Don’t track your kid like a FedEx package
About 10 years ago, when Lenore Skenazy let her 9-year-old son ride the New York subway by himself, you’d have thought from the reactions that she’d committed a crime. In some places, she would have. Now Skenazy has founded Free Range Kids, a movement to bring up safe, self-reliant children, and the nonprofit Let Grow. Utah passed a “free range kids” law, legally protecting parents from being charged with neglect for, say, letting a youngster walk from home to the library. As summer arrives and parents fret about what liberties to allow their kids, Skenazy argues that freedom’s risks are exaggerated, and its advantages are incalculable.
What’s the difference between a free-range kid and a neglected kid?
A free-range kid is taught how to cross the street, knows they have to be home by a certain time, and then is given some freedom. A neglected kid is harmed by parents who are blatantly disregarding their welfare.
What changed the free-range default position of childhood into what you see now?
Yeah, how did we go from thinking it was great for kids to walk outside? That was the norm. Suddenly we hear about parents getting arrested for letting their 10-year-old play outside. We’ve decided now that any time a child is unsupervised, they are automatically in danger.
The crime rate was higher when we were growing up in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and nobody screamed, “How dare you let your child walk to school?” It’s like we’re living in “Grand Theft Auto.” Walking a couple of blocks in a quiet neighborhood is about as safe as you can get. It’s certainly safer than driving your kids anywhere. Yet we fantasize that the second they step outside without a security detail, they’re going to be hurt.
We seem to have a zero tolerance for any risk to kids.
The idea is that any time something bad happens, it’s because of somebody being not vigilant enough. And now we have technological devices to keep constant tabs on almost everything our kids do. You can GPS them. RFID tags tell you if your child got on the school bus and where they got off . Once you start thinking like that, you think that your child has to be tracked like a FedEx package.
The Atlantic pointed out the dissonance between how white middle-class parents are regarded when it comes to free-range parenting versus poor parents and parents of color.
That is very true. This [African American] woman named Debra Harrell was working at McDonald’s. And during the summer, her daughter, age 9, would sit at McDonald’s and play on a laptop. Their house is burglarized and away goes the laptop. And the girl says, “How about if I go to the sprinkler park near us instead?” And the mom thought, that’s a great idea.
On the third day, some lady says, “Little girl, where is your mother?” And she says, “She’s working.” And the woman dials 911, and the cops take the little girl away for 17 days. And they throw Debra in jail for a night and interrogate her.
What’s great about a freerange kids law is that it protects everyone. There’s no reason a parent shouldn’t be allowed to choose, by necessity or by desire, to give their kids some independence, and that includes coming home with a latchkey.
Kids like their computers and their phones. Is it hard to get them to let go of those and go do something?
And I’m not against online games, I’m not against computers, I’m not against phones. But I do know that when kids are outside, there’s so much fun and social, emotional growth to be had through free play that they don’t get if they’re supervised. And I don’t think they get as much of it online.
I recently asked some educators, “What’s something you loved doing that you don’t let your own kids do?” And everybody was telling stories of the time this went wrong or that went wrong, and concluded with, “but we didn’t tell our parents.”
These [events] are what your grown-up life is based on, knowing you’re the kid who handled that. And we keep taking this out of our kids’ lives and saying, “Oh, honey, did you hurt yourself? Let me help you.” “Oh, look, I brought an entire bag of first aid, and a cast, and a Medevac in my pack here.”
It’s so unfair to children, because it’s taking away their childhood and giving it to us.