Lenore Skenazy started the free-range movement almost by accident in 2008. Two days after her personal essay, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” appeared in the New York Sun, Skenazy found herself on Fox News and the “Today” show, and labeled “America’s worst mom.” So, with the help of a friend, the New York City-based, Monroe-summering writer coined and trademarked the term “Free-Range Kids” and started a blog.
Skenazy is no parenting daredevil. “I wouldn’t have done it if I thought I was putting my son in danger,” she says. But when she’s advocating that parents take their kids to the park and leave them there or outlining the imperfections of the sex offender registry (which tracks convicts), she’s easy to vilify. Yet her overall message exposes the clash between anxiety and traditionalism in our shifting culture, and it’s resonating with parents.
Victoria Stramiello recently moved to New Windsor and started the Hudson Valley Free Range Kids & Parents Meetup group so she can befriend people without feeling defensive about her parenting choices. When she goes hiking, other parents worry about Lyme disease, how the kids will hike back down, and whether the mountain stream water is dirty. Recently, when one little girl kept stumbling on the rocky terrain, Stramiello said, “If you don’t let them fall when it’s easy, they won’t be able to get up when it’s hard.” She admires Skenazy for putting things into perspective. “I think free-range needed a spokesperson, especially for those individuals who may not have the resources to always watch their kids,” Stramiello says.
Age of Anxiety
On her Discovery Life channel reality TV show, “World’s Worst Mom,” Skenazy coaxes overanxious parents into letting go. She says our knee-jerk reaction is to do worst-first thinking. Our kids might be five minutes late coming home, and we imagine the worst-possible scenario. “‘What if?’ leads to a lot of fearfulness on our part, but it also leads to laws,” Skenazy says. She rails against criminalizing the type of parenting our parents employed, like letting the kids wait in the car for five minutes (illegal in some states) or walk home from the park (recently deemed unsubstantiated neglect in a case in Maryland). Skenazy feels we’re prepping for random acts of violence as if they were the everyday norm. Our precautions send the message to our kids that we love them, but we don’t believe in them. “A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own, eventually can’t,” Skenazy writes. It also renders any free time that parents carve out as being at the expense of children’s safety, and there’s an element of back-door antifeminism to that. Skenazy feels that limiting a parent’s everyday options as well as a child’s freedom groups the two as if they can’t survive together unsupervised. That becomes a no-win situation for people navigating the challenges of a culturally chaotic family life.
In New Windsor, per the Board of Ed policy, Stramiello’s seven-year-old son can’t get off the school bus near home unless someone is there to meet him. It’s perplexing to Stramiello, who grew up in a single-parent household as a latchkey kid. “I don’t want to make parenting decisions based on someone calling the cops on me,” she says. “I want to make decisions based on what I’m comfortable with.”
She has a vision of how she wants to raise her children. They’re young, so she starts by teaching the basics: reporting to her where they’re going and strategizing with them age-appropriate risktaking. While they’re hiking, she’ll ask her son which path they should take, and let him decide to change course when needed. “I want him to be able to solve a problem without me fixing it. It’s about education and boundaries.” But when Stramiello reads posts and comments on Facebook, she feels judged. She laments someone’s recent claim that it breaks her heart to be without her children. “It’s almost a badge of honor if parents are hovering.” What constitutes good parenting is subjective, and Stramiello feels it’s too easy to condemn others rather than offer a helping hand.
Boundaries Closing In
At some point, the family focus shifted from an experiential, spontaneous childhood to an idealized, blog-worthy parenthood. When did we start hollering at the teenaged umpires during our kids’ soccer games? When did we stop letting our children run barefoot in the grass? During WWII, kids were sent walking home from school with house/latch keys dangling from necklaces, presumably to spend hours alone until mom got home from work. But by the aughts, parents were calling their college-aged kids to wake them up for class. This helicopter parenting is a relatively new phenomenon that’s transitioning to become the new norm.
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.”
“People who believe in free-range kids believe in kids and each other and humanity,” Skenazy says. “We get into scrapes, and we get out of them.” Case in point, she asks, “Which of your neighbors do you think will poison your children’s Halloween candy for kicks?” She feels our constant fear is a colossal ingratitude and unawareness of these lucky times in which we live. “The ‘stranger danger’ obsession of the last 30 years has corroded a lot of what I love about America: people being open, walking outside and meeting your neighbors, doing business with a handshake, sending your kids outside to play. If you think everyone is a potential threat, you’ve closed off a lot of your life and a lot of your kids’ lives.”
RESOURCES
Lenore Skenazy Freerangekids.com
Hudson Valley Free Range Kids & Parents Meetup.com/hvkids
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
Free-Range Children Mid-Hudson Valley Facebook.com
This article appears in June 2015.
Even were I not a free-range and Lenore fan, I would find trouble with at least some of Mr. Lowery’s analysis. On what does he base his statement that the reduction in child abduction is due in part to the sex offender registry? That indicates that there was a measurable problem with registrants abducting random children and his having some evidence that the public registry helped lower that. Three cases come to mind: that of Jessica Lunsford, Jaycee Duggart, and Cherish Periwinkle. Even though you cannot prove a negative, it is inconceivable to me how the registry prevents this from occurring more frequently than what can be considered rare, isolated acts. The Lunsfords knew their neighbor was a registered offender; their knowledge did not help Jessica. Jaycee was held for many years with her abductor being on the registry and checked on by law enforcement many times over those years, and Cherish’s abductor took advantage of a sudden, spontaneous opportunity.
Lowery’s statement is in disagreement with FBI statements: “RSOs contribute to a minuscule part of the child abduction problem….In addition to the FBI reporting, NCMEC has revealed that there were no RSOs involved in AMBER Alert cases in 2009….. Moreover, despite media reporting, the FBI confidently assesses that the majority of child abductions are committed by persons with a relationship to the child they abduct.”
This is overall a very good article. Thank you.
We were always on our bikes, always in a group, always aware of how to get away since we chased each other around our territory enough to know. Kids had automatic immunity from trespassing in those days, giving them ways to flee that adults would not think of. Of course we never encountered danger.