Lenore Skenazy - Free-Range Kids

Or at least impaled on a towel hook.

Writes a Free-Ranger:

I have to say that I am an overprotective mother and have tried to loosen up a bit lately. I do not want my children to grow up in fear of everything. I am taking baby steps—just allowing my children, one being a teen, to go to the park across the street unsupervised—but I am getting there. The first thinge I did was disconnect the cable. Not because of what the kids were watching but because of what I was watching. Just like the Internet. If something catches my eye, I read it. But if it is about another child abduction or another school shooting, I do not read it. I am trying to let go of those fears that the media has generated.

Free-Range Baby Step: Don't click that link! Get today's local news from an actual local—a neighbor. Bonus: Maybe you two can keep an eye on each other's kids, literally making your block safer.

Free-Range Brave Step: No more keeping CNN on as background noise. I know, it's nice to hear a voice. But the fear seeps in even when you think it doesn't. Switch to music or some podcast that isn't a 27-part series on tracking a murderer.

One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Get up and go out. Spend that hour you were going to watch another Law and Order on a walk with the kids instead. Look around at all the unspeakable crimes not being committed. This is called reality. (Not to be confused with reality TV, which is a crime all of its own.)

Did you read What to Expect When You're Expecting ? Of course you did. Or your spouse did. Everyone did. I did. I found it very helpful.

And horrible.

Like most advice out there for parents.

Helpful because when you're wondering if those gas pains are really contractions, it's there to give you a clue. (Baby's head emerging? Not gas.) But even though at times the newer editions bend over backward to reassure moms-to-be that they should “lose the guilt,” the basic premise of this book is that there's a right way and a wrong way to act when you're pregnant, and a whole lot of dilemmas and potential pitfalls along the way. Or, as the introduction to the fourth edition cheerfully proclaims, “More symptoms and more solutions than ever before.”

That's good, because moms just weren't worried enough.

Let's take a glance at the twenty-nine pages on “eating well.” (Not to be confused with the brand extension, What to Eat When You're Expecting —a whole book. By the time you're done reading it, the baby's in law school.) Naturally, the authors tell moms to try to eat a balanced diet. Fine. But then they go on to say that this isn't just a question of trying to eat a few more spinach salads and a little less Kahlúa cream pie. No, the writers ask moms to kindly remember that “Each bite during the day is an opportunity to feed that growing baby of yours healthy nutrients.”

Not each meal. Not each day. Each bite has to be carefully considered if you're going to be doing the right thing by your child. So “Open wide, but think first.”

What are the consequences of a single bite you don't “think first” about? Oh … maybe the slow class at school for junior. Maybe weight problems for life. Or worse. After all, eating the precise number of calories and nutrients suggested by the book can offer “impressive benefits,” including “better birthweight, improved brain development, reduced risk for certain birth defects… .”

Aieee!! If that doesn't make mama throw her baloney sandwich out the window, what will? On the other hand, if that mama cannot resist the deli meat and gobbles that darn sandwich right down to the crust, she is left to feel that she's a horrible person. A lax, no-good, baby-damning baloney addict—at least compared to the will-of-steel baby mamas the What to Expect authors applaud. Even in the food chapter's little box about not feeling guilty, they jauntily say, “Lose the guilt, hold the deprivation, and allow yourself a treat every once in a while.” A treat that will make “your tastebuds jump for joy.” And what exactly would that fantastic treat be?

“A blueberry muffin.”

Not even a cupcake. I guess frosting is the What to Expect equivalent of crack.

Now listen: on the one hand, it's hard to argue with a book that says pregnant women should be eating well. On the other hand, it's hard not to argue with a book that drives pregnant women crazy. “It tortures them and it tortures me,” says obstetrician Dr. Craig Bissinger of the book he dreads seeing his patients waddle in with. As a teacher, lecturer, and deliverer of 8,000 babies, this is the sum total of his dietary advice for expectant moms: “Just eat like you have your whole life, but eat a little more.”

So much for the “each bite” advice—advice so picky and so extreme that it's bound to make any mom self-conscious. (Aren't the people who think about the consequences of each bite generally referred to as anorexics?) It is exactly that hyperconsciousness—the worry that at any second we could be doing something terribly wrong that will hurt our children forever or, alternatively, that any second is another opportunity to produce the perfect child if only we don't blow it—that is one of the reasons we're so worried about our parenting capabilities. Even before our kid is born!

After birth, of course, it never ends. Go to the parenting section of your library or bookstore—or maybe you're there right now (so buy this book already!). In front of you awaits a wall of “expert” advice so daunting, you may want to cry. Then again, maybe you're there because you're already crying because you think you're such a bad parent.

This is not the place to look for reassurance. It's not that there's no good advice to be found here. Dr. Spock is still calm and good, though dead. (The new Dr. Spock is Robert Needlman, who is just as calm and good, with the added advantage of being alive.) Emily Oster's data-driven Cribsheet is reassuring, telling parents that breastfeeding is not a must and kids in daycare are not less attached to their moms. The books on child development can clue you in to why your toddler isn't taking your every helpful suggestion yet. (“Sweetheart, let's not climb on the eighteenth-century porcelain elephant.”) And of course, if your child has been given a diagnosis of something you want to read up on, it's great that these books are here.

But …

I went flipping randomly through a whole bunch of these books, and I guarantee that if you tried to follow the advice in even a chapter or two of some of them, you would fail or at least forget the million particulars that you're supposed to do. And then you'll feel bad. Examples?

The Happiest Toddler on the Block —ah yes, let's compete for whose kid is happier—teaches parents how to talk to their tantruming tots. It is not enough to tell a child who is freaked out by a broken cracker in her snack, “It's OK! It's OK!” No, you must “Save your reassurance for after you respectfully reflect your child's feelings.”

That's right, folks. There is a wrong way to calm your children down, and it's by reassuring them. So next time you're talking to your kid, don't do what comes naturally. Think hard about what an expert told you to do and then talk. Otherwise, you'll be doing it wrong.

What if you want to encourage good behavior in your child? Saying “Yay!” is no longer enough. Happiest Toddler suggests rewarding kiddos “with a pen check mark on the back of their hands when they have done something good.” At night, “count the checks and recall what he did to earn each one. He'll end his day feeling like a winner!”