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. (more…)