Free Range Kids book: introduction online free

Lenore Skenazy (creator of the Free Range Kids blog and an activist for allowing kids to take risks as they grow up) has just posted the first chapter of her new book (Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry) to Scribd.

Yet here in the nice, safe, scurvy-free twenty-first century, we worry about our kids riding their bikes to the library, or walking to school. We worry when we can’t reach them on their cells. In fact, cell phones–though I love them dearly–are a great example of how everything has gotten so mixed up. We give them to our kids because we don’t want to worry. We say, “They’re for emergencies.” And yet now, if you ex- pected to hear from your daughter after her Mandarin lesson and you can’t reach her immediately, you may well start to think: What happened?! Lost, dead or white slavery? (Which, for our purposes, includes Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, and Inuit slavery, too.)
So now the phone–the very device that was supposed to reas- sure you–is making you freak out when you never would have freaked before. Back in the good ol’ 1990s, you’d at least have waited for your kid to be a few minutes late before the heart-stopping scenarios kicked in. Now anxiety is on speed dial.
And so we worry all the time: Is he safe? Is she OK? Did he eat all his baby carrots? (Answer: no.) And what happens when we don’t worry?

FREE RANGE KIDS (Intro) by Lenore Skenazy

Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry

Previously:

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Book • Happy Mutants • Kids

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Anonymous

Try explaining to CPS that your missing child was simply a “free range” kid and that you have no idea where they have been for the hours leading up to their disappearance. There is a level of protection and “parenting” that is expected by society and even the law. I think this strays outside that.

Its much like the “Un-Schooling” where a child’s natural curiosity will guide them to the knowledge they need. Please.. .my natural curiosity guided me to nothing but trouble. It just seems so easy not to justify shirking responsibility. Now there are even cute names for it.

Even my free range chickens have protection for the hawks and coyotes.
Slizzered

@ 23

Speaking from personal experience, you don’t have to be neglected to be a mischievous li’l bastard. In fact, you don’t even need much free time at all to make mischief. Given a free hour away from the watchful eyes of an adult might lead in many cases to nothing more sinister than reading a good book (one of my preferred activities as a kid) but may lead to experimenting with destruction of public property in other cases.

Asked in an open, honest way “What did you do today?”, obviously no child in existence would be foolish enough to tell his parents about the sort of things that would land him in hot water.

My oldest bro was perfectly capable of (and did) breaking a stranger’s collarbone (Yay karate lessons!) in an alley during the brief walk from between the Catholic school bus stop and our home. When he arrived home, he was so cool about having done it that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Parents never found out. How could they? We sure weren’t telling.
Bloo

As I understand it, the ‘free range’ concept is what my parents did: told us to go outside and play, without abdicating their role of teaching us to be responsible, and without worrying about every little nick or bruise. It wasn’t about ignoring the kids completely, believe me.

They also seemed to have a mesh network of parents who all worked the same way, and could be depended upon to tell one of us to quit doing something if it was truly dangerous or criminal. Yelling at your neighbor’s kid when he was about to jump off the roof into the swimming pool was not only tolerated, but more or less expected.

I believe in the ‘free range’ concept and it’s corollary of not over-scheduling a kid’s time. I do fear, however, that parents aren’t forming the mutually-supporting mesh network. People seem afraid to yell at or otherwise keep their neighbors’ kids in line. That to me, is a problem that needs to be solved.
fencesitter

@ Anon (#18)- formatting error, drop the close-paren from the end of the URL.

And where’s the reference to the other posting and free online version of Tim Gill’s book (the whole book)? I’m still working on that book/pdf…

I think there is a big difference between free range parenting and laissez faire parenting. (with apologies to Timothy Hutton- it’s all just practicing parenting. Why am I reminded of the joke “I don’t want to see a doctor who’s been practicing medicine, I want one who’s perfected it.”)
Slizzered

We four children in my family were free rangers. Parents = govt bureaucrat and building contractor.

Here’s a “sampler” list of a few of the good times we managed to have without getting caught — all before the eldest of us had even reached the age of 13:

1) Break from the street into the sewer system using picks and shovels;
2) Steal marijuana from the yard of a dealer and distribute it free to other neighborhood kids;
3) Break and enter into a few unoccupied homes, (taking only the sort of things a group of free rangers might be interested in: returnable bottles and the like);
4) Convince the local girls to put on a strip show for us;
5) Shoplifting contests;
6) Beat neighborhood kids with electrical tape-wrapped lead pipes;
7) Form a gang;
8) Take up smoking and drinking;
9) Lose virginity to neighborhood girls;
etc…

Outcome:

Oldest – alcohol dependent ex-con;
2nd oldest – Ditto;
3rd oldest – heroin dependent, current whereabouts unknown;
Youngest – international business consultant

Just sayin’…
13strong

Nice to see this approach to parenting getting more promotion (even if it is “trendy”).

Shame the cover is, well, hideous.

Love the “World’s Worst Mom” tagline, though. Say it with pride!
jimmitude

Slizzard, my hopes for a better path for all of you but I think your situation is not what this book describes.

I raised my kids against the grain, and got my share of nasty looks and comments from the ‘shiny kid parents.’ My kids got to explore, quit sports that they didn’t like (soccer is boring, even when you’re playing it) do relatively dangerous stuff (hey, come look at the rattle snake before it slithers off!), and some really strange stuff (game hen mummies, anyone?) They played with matches, but always/usually out doors, they got scraped and bruised and were expected to persevere when things didn’t go their way. Result: artist/small businessperson, airplane mechanic/punk rocker (he takes after dad), and a 14 year old chess whizz, who plays jazz bass and draws anime and wants to be a lawyer, and will be.

The free range thing is more a push back from the overcoddled little babies who have all their time scheduled and can’t go outside without an adequate supply of anti-microbial little kitty bandaids….. not that there’s anything wrong with little kitty bandaids.

Later
IamInnocent

@ Slizzered

At least only one turned seriously bad.

@ Troofseeker

Cactus paddle I hope, otherwise where’s the (ahem) justice?
elagie

Slizzard!

Thanks for a rare dose of reality in this topic. There is this too often a bizarre “noble savage” mythology that kids left on their own will experience an idyllic childhood of innocent adventure. Some will, of course, but kids are also likely to get in trouble through natural risk-taking instincts (at a time when brains are not developed enough to think through situations.)

The “hands off” approach has always smacked of self-justified lazy parenting. And I always laugh at the “well, I grew up that way and I’m just fine.” Well, duh — all of the people who grew up that way and *didn’t* get through it are not here to comment! (Dead kids tell no tales.)

I survived childhood without wearing a seatbelt in the car — does that mean my kids would be better off without them?

There is a huge gray area between over-protective parents and free range. As usual, the extremes are almost always dangerous and lack sense (but serve one purpose, to make a quick buck for the writer.)
nanuq

Meanwhile there are millions of “street kids” worldwide who are subject to abuse, neglect, and even “cleanup squads” financed by local third-world businesses. Parents of “free-range” kids should keep things in perspective.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_children
Anonymous

Alright, PEOPLE! She’s talking about being non-freaky raising her kids. Like pointing out there are kneepads being sold for babies learning to crawl. Like my coworker who had a neighbor gasp that she let her kids play in her backyard???

I rode Frankfurt, Germany’s mass transit system when I was 13, and Paris, France’s Metro when I was 15. I *get* what this lady’s talking about!!

Just how much independence–or ANYthing–do you think kids are going to learn if they’re wrapped in cotton wool their whole lives?
IamInnocent

Justice? How’s this: my brother lives here in my house. If he shows me the scars on his ass one more time…!

I say, there’s a cause for a good spanking if there ever was.

Just kidding Troof.

J.
blueworld

@12

Number of children kidnapped by strangers in the U.S. in per year: 200 to 300 (in the 90s, may be decreasing)
Number killed: about 50 per year
(source: http://stats.org/stories/2002/phony_aug01_02.htm)

Number of children injured in car accidents in the U.S. each year: 250,000
Number killed: about 2,000
(source: http://www.articlesbase.com/law-articles/children-car-accidents-the-alarming-statistics-695796.html)

An average child is 400 times more likely to die in a car accident than be abducted and murdered by a stranger. An average child is 833 times more likely to be injured in a car accident than be abducted by a stranger. If you manage to keep your child from ever being unattended even for a minute, you will be such a great parent for saving them from that (literally) one in a million risk (the abductor will just find someone else’s child to kidnap, child abduction rates will not change). On the other hand, if you could move your kid somewhere where they can get around without you driving them, or being exposed to cars as a pedestrian, you could save them that 4 in 10,000 risk of dying in a car accident.

Hysteria over child safety is just another manifestation of our brains being bad at statistics. Ultra-rare, dramatic things take on a ridiculously overblown importance. A big part of the Free Range Kids book is looking critically at the data and deciding which things are important to your child’s safety, and which are overblown media BS. For each restriction you can make on your child, there’s a cost benefit analysis. There IS A COST to the child’s future by denying them that experience. Sometimes it’s worth that cost to prohibit it, for things that are true safety risks. But sometimes the risk of being permissive is so small that it’s outweighed by the benefits. And that’s what the book is about. Not about being an uninvolved parent or letting kids run wild.
spincycle

> ” Lost, dead or white slavery? (Which, for our
> purposes, includes Hispanic, Asian American,
> African American, Native American, and Inuit
> slavery, too.)”

So why not just call it slavery, without the caucasoid-centric worldview?
bklynchris

As has been well established by my hyperbolic posts, I am too paranoid. I have watched this mother establish herself as the new parenting sensation from the discussion very soon (like within a week) after her then 9 yo son’s inaugural solo subway trip in the local nyc media to now.

Why would you want to advertise that you let your son run about freely through the city? Why not just lo-jack his ass and send his coordinates to NAMBLA instead?
Slizzered

@ 10

Have not read the book, so can’t say. Only know that some kids need more supervision than others.

The same sort of upbringing can lead to all sorts of different outcomes. Personally, I think genes play a much larger role in how people turn out than almost anyone likes to imagine.
Timothy Hutton

So the right response to one over-reaction (overly protective parenting) is another over-reaction (un-protective parenting)?

I practice parenting – neither “over” nor “un” – by gradually giving my children more responsibility and freedom as they grow.

When I was growing up, parents tended to manage their children in much larger chunks of time (several hours) compared with many of my contemporaries (schedules with details down to 5 or 10 minutes), and I think we were better for it: we learned to entertain ourselves, we had time to clean-up from various adventures gone awry, and we could spend large chunks of time on things we liked, not things our parents thought we liked. Personally I spent countless hours building intricate wolds with sticks, twigs and matchbox cars in the back yard, as well as exploring the town on my bicycle by myself, frequently riding miles from house without telling my parents.

The trends that worry me are when parents abandon parenting and try to become their child’s BFF, and when parents try to relive their childhoods through their children (the frustrated parent that was denied ballet classes as a child that forces their child to take ballet, etc.)…

Is this the woman that sent her child off on the NYC subway armed with a cellphone and his 12-13 years of accumulated wisdom? If so, aside from her self-promotion and the “stunt” aspect of the whole thing, I thought it was an OK experiment, but not really the “parenting revolution” she made it out to be.
iomatic

Just do what I do, and get them into Karate. A jodan oi zuki usually takes care of stalkers pretty quick-like.
Anonymous

“This content was removed at the request of John Wiley & Sons”
RevelryByNight

@24

Would you suggest the opposite tack would solve or improve the problem? Locking the kids in their rooms, never letting them out of your sight, and forbidding them to be without adult supervision?

I agree that it’s not always neglect that makes for little hellions, but I’d imagine that no matter how watchful your parents were in those situations, your brother would still find ways to raise hell.

I still believe that all kids need the freedom to explore the world in a way that allows them to learn responsibility through the consequences of their actions, not by telling them horror stories of pedophiles and murderers on every small-town street corner.
TroofSeeker

Slizzered, you’re my kind ‘a guy!
There’s a thousand stories I could tell here, but I’ll start with the cover picture:
I’m eight years old, walking on a fence. Behind me is my little brother, four, and behind him is my little sister, six. Below us is a cactus patch. Sister starts to flail, grabs little brother, who reaches for me. I step beyond his reach, and they both fall into cactus patch.
There was a lot of crying that afternoon, Mom with pliars and me with my butt glowing red from a fresh paddling. Precious moments.
TroofSeeker

@IamInnocent >”Troofseeker, Cactus paddle I hope, otherwise where’s the (ahem) justice?”

I couldn’t have held them both. The belting was for letting them follow me, then leading them on a narrow fence above a cactus patch.

Justice? How’s this: my brother lives here in my house. If he shows me the scars on his ass one more time…!
RevelryByNight

A lot of you guys are missing the point. Raising Free-range kids is not about being an absent or neglectful parent, which is the source of a lot of the trouble-making and drug-addiction horror stories you’re referring to.

It means giving kids a chance to have freedom, independence and privacy according to their needs. Every person, including kids, needs to feel like they have a certain amount of self-ownership, even if it’s disguised as free-wheeling in the backyard under the watchful eye of a parent in the kitchen. No one, including the author, is advocating ingoring your child as s/he causes havok.
It’s about trusting your child to use his/her instincts and sense to explore the world in increasingly large spheres of experience. It’s enough for a four year old to have a backyard, a 9 year old to have a tree house out of the gaze of parents, a 12 year old to have a bike they can ride around the neighborhood. And then, when they’re home, the parents ask questions like “what did you do today?” to encourage an openness and honesty that neglected kids never have a chance to share.
Anonymous

@Blueworld
I don’t know if its just formatting but the links you provide as evidence for your case both go to 404 errors.
IamInnocent

I wonder if there is a book that advise not to set too much store by trendy books…
Remez

@Blueworld, bingo the issue of relative risks. My eldest kid started walking home alone from the school bus stop at 10 years old. It’s about a mile walk along a well-travelled street in a generally safe suburbian neighhborhood, a route she’d been walking with adults for many, many years. My fear was (is!) always about her being hit by a car by an inattentive driver. She knew (and demonstrated) that crossing a street means not only looking both ways, but also establishing eye contact with a driver stopped but poised to turn into her path. I cannot tell you how many calls we received from other parents who saw her walking by herself, who then asked if I wasn’t worried about her being kidnapped.

IIRC, Skenazy sent her son off on his journey without a cell phone because she was worried that he would lose it. OK, I know that kids do lose phones, but it seems a bit odd that a parent would think their kid is responsible enough to be able to handle a long subway ride but not be able to hang onto a phone.