of their own. I don't like to play the fear card, so let me just list them really quickly: depressiondiabetesobesityaxietyrickets. We're talking problems that can crop up when kids don't get any time to run around, explore, or just do something for fun without us turning it into an adult-led Enriching Activity.
That's not really how we want to raise our kids, is it? It's time to believe in them again!
So in this book you'll find a skeptical look at the hovering advice we've been given, an equally skeptical look at the devices designed to help us do that hovering, and all sorts of support and facts and (God willing) fun boiled down into The Ten Free-Range Commandments.
Well, at least that was the idea. But then it turned out there were a whole bunch of other issues I wanted to get to, from how to ignore media hysteria to how to stop worrying about every little parenting decision, to how to get a kid to put down the device more powerful than the giant computers that put a man on the moon (or did they???) and go have fun with a stick. Pretty soon, there were Eighteen Commandments. Let's just say Moses had a tougher editor.
How do kids grow when we can loosen our grip and Free-Range? Let me tell you two stories.
My friends’ daughter Carrie is a special needs kid. She goes to a special school, special camp, special therapists. But one day, out of the blue, she asked her mother if she could go get a slice of pizza on her own, not far from their apartment in Manhattan.
Her shocked mother said, “Uh … OK, but why not get the pizza and bring it home to eat?” “No!” said Carrie, sixteen at the time. “Other people eat at the pizza place, and I want to, too!”
So, bless her, my friend said OK, and Carrie went off by herself a block or two away. When she returned, her mother was waiting for her outside, but couldn't even see her coming. She'd been so worried, she'd run out of the house forgetting her glasses. Then Carrie zoomed into view, glowing, grinning, and gave her mom a hug.
“What made you want to do this?” her mother asked.
Carrie had seen her friend Izzy on TV, talking about his subway ride.
“I thought if he could do it, I could do it too.” Darn tootin’.
Story 2: More recently I visited an elementary school where all the kids had been doing The Let Grow Project, a homework assignment where they have to go home and do something new, on their own, without a parent. Usually the kids bike, bake, run an errand … things most of us did without a second thought.
The delighted principal told me she could see The Project's impact almost immediately. For instance, she said, the kids weren't sticking out their feet as much.
I had no idea what she was talking about. “You mean, they're not tripping each other anymore?”
No, she said. “They're not sticking their feet out for their teacher to tie their shoes.”
Go Free-Range and I can't promise immediate happiness, responsibility, pizza-buying, or shoe-tying. But I can say that the fears so rampant in our society aren't in line with reality anymore, and when we start to realize that, our kids reap the benefit. Free-Range is a way to fight the real-world consequences of imaginary or insanely inflated dangers. Do that and we can give our kids a different kind of childhood.
They say the first step toward change is realizing that you really want to change, at least a little bit, so kudos to you for picking up this book. A bigger kudos to you for reading it. (Picking up a book only gets you so far.) All children deserve parents who love them, teach them, trust them, and then … let go of the handlebars.
Commandment 1Know When to Worry Play Dates and Axe Murderers: How to Tell The Difference
It was one of those chaotic parenting moments. The ones when you have to make a decision—fast.
Isabelle, the twelve-year-old daughter of my friends Jeff and Sue had just been in the middle school play. She was going with the cast to the local Friendly's for ice cream, along with several dozen kids and parents. Clearly this was the suburban equivalent of the Vanity Fair Oscar party, which is why Isabelle's little sister, ten-year-old Kaitlin, begged to go along, too.
My friends said yes, even though they'd promised to look after Kaitlin's friend, another ten-year-old. Let's call her Baby M.
This gets a tiny bit confusing, but bear with me. My friend Sue had to peel off, so Jeff dropped all three girls off at Friendly's, gave them money for ice cream, and told them he'd come back to pick them up in half an hour.
So now, instead of going straight to Kaitlin's house as planned, ten-year-old Baby M was at an ice cream shop with her friend, her friend's older sister, and another fifty or sixty riotously happy schoolchildren she knew. Being a responsible girl, she called her mom to tell her where she was.
“WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?” screamed Baby M's mom. “You're WHERE? By YOURSELF?” She slammed down the phone and called Sue and Jeff to yell, “How dare you do this to my child!”
Now look, I'm a mom too, and when plans change, I'd like to get a call. But there's a difference between being mildly annoyed and hair-standing-straight-up hysterical. The crazed mom barely had time to hang up the phone before she ran out to her car and sped over to Friendly's. She scooped up her kid—yes, leaving little Kaitlin friendless (at Friendly's!)—but not before declaring to the world, or at least to a whole lot of ice cream eaters: “This is NOT how I'm raising my daughter!”
No indeed! She's raising her to be a hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguisher—just like she is. (Which, by the way, is why I've changed everyone's name in this story. I don't want to make a crazed mom crazier.)
Days went by, and this mom refused to answer any of Jeff and Sue's apologetic emails. Why would she? To her mind, they had done the moral equivalent of dragging her daughter into a forest filled with wolves, snakes, and unshaven guys lurching around with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a pickax in the other.
Baby M's mom thinks her daughter is just very lucky that nothing bad happened to her that scary, scary night. She also thinks that, as a mom, she was doing the only rational, caring thing: making sure her ten-year-old was supervised every second, every place, every day by a pre-approved adult.
How dare anyone subject her daughter to that unscheduled ice cream shop experience? Mama didn't approve of it beforehand, she was not consulted, she didn't check the menu for appropriate foods, she didn't know who the girl might talk to—and it's quite possible that while there, her daughter might have had to go to the bathroom. God knows what would have happened to her there! (Cue the unshaven lurchers.)
Anyway, my point—and maybe I'm starting to sound as unhinged as that mom—is this: a lot of parents today are really bad at assessing risk. They see no difference between letting their children walk to school and letting them walk through a firing range. When they picture their kids riding their bikes to a birthday party, they see them dodging Mack trucks with brake problems. To let their children play unsupervised in a park at age eight or ten or even thirteen seems about as responsible as throwing them in the shark tank at Sea World with their pockets full of meatballs.
Any risk is seen as too much risk. A crazy, not-to-be-taken, see-you-on-the-local-news risk. And the only thing these parents don't seem to realize is that the greatest risk of all just might be trying to raise a child who never encounters any risks.
Not
