Parenting, 1980s style

Lenore Skenazy is the mother who in 2008 gained fame, some would say notoriety, for letting her nine-yearold son ride the New York City subway alone, without a cellphone. Specifically, he rode the Lexington Avenue line 25 blocks and then hopped on the 34th Street crosstown bus, which especially in modern-day Manhattan is an incredibly safe thing to do. And yet some of the reactions she received were utterly incredulous, if not furious. What if something had happened?

Skenazy is evangelical about letting kids off the leash. She makes it her business to chronicle the absurd ways in which modern governments — schools, child services agencies, po- lice — interfere with parents who wish to afford their children a degree of independence that was utterly routine a single generation ago, based on no justification except that “something might happen,” and despite the fact, as recently reported in the Washington Post, that fewer children are murdered or go missing today than at any point in recorded history.

Letting your kids go to the park, or walk to and from the park, or leaving them in the car while you nip into the store to grab milk, can easily attract officialdom’s attention. Most recently two Maryland siblings, age 10 and six, were apprehended by police on the way home from the park and taken into the custody of child protective services, which launched an investigation into their parents. And it happens here too. Police in Squamish, B.C., recently responded to a complaint of a four-year-old boy playing without any clothes on … in his own front yard.

Even more ridiculously, the National Post’s Joe O’Connor recently reported the story of an 11-year-old Calgary boy detained by security at a Lego store for the crime of … being there, by himself, intending to buy $200 worth of Lego. “Our primary concern is for children’s safety, and as such, we have a policy regarding unaccompanied minors in our stores,” a Lego spokesman told O’Connor. “As this customer was under the age of 12 and unaccompanied, our store staff followed our guidelines and alerted mall security.” When 11-year-olds at malls are considered dangerous, you know something has gone well off the rails.

Skenazy has launched something of a movement: Free Range Parenting, she calls it. In the wake of the Maryland case, she organized a Take Our Children to the Park and Let Them Walk Home by Themselves Day. It’s enormously well-intentioned and is likely doing a lot of good as parents declare themselves “free rangers.” Indeed, policy-makers and enforcers now routinely use the term “free ranging” in discussing what is and isn’t appropriate. “A 10- and a six-year-old out free ranging is one thing, but a seven- and a three-year-old is another thing,” one councilman opined on Facebook with respect to the Maryland case.

Focusing on the term has a perverse effect of making it seem these parents are doing something bold, or experimental — as if they’ve adopted a lifestyle that the state, and mall security forces, must either come to grips with or not; as if they’re offering their children unprecedented levels of freedom, to prove some kind of point. And it’s a point worth proving. But what they are really doing is abandoning smothering level of micromanaged parenting that’s a very recent and baffling invention. Police and child services agencies and mall cops and politicians don’t need to adapt; they don’t need to think long and hard. They just need to mind their bloody business and leave them kids alone.

‘Free-range parenting’ isn’t new. It’s how everyone was

raised 30 years ago