Free-Range Kids. Lenore Skenazy
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if “The Incident at Friendly's” were unusual, this book would end right here. It would be about one overworried mom, and who cares about that?
But unfortunately, Mama M is not alone in her fears. Millions of moms and almost (but not quite) as many dads now see the world as so fraught with danger that they can't possibly let their children explore it.
Sometimes they regret having to rein their kids in, but rein them in they do. A woman who wrote to me from quiet, suburban Atlanta won't let her daughter go to the mailbox by herself. That's right. The mailbox. In her mind, there's just “too much that could happen” between the door and the curb.
Another dad informed his daughter that he was going to follow her school field trip to make sure nothing happened to her. Why? Could he stop the bus from plunging off the road?
Then there was the New Jersey radio talk show host who interviewed me after the now infamous incident of my letting Izzy ride the subway by himself. How could I do such a crazy thing, the host demanded. He believes in safety. He loves his son. That's why he won't let his boy, age eight, play basketball in his own driveway. Too many creeps out there!
Yes, there are many creeps in this world of ours. Some of them even have bombastic radio shows and speak in italics. But some of them are creeps of the classic kind: predators and murderers and guys who feel compelled to show kids what's under their raincoat. Creeps are a sad fact of life. The fact that many parents seem unable to process, however, is that
THERE AREN'T ANY MORE CREEPS NOW THAN WHEN WE WERE KIDS.
Hard to believe, but that's what the statistics show. Over at the Crimes Against Children Research Center, they track these things (as you might guess from their name). David Finkelhor, the founder of the center and a professor at the University of New Hampshire, says that violent crime in America has been falling since it peaked in the early 1990s. That includes sex crimes against kids. He adds that although perhaps the streets were somewhat safer in the 1950s, children today are statistically as safe from violent crime as their parents and grandparents were.
So when parents say, “I'd love to let my kids have the same kind of childhood I had, but times have changed,” they're not making a rational argument.
Times have not changed, danger-wise. Especially not where childhood abductions are concerned. Those crimes are so very rare that the rates do not go up or down by much in any given year. Throw in the fact that now almost everyone is carrying a cell phone and can immediately call the police if they see a kid climbing into a van filled with balloons, a clown, and automatic weapons, and times are, if anything, safer.
The problem is that we parents feel that childhood is more dangerous for our kids than it was for us, and over the course of this book, we'll look at where those fears come from and which ones are utterly baseless and why they're so hard to shake. But if you (like, sometimes, me) only read a chapter or two and then “forget” to read the rest of a book, or “accidentally” leave it on the bus, or perhaps you've reached that point on Kindle where it says, “FREE SAMPLE TIME IS OVER, BUB. TIME TO ACTUALLY PAY FOR THE BOOK,” let me just state before it's too late that we have it all wrong. Our kids are more competent than we believe, and they're a whole lot safer, too. We are extremely worried today about exceedingly unlikely disasters—or, as the experts put it, “negative outcomes.” (Like death would be a “negative outcome” of gum surgery.)
Dr. F. Sessions Cole, a professor of pediatrics at Washington University and former chief medical officer at St. Louis Children's Hospital, one of the Midwest's biggest, put it this way: “The problem is that the public assumes that any risk to any individual is 100 percent risk to them.”
What he means is that if people hear about one child who died from falling out of a crib, they immediately assume that their child is at risk for that same thing. When one child gets a rare infection, they think it's likely that theirs could, too. When they hear about one child abducted from a parking lot, they assume their child could well be next, even though, in reality, those chances are so slim that actual, factual statisticians have a word for them: de minimis. Risks so small that they are virtually equivalent to none. I'm not saying that the abducted children are equivalent to none. No! I'm saying that the risk is so small, it's almost impossible to guard against. Just like it's almost impossible to guard against the possibility of being hit by an asteroid.
And yet rattled parents, besieged by media and each other, feel they must take all possible precautions to avoid all these extremely rare possibilities. “But if you live your life that way,” said Dr. Cole, “as best I can tell, you can never even go to the bathroom, because there could be something that sucks you into the toilet.”
Dr. Cole isn't being flip. Well, not totally. He's the classic white-haired, avuncular doctor—he should have his own TV show, he's so perfect for the part of himself—and over the course of his career he's seen more and more parents coming in distraught about more and more outlandish possibilities. Even after he has reassured these parents that their child is fine, they demand MRIs and other tests to “prove” it. Or, just to be safe, they decide to restrict their children's diets, even after he tells them he seriously doubts this will have any effect on their health.
This eagerness to restrict things is not limited to food. Think of how, thanks to fear, we restrict so many other aspects of our children's lives. They're not allowed to walk alone (cars!), explore (perverts!), or play in the park (those perverts again) or in the woods (ticks!) or in trees (gravity!) or in water (drowning!) or in dirt (dirt). It's not your imagination: childhood really has changed. Fifty years ago, the majority of U.S. children walked or biked to school. Today, about one in ten do. Meantime, 70% of today's moms say they played outside as kids. But only 31% of their kids do. The children have been sucked off America's lawns like yard trimmings.
Where did all this fear come from? Take your pick: The fact that we're all working so hard that we don't know our neighbors. The fact that the marketplace is brimming with products to keep our kids “safe” from things we never used to worry about—like shopping cart liners to protect kids from germs.
Then there's the way our brains cling to scary thoughts (kid taken from a bus stop) but not mundane ones (all the kids who get on and off the bus without getting taken). That's just basic psychology. Meanwhile, “helpful” websites list the dangers of every possible activity from running barefoot (fungus!) to flying kites. “Choose a sunny day when there's no chance of lightning,” one kite article actually suggested. So I guess we shouldn't choose a day when trees are flying by the window and there's a funnel-shaped cloud coming up the driveway? Thank you so much, oh wise tip-giver!
Fear, fear, fear. We're always expected to be thinking about fear. Schools hold pre–field trip assemblies explaining exactly how close the children will be to a hospital. At least, my kids’ school did. Come home and the TV tells us about “the killer under your sink!” (Turns out you shouldn't drink Drano.) And “the monster who could be your neighbor!” (but probably isn't). And “the hidden danger in your drink!” (A lemon. It has bacteria on it. Big deal. So does everything else.) Everyone is exhorting us to watch out, take care, and plan for doomy doom doom. Which puts a damper on things, to say the least.
A doctor wrote to me early on to say:
We live in beautiful Ardsley, New York. I pay 20K in taxes a year to provide a safe environment and good education for my children. You would have thought I committed a crime when I let my 8-year-old daughter ride her bike by herself approximately two city blocks to a friend's house. My wife let it be known how vehemently she disagreed with me. In addition, all the parents in the neighborhood also thought I was crazy. Indeed, of course I would have grieved had “something” happened. But should I let that immobilize my children? I lost my mother to a drunk driver at the age of 46, and my sister to cancer at age 24. In addition, I am an emergency medicine physician who sees tragedy every day. Therefore, I know, more than most, the pain of tragedy and longshots. I could let this paralyze me, but I don't. I choose, to the best of my ability, to allow my children the same freedoms that I had as a child growing up, when I was taking the train by the 7th grade, and riding