With a 17-year span between her own four children, Kim Kimble agrees that parenting has changed. She was a free-ranger before she knew the term, letting her 10-year-old bring his five-year-old sister into town for hot chocolate. Like most free-rangers, Kimble wanted to give her children a childhood she recognized: playing kickball in the street, coming home when the streetlights went on, and dealing with squabbles amongst themselves. "They had boundaries," she says. "You just gradually expand them." With her youngest son, the regulations astounded her. He wasn't allowed to take a shot at half court because someone might get hit with the basketball. "Yeah, sometimes things happen, but there's also an awareness needed when you're standing on a basketball court," Kimble marvels. "Once these things become entrenched in society, in spite of the facts in front of us, I think we'd rather be hysterical."
The "Stranger Danger" Obsession
The fears swirling around our children are numerous, and perhaps our worst is where they vanish in plain sight at the hands of a deranged stranger. According to Bob Lowery, vice president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who oversees the Missing Children Division, instances of kidnapping have sharply declined in the past 10-15 years. That's been the Center's 31-year mission, through educational outreach (locally, through their Saratoga Springs office) and helping law enforcement and families find and protect children. In his 30 years' of law enforcement and six years at the Center, Lowery knows that child abduction is a crime of opportunity, not often planned. He credits the reduction in cases to Amber Alerts (public notifications about missing children reports), the prevalence of cameras and videocameras in public, and the sex offender registry. "We haven't reduced the number of offenders who will commit a crime, but we have limited their availability to get away with it." The Center doesn't believe in fear mongering, and Lowery wants people to feel safe in their neighborhoods. "We've come very far in the protection of children, but I would take it as a step back to think of the world as universally safer."
The world is also different. When Lowery was growing up in the 1960s, there was often one nonworking parent at home. When the neighborhood kids played at the other end of the block, the parents there took responsibility for them. "Our neighbors were extensions of our family." Today, we don't always know our neighbors, and adults won't often approach unknown children for fear their intentions will be misunderstood. Instead, we call the police to report our concerns, which Lowery feels isn't a bad thing. "To discourage people from calling the police because of this conversation would be to the detriment of the child. If it was my neighbor and I knew them, I'd call them first. But it depends on the situation."
Lowery applauds the free-range movement for empowering children. "Assertive children with confidence are the ones who generally get away from an abductor," he says. But he's quick to point out that how people respond in the face of danger is hard to predict. "That's the unknown we all face. We don't know how we'll react, and we're asking a six- or 10-year-old to. We can't assume we know what they'll do." So Lowery feels it's important to be prepared: know what's in the neighborhood, walk routes with children, work out safe places for them to go, and use teaching moments and what-if scenarios to see how children react. That's what Kimble did when her kids were little. "'If you got lost right now in this mall, who would you go to?' 'If this is our meeting spot and you couldn't find me, or you couldn't find our meeting spot, what are you going to do?' We practiced problem solving together," she says.
As a grandmother, Kimble enjoys watching her eldest son teach his daughter to interact with strangers. That's something free-rangers talk about a lot. They don't want their children to fear strangers; they want to teach them a safe way to meet people. Stramiello, for example, credits the kindness of strangers, the ones who gave her directions when lost or with whom she shared a conversation over some commonality, with enriching her world travel when she studied abroad in college. "I don't think that by encouraging your children to participate actively in the world that you're telling them everything is safe," Kimble says. "You're just giving them more experience to base their judgments on."
