Free-range kids
AColorado bill that seeks to allow unfettered ‘free-range kids’ passed a floor vote last week in the House of Representatives. Your take?
This is such an intriguing bill. I am perplexed as to why the government has a say in how children are raised…talk about invasion. Come on. Is this really where we’ve landed? Agh!
The established parameters of child neglect recognize that there must be a well-defined pattern of behavior (or lack thereof) that has ultimately caused harm to the child or children in question. Letting your kid play in the mud, go down to the park and meet up with their friends, or find adventure in the mountains is up to you! I would HOPE that as a parent, you would understand the risks associated with any of those things and make an informed decision based on your comfort level with your kids’ abilities to handle themselves, know their surroundings, and act appropriately. Understanding those risks and making choices for you and your kids is not synonymous with being negligent or endangering a child.
Not for nothing, but if you’re calling the cops on kids who are on their own out for a run or playing soccer at a park, you need a hobby. I am sorry if that sounds aggressive, but it’s the truth. They’re not your kids and therefore not your concern. As such, they are not the government’s kids and therefore not the government’s responsibility. With all of that said, I don’t know that I will let my kids have free rein in the surrounding neighborhoods and will probably be intentional that they walk or take the bus to school with a specific group of friends. The world we live in is a scary one, but it is completely up to you as a parent to be able to determine how to be safe and what is an acceptable level of risk.
Emily Walsh, emilyallenwalsh@gmail.com
My parents divorced when I was in fourth grade, and my mom worked the day shift as a nurse at Six Flags Over Georgia. On summer mornings, after a cherry Toast’em, I grabbed my bb gun and headed down to the woodpile, looking for copperhead snakes. I would finish the morning by walking the creek to the pond at the culvert, keeping an eye out for water moccasins, playing with crawdads and salamanders, and hollering into the culvert to get an echo.
Later, I would get on my trusty steed — a Huffy single speed. Mom said we couldn’t afford a Schwinn. I would ride down to a friend’s house to jump on his trampoline. Jeffrey broke his arm when he landed between the springs, and I thought it was cool that you could sign his cast. He saved the cast after they cut it off.
Once a nosy neighbor with nothing better to do called my mom and asked her to rein in her son and his friends who were acting like “trailer trash.” She taught me to politely ignore him and said we weren’t doing anything wrong,
A few years later, the world seemed to change a little. A serial killer began strangling children and leaving them in the woods and river not far from my house. Mom instructed us not to get in cars with strangers, but she let us keep roaming. She really had no choice. At Halloween, there were rumors of razor blades in apples. Mom told us not to eat apples. I was good with that — candy was better.
There are hazards at every stage of life. Kids need a reasonable amount of freedom to learn responsibility and independence. Parents need freedom to put food on the table and teach their children. I support the bill.
Andrew Shoemaker, ashoemaker@sgslitigation.com
My kids were once yelled at by a neighbor for playing in the street and being “too loud.” It was a beautiful spring time day and they were doing nothing wrong. Because I live in Gunbarrel, a place where the city and the
county have neglected to provide neighborhood parks, the neighborhood streets are their only option for a game.
I am lucky that I live in a neighborhood with lots of kids that range from infants to high schoolers, and they all seem to look out for each other. Since the age of 5 or 6, I routinely kick them out of the house and into the neighborhood to play with the other kids. Over the years they have become pretty good at entertaining themselves and do all types of activities on their own with the older kids typically assisting the younger ones. They have done things like planning, directing, and organizing school “day off” camps and musical productions, and organizing kid-led cleanups of our local creek. They also play a lot of make-believe. We don’t go out of our way to organize playdates or other social activities for our kids. If they are bored, they need to start knocking on the doors of their friends.
The experience has taught them how to navigate group dynamics, resolve conflict and take responsibility for their own entertainment. Another added benefit is they also have a large support group at school with kids younger and older, and they mentor each other on transitions between grades and look out for each other in social settings.
All kids should have access to freely move about their environments. Unfortunately, the kids that get policed the most when they are walking or playing in their neighborhoods or at parks tend to be children of color. Black and Hispanic children are six times more likely to be killed by the police than white children. It seems silly to have a law for something children and parents have a natural right to do. But, if this bill restrains law enforcement’s discretion on punishing kids for playing, I am all for it.
Doug Hamilton, Hamilton1801@aim.com
It is well established that kids need free, unstructured time to play and explore and some of that should be unsupervised. Despite this, we’ve sheltered kids more and more, scheduling every minute of their day. When some parents go rogue, allowing their kids freedom for frolic and fun, the Karens come a-calling.
In a highly recommended book,
“The Coddling of the American Mind” by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the authors explain that kids yearn to take chances and will continue to push things until they fall, get lost, or fail. This is healthy. Kids are “anti-fragile,” meaning that they become stronger, better-adjusted people by going through stressful situations. We shouldn’t pave the road smooth for our kids. Bumps are healthier.
House bill 1090 enumerates what is not child neglect, including, but not limited to: walking alone to school or the store, staying alone at home, and playing outside. Playing outside? Really? That’s mind-boggling to me now, and when I was a kid, such wording in a bill would have been beyond ludicrous.
My mom left me home alone when I was 5 years old. Thirty-five years later, when I left my sons, ages 9 and 6, alone for a date night, my sister was aghast. How could I take such a risk? It’s not just that people want to be fearful, but we crave to condemn others for not being fearful enough. This bill, in its small way, signals a pullback from the nanny-state, be-fearful-ofyour-shadow society that we’ve become, yet it is a depressing sign that anyone would deem this bill necessary.
At least we all agree on what this legislation says, though it is sad it needs to be enshrined as law. Maybe it is worthwhile just to show that there are issues where everyone agrees.
Bill Wright, bill@wwwright.com
Thom Krueger’s recent op-ed on the history and ongoing causes of Boulder’s worsening jobs/housing imbalance and its direct effects on sky-rocketing housing prices and the widely perceived lack of housing availability in Boulder is a welcome opener to a deeper investigation into these causes. (“Thom Krueger: Affordable housing is a goal for the real world, not supply-and-demand fairy tales,” Feb. 25)
Spense Havlick and others have recently and rightly drawn attention to the need for immediate University of Colorado Boulder enrollment caps, given the painfully obvious way in which the Hill and other nearby neighborhoods have been overtaken by real estate investor-owned, high-density, transient student rentals to the detriment and increasing exclusion of stable owneroccupants, especially longterm residents working for Boulder’s primary employers including CU Boulder itself, the National Labs, City and County governments, and employees of essential service agencies and local small businesses. (“Spense Havlick: CU Boulder’s growth and its impacts compel town-gown discussions,” Feb. 6)
Until residential owneroccupancy rates on the Hill equal or exceed short-term student occupancy rates, Hill business and Hill residential neighborhood “revitalization” remains a fantasy marketing ploy by development interests.
So what else, besides CU Boulder’s completely unsustainable on-campus over-enrollment, is fueling the jobs/housing imbalance? Why have nearly all of the attempts to deal with the affordable housing crisis been focused on supplyside fixes and almost none on demand-side drivers? And what are these demand-side drivers anyway?
The answer can be found in the dysfunctional policies and practices of the myriad of public and private sector economic development engines (EDES), including and especially CU Boulder, which operate at local, regional, state, national, and even international levels. Significant problems with the operation of these EDES arise when they operate:
1. undemocratically;
2. with insufficient government oversight;
3. with zero accountability to non-client/non-corporate local residents;
4. with no regard for community-led comprehensive planning or local environmental carrying capacity limits;
5. with policies that are based upon the propagation of dysfunctional business-as-usual business models;
6. with total disregard for the long-term wellbeing of all significant stakeholders;
7. with unexamined trickle-down assumptions (e.g., the assumption that endless growth is the sine qua non for a stable local government tax base); and
8. when significant tax and other incentives are given to non-local corporate entities that draw large numbers of highwage employees to Boulder from locations outside of Boulder.
The historical purpose of economic development engines or EDES is to use tax subsidies and other incentives in ways that provide appropriate and muchneeded lifelines to struggling communities, particularly communities that lack economic and industrial diversity, adequate existing infrastructure, and other assets.
However, this description of community need is a far cry from Boulder’s uniquely-privileged situation. Hence public and private sector economic development policy and practice impacting Boulder from all levels needs to be adequately overseen and completely retailored to deal with the Boulder’s actual needs and the actual drivers of Boulder’s jobs/housing imbalance.
In short, Boulder residents need to identify and hold accountable the economic development engines or EDES that have ceased to serve us and are, instead, inflicting mounting harm via unsustainable growth incentives.
I challenge Boulder residents to take a fresh look at the daily business news and keep track of how economic development engines or EDE policies and practices are actually playing out in our community. I challenge Boulder residents to understand when EDES actually help small local businesses, local residents, and governments in need of support versus when they, instead, add rocket fuel to Boulder’s worsening jobs/housing imbalance, affordable housing crisis, homelessness, and climate and other environmental crises. And I especially challenge Boulder residents to prioritize dealing with the EDE drivers of this systemic dysfunction and to cease wasting precious time and effort on grappling, ineffectively, with only the effects.
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