Free Range Children
I had a second introduction of sorts to the idea of free range kids over the weekend. Writing in Salon, Lenore Skenazy discusses how we as a society are overly protective of our children. My first introduction was via a link a commenter at Front Porch Republic gave to her blog, suggesting the two blogs get together for a play date. Lenore Skenazy’s claim to fame is a column she wrote a couple years ago about allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway home by himself. For allowing this, she was deemed by many to be a grossly irresponsible mother.
As one with a contrarian streak, I have a certain admiration for her message. We have abysmal expectations for our children. If you let your child have a drink with you at dinner, they will become a raging alcoholic later in life. Your child, and this is true in Christian circles, is a moral idiot that can’t understand the consequences of bringing life into the world, so he/she needs to be stuffed with medicines, use devices, or abstain until he or she is mature enough to handle those consequences, hopefully somewhere between 25 and 35. More generally, there is a tendency to want to shield children from all bad things. If anything remotely bad happens at school or involves school children, bring in the grief counselors. We need to avoid the big city lest our dear child see a homeless person, a drug addict, immodest attire, or language that would make a sailor blush.
It isn’t my intention to set her position up as a caricature. If she lived in my neighborhood, I’m quite confident I would have no trouble with her kids. It’s possible to be a responsible parent without a 10-foot tether. My wife and I joked about giving the article to a few friends. As I was reading it though, something kept bothering me. We lived in a small city (10,000 people) about a half-hour north of Milwaukee. We lived in a 3-bedroom townhouse with similar townhouses, so we had about 500 people living within a two block radius. My wife stayed home with the kids. One of her constant complaints was having to yell at other people’s children. She wondered how she ended up getting appointed neighborhood babysitter. It is one thing to participate in a cooperative exercise of watching over each other’s children, something I believe is closer to the author’s heart; it is another thing to surrender your parenting to the larger community. Perhaps we could call this the difference between free range children and feral children.
In the absence of a proper functioning community, I think we are seeing more feral children. Think “Lord of the Flies”, urban edition. These children without direction from their parents and really even society as a whole are engaging in not-so-cute behavior. In suburban communities and commuter havens, the peak time for crime is between 3:00 and 5:00 PM. If you drive around on a Friday night, you will see youths idling in parking lots and similar facilities. If a person were to show up from outer space and look at our communities today, he would be likely to conclude that the biggest problem our society has is that we give our children too much freedom, not that we don’t give enough.
Still, she has a point. As an experiment, I had my three children lead themselves to the park. I told them that I and their mother would follow behind, but they were to lead the way. Our children are 8, 7, and 2. My 7-year-old daughter dutifully took my 2-year-old by the hand and led him. She even dragged him for a short time, but she was going to make sure he stayed on the sidewalk and with her. My oldest on the other hand was in his own little world, basically oblivious to what was going on around him. Admittedly, this was one experiment only. It certainly wasn’t all bad, but I didn’t come away from the experiment with great confidence in my children’s abilities to function on their own. I think it was Bill Cosby that said parenthood was about getting children to the point where they could leave the house. Exposition can take you so far, but experiential knowledge is invaluable. So in short, I’ve come away from this with the belief that real functioning communities are vital for the raising of the next generation, and I need to let my children get more bruises lest they get broken bones.
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M.Z. – The free range stuff is pretty neat, I think. It is genealogically attached to the production of adolescence by developmental psychology. The problem as I see it is that the dangers that were once considered to be part of life are now taboo and negligent. If you like this free range stuff you should check out some vintage Illich, Goodman, and Holt… Nice stuff!
I think we are waaay too overprotective of our kids. Agnostic has a lot of good writing on this.
http://akinokure.blogspot.com
Of course, easy for me to type that as one without kids.
I’m not sure it has to be one or the other. One can come up with plenty of examples of overbearing parents. One can also come up with plenty of examples of children that have basically been abandoned. There is a sharp difference in my children’s school between those kids that are in homes like ours and those that are from “working” mother homes, particularly those working mothers not paired with working husbands. Substituting adult interaction with children (even if by strangers) with interaction strictly confined to one’s peer group is another term for gangs. The plain truth is that we don’t have a proper functioning society, and it shows by these two extremes.
MZ,
Yes, for whatever reason our society seems to manage to be both over-protective and completely neglectful of children at the same time.
I recall back when my younger brother was in elementary school there was an elaborate playscape there which was locked away such that no children could play on it: a child had once chipped a tooth playing on it and the school had decided to lock it up to avoid lawsuites.
And yet, we routinely see the packs of unsupervised 10-13 year olds wandering the neighborhood from 3-6pm looking for something to do.
To an extent, perhaps, it’s different groups of people with different problems, though at times I wonder if the opposite vices may inhabit the same parents as well: very protective of certain things yet unthinking of how the two income lifestyle leaves their kids adrift much of the time.
Sam,
I don’t know if I can say this without offense, but not everything has to result in a referral to works on theory. You strike me as a very smart and amicable enough fellow, but one does not want to fall into the “Who cares if it works in practice, does it work in theory?” trap to which smart people are all too ready to fall.
Not that there’s no value to referring to works on theory as regards education or child rearing, but one must recognize the limits of theory, and replying to every topic by rattling off a list of authors risks estranging one’s audience.
A less-discussed piece of this is the common idea that children are a means of reflecting prestige or shame on the parents – if little Timmy gets into Harvard, that means that you are the parents of the year; if he becomes a grocery bagger, assembly line worker or filling station counter guy, then you’ve “failed.”
Something is out of balance there; not every kid has the smarts to get into Harvard, and as long as your kid grows up to be kind, responsible and contributes to society, you did just fine. Pushing your kids as hard as I see lots of parents pushing theirs is not an expression of love, but of narcissism, I think. It’s not about whether little Timmy is happy and well-rounded, but about the amount of bragging you’re able to do at the next parents’ get-together.
That aside, there is another piece to this, I think; it used to be that you could make a decent living and raise kids on a working-class wage (meaning the kind of job that does not require college) but this is way less true than it used to be. This, combined with the shabby way our society treats poor people (I’ve heard Jay Leno use the appalling term “trailer trash” and get a laugh) means that fear plays a part in parents pushing their kids as well.
DarwinCatholic: No offense taken. I do however find what you say to be virtually incoherent to me at this point. Here are some replies from the little I think I could gather:
Not all books or authors are theoretical, including almost all of the ones I mentioned here. Also, not all practice is practical, so on and so forth. I think you are falling into the assumption that theory and practice are different things altogether.
But I may be totally off base, so please let me know what it is you mean by “theory” and “practice.” Or, are you just annoyed at my proclivity to recommend books.
If the problem is the latter, then, I am guilty as charged—recommending books is something I like to do, mostly because I like to share what I read with others. Some might call this putting theory into practice, but I wouldn’t because I don’t quite know what those words mean and no one seems to be keen on telling me.
MZ: The balance you mention is the heart of it: it transforms parenting into an art, instead of some kind of prescriptive science.
Matt T.: I think you’re right about that, its hard to get out of the brute truth of the matter and start making sense about it though, I feel like I brink on complete nonsense when I try…
That aside, there is another piece to this, I think; it used to be that you could make a decent living and raise kids on a working-class wage (meaning the kind of job that does not require college) but this is way less true than it used to be.
I think this is important as well. If we were to do one of those picture tests psychologists enjoy, I think a picture of a family with 5 children would see terms similar to “parasitical”. (I remember one mother telling me about being approached by an older woman and being scolded about having 4 [or maybe 5] children and living off the government. They are in the top 25% of income earners.) It isn’t like our society is the first society where poor people have had children. It is in fact common to all ages. Our attitude about it though is rather harsh, particularly compared to the attitude toward the unmarried law school graduate with one child.
Our attitude about it though is rather harsh, particularly compared to the attitude toward the unmarried law school graduate with one child.
Or 5 kids and a nanny, I might add…
Matt Talbot writes:
“Not every kid has the smarts to get into Harvard…”. Or the even greater smarts to avoid it. [Bill Gates went to Harvard for one year, and then left].
I used to ride the subway at age 9. It was considered usual. But it was also considered normal that adults did not interfere with kids.
Much of the problem may be suburban. When we were burglarized, the cop who came took all the necessary information. We then spoke of growing up in the city. He recalled growing up in Hell’s Kitchen. “One good thing” said he “is that everybody knew everybody else. If you were spotted on the street during school hours, you could be sure that someone would call up your parents”. The he fell for the suburban trap. “Now I don’t know where my kids are”.
I have long believed that delayed adulthood is a serious social problem with long term consequences.
To follow up on what Darwin said, it is amazing that we are not only over-protective and neglectful at the same time, but that we are over-protective and aborting children by the hundreds of thousands at the same time.
Actually it isn’t really so amazing; its two manifestations of the same thing – the objective foundations of the family withering away. Children are no longer necessary for the survival of adults as they were in the past. We don’t need to have boys to work our family plot or girls to marry off to establish beneficial social connections. Like all things that are no longer necessary, they can either become luxury goods – pets to be dolled up and pushed to the point of exhaustion so that the parents look good, or so they can live vicariously through them – or they become superfluous, that is, thrown away, destroyed, killed.
What actually preserved children in the past, in other words, was their value to their parents.
No one likes to think back on the family as an economic unit. People like to imagine this golden age when the family was really just universally and intrinsically good – not contingent on anything real or necessary or gritty for the continuity of life, but a good in itself.
For some people it can be, for all people it ought to be (especially us), but for most people, it wasn’t and isn’t. By the time the ‘nuclear family’ had come into being, the old family based on the village, the clan, the extended family, had long passed away. The Protestant rebellion and this thing normally called ‘capitalism’ gave us this thing called ‘the nuclear family’, a sham and a parody of the rich extended family life that existed under the Catholic social order.
The Protestant rebellion and this thing normally called ‘capitalism’ gave us this thing called ‘the nuclear family’, a sham and a parody of the rich extended family life that existed under the Catholic social order.
Joe – I don’t think I’ve said this to you before, but a really appreciate your comments here on VN – both the tone and the content. You’re a good influence, on me at least.
Hey, thanks Matt. Usually I’m the one who needs the good influence, lol :)