Picket Fence Post

You knew this one was coming. A report from a respected medical journal saying that today’s children don’t get to spend enough time in the sun. You read that correctly. They do not get enough time IN THE SUN. In fact, the report from Pediatrics went so far as to say that researchers have discovered that 7 out of 10 American kids have precariously low levels of Vitamin D. NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams called the report a “stern warning” that kids have “shockingly low levels of Vitamin D, the one we get from sunshine.”

After detailing a horrifying list of ailments that can develop if children don’t get sufficient Vitamin D — heart disease, weak bones, rickets — NBC’s medical correspondent actually told parents that children should spend 10-15 outside without wearing sunscreen. Let me repeat that one: WITHOUT WEARING SUNSCREEN. This goes directly against the advice we’ve had shoved down our throats for years and years which was if you don’t slap sunscreen on your kid, you’re condemning him or her to skin cancer, you knucklehead of a parent.

Here, watch the segment about the report for yourself:

After a decade of sunscreen-first advice, they’re telling us to send the kids outside without sunscreen. This is just another example of how the alarmist advice we’re handed by parenting experts, if followed to the letter, isn’t always the best way to raise a kid. (I already let my kids outside without sunscreen in certain circumstances, but don’t tell the sunscreen-first people lest I tagged as a Bad Mommy.)

Why don’t parents send kids outside without sunscreen? Because of the dire cancer warnings we’ve received. Why else don’t American kids tend to spend as much time outside (leading to obesity, among other ailments) as they used to? Because experts have trained parents to fear abductors at every turn, West Nile Virus in every mosquito, germs and bacteria lurking in every speck of dirt (we are, after all, Purell Nation), in each grain of sand in the beaches (the Boston Globe recently ran a story designed to scare everyone about beach sand), in the possibility of heat exhaustion during summertime play and with the hazards of potentially killer playground equipment and inadequately safe playground surfaces. If you pile all the expert warnings on top of one another, it’s no wonder that parents sometimes think that the only safe place for their kids is inside their homes because you can’t possibly simultaneously follow all of the often contradictory advice. (For example: To avoid harsh sun, you’re told to go outside in late afternoon when the sun’s rays are weaker. However by that time of day, the mosquitos are starting to come out and you could put yourself at risk for West Nile Virus. You’re also told that to keep mosquitoes and ticks at bay, you should wear long pants and long sleeves, but the heat exhaustion folks say that you should wear light clothing — stuff like shorts and T-shirts — on hot days.)

The experts have, frankly, made everyone paranoid, which is why I keep going back to the same, simple message: If you parent in a moderate and reasonable fashion, you and your kids will be just fine. Sure, examine the new data as it comes out — in this case, the study found that a majority of American children have insufficient Vitamin D levels — and then figure out a way to make sure your kids are getting what they need.

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: Wellesley Mothers Forum

I had a fantastic conversation with the women who attended my speech last night at the Wellesley Mothers Forum. During the talk, I urged the moms to trust themselves and their own instincts when it comes to raising their children, and to take the strident advice of fear-mongering “experts” with a grain of salt.

Some said that they’ve felt the way I did in my early years of parenting: Overwhelmed by the volume of parenting advice and judgment coming at them from all directions. Like the advice tossed out in an op/ed in last week’s New York Times which said if you use a forward-facing stroller, you’re hindering your child’s potential linguistic development and should consider rear-facing strollers so you can talk non-stop to your kid. Seriously. The op/ed chastised parents — “stroller pushers” they were called — that by facing your child away from you “valuable opportunities for interaction can be missed.” Good God.

All too frequently, we decided during the Q&A session, mothers receive and absorb only criticism about their child-rearing and wind up feeling badly about their inability to meet impossibly high parenting standards. There’s very little positive reinforcement that moms receive.

My anti-advice to the group: Parent in a way that feels right to you and don’t be bullied by the experts.

Item #2: Atlantic Mag Takes on Breastfeeding

Speaking of issues which make mothers feel guilty . . . the Atlantic Magazine’s April issue has a piece which is sure to be grist for many a mommy blog and irritate breastfeeding advocates to no end. In an article entitled, “The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” Hanna Rosin, a mom of three who has breastfed all three of her children, deconstructs the studies proclaiming breastmilk as having the power to make babies brilliant and super-healthy, by saying that close scrutiny of the results doesn’t prove that mommy’s milk is quite the magical elixir people may think it is.

“Given what we know so far,” Rosin wrote, “it seems reasonable to put breastfeeding’s health benefits on the plus side of the ledger and other things — modesty, independence, career, sanity — on the minus side, and then tally them up and make a decision. But in this risk-averse age of parenting, that’s not how it’s done.”

Describing the intense pressure to breastfeed, particularly among mothers in her area, Rosin said when she even suggested the notion of stopping breastfeeding her baby after a month (the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a year), she got the cold shoulder from her peers. Rosin wrote:

“In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breastfeeding is the real ticket to the club.”

Item #3: When Ricky Gervais Meets Elmo (NOT for Kids!)

Okay, enough with the serious. Bring on comedian Ricky Gervais for a wholly inappropriate interview with Elmo that should make you at least crack a smile. Just don’t share it with the kids. (Link to video is here.)

Ricky Gervais seems to be having so much fun during this Associated Press interview, doesn’t he?