Fear-based parenting stifles children
When my son was a young boy, I allowed him to walk a few steps ahead of me and my friend while strolling through downtown Chicago.
Josh, who’s now 34, wanted to explore the big city on his own. I wanted him to do it too but with a safety net several feet away — me. He confidently walked down the bustling sidewalks, block after block, looking back at us every so often with a proud smile on his face.
This was my idea of progressive parenting at the time. It still is.
I’ve always subscribed to the concept of giving children two related qualities — roots and wings — so they feel grounded in life, yet able to fly away someday. In Chicago in the late 1980s, while Josh was trying out his young wings, was I worried because he wasn’t holding my hand or at arm’s length? Yes, a bit.
But I was more worried about what kind of adult he could become if I kept clipping his wings. I didn’t want him to fear the world, whether it was playing in a park in Portage, where we lived, or exploring the mean streets of Chicago.
My late friend, Mark Manos, lived in Chicago at the time and we often explored different parts of the city, sometimes with Josh in tow. He loved hanging with “the guys” and we loved watching our “little man” grow up before our very eyes. Literally one step at a time.
I flashed back to this proud parenting moment while reading the story of an 8-year-old girl from Wilmette, Ill., whose mother allowed her to walk their dog, on her own, around the block. But seeing her alone, an anonymous caller notified police, according to her mother, Corey Widen. There were no charges, but the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services initiated an investigation to see if Widen was neglecting her children.
“For something like this to happen to me, there’s something really wrong,” Widen, 48, told the Chicago Tribune. “The funny thing is … I’m a joke with my friends because my kids are around me all the time.”
Widen, who also has a 17-year-old son, said her daughter’s walk around the block with the dog is the only time the home-schooled girl is unsupervised. The girl promised her mother to help walk the dog, Marshmallow, when they got it as a puppy.
“Everyone needs to allow the parent to do what is best for their family,” Widen said in the story. “No one will dictate my parenting choices.”
I agree with her declarative statement, but in today’s fear-based, overreactive world of proper parenting, it seems that everyone is dictating other parents’ choices. I can’t imagine how I would have been perceived as a parent by today’s society as a young, super-lenient father of two young kids.
I intentionally allowed my young son, and at times my young daughter, to explore the world without the leash of my fears wrapped around their necks. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure if my untested theories would help my kids become self-sufficient, independent adults. But they did and I still stand behind my methods.
Even my kids’ mother and my own mother expressed concerns at the time about my parenting style. I stubbornly didn’t give in to their maternal worries. Instead, I was determined to raise my kids to be assertive and proactive, not fearful and reactive.
I may have even said Widen’s statement verbatim: “No one will dictate my parenting choices.”
In her case, DCFS investigators conducted multiple interviews with her family, as well as with the kids’ pediatrician, before concluding there was no neglect, Widen said.
So what’s the difference between a neglected child and a so-called “free range” child in today’s society? It depends on who’s making that judgment.
In Utah, the child neglect law was revised in May to create a first-of-itskind “free-range parenting law.” Under certain conditions, it allows children to, say, play unsupervised at a park or sit unattended in a parked car. Both of these real-life, everyday examples would prompt some observers to call police or, in this state, the Indiana Department of Child Services.
Should they? Would you? It’s a tough call, isn’t it?
“Most of us grew up free range, and it didn’t even have that name then,” said Lenore Skenazy in a June 12 Los Angeles Times story.
She once let her 9-year-old son ride the New York subway home by himself, raising some eyebrows and the ire of other parents. She later founded Free Range Kids, a movement to bring up safe and self-reliant children.
When I read that story, I clipped it because I knew I would soon be writing about this touchy issue. I remember quietly applauding its lecturing headline: “Stop thinking children need to be tracked like FedEx packages.”
Isn’t this exactly what parents of young kids (and teens) are expected to do these days, track their every move as if they’re fragile parcels, not young people? Some parents actually do this through their kids’ cellphones.
“What happened is that we’ve decided now that any time a child is unsupervised, they are automatically in danger,” Skenazy said. “There’s no connection between that and reality.”
She believes, and I agree, that we need to “re-normalize” the oldfashioned idea that kids are simply part of our world. And they should be treated as such. They’re not Precious Moments dolls to keep safe in a glass cabinet, taking them out only to dust and admire them.
This isn’t parenting to prepare a child for the real world. This is parental delusion based on fear or the desire to be needed in their life, at every age.