Patch Blog: Can You be a 'Free Range' Parent?

I recently was invited to participate in a parent book club and the first book was Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.

You might remember Lenore. After giving her 9-year-old son a map, Metrocard, quarters for the phone and $20 for emergencies, she let him ride the New York subway home – alone.

He walked through the front door 45 minutes later, ecstatic with independence and Lenore wrote a column about his adventure. Not long after, the media dubbed her “America’s Worst Mom” and she found herself defending her decision on the Today Show, NPR, MSNBC, and Fox News.

Lenore, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose work has appeared in The London Times, New York Daily News, Reader’s Digest, Ladies Home Journal and The Nation, launched a blog to explain her parenting philosophy. The book, Free Range Kids, followed. The book has a section titled “The A-Z Review of Everything You Might Be Worried About,” in which she debunks popular parenting fears such as formula, toilet drownings, shopping cart germs and even Halloween candy.

“I believe in safety,” Lenore wrote. “I LOVE safety — helmets, car seats, safety belts. I believe in teaching children how to cross the street and even wave their arms to be noticed. I’m a safety geek! But I also believe our kids do not need a security detail every time they leave the house. Our kids are safer than we think, and more competent, too. They deserve a chance to stretch and grow and do what we did — stay out till the street lights come on.”

Lenore argues that bad things happen to a very small percentage of children and that the world is actually safer today then back when our parents were letting us roam the streets with the neighbor kids or ride our bicycles up the corner store. Now, she says, there are more and more “helicopter parents,” a sort of disparaging term for parents who believe their child is so vulnerable — to injury, teasing, disease and disappointment — that they have to sort of hover (like a helicopter) over the child, ready to swoop in if anything remotely bad happens.

“Our parents were watching Dallas and Dynasty, where the biggest crime was big hair,” Lenore writes. “Today’s parents are drowning in bad news that comes to us instantaneously from around the world. We hear about abductions in Portugal and Aruba. I can instantly name you five girls who met ghastly ends — Caylee, Maddie, Natalee, Jon Benet, Jaycee — but our parents could never do that.”

It did make me think. When my daughter is old enough, would giving her this level of independence result in a stronger, more secure child? Have the media and baby product safety advocates turned us into overprotective parents who believe that even a minor hazard is akin to a looming disaster?

I grew up in a big city, but I knew the streets in my neighborhood like the back of my hand. As kids, we played ball in the streets, rode bikes to the nearby park (crossing a semi-busy street!) and even walked to and from school. My family moved to this area because it’s safe and family-friendly, but would I let my daughter do these same things today? Are outside influences to blame, or is it due to factors such as living in the second-largest city in the country and knowing only a handful of our neighbors? As a kid, I could name the people living in every house on my street.

Interesting thoughts for sure.