Free Range Kids
Mothering As A Spectator Sport
Happy Mother's Day!
Oh, I know the burnt toast and
dandelion bouquet won't come till May 10. But lately, every day is
Mother's Day, thanks to our relentless focus on moms (and to a lesser
extent dads) and the way they parent.
Parenting
has become a spectator sport. We set the bar extremely high for what is
"good" parenting and start judging the moment we hear someone did
something that could be considered one drop dangerous.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')
I should know. I'm the mom who let her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway by himself.
Just about a year ago I made national news when my husband andI decided
to take our son someplace he hadn't been before and let him try to find
his way home by himself on public transportation. (By day, not very far
from home, with money and a map and quarters for a phone call.) The
very thing he'd been begging us to let him do for months. He made it
home fine, btw, but millions of folks weighed in, often critically, on
my parenting.
Now I feel a little like Miss America, passing my "Bad Mom" crown and scepter to Madlyn Primoff, the Scarsdale, N.Y., lawyer who was arrested for endangering the welfare of a child a few weeks back after she left her two daughters, ages 10 and 12, in a shopping area of a New York City suburb because they were bickering in the car. (Both the girls got home safely, though one did wind up waiting for her parents at the local police station.)
Primoff
can have the crown, but I'm keeping the scepter for self-defense. All
moms could use one. It was only when complete strangers started saying
I was lazy/crazy/cable-TV-fodder-in-the-making that I began to
understand that a lot of us Americans are raising our kids in an utter
state of panic. We are convinced that every day, in every way, our
children are in terrible peril. We are obsessed with other parents'
child-rearing decisions—and our own—because we're being told each one
is of life and death importance.
And it's not just
about stranger danger. It begins even before birth, with the pregnancy
diet books (a whole new genre!) telling us "each bite" is going to
determine if our kids are golden—or duds. Same goes for every other
parenting decision we make: are you having natural childbirth? If not,
you're traumatizing the baby! Are you breastfeeding? If not, your kid's
going to be a dummy! With allergies! And extra-chunky thighs! Are you
feeding your kid nonorganic baby food? Did you wait too long to sign
her up for music lessons? Shouldn't you get that toy that teaches
multiplication? But the biggest decision of all, of course, is: can I
ever leave my kids to their own devices? To climb a tree or walk to
school? And lately the answer is: no. Not until their hair goes gray
and they start liking bran flakes.The prevailing belief is that even
one unscheduled, unsupervised childhood episode (like the car-ejection)
is dangerous to the point of criminal. That kids could never possibly
buck up and ask someone for help, or figure out how to use a public
phone, or ask directions to the police station.
But
that Scarsdale lawyer's kids were not preschoolers. At age 10 or 12 in
other eras, those kids would have been apprenticed already. Or working
as servants in someone else's house, or picking coffee beans. Actually,
in other countries, some children that age are still picking coffee
beans. Why do we assume that today's American kids are the dumbest,
most vulnerable, least competent generation ever—and that we are doing
them a favor by treating them almost as if they are disabled? ("Let me
open the car door for you, honey!") Because that's what our culture
tells us to do. It tells us that kids need extra classes, extra padding
and extra supervision just to make it through another day. It tells us
we should always plan for the worst-case scenario. And it warns us that
they are in physical danger from a crime-crazed world, even though,
nationally, our crime rate is back to what it was in 1970. Yes, if you
grew up in the '70s or '80s, times are safer now than when you were a
kid. That's according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics. We
Americans have a very hard time believing that good news because good
news is not what we are soaking in. Mostly we are soaking in 24-hour
cable, bringing us the worst stories—especially child abductions—from
all corners of the globe. (Aruba, anyone? Portugal?) When we flip to TV
police dramas like "CSI," we see maggots and autopsies and the
freakiest, saddest scenarios Hollywood can dream up, usually involving
duct tape. These stories, so graphically told, sear themselves on our
brains. Pick up a parenting magazine instead, and we find article after
article, "Is your child's crib safe?" "Is your child's food safe?" "Is
your child's [fill in the blank with something that seems extremely
safe, like a pillow] safe?" If that magazine can't convince us that it
has some lifesaving info that we really must read to keep our kids alive, we won't buy it. So it's in the same biz as TV News: It simply has to scare us.
In
short: we are being brainwashed with fear and it makes us worry that
everything we do as parents may be putting our kids in danger. That's
why we judge other parents so harshly, and why we keep our kids
cloistered like Rapunzel. Don't get me wrong. As founder of the
Free-Range Kids movement—a group of people who believe in giving kids
more freedom and responsibility—my philosophy is not to throw kids out
of the car (sorely tempting though that may be at times). But
Free-Range parents do believe that kids are more capable and
competent than we give them credit for. And that, after teaching them
basic safety, they need some freedom to develop as smart, happy,
responsible humans. Not crazy freedom. Just the kind of freedom we had,
back when parenting decisions were not the stuff of national news.
Skenazy is founder of the blog-turned-parenting-movement
FreeRangeKids.com
and author of, "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." (Wiley, April 2009)
Read more: 
