Picket Fence Post

Lenore Skenazy is passionate about her cause: Giving children — and their parents – freedom. For the kids, it’s the freedom to play outside without grown-ups, to make mistakes, to climb trees, to walk to school alone, to frolic. For their parents, it’s giving them the confidence to let go of irrational fears that make them to want to place their children under lock and key or 24/7 surveillance. Or both.

Following the hullabaloo that accompanied her controversial public announcement (via a column in the New York Sun) that she let her then-9-year-old son to ride the New York subway solo, Skenazy started what she believes to be a movement, the “free-range kids” movement. Now that movement has a web site and a book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. 

Instead of the Picket Fence Post’s typical author Q&A , I’ve summarized my chat with Skenazy below, as the author mused at length on a number of topics including why parents today are safety crazy and how to put risk into perspective. (Note: Some of Skenazy’s quotes below have been condensed.)

When we started chatting, the first subject that came up was the story about the New Hampshire father who was arrested and charged with child endangerment after he left his 16-month old alone in the car. (Police said the child, who was treated and released from the hospital, appeared to be suffering from “heat-related signs of distress.”) Prior to our interview, I’d been listening to radio talk show callers say they’d never leave a child alone in a car, largely because they were afraid a stranger would steal the child. One caller said, “Your baby only has one infancy. Why would you risk it?” I asked Skenazy about the callers’ opinions, in particular, the invoking of the “but it COULD happen” and the “if it’s one in a million chance, what if YOU’RE the one in a million” arguments.

This is what Skenazy called relying on “the very least likely scenario on earth” to gauge something’s relative safety.

“People get upset about these risks we ‘can’t take,’” Skenazy said. “We need to put it in perspective.” Parents who don’t constantly watch their children when they’re out of the house are pilloried by their peers in this climate of fear, she said. “I keep thinking of the Salem witch trials as the only sort of working analogy for me.” By writing her book which encourages affording more freedom to kids and for allowing her own grade schooler to take the subway alone, she said, “I’m on trial for being a cavalier parent who doesn’t care about safety.”

Putting risk into perspective

After scrutinizing federal child abduction statistics for her book, Skenazy said she learned that: “If you were outside in the 1970s/1980s, your children are safer outside today. To say this to anyone and to have them digest it are two different things because people don’t believe it. People don’t want to believe it.”

Even if parents believe that it’s possible to vigilantly protect their children from harm, there’s no way to eliminate all risks, she said. “It’s all this mistaken notion that if we avoid everything, we’ll avoid risk. First of all, we’re all going to die,” Skenazy said, adding that the fact that the number one cause of death for children is as a result of vehicular crashes doesn’t stop parents from driving their children around. She said people have put the risks of automobile accidents into context by saying that driving is a necessary evil. And they should put the risk of child abductions into the same perspective, Skenazy said.

Parents have been persuaded to substitute the advice from TV and magazine experts for their own, and often fret about something that has a statistically minuscule chance of occurring, resulting in the over-zealoused protection our children, she said.

The media — both news and entertainment — make it seem like children are under a constant threat

In the past 20 years, Skenazy said there’s “been an enormous sea change,” in what freedoms parents allow their children to enjoy. She pins a lot of the blame on 24/7 cable TV news networks which beam and hype children-in-danger stories into living rooms around the world, and an entertainment culture which offers unflinching violence against kids/or sick kids plotlines for crime/cop/medical shows nearly every night.

When it comes to stories or TV shows about children who’ve been abducted, Skenazy said: “On TV, the victims are usually strangers. There’s somebody randomly plucking a victim out of nowhere . . . In reality, most criminals are family members or friends.” She said when people talk about the likelihood of an unattended child being abducted from a car, people imagine that someone, “the Boogie Man,” is “lurking, waiting there” on the off chance that a parent will come by and leave a child there for him to take.

Today’s parents, Skenazy said, have “been served up for 20 years now. . . horror stories about children . . . You’ll start feeling like no child is safe. We’re marinating in Stephen King territory.”

Parental guilt fuels safety mania

“Parents are made to feel so terrible and guilty,” Skenazy said, observing  that many folks feel as though they fall short in the face of unrelenting parental expert advice. “I can’t be the perfect parent that you [the parental expert] suggest . . . I went and read these [parenting] books. There’s book after book of how to talk to your child. The assumption behind all of these things is that at any moment you could ruin them.”

On the subject of parenting magazines, she said: ”They’re poison. Those magazines don’t only tell you all the behavioral things you’re screwing up, they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for the things that COULD happen to the baby. ” She said one of her favorite examples of how the magazines make parents irrationally crazy was a magazine article she once saw about ”how to have a fun, and totally safe, day in the sun with your toddler.” Skenazy said, noting that there were many tips on how to avoid hazards like sunburns and other disasters. “I didn’t realize it was so difficult to have fun with my toddler or something bad would happen.”

Giving children confidence

 The way to actually help children become confident and navigate the outside world is to let them experience it, Skenazy said. “The way you get confidence is by doing something by yourself, by falling off your bike and getting back on, all the things we did when we were younger,” she said. “When you’re allowed to do something on your own, it makes you who you are. You get your kid prepared. . . Our job is to prepare our kids to be a part of the world.”

Image credit: Amazon.com.