Everyone I know has posted or commented about “free range parenting” lately, due to several articles about it and a current case where parents are being charged with child neglect for letting them walk to a local park alone. It is an important topic regarding how, as a society, we are addressing issues like personal responsibility and maturity with our youth. I’m not a parent, but even from a distance I feel invested in this as a serious issue; kids need the freedom to learn how to fail, to make mistakes, to know how to get up out of the dirt and start over. *
Mostly, though, all the dialogue has been focused on “well in MY DAY…” followed by some glorious re-imagining of their tetherless, freedom-filled childhood, and how since it was (clearly!) so wonderful for them, then it must absolutely be the best way to raise a child.
Inspired, I want to share my own story:
My mother was a woman who suffered from crippling health issues, bi-polar disorder, and anxiety. Suffice to say, she was absolutely paranoid about my safety and was the acme of “helicopter mom” long before the term was coined. I was not allowed to even go around the block unsupervised. This was in the late 70s, back when all of my peers were enjoying their freedom filled, free-range childhoods.
I was insanely jealous.
When I got to 2nd grade, I would watch my peers troop out of our neighborhood and hike – by themselves!!!! – the five-or-so blocks to Eubank Elementary School, while my mother drove me the same distance. It was just humiliating. I was made fun of for that alone (among many other reasons, but I digress).
One of the primary reasons for mother’s decision was that there was one – ONE – major intersection in between our house and the school. It was a stop light intersection with two lanes of traffic. There was no crossing guard but there had been a few instances of kids getting hit by cars, which I believe was why there was a stop light there to begin with. That did not appease Mother, oh no, it did not, so in the car I went.
Finally, after a about a month, Mother was having a bad health day and I, being a selfish brat, connived to use that to my advantage. I would walk to school! I convinced Mother I would stay with the kids from our street who “knew how to do it”, I would be safe, I would be careful. She relented with ill-disguised displeasure. I knew I was taking a risk. I knew how much rode on this major milestone. This was my chance! I could show my mother that it was safe for me to be out of her direct line of sight! Free range childhood, here I come!
The walk to school was exactly as uneventful as I expect. A herd of us trapesed down the sidewalks, stopped at the stoplight, crossed the roads, and got to school unscathed. TRIUMPH!
The walk home later that day started out the same. We got to the stop light intersection. And then…the other kids started playing “beat the clock.” It was a popular game and one they obviously did every day, where they tried to outrun cars running through on a green light, or waited until the last possible moment before a light changed from red to green before crossing. It was suicide waiting to happen (and, as it happens, a kid was seriously hurt later that year; I remember clearly how upset Mother was by that even though she was homeschooling me by then) and they kept trying to push me into traffic to get me to play.
Terrified and horrified by the craven stupidity of my peers, I got home, put my little backpack down, and solemnly told my mother that it was okay if she wanted to drive me to school the next day. I did not tell her why (which I think proves just how smart I am!).
The lesson here, in case you missed it: making it out of your childhood alive does not mean that other kids did. There were many years where kids died of head injuries because it was socially acceptable for kids to ride bikes or skate without helmet. There were many people who died not wearing seatbelts because “how bad could it be?” Women used to drink alcohol in quantity and smoke while pregnant because their doctors told them it was okay. Children played tag with cars because everyone assumed all kids were smart enough not to.
I’m not saying that American parents aren’t suffering from a severe case of “helicopter-itis” in the raising of their kids; trust me, I see it every day here at the university, where students are crippled from self-development into adulthood by over-controlling parents. It is truly frustrating for them and for me. My own mother crippled me in a lot of ways by trying to protect me from all the bad in the world that scared her so much. Being over protective stops kids from learning important lessons about life. That is a real concern for their futures.
But while my mother was definitely overboard on the protectiveness, robbing me of a much of my childhood due to her paranoia, a lot of parents ended up with hurt or dead kids because they weren’t protective (or wary) enough – even when they thought (and were told) they were doing everything right.
There is a middle way here, but the trick is that it moves depending on the child and the parents and the current information we have about risks (that is, the safety of the neighborhood and the school). We’ve got to stop judging parents and children of today by value systems that were questionable to begin with and are definitely out of date now. Just because you never got hit by a car doesn’t mean your friend’s five year old is ready to walk five blocks to kindergarten alone – the reverse being, just because you weren’t allowed to date until you were 15 doesn’t mean your next door neighbor’s 12 year old isn’t mature enough to self-identify as queer.
More importantly, we need to understand that maturity and age are not synonymous (for kids, or for adults). Yes, violent crime has actually dropped compared to the 1970s and 1980s, but that’s no damn reason to give kids carte blanche to wandering around alone, especially if they are not mature enough to handle it yet. And you know who are the ONLY people who can make that call? That kid’s parents.
Maybe if someone had decided that at least one adult needed to walk with those kids every day to and from school – OMG THE HELICOPTER-NESS OF IT ALL – some kids would have not been hurt/killed there. Maybe my mother (who could not be that adult because of her health) would have felt more secure in allowing me more freedom…but I think she saw the craven stupidity as much (if not more) than I did, and she definitely knew that I was not ready to handle that kind of peer pressure.
So instead, she hovered. For that, I’m honestly grateful.
*For the sake of this essay, I’m not addressing the issue of parents being charged with neglect or whatever for letting their kids walk to school – yes, I think that’s ridiculous. But this post is about children and parenting, not the law.