Picket Fence Post

We’ve dished in this space about how kids don’t seem to walk to school anymore like they used to back in the day. I’ve often  quoted rabble-rouser author Lenore Skenazy (of the Free Range Kids) on this subject where she’s mused about how overprotective today’s parents can be.

And this past Sunday, the New York Times ran a large article on the front page of the Styles section entitled, “Why Can’t She Walk to School? An Issue That Distills the Anxieties at the Heart of Modern Parenting.” It chronicled how hyper-parental anxiety, plus the heightened fear of abductions fueled by massive media coverage of disappearances, has driven parents to feel compelled to monitor their kids at all times when going to and from school, never mind letting them walk to school on their own. An excerpt:

“. . . [A] generation of parents and administrations have created dense rituals of supervision around what used to be a mere afterthought of childhood: taking yourself to and from school.

Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.

But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus . . . Children are driven to school two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building and each child is escorted out.

When to detach from the parental leash?”

Truth telling time: I still accompany my 8-year-old to the bus stop on my street. But it’s not because I think anything bad is going to happen to him. Believe me, I’d rather drink my coffee and read the papers while listening to Morning Joe in the background, but I just can’t resist the little man when he begs me to go out there with him so he’s not bored while waiting there alone until the other two families arrive. Plus, he’s the only boy at the bus stop.

But this will be the last year of my going to the bus stop with him. Next year, he’ll join his brother and sister, now 11 years old, who walk to their bus stop together and seem to be doing just fine. If the schools my children attend were within walking distance of the house, you bet I’d be in favor of them using some good, old fashioned shoe leather.

How do your kids get to school via bus, walking/biking or by car? Do you accompany your kids to the bus stops?

Image credit: Jamie Kripke/New York Times.

When I posted a lengthy story/interview with author Lenore  Skenazy — who wrote Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry — I neglected to include on this blog a YouTube video that she prominently mentioned in her book.

Arguing that parents shouldn’t try to protect their children from every risk, thereby robbing them of valuable learning opportunities, Skenazy said that encouraging an “If I fail, so what? I will try again” mindset is considered to be a child’s “surest path to success.”

I finally looked up the “Life=Risk” video she mentioned in her chapter, “Fail! It’s the New Succeed.” And I think I’m going to keep it bookmarked and pull it up onto the computer screen the next time one of my Picket Fence Post kids is feeling down or discouraged.

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. (more…)

Item #1: Grandparents Want Hip Names

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about how I thought the media were unfairly maligning Baby Boomer grandparents — specifically grandmothers – portraying them as too narcissistic to be bothered to do “grandmotherly” duties and pitting them against one another.

This week I saw yet another grandparent-centric article which deepened my suspicion that the media have grown tired of the old working mom/at-home mom “mommy wars” and is trying to drum up some excitement for the so-called ”nana wars.” This page one article in the Boston Globe focused on the fact that some grandparents don’t want their grandkids to call them by traditional names and prefer either their first names or something quirkier, hipper. The article entitled, “They love being grandparents, but call them something else,” begun this way:

“As the youth-obsessed baby boomers advance, albeit reluctantly, into the next phase of their lives, they are embracing grandparenthood with the same gusto they have expressed for everything else, be it exercise or adventure travel. They’re loading the grandkids’ video games onto their own iPods, listening to their music, and taking them on trips.

But grandparenting comes with a catch: It means you are getting old — or at least older. And that’s not sitting well with a generation that grew up on The Who singing, ‘I hope I die before I get old.” Sure, they want to be grandparents. Just don’t call them that.”

The article offered examples of grandparents who prefer to be called by their first names or unusual monikers such as Bubbles, Sharky, Pebbles, Rock, Gram-E and Nanno. Somehow I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the this-generation-of-grandparents-isn’t-playing-by-the-so-called-”rules” stories.

Item #2: ‘Free’ the Kids

I’m currently finishing reading the book Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy, with whom I’m hoping to conduct a Q&A for posting on this blog next week. She makes the compelling argument that we’ve become too over protective of our children in all areas of their lives. And she’s not the only one who thinks so.

In my June Parents & Kids Magazine column entitled, “Free the Children: Not a Slogan for This Generation of Parents,” I addressed how different childhood is for kids today versus when we were youths (like when my parents used to regularly send me to the store to buy them cigarettes whereas today they’d be jailed for doing so). The column calls attention to an incident this spring involving the police, a 10-year-old boy and a mother who let said boy walk down the street solo to soccer practice and got harassed about endangering her child.

(more…)