So, I'm finally almost through reading "Free Range Kids" by Lenore Skenazy, which I started months ago, put down and sort of forgot about, then recently picked up again.
It's about how parents today are basically smoking anxiety crack, and how we need to all just get over ourselves and the idea that we can and should shelter our kids from all possible danger, because a) our lives are really not all that dangerous and b) the effort is making us positively nuts.
She points out that this is not at all the way WE grew up. And it's totally not. How many stories can we all tell about things we did as kids that today would possibly land our parents in the DCFS office begging for their little ones back?
Here's my personal favorite... My sister and I decided we wanted to build an office for ourselves. Maybe it was for the newspaper we were publishing, I don't remember. But we knew we needed two large boxes. And we knew where to find them: the Sears warehouse. I was maybe 8 and she was 4.
Sears was located, inconveniently, across two highways. I don't remember at all whether we purposely decided to not tell our mom where we were going, or if it just didn't occur to us to mention it. In any case, we walked about a mile to Sears (crossing the highways carefully) and into the loading dock behind the store. We asked the guys working there--who I seem to recall were a little stunned--for two boxes. One short and one tall, please. Yes, a refrigerator box. A stove one too. Thanks.
Carrying the boxes above our heads, we then walked back home, where we proceeded to paint and cut doors and windows in the coolest playhouse ever. This became our HQ for many, many months.
Now that Talia is almost 4 herself, I admit that it makes my stomach turn inside out to contemplate her going on a similar adventure, even with a supremely mature (ha!) 8-year-old. (And to be fair, it does pain my mom to hear this story, so maybe some things haven't changed.) We don't even let her cross our little road by herself yet. And yet don't I want her to feel brave and resourceful? To solve problems herself? To think outside the--well, the box?
Skenazy makes the comparison between small children of decades and centuries past--and in many parts of the world today--who took and still take on responsibilities and jobs and challenges that we couldn't fathom for our lactose-intolerant, knee-pad-wearing kids slathered in 100 SPF sunscreen. Like say working as a blacksmith's apprentice, or even selling newspapers or taking care of children just a couple of years younger than themselves.
Probably about 0.4% of American parents today would be OK with their 6-year-old babysitting and slightly fewer (0.0004%) with their first grader hammering molten horseshoes. But somewhere beyond the horrible "what-ifs" of these scenarios is the question of how we give our kids real challenges, real exposure to the world around them, and prepare them to grow up--without being oblivious to their general safety.
I thought about that question a lot while reading another book recently, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" by Alexandra Fuller, a memoir of her childhood in various African countries. Her parents were crazy pioneer types. The family suffered. There were wars, predatory animals, diseases, heat, hunger, everything. Three siblings died.
You either read a book like that with your mouth hanging open in horror (that these British parents decided, what a great way to raise a family!) or sort of in awe of the author and how she grew up with so many life skills.
Now, you could say that's what even Skenazy calls "romanticizing childhood in impoverished villages."
There does seem to be a bit of backlash rippling through our culture when it comes to overprotective parenting. As one example, the movie "Babies," which tracks the first year of four infants' lives in both industrial and developing countries, presumably showing us how cool it is when your baby can ride on your lap on a motorcycle or drink water out of a muddy puddle. The film of course doesn't show the puddle baby getting dysentery. (Hopefully she didn't.) But maybe these images can at least start to prepare our minds for the idea that baby gates aren't solely responsible for our species' survival.
Anyway, I've struggled with this question of "what's safe enough" while living outside the U.S., in a country where young kids have a lot more freedom and society isn't nearly as litigious. We might take a walk into the fields by our house and see a few kids riding in the front scoop of a tractor driven by their dad, even though this is Totally Unsafe. I think it's kind of cool. And yes, I've seen 6-year-olds watching their kid sisters at the playground. Nobody got hurt.
But soon it will be time to test our beliefs. To let go a bit more. Can we, who are so comfy we delude ourselves into thinking we can control everything, let our kids have their day?
