Welcome, TIME Magazine Readers!

I just saw a banner that would make a good logo for this post, or in fact, this entire blog. It kind of unintentionally sums up the attitude of the opposition (“Be safe, or WE’LL get you”).

Okay, see, you know how to do it right sister. And I’m following your lead. Glad to share pages with you in Time. And so glad too that Free Range and Slow Family are hitting the streets.

I discovered this blog on Time Magazine this afternoon, and haven’t been able to put it down since. I wish all free-range parents had been my friends when I was raising my daughters — now 20 and 16 yrs. I lived in a small town in Indiana when I was a kid, and grew up on the same books we encourage our daughters to read today about the independent spirit that grows out of freedom from parents and authority (Pippi Longstocking) and/or that grows from parents who respect their child’s need for freedom and self-reliance as a valuable tool in later life (Nancy Drew). My parents were what I call “Charlie Brown” parents — the reverse of the old saying that children should be heard but not seen — in that they always provided reassuring background noise, but were never hovering. My two siblings and I grew up in total freedom after school and during the summers, riding bikes, playing “Nancy Drew” which meant exploring the town and the woods in search of all clues, walking to the bus stop over a mile away, and venturing out on a $1.75 allowance in search of treasures to be had at the GC Murphy’s uptown (also a mile away). The only cautionary advice my mother gave us as we ran out the door was to be sure to be home before dinnertime. Once, my brother left a note on the refrigerator that advised my mother that she didn’t need to cook that night because he was going down to the Ohio River to catch lots of fish for dinner (my mother had Swanson’s TV dinners on standby just in case). He was probably around 8 or 9 years old.
When my (now ex-) husband moved to a city and had children, we wanted the same opportunities for freedom for our girls. Having chosen an inner-city neighborhood, we knew we had to be particularly creative. In retrospect, we just started slowly allowing them to “free range” in a responsible and age-appropriate manner — taking cookies across the street and down a couple of houses for a sick neighbor at 4 or 5 years, picking up pizza around the corner at 6-7 years, riding their bikes to the community garden to pick flowers at around the same age. Like Lenore, when our older daughter turned 9, she begged us to let her ride a bus all by herself from our house to her dad’s office at Carnegie Mellon University (about a 45-minute commute). We were thrilled at her wanting to do this at all! — after all, the books we feed our children encourage this very kind of independent spirit . (My sister, who lives in the suburbs, complains that she encourages her boys to do things like this ala Huck Finn, but they don’t even want to do them!). So, I waited with her at the bus stop, and her dad was there to greet her, at the other end. It turns out this is one of her fondest memories of childhood because of the pride and thrill of having accomplished something big and responsible all on her own.
I’m a divorce lawyer who does a lot of custody, and I am particularly sympathetic to free range parents, because often the judges are the very over-parenting parents we free rangers don’t admire because of their tendency to judge our own parenting skills. I think I’m a very good parent, just like my mother was in the 1960-1970’s, and I like my life and the way it turned out to be confident of my own parenting when it comes to my daughters. My mother kept the note that my brother had written about catching an entire dinner. She also made sure that she had Swanson’s dinners on standby, which turned out necessary when my brother returned empty-handed after fishing. My younger is a teenager now. I am not her “best friend” but remember how hard it was to be a teenager. Being a fan of Beatrix Potter as a kid, I offer the same kind of comfort that Peter Rabbit’s mother offered him after a day of scary (but unknown to parents) adventure—chamomile tea and a big hug.

I would like to see more blogging and ideas about how this concept applies to parents of teenagers.

I absolutely love the chapter titles, and got a giggle out of the Kiddie Safety-Industrial Complex. 🙂

Awesome blog, wonderful premise. It’s nice to know that their are other parents out there who actually let their kids ride public transportation. My wife and I got lots of grief for letting our 12 year-old ride the city bus in Denver…alone! He loved it, however.

Moreover, my wife, who teaches kids from around the world at a public middle school in Denver, has students who ride the city bus for 75 minutes each way. Because the have no other choice. And they get along just fine, thank you very much.

My 14 year-old son has asked to ride his bike to school. It’s about 5 miles away. After reading this blog, I’m ready to say “YES!”

Thanks.

@ Mark

Love it! I grew up in Denver, and I used to love riding the bus downtown to the library and the art museum. I also used to ride the bike trail along the Platte down to Larimer Square, and play in fountains, and ride the parking structure at Boetcher.

Was in Denver for the first time in 20 years this past summer. What a great city! Lucky kids you’ve got!

Mark,

If your son wants to ride 5 miles everyday, you need to definitely encourage that before it is too late and he gets into other things… As I wrote earlier, I have a sister who encourages this in her two boys, but they are not interested. I have one daughter who rode the city bus and it’s one of her fondest memories today. The younger (16) has no interest, but of all the boys who are her current friends, the ones I really like are the ones who bike over, and frequently leave the bikes on our front porch until the weather improves for riding home.

Sophie

THANK YOU!

I am so relieved to see that others feel the same way about the over-parenting that is in my face everyday. There are so many dimensions to it, from the absence of children playing outside in our perfectly safe neighborhood, to the moms who manage all the answers on their kids’ elementary school homework, to the purell squirts at every playdate. I’ve been making myself accepted by others to just say that I’m too lazy to watch my 4 year old kid every second of the day. I was also “too lazy” to stand in line for 4 hours to get my kid vaccinated for the swine flu despite the god-forbidders. The hysteria on all of these fronts have to stop or I’m going to have a very hard time making friends.

Where does the helicoptering spring from? Is it anxiety and competition that your child must be a bigger wage earner than the next kid when they grow up, or they won’t survive? Is this because the middle class is disappearing?

I’m going to check this site regularly and buy any tee-shirts you might be selling, so maybe I can start a few conversations in this leafy town.

http://www.truthout.org/1122091

That’s the better link, go read that link.

I hope she told your neighbor to go to… work.

You know what I really think it is? I think it is that moms (dads, too, of course) are older when they have kids in the first place, and have thus had time to develop the dreadful sort of work ethic and future-orientation required to be so INVOLVED.

I myself was a youngish mom (23 when my first was born) and I’ve always noted a certain age/class disparity in parenting styles.

(there’s a reason young moms are stereotyped as lazy and self-centered! And yes, it got on my nerves when some anxiety-riddled 35-year-old first-timer helpfully lectured me about how I wasn’t stimulating my kid’s brain in the proper manner!

She, in turn, probably found it horrifying that I reeeeeeally actually didn’t care that much about the various extremely dull developmental milestones of infancy. Nope, and I still don’t care much whether my kids can transfer a block from one hand to the other by the appropriate age… but it’s easier for me to see why it *should* somehow matter.

But I honestly lacked the capacity to worry about it that much back then.

At 28, I’ve developed a much better “what-if??” meter. I live less in the moment than I did at 23. I’m less selfish. More future-oriented. Better able to imagine likely outcomes for present actions. Etc.

They say you finally finish growing up at 25, and I believe it. That said, our mothers may have let us have more free reign BECAUSE they were largely still young, selfish and shortsighted when we were born, and by the time they themselves had finished growing up enough to worry overmuch about our little destinies, certain family and neighborhood dynamics had already emerged.

My mom was 21 when I was born. HER mother was 19 when she was born.

I doubt either of them were as patient or as self-sacrificing as the 40-year-old new mothers I used to run into at playgroups.

Maybe a pinch of maternal selfishness is not the worst thing in the world for a kid.

I was 19, 24 and 26 when my kids were born. I was the paranoid mom of the year. In my defense, in my immediate family and neighborhood we’d had 2 non-custodial parental abductions of kids we knew, as well as 2 stranger abductions, one of my youngest brother and one of a kid my other brother rode the bus with to school. They went to different schools, but rode the same bus. My youngest brother reappeared about 10 hours later… the kid from the bus was Kevin Collins. San Francisco, about 1983. He has never been located. I was an older teen, 17 and 18 respectively, and these experiences impacted my later parenting in profound ways.
As a grandmother raising a grandchild who was born when I was 40, I’m waaaaaaay more relaxed. I moved to the midwest when my kids were 2 younger kids (oh yeah. my oldest? the one who was born when I was 19? He was non-custodial kidnapped from school at age 7. I found him on Myspace at age 21) were 9 and 11, and it changed our lives. There are sidewalks here, and parks, and my neighbors noticed when we moved in, and noticed we had kids, and came over to give us a block phone list, introduce themselves and their kids, and invite us for tea, picnic, coffee…
I’ve developed a great community of friends, and I love the freedom of knowing that my grandkid, and my kids when they were younger, are/were much safer than I ever imagined, and it was okay to let them go explore and find themselves.

As an avid reader of this blog, I was delighted with the Time magazine article. There’s one point I do not agree with. I can’t remember if it was made by the reporter or Lenore..that of vaccinations. The over-vaccinating of our children is another piece of fear based over-parenting. I had a few vaccinations as a kid…polio, small pox, etc. Now 2-day old babies are being vaccinated against hepatitis! This is a disease transmitted primarily via intravenous drug use. The chicken pox vaccine has been labeled a convenience vaccine. Parents couldn’t afford to take a week off of work to stay home with a sick kid. I got the chicken pox, mumps, measles, etc. I choose not to vaccinate my kids because I realize their immune systems need to get sick sometimes in order to grow and develop, much in the same way our kids need to fail in order to learn, make their own judgments in order to thrive as adults.