The growing backlash against over-parenting:
That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.
No shit. This is a general disease in society, mind you. Both namy-pambyism and an inability understand actual risk. No, odds of you or anyone you know being killed by a terrorist are so close to zero as to essentially indistinguishable. On the other hand, getting in a car is dangerous, and so is crossing the street. Oh, and flying? Far safer than driving. (Although less convenient, thanks to paranoia driven security theater.)
I was a free range kid. I walked or took the bus to school. When I took gymnastics classes as a kid, I took a half hour bus ride—I didn’t get driven. I had to be home for supper and for bedtime, and I had to let my parents know more or less what I was doing, but other than that, I was free to do what I wanted with my time. If I wanted to join the soccer team, or take classes, my parents would support me in that, but they didn’t rush around signing me up for everything. And when the bus didn’t go where I needed to get for soccer games, my father would drive me. But only if I couldn’t get myself there myself.
In my teens I wandered through the Bangladeshi city of Dhaka by myself, as well as Kathmandu, Calcutta and Bangkok. It never seemed to occur to my parents that I was some hothouse flower who couldn’t handle himself, and indeed, I did handle myself and I learned valuable lessons in doing so.
When I went to University in the early nineties, I already found that the suburban raised children who were my peers had had fear bred in. Oh, they were great at high school style social politics, in-groups and out-groups, but put them on the street in downtown Toronto at 1 am, and they quaked in fear. (For the record, I can think of few places safer than downtown Toronto at 1am, including many cities I’ve spent time in at 1pm.)
You can’t live in fear all the time. If you do, you don’t live. And if you make your kids live in fear, then you take away their ability to live and turn them into hothouse flowers, scared of their own shadows.
Celsius 233
I was also a “free range kid” (good one) who grew up in (at the time) very rural Locust Valley on Long Island.
I’m appalled at the attitude of Americans; they want security from womb to tomb; why is that?
I just always wanted to be free to explore this wonderful life to it’s depths.
Celsius 233
Fear is a thief; don’t let it steal from you.
Lex
Yeah, the land of the free and the home of the brave is full of coddled sissies, with at least a full generation raised on nothing but fear.
tjfxh
By and large, Americans are paranoiacs. The GOP has figured this out and used fear very effectively — along with greed, of course.
mommybrain
I agree wholeheartedly. My mommy friends are aghast that I even let my 10 year old and his friend sit in another part of the theater when we see movies. I’m always telling them you can’t live your life as if the worst thing in the world will happen in 20 seconds.
Yet…
In my life, my parents’ best friends and their 18 month old were kidnapped from their house in the dead of night by escaped killers from Oregon. They were rescued, unharmed, 40+ hours later by CHP officers; my brother chased down and captured his friend who had just murdered my brother’s girlfriend’s sister in her kitchen because she wanted to break up with him;
a roommate of many years ago was killed when lightening struck her house as she was vacuuming.
I won’t tell you about the bear that my Sprout came face to face with in our front yard.
But still, I agree with you and not snarkily. I think my quota of weird experience is used up for this lifetime.
Ian Welsh
Hi Mommybrain, glad to see you here.
TW Andrews
I think my quota of weird experience is used up for this lifetime.
And then some. Wow.
nihil obstet
You can’t live in fear all the time. If you do, you don’t live.
I’d like to agree, but I’m afraid the causation may run the other way. Lots of Americans don’t live, or at least live only vicariously through TV. Fear is one of the ways to feel alive, along with celebrity worship, of course. Marginal threats are a drama of control. You don’t want to be afraid of driving, because that’s a limitation without any emotional payback. On the other hand, obsessing over strangers coming after your child gives you a strong emotional experience, an active fantasy life, a sense of control, and a feeling of being extraordinarily good at family relationships.
And it’s all very actively encouraged by the tools of the propaganda state.
Lori
It’s all about narcissism – the belief that just the physical being of you and your loved ones is worth so very much that no risk is worthwhile. The whole scenario gets set up to pump up people’s ego that go along with the fearful scenarios. “oh, we would never let our child do that!!” Parents who do let their child do “that” are made to feel uncaring.
I raised a free range kid and he’s glad to this day. By the time he was 6, he could take an LA bus to school by himself. By the time he was 8, I could call him at home after school and he could run to the grocery store for me to pick up what we needed for dinner. There is no place in the world that he’s afraid to go.
We are a very narcissistic nation and we’re on our second narcissistic personality disorder president in a row. We love this stuff.
Carolyn Kay
I wonder if the helicoptering has a lot to do with people having fewer kids.
They think they’re protecting their investment.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
jo6pac
Yep it’s sad, I walked about half mile when I was 5 until 7 to school. Then we moved and I had a bike about 2 miles or ride the bus. I only rode the bus when it was winter and winter isn’t a big thing in SF Bay Area, Calif. It’s amazing when I watch parents today but then again I’m not a parent. Creative has been killed by they way they are treated and never having to work for anything. Oh well they’re all about to get a hard leason when this $ catches up to Amerika.
dave anderson
Agreed — by the time I was 11, I had to report basically whom I was with, a broad plan for the day (we’re playing kick the can or going to the park etc) and any expectation that I was coming home after dinner but before dark. That gave me about a 15 to 20 mile radius of action as that was about as far as I could ride my bike on a Saturday morning and come back before dark after having some fun. And if anything major changed/needed help, I could always count on my parents picking me up after a phone call, no questions asked until we got home.
I have an 11 month old, and I sure as hell hope that I’ll be able to give her the same basic freedom I had. I had the chance to make mildly bad decisions instead of the really really bad decisions as a teenager because I knew I had opportunities to have fun and think indepedently
mommybrain
Hi Ian, glad to have found you again.
Caren
I let my 9 y/o son run up the street to get laundry quarters, a quart of milk at 7/11, or to pick up dinner at the Mexican place a coulple blocks away.
We had one failed attempted mugging by a teen on a bike that my son OUTRAN.
He walked a mile to camp this summer.
I trust him. My biggest fear when I let him run errands is that other adults will stop him and demand to know where his parents are. That other adults will call the cops on him b/c he’s out on his own a block or two from home. B/c the helicopterers will try to force those of us who trust our kids to play by their rules.
anonymous
No kids here, but I do have neices and nephews (only nieces locally) from 2 to 14. I was blown away at how attached these kids are to their parents watching them grow up. Almost never out of sight of mommy or daddy or another kid’s mommy or daddy (as long as their parenting skills were considered up to muster) until almost age 10, and always supervised, always play dates, never going to a friend’s house alone…
As suffocating as it must be for the kids, I just can’t see how the parents can handle all that together time. (The worst part is being at a park or coffee shop or whatever when 2 or more of those stay at home moms are blabitty blabitty blabbing with the kids nearby). Last weekend I went to meet some family at a restaurant for brunch and happened to park across the street from my brother’s minivan a block or so away from the restaurant. Someone must have left something in the minivan because the 14 y.o. and the 11 y.o. girls were walking down the street toward me. It was so wierd to see them w/o an adult in public. I almost didn’t recognize them they seemed so teenagerish instead of like children. And I have to confess I started thinking about someone abducting them. Maybe because it seems like when there are so few unsupervised kids, the perps will just jump at the first opportunity. I was very surprised by my own reaction.
When I was a kid we were never even told much about child abductors. We were told not to take strangers from candy, but nobody ever explained what the hell a grown up would want to do with a dumb little kid, or why ANYBODY would give away candy unless it was under threat of “trick or treat”. Our community pool had “away” swimming meets in the evenings in places where I never could have found my way home from, and we were expected to find rides home on our own. The swim team folks never paid any attn to how anyone got there or got home. I was painfully shy and my siblings always ditched me to get their own rides home (usually with a pit stop at a Hot Shoppes). So I was usually one of the last people left when some complete stranger, often one without kids, would come up to me and say “little boy, do you need a ride home?”, and I’d have to go with them. That was pretty neglectful, of course, and these days those thoughtful strangers would have been attacked with torches and pitchforks, all sorts of people would have been fired from their jobs, and CPS would have maybe got involved with my parents. But back in the 70’s no one gave it a second thought.
anonymous
“We were told not to take strangers from candy” or “candy from strangers” either. Jerry Blank and Chuck Noblet really messed up my brains.
lambert strether
Quaking in fear in Toronto???
apishapa
I was one of five kids. Pretty much on my own. I lived in a small town and just ran all over the place. I came out fine.
I have four kids. I am raising them alone, and they are expected to be pretty independent and self-sufficuient. They play sports, but I work 45 miles away, so they have to get themselves to practices. It’s only a block to the school. They all were in 4-H and that’s about it. We go fishinhg every weekend in the summer, unless they have a ball game.That’s aboout it. I still live in a small town. I’ve never missed a game, concert, art show or teacher conference, becuase I go to work early and leave late to make up the time. That flexibility is why I stay working there.
I know where my kids are because there are only about 200 people in this town, there are only a few places they can go and everyone tells on them anyway. My kids are all doing fine, and are more self-relaint and mature than others I see.
My neice in Denver has one four year old girl. She is in swimming, karate, gymnastics, pre-school, ballet, etc. My neice runs herself ragged taking that girl to all her activities. She works for the Fed Govt and is expected to work 50 hours a week, every week. I think it is kind of ridiculous. I would pick one or two things that the girl likes best and say, that’s it. But it’s her life.
jimbo
I am an (about to be) new parent. I dearly hope that we have the strength to resist this absurd fearmongering. But the problem is, you defy societies’ prejudices at your peril. I fear that if allow my 5 or 7, or even 10 or 12 year old child to walk down the street alone, I’ll be reported to the authorities and they’ll be taken away. This is not, I think, an unfounded fear…