I may have been the most regulated child in my class, but that comes down to things such as “instead of spending one or two hours playing in the park across from the school with my classmates, after school I had to shoot home, let myself in and do my housework”.
So… a couple hundred not-so-free range kids, a handful of latch key ones. The closest to a heloparented classmate I had was a girl whose imbecile of a mother treated her as an art project rather than a child. She wasn’t allowed to choose her own clothing, or in fact knew how to put clothes on herself, at an age when the rest of us were fighting our mothers tooth and nail for the right to wear the fashionable stuff even if it made us look like wrapped presents.
Cite that the parents in that case “believed in free range parenting?” As opposed to, say, being high as balls for a day and coming up with excuses after the fact?
There is a happy medium. Another poster above mentioned the technology we have at our disposal to allow kids some taste of independence while still being able to check in. Everything I’ve read promoting the modern concept of “free range parenting” includes having the kids be able and willing, even required to keep in touch remotely. There are still plenty of parents out there who are simply neglectful, checked out rather than giving conscious thought to how to loosen the reins and allow their children character-building experiences while minimizing risk.
The mom in Florida who recently got arrested for letting her little boy walk to the park alone is, to me, a perfect example of someone doing it the right way and still getting in a heap of trouble for it. It’s appalling and as a society, we ought to be resisting this trend in criminal justice. http://fox6now.com/2014/07/29/mother-arrested-after-allowing-7-year-old-son-to-go-to-park-alone/
You know, the last time my neighborhood looked like a neighborhood, was two winters ago when we got a really good snow and all the kids put down their video game controllers to marvel at this strange white substance falling from the sky. (I’m in Texas)
Seriously, I was driving home from work when all this was going on. A flood of memories came rushing through from my own childhood, to remind me: THIS IS WHAT A TYPICAL NEIGHBORHOOD IS SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE!!
Also, I had no fucking clue, until that day, how many children actually lived in my 'hood. It was beautiful. Even if it did only last for a minute.
Free range parenting isn’t a fad. Not letting children out of your sight is the fad. If it continues for another 10 years then maybe I’ll start to think it’s the norm, but it hasn’t been going on long enough for me to think of it as normal. It’s kinda demented, actually. And the “free range” movement is just normal parents re-asserting norms before society goes completely insane and actually codifies into law the faddish parenting style of today. At least for now, there are no laws against letting your kids roam free, although you’ll face some societal harassment and possibly some police and governmental harassment as well. Since the law is actually on free range parents’ side, now is the best time to push back.
In fact there’s less reason to fret- both because of technological advances and because it’s easier to get good data on safety and dangers, which ought to make people less likely to panic. Of course it never really works that way, but in theory…
I have never seen Dopers lose sight of this.
Quick bottom line? People are terrible at evaluating risk. Driving children around is much more dangerous than letting them hang around at a playground unsupervised and friends and family members are a much bigger threat to them than random child predators, but precisely because we drive and see friends and family members on a regular basis, we get used to them and don’t consider them to be threats. And of course many of these threats, even when considered in their proper context, are still extremely small.
I’ll add that free range parenting is hardly even a thing. It’s seen as a minor counter-trend that runs opposite to the way everybody else is supposedly raising their kids. I’m sure there’s plenty of (sigh) “helicopter parenting” out there, but it’s not really how everybody does it. It might be how the people newspapers tend to write about raise their kids, but that’s not a representative group. Or to put that a shorter way, do you think there are a lot of poor helicopter parents? I don’t. People started writing about helicopter parents because it was an annoying-sounding phenomenon that would get pageviews and maybe an exaggerated version of a real thing. Now they’re writing about an opposite trend that the audience is expected to applaud. It’s not something taking the nation by storm and I doubt it’s a threat to children.
I agree she shouldn’t have been arrested. And the child should not have been put straight into foster care or anything (it’s not clear if that happened or not in this case). She should, however, have gotten a warning and some visits from a social worker.
Three quibbles with that:
(1) You make this assertion about “children” generically; but there’s no way to tell what age you’re talking about. If you mean 13 year olds, then sure, of course. If you mean two year olds, that’s insane, and I seriously doubt that’s what you intended. Somewhere in the middle is a grey area, but when you make such a nebulous assertion without staking out an age you are arguing is old enough, it’s essentially an unfalsifiable claim.
(2) Why are those the binary choices? Why can’t parents walk or bike to the playground with their kids? For three years until last October, my kids were not being driven around by me, because I didn’t have a car. But that didn’t mean I let them walk/bike around on their own either (other than the oldest, once he hit middle school), and it didn’t mean they got cooped up inside. The whole family* just went outside and walked places. What a concept!
(3) I have to chuckle that the two most common retorts I get are:
(3a) “Driving them anywhere is what’s really dangerous.”
(3b) [in response to the data I provided on the massive reduction in child mortality since 1970 due to “unintentional injuries”] “That’s just because it’s so much safer now to ride in cars.”
Umm…ok?
*Seriously, it’s like there’s some fundamental assumption that parents are hopeless couch potatoes regardless, but we should try to forestall that condition for kids (until they are parents too, I guess) by letting them run around outside unsupervised.
There’s a certain amount of truth to that, but I really don’t see a problem with there being an educated subculture within the larger culture that has certain norms and gets a fair amount of attention in the media (since they are the ones disproportionately reading said media). Others outside that elite group should not be totally ignored, but I don’t think they need to get equally represented, any more than we need to, in the name of fairness, have more words written in the business media about ways to get the best deals at dollar stores than we do about mutual funds or IRAs.
This subculture, it should be noted, has clearly already been doing the best job of keeping kids safe from lethal injuries. Just look at some of the graphs in the PDF I linked in the OP. In richer counties, such injuries are far lower than in poorer ones; and in poorer (mostly red) states, they are far higher than in the more affluent and better educated Northeastern and West Coast states.
And part of that, whenever you are dealing with educated elites who have the most influence on policymakers (or are policymakers themselves), is going to be taking the safer social norms developed in that class and, more and more, making them the legal expectation of poorer people (similar to how zoning standards and building codes evolve). This will not always be fair, and it should not be enforced in a draconian or racially disparate way. But it’s not a bad direction overall to move.
As for whether this free range “counter-trend” is “minor” or “hardly even a thing”, let me quote an email I got from a good friend who is a college professor and parent of two, after I sent him some of the same info and arguments:
If you are a well educated liberal who reads stuff like *Slate *and The Atlantic, listens to NPR and various podcasts, has certain people in your Twitter timeline (I got into it with Jamelle Bouie a couple days ago on this subject), etc., this “free range” deal is a pretty major counter-trend that threatens to pick up steam and sweep up a lot of the literati if no one pushes back (which is obviously what I’m trying to do). The secondary impact of that would be to stop enforcing these kinds of standards on others outside this elite group, which I also think would be lamentable and could have a much wider impact (as in, a lot of deaths–to go back even to the levels of the '90s would be awful).
Then why bother asking if I meant it that way? Who is advocating “free range parenting” for two-year-olds? What would that even mean?
It’s a comparison of risks, not binary options. Come on.
Those two points are not mutually exclusive. You can make a dangerous activity safer.
In other words it’s a really big deal to a really small and specific group of people who are prone to obsessing over things like this. Which is another way of saying it’s not a big deal at all.
I was pretty helicoptered. It wasn’t a big deal in the scheme of things. I don’t have many stories about doing dangerous things as a tween or getting approached by weirdos when I was alone, which I don’t see as a bad thing. But then, I’ve never known anyone as sheltered as the the people that the rest of the people on this board seem to know, who were forced to stay inside all day. My parents wouldn’t have allowed us to go to the park alone at eight years old, but that didn’t mean we didn’t go. It meant that our mom went with us and sat on the bench with the other parents. Nobody was embarrassed because all the moms were there.
Sometimes I think the town I grew up in got on board with being protective earlier than a lot of other places. We had plastic playground equipment, homemade birthday treats for the class were banned, the school would call home if a parent didn’t report their kid absent that morning, so there was no chance a kid could go missing in the morning and have it gone unnoticed until the end of the school day. And this was all way back in the early 90s.
There is no point in treating this as some sort of single spectrum of helicopter vs free range. Some of the “new standards” in child safety are a really good idea. Helmets for bikes, sleds, skateboards. Concussions are brain damage. We are not somehow wussing out by trying more enthusiastically to prevent them. Car seats/boosters until 7 are a good idea. We weren’t better off when our parents let us re-create pro-wrestling matches in the back seat.
And it’s not like latch-key kids were always learning tons of independence. The cooking a kid learned to do was often frozen pizzas and mac n’ cheese, kids snacked a lot more than when mom was monitoring, they watched more crappy TV, etc., etc.
I also think it’s good that 8 year olds aren’t setting off fireworks, playing with jarts, or climbing jungle gyms installed over naked poured concrete. Those were really pretty significant risks that weren’t worth the reward.
There’s no point in comparing any of this with driving, because driving has a pretty concrete reward to balance the slight risk. Putting some fucking mulch down, or strapping on a helmet, or having an adult there while you set off fireworks do not.
At the same time, kids absolutely need more autonomy, more space, more active engagement with the world. But this is really one of those cases where it’s so easy to exaggerate the opposition that no one can even have a conversation about the details–it’s one side saying "I can’t believe you let him boil water with a stripped AC cable, a set of keys, and coffee cup (my husband’s grandfather set him doing this . . . ) and the other side saying “I can’t believe you go down the slide with your 8 year old!”
That was called a Beehive and they were all over the place when I was a kid. It was my favourite monkeybars thing. I haven’t seen one in years, thanks for posting. Now I’m going to watch for one and totally go play on it. I’m a 40 year old woman.
Slacker, there’s more to raising kids than keeping them safe though. Being an adult isn’t safe, and it’s not safe at all if you are thrown out of the nest without already having learned some survival skills.
If the change has simply been that now instead of kids roaming free at age 5, to now being allowed to roam free at age 12, then I guess it’s no biggie in the grand scheme of things. But if the age we let kids roam free gets much higher, we will seriously need to revisit the age of majority, look into raising it back to 21 or something. Because you just can’t shelter kids until high school and then expect them to “cram” for real life in just four years and then “bye bye, going into the real world now, thanks for the help mom and dad!” Teaching kids independence is a process that starts pretty much as soon as they can walk(that’s kinda why they learn to walk, their first act of independence is to go and get something rather than point at it so their parents can get it for them). You gradually give them more and more slack on the umbilical cord until hopefully by high school they could survive without you if something should happen(and with parents waiting longer and longer to have kids, that’s a very realistic worry).
What I see a lot of parents doing today is smothering kids, protecting them from all harm, not letting them fight their own battles or make their own mistakes, until they either rebel or the parents go “oh crap! My baby’s about to get her learner’s permit! I’m not ready for this! She’s not ready for this!” ANd then they just end up having to grow up all at once.
For me, the main concern is that the overprotective parents are trying to criminalize normal parenting, and while the law is not on their side, an increasingly risk averse society is moving their way. It should not be headline news when a 9-year old takes the subway home, and parents should not be harrassed and then charged(only to have the charges dropped) because they let their kid play at the playground unsupervised.
Basically, it’s one generation calling the previous generation unfit parents. Although they rationalize it by saying the world is a more dangerous place, which is just factually wrong.
Thank you for that testimony, Omega! I remember thinking in the '70s that it was insane to have high monkey bars and jungle gyms over concrete or asphalt instead of grass or something, even dirt. Then later they switched to bark or rubber pellets, and I felt vindicated for my childhood caution.
I especially appreciate that your story illustrates the false dichotomy of being “free range” or sitting inside all the time (or getting driven to faraway activities, I guess).
I thought the point was clear, but I’ll try again since you are unclear on it (or being disingenuous, can’t tell which). You said “Driving children around is much more dangerous than letting them hang around at a playground unsupervised”. The clear implication of this IMO (please correct me if I’m wrong) is “Marley thinks it’s okay to let children hang around at playgrounds unsupervised, and regrets that so many other parents (and/or police) do not agree”.
But it’s completely unclear as to what position you are actually taking. No one but the very extreme would either be against a thirteen year old going to a playground unsupervised, or be for letting a two year old do so (the latter case is even more insane, so maybe I should have said four or five). Therefore you are somewhere in between. Hey, so am I: I guess we agree! Except that seems doubtful.
So I’ll state my position very clearly and specifically:
I don’t personally feel comfortable with letting my kids do this until they are eleven. For others’ kids, I feel there should be social disapprobation for letting nine year olds do it, state intervention (not including, for a first offense, arrest or removal of the child) for letting eight or seven year olds do it, and more severe actions for children six or younger.
Like all age guidelines for anything, you run into the problem of different kids maturing at different ages, and of course the issue of being just barely before a birthday or whatever. But those seem to me like good compromises between individual parents’ rights to choose to parent differently than others on the one hand, and society’s responsibility to protect children on the other.
Where do you stand?
ETA: Manda Jo, great post. We might not agree on every detail, but I really like the way you approach the issue.
I didn’t express regret for anything (that’s an odd choice of words). I compared the risks of two different things. You’re right that I didn’t specify ages and I’m not going to do that now either, but I thought the general point was pretty obvious: if you have a child who is reasonably mature and responsible, yes, they should be allowed to play outside on their own from time to time.
I think this is a horrible idea, and the good news is that it probably won’t happen because police and child protection agencies would be so swamped with panicked calls that they wouldn’t be able to act on them anyway. No, I don’t think it’s sensible to get the government involved if you see an eight years old playing on their own at a playground. The odds of anything bad happening are low, and the consequences of getting child services involved can be high.
That seems like a damn good reason not to call child services on someone else’s children for something you might not let your own children do.
So you’re just going to stick with nebulous pablum that no one, including me, can dispute. “Puppies are cute.” “A summer breeze is pleasant.” Really taking a brave stand over there, **Marley **m’boy!
Again, you’re being disingenuous (making me into a straw man) or realllly struggling with comprehension. I said I won’t let my kids do it until they are eleven; I said I believed authorities should be called if other people’s kids eight or younger are doing it. I’ve got to think you must possess the basic math skills to see that there is a significant span there (anyone who has kids, or works with them regularly, knows there’s a *huge *gap developmentally speaking between eight and eleven) of “I wouldn’t let my own kids do it at that age, but I wouldn’t call the authorities on other kids that age doing it”.
Aha, this is a revealing comment! I have seen a lot of this, of older generations getting their noses bent out of shape. Grandma wants to donate her old crib, but the new parents reject it (rightly) because it does not meet modern safety standards. Today’s educated mothers are much more likely to breastfeed babies, and to refuse to let them “cry it out” in a distant nursery. They look for healthier foods for their children, and the dads spend quality time with the kids instead of sitting in the easy chair with the pipe and newspaper.
So yes, it’s hard for the older generation not see this as an implicit rebuke. Well, tough shit. Those mortality statistics show that the rebuke is deserved. Or perhaps the softer, nicer (and more patronizing) view is “well, you didn’t really know better back then”. Not easy to hear from those whippersnappers you ignored all through their childhood, I’m sure.
And you’re right that the rationalization of a “more dangerous world” is bogus. What you may be missing though is that I think this, more than anything, is mainly stated for the purpose of softening the blow to that older generation. Instead of saying “wow, you fucked up, good thing I survived” they can just paper it over with this “more dangerous world now” claim and everyone can feel better or something.
I think this would be a good idea, to delay the age of majority. I went back to school less than a decade ago, and took a course on the psychology of adolescence. I learned that the scientific definition of adolescence in that field has been divided into early/middle/late, with the “late” extending into the early twenties. And as someone who lives in a college town, I can aver that “college kids” are not really adults except in a narrow legal sense.
Pew’s portrait of Millennials strikes me as indicating that this is already happening informally, and with mostly positive results from my perspective:
