little fella. Mommy sent me to get you.” Presto—he mentioned mom, so he’s not a stranger anymore. He grabs the boy even while, just a few feet away with her back turned, a grandma sits reading her paper. Will the little boy scream, “Hey lady! Help! Put down the magnifying glass and call the police!” Or will he not say anything, because she’s a stranger, and Mommy said never to talk to them?

  “Don’t talk to strangers” is one of the most useless pieces of advice ever foisted on us to foist on our children. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

  “Our message is exactly the one you’re trying to convey. We have been trying to debunk the myth of stranger danger,” says Ernie Allen.

  What’s stunning about this statement is that Allen is the head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The organization John Walsh helped found after his son was killed. The organization that runs 1-800-THE LOST. The organization that put the missing kids’ pictures on the milk cartons and didn’t tell us that most of them were runaways or abducted by family members. And although I believe that his organization is one of the reasons we are all so out of our minds with abduction fear, it turns out that Allen and I are in heated agreement that parents are worried about the wrong problem and giving out the wrong solution.

  “Our message to parents is you don’t have to live in fear, you don’t have to feel you have to lock your children in a room,” says Allen. What you do have to do, he says, is talk to them about how to handle themselves confidently, among people they know and people they don’t.

  Let’s talk about the likelihood of abduction first, and then we’ll talk about what to teach your kids. (And why I ended up thinking Allen is great.)

  Having pretty much dispatched with diphtheria, whooping cough, polio, TB, scurvy, smallpox, consumption, cholera, typhoid, scrofula, Spanish flu, malaria, yellow fever, and the bubonic plague—at least here in the comfort of the First World—the towering parental fear is now the thought of one’s child being kidnapped, carried off, and killed by a creep in a van. (Vans are in need of some major PR.) This particular scenario is known, in the juvenile justice world, as “stereotypical kidnapping.” And even though it feels as if it’s happening all the time—and on TV, it is—it’s actually exceedingly rare and getting rarer.

  As of 1999, the latest year for which we have statistics, the number of U.S. children abducted this way was 115. Of those, 40 percent were killed, bringing the total to about fifty, or 1 in 1.5 million. But the number of abductions may actually be even lower today than it was in 1999, because crimes against children have been plummeting since the early nineties. Homicides of children under age fourteen were down 36 percent from 1993 to 2005; teen homicides were down 60 percent. And juvenile sex crimes were down a whopping 79 percent, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center. Imagine a graph of Hummer sales in 2008, or Miami condo prices, or birthday cards to Bernie Madoff. That’s what a graph of crime over the past fifteen years looks like: an unbelievably dramatic jackknife down.

  Crime peaked around 1992 or 1993, so if you grew up any time in the seventies or eighties as it was ramping up, there is no need to feel that times now are less safe. As I’ve noted before in this book, crime has returned to the levels of the early seventies and continues to go down.

  That is all phenomenally great news, and there are several reasons for it, ranging from more cops to better prosecut
ion of sex offenders to less tolerance of abuse within the family. (Thank you, daytime talk shows!) Cell phones are probably also to thank, because as the number of phones has gone up, the number of crimes has gone down. And we should also thank our medical and social work system for getting more troubled people onto psychiatric meds. This may be the “sleeper” reason fewer crimes are being committed, says sociologist David Finkelhor: the criminally insane are feeling less insane and hence, less criminal. So hooray for progress from the streets to the courts to the clinics! Let’s hear it for society working!

  But, of course, you never do. Hear about society working, that is. “Mellowed-out criminal uninterested in snatching local child, and even if he did, greater police presence would probably prevent it” is just not a ratings grabber. At least not compared to “Child snatched off scooter!”

  We’ve hashed out the media problem already, so I won’t start in again. I’m just trying to explain why this incredible good news about crimes against kids seems to contradict everything you’ve read, heard, and seen. But there are two more reasons why all this good news may not be at all reassuring to you:1. It’s lovely that abductions are down. But what if that 1 in 1.5 million is YOUR KID?

  2. It’s lovely that abductions are down. But what if that 1 in 1.5 million is MY KID?

  That’s how everyone thinks—including me. And I’ve been thinking that way even more, ever since the world decided to weigh in on whether or not I was an irresponsible jerk to let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone. Usually after I replied to my detractors by rattling off all my safety stats, the person would probe, “But what if that one was your kid?” followed by, “How would you ever forgive yourself?”

  Answer: I wouldn’t.

  Of course I wouldn’t! But what was so upsetting about these questions was the notion behind them: that I’d deliberately put my son in harm’s way—and didn’t give a hoot—when actually I was allowing him to do something that was extremely safe. And confidence building and competence building too.

  Then one day I got an e-mail that deserves the Nobel Prize for Clobbering Parental Hysteria. (Stockholm, get busy.) It suggested that from now on, whenever anyone asks, “How could you possibly let your child get around on his own? Wouldn’t you feel terrible if something happened?” you respond, “How could you possibly let your kids get in the car with you? Wouldn’t you feel awful if they were in a crash?”

  After all, a child is forty times more likely to die as a passenger in a car crash than to be kidnapped and murdered by a stranger.

  Using this wonderful e-mailer’s strategy, you could even respond, “How could you possibly make your kids stay inside after school instead of letting them wander around on their own? Wouldn’t you feel awful if they were burned to a crisp?” After all, there are about fifty children killed by kidnappers each year, but ten times that number are killed by fires at home.

  And by the way, “How could you possibly get your kids a pool?” After all, they are almost twenty times more likely to drown than to be kidnapped and murdered. And “How could you possibly let your children visit a relative?” After all, they are eighty or ninety times more likely to be molested by someone they know than . . .

  You get the idea. The point is not to make parents even more nervous about everything they do, every second, every place. It’s to make them realize that a lot of our fears are off base. Things that we’re familiar with, like driving, don’t scare us, despite the odds. Meanwhile the stranger danger fear is so gruesome and out of the ordinary, it dominates our parenting lives even though it doesn’t deserve to. You know that book they have for kids, Go Away, Big Green Monster!? We need one for adults: Go Away, Unlikely Predator Scenario!

  The good news: there really is a way to make the predator fear go away. The better news: it will actually make your kid safer, too. It’s called empowerment.

  Glen Evans is a police officer and father of four outside of Day-ton, Ohio. About five years ago, his four-year-old asked him anxiously, “Daddy, what if a bad guy comes and says, ‘I’m going to do this, this, and this!’?” And he proceeded to act out a series of Power Ranger moves.

  Teachable-moment Daddy replied, “Well, what if somebody came up to you and said, ‘Hey, I have some puppies in the car, why don’t you come with me?’ What would you do then?”

  The excited boy said, “I’d run!”

  The excited dad said, “Fine. Run!”

  So the boy ran around the house and came back jazzed and happy. Evans was equally jazzed. As a cop, he realized he’d just taught his son a fine lesson: when an adult tries to get you into a car—run. But most parents are not cops and have no idea what to teach their kids about personal safety. The proverbial light bulb started hovering over Evans’s head. He would go forth and teach the safety tips a cop knows!

  So now that’s what he does. His company is called ASSERT Super Kids and he teaches everyone from MOPS (Mothers of PreSchoolers) to tweens all about how to stay safe from creeps. He likens his lessons to the lessons cops get on how to use a gun. It’s unlikely they’ll ever need to use the weapon. But by knowing what to do in an emergency, they become not only prepared but confident. And we have confidence in them, too.

  Evans’s technique is visual and, above all, physical. It involves literally showing kids the lures a predator could use: a bag of candy, a leash that supposedly “proves” a guy is looking for his puppy. Then he has the children practice the three things that could help them the most:1. Throwing their hands in front of them like a stop sign.

  2. Screaming at the top of their lungs, “No! Get away! You’re not my dad!” “Your voice is your most effective crime-fighting tool,” he tells them.

  3. Running like hell.

  By actually getting up and practicing those things, the kids feel ready for the worst. But it’s not just them: the parents who are watching them get a surge of confidence, too. Public safety instructors liken this kind of training to the “Stop, drop, and roll” drill that kids get as part of fire safety instruction. Once again, it is extremely unlikely they’ll ever need to use it, but—it’s handy to have. And rather than creating more fear, it seems to help alleviate it. The more afraid we are of something, the more power it has over us. But the more prepared we are, the more power we get back. Training confers power.

  One more thing Evans tries to convince the parents, by the way, is not to tell children, “Don’t talk to strangers.” “When you tell your children not to talk to a stranger, you are effectively removing hundreds of good people in the area who could be helping them,” he says. Instead, Evans teaches the kids that1. Most adults are good.

  2. There are a few bad ones.

  3. Most normal adults don’t drive up and ask for help.

  4. If they do, or if they bother you in any other way, you can ask any other nearby adult for help. And again, if you need to, scream, hit, and run.

  The best piece of advice I heard while researching this topic comes from a psychotherapist named Michelle Maidenberg, and it’s really simple: tell your kids they can talk to strangers. They can ask for help from strangers. What they should never do is go off with strangers.

  Teach kids NEVER GO OFF WITH STRANGERS, even if those strangers say they have something nice to give you or need your help or were supposedly sent by Mom.

  To fine-tune the message, you can tell your kids never to go off with anyone you haven’t preapproved beforehand. Simple as that.

  Over at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Ernie Allen approves. “Probably no single case in the twenty-five years we’ve been here has had greater impact and unleashed a greater flood of calls than the case of eleven-year-old Carlie Brucia,” he says, recalling the Florida case from 2004. “She was approached by this guy and it was captured by a video camera at a car wash, and the child ended up murdered. This was a very bright little girl, and what was so terrifying to parents was they saw how easily and how fast it happened. He said something to her and led her awa
y. No resistance, no fighting back, no trying to run.”

  We still don’t know what the killer—Joseph Smith—said to the girl, but at the time of this writing, he is on death row for the crime. Meantime, Allen’s organization has studied hundreds of abductions that ended very differently: the victims got away. How?

  “Overwhelmingly, by either running away or fighting back: yelling, kicking, pulling away, or attracting attention,” Allen says. So that’s exactly what the center encourages kids to understand: you have a right to call attention to yourself, to resist a grown-up, to stand up for yourself, to be impolite, and to ask others for help.

  Interestingly, says Allen, these turn out to be the very “same techniques you’d use to resist peer pressure over drugs or bullies or gangs.”

  Let’s talk about those bullies for a second. Although parents most fear the man-with-van, the greatest number of young people are harassed and harmed by people they know, often other young people. Of the fifty-eight thousand people under age seventeen who go missing for more than an hour, having been taken or seduced away, almost two-thirds are between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Most of them are girls. And most of them went off—by force or foolishness—with friends, relatives, boyfriends, or acquaintances.

  This is not to minimize the danger they’re in or to blame them for bad judgment. It’s to point out that self-esteem and self-confidence come into play here just as much as they do with a younger kid approached by a pervert on the playground.

  Teach your children, including your teens, that they have a right to say NO to anyone who wants them to do anything they don’t want to do (except homework). Back this up by letting them know you will support and love them even if they do end up doing something ill thought out. (Or even stupid.) That way they’ll be able to confide in you, and you can give them guidance.