Lenore Skenazy - Free-Range Kids

Then there's the way our brains cling to scary thoughts (kid taken from a bus stop) but not mundane ones (all the kids who get on and off the bus without getting taken). That's just basic psychology. Meanwhile, “helpful” websites list the dangers of every possible activity from running barefoot (fungus!) to flying kites. “Choose a sunny day when there's no chance of lightning,” one kite article actually suggested. So I guess we shouldn't choose a day when trees are flying by the window and there's a funnel-shaped cloud coming up the driveway? Thank you so much, oh wise tip-giver!

Fear, fear, fear. We're always expected to be thinking about fear. Schools hold pre–field trip assemblies explaining exactly how close the children will be to a hospital. At least, my kids’ school did. Come home and the TV tells us about “the killer under your sink!” (Turns out you shouldn't drink Drano.) And “the monster who could be your neighbor!” (but probably isn't). And “the hidden danger in your drink!” (A lemon. It has bacteria on it. Big deal. So does everything else.) Everyone is exhorting us to watch out, take care, and plan for doomy doom doom. Which puts a damper on things, to say the least.

A doctor wrote to me early on to say:

We live in beautiful Ardsley, New York. I pay 20K in taxes a year to provide a safe environment and good education for my children. You would have thought I committed a crime when I let my 8-year-old daughter ride her bike by herself approximately two city blocks to a friend's house. My wife let it be known how vehemently she disagreed with me. In addition, all the parents in the neighborhood also thought I was crazy. Indeed, of course I would have grieved had “something” happened. But should I let that immobilize my children? I lost my mother to a drunk driver at the age of 46, and my sister to cancer at age 24. In addition, I am an emergency medicine physician who sees tragedy every day. Therefore, I know, more than most, the pain of tragedy and longshots. I could let this paralyze me, but I don't. I choose, to the best of my ability, to allow my children the same freedoms that I had as a child growing up, when I was taking the train by the 7th grade, and riding my bike by myself by the age of 9. I choose to give my children freedom.

What a cool guy, embracing life with his eyes wide open. Good luck to him, and good luck to you, dear reader, as you seem to be on the same journey. And then good luck convincing your friends and spouse to join you.

You're going to need it.

A Free-Ranger writes:

I'm a mom of a 13-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl and I'm ashamed of how paranoid I am. The news keeps you in constant fear of your child being abducted and raped and eaten, etc. I was a kid who took two buses to get to my Catholic School as early as age 7. And I did it all by myself. My friends and I wandered all over the city, and as long as we were home by dark, we could do whatever we wanted. Without cell phones! Now, here I am, with a teenager, and I get an upset tummy when I watch him walk with his friends to junior high each day. What's wrong with our society? What's wrong with me? Here I am, a formerly fearless adult who went everywhere I wanted as a kid, and I'm too paranoid to let my teenager walk to the store. I'm ashamed that I've allowed society to shape me into a worrier. Yes, there are predators. But they aren't everywhere and I need to get over myself. Fast. Before I raise a scaredy-cat son and paranoid daughter. We're gonna have a whole generation of skittish people if we don't give our kids some space, starting with mine. I'm gonna go kick them out of the house on this sunny afternoon and let them wander. (But they better answer their cell phones.)

All kids are different, as are all parents (for better or worse), but if you're reading this book, chances are you are probably wondering how to start weaning yourself off excess worry and giving your kids some old-fashioned freedom. There are no hard-and-fast timetables and, alas, no guarantees of which of these will work for you, but consider the following suggestions:

Free-Range Baby Step: Cross the street with your school-age child, without holding hands. Make 'em look around at the traffic.

Free-Range Brave Step: Let your little bikers, starting at age six or so, ride around the block a couple times, beyond where you can see them. Hang tight!

One Giant Leap for Free-Range Kind: Drop off your third- or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour. So there.

Is there one single reason we are so much more scared than our parents? One person, place, or thing that left us so shaken that we spend literally four times as much time supervising our kids than our own moms and dads did in 1975? Yes, and I'll give you a hint:

It has white hair, seems to be on CNN about twenty-six hours a day, and has piercing blue eyes so brimming with empathy that you want to hold him tight and co-parent that baby of his.

Of course, it's not just Anderson Cooper that's driving us crazy with fear about crime. But he's part of the problem, just like cable news is, and local news is, and whatever we call the “news” that clickbait leads us to is. And also Law and Order , and Law and Orde r, and Law and Order , and the other Law and Order . The one with the special victims. Or, as TV historian Robert Thompson says, “The Law and Order for people who like to see crimes that are grossly sexually fetishized and practiced on children or vulnerable adults.”

What's not to like?

The problem with all these shows, from the news to the dramas ripped from the news, is that they present us with a world so focused on the least common, most horrific crimes that we get a totally skewed picture of what it's like out there. How skewed? Let's take a look at one week's TV offerings. Not whatever's on YouTube's Beheading Channel. (There must be one, right?) Just plain-old TV.

Well, hmm. During the particular week I looked at, you could watch a double murder on The Mentalist . That's nice. Then it says there's a “dismembered, headless body” discovered on Bones . I guess Bones did some test marketing and realized that a merely dismembered body might lose some viewers. (“Forget it! If the head's still attached, I'm not watching.”) Then there was CSI: NY . The episode I watched showed, oh, a guy's stomach sliced open because he swallowed a key. And a body dredged up from a swamp. Then there was a woman almost drowned by a madman in a bathtub, but she survived—only to stumble around and accidentally impale her breast on a towel hook. (I hate it when that happens.) On the local news right after that, there was a guy on fire, and a guy who plunged to death, naked. And that night's Law and Order re-run featured a fourteen-year-old girl raped by a Serbian war criminal. Well, we didn't see the actual rape. But we saw her going, “Mph! Mphmmph!” through the duct tape over her mouth as the leering guy reached for her thigh. (She was, of course, bound with a phone cord—like anyone still has a cord phone—and blindfolded.)

I'll get to real news shows in a minute, because we all know how they can make you feel totally depressed about the world. But less attention has been paid to the fact that even these so-called entertainment shows (Rape! Bondage! Towel-hook impaling! That's entertainment!) end up changing our whole outlook.