Six-Year-Olds Build Nuclear Reactor (Or So the Cops Think)

Another story of strangely advanced kids – or is it strangely inept cops? — this time from Germany. Enjoy! — Lenore

Fourth Grader Lost in Wilderness Doesn’t Panic

I spend a lot of time trying to convince skeptics that “Free-Range” does not mean, “Send Your Kid Down the Mississippi on A Raft.” So when I present this article, it’s only because it delights me so: The story of a boy who will be in fourth grade next year who got lost in the wilderness and didn’t panic.

Instead, he tore up his yellow slicker to leave little ribbons in trees as a sign to searchers: I’m nearby!

He also followed a stream figuring it would lead to a lake where there might be people.

And upon reuniting with his dad 18 hours later, what were his first words? “Happy Father’s Day.”

Bet it was.   – Lenore

Help, Daddy! A Grandma Smiled At Me! Will She Kidnap Me?

Hi Free-Rangers!
Just though I’d share this little note I got from Australia this morning. Makes you realize it’s a small world after all: A small,  paranoid, danger-halucinating world. This is from a lady named Vivienne:

Walking in Ikea.

 

I am a pleasant-enough, smiley grandmoter of 9. A man with his daughter of about 3 or 4 parks her near me as he steps to look at a shelf.

 

I smile as I step past and the child screams.

 

“Don’t leave me Daddy! Someone is going  to steal me!”  I almost pass out with shock.

 

Today,  walking into a ladies toilet, a child passing by asks her Daddy if she can go in.

 

“No,” he says, “someone might take you.”   I don’t even dare suggest that I take her in.

 

 I can’t stand it.

 

It’s as if parents have joined a mad cult. What’s the pay off?

 

I had five free range kids. They’d walk down to the wool shed with lunch for Jim  and a mile to the school bus each morning . They walked to visit Granny three miles over five steep ridges, and they now  live all over the world, which was always my intent for them .

 

Is it that children are now regarded as possessions?

 

Lighten up.

 

#

We’re trying, Viv! — Lenore

Free-Range Kids Changes A Mom (And Two Childhoods)

Hi Readers — This letter, received today, made me cheer. For the mom, for the kids, for the movement!

From a mom named Mia:

I do very much wish to thank you for writing and sharing this blog.  It is changing my life and that of my children and I suppose you could call me a convert of sorts.

It feels like such a relief, a weight lifted from my shoulders, a permission of sorts to be the kind of parent I feel comfortable being.  And that kind of parent is not one who approaches child-rearing with fear and quilt, rarely able to take a deep breath and relax.  I am so weary of the excessive worry about every little thing – and the pressure, judgment  and competition from other mothers to see who can cushion their child the most.

I want to be a free range mom!  The thoughtfulness behind your articles and the intelligence of your reader’s discussions have emboldened me to change it up and let loose a bit around here -

A week ago I let my 11 year old leave the dentist’s office we were at (for his brothers appointment)  to walk alone, out of my sight, across the semi-busy shopping center to the McDonald’s and buy an ice cream cone.  He was so proud of himself .  And I felt such shame that I had never before allowed my son to feel this accomplishment and confidence.  Next time there is a dentist appointment for his brother he can stay home alone and I know he’ll be just fine.

Yesterday I let him make a boxed mac & cheese.  I wasn’t even in the same room where he was boiling water on the gas stove for the 1st time.  Just hollered out my answers to any questions he had.  He did it!  And his grin of pride was huge.

Also yesterday, I let my 8yo son go outside alone for the 1st time.  To go to friends homes and see if anyone could play, or maybe go to the park on the corner and find some kids there to play with.  He rode his bike and he stopped by often – for popsicles, to give home tours to new friends, to grab a ball, to get our puppy and participate in an impromptu 5-child dog walking trip around the neighborhood.  And with the age old twin calls of hunger and twilight, he was back home, grinning and enthusiastically asking if he could do it all over again tomorrow.

Ahh,  *now* I’m breathing and it feels like fun and happiness.

And with that, readers, a great weekend to all! — Lenore

Free-Range Kids Outrage of the Week: “Wear Goggles When Putting Up Posters”

As nutty as we think the restrictions on American kids and teachers are getting, England may even be a few steps ahead. In this piece from The Telegraph, teachers tell of regulations that require them to wear goggles  when putting  up  posters with “Blue-Tack” (i.e., sticky stuff). They were also issued a 5-page warning about glue sticks  (which they call the Pritt Stick). Meantime, school got rid of its “three-legged” races for the kids — too dangerous — while another got rid of its climbing equipment because the wood chips underneath weren’t the required depth.

Calling Monty Python!

Worst of all — for kids, for teachers, for anyone who wants our children to poke through the increasingly bullet-proof  bubble that is childhood – four teachers in ten said that some field trips had been “toned down or cancelled” because they just weren’t safe enough.

When you have to wear goggles to put up a poster, what is?

– Lenore

Boys In School: Antsy, Desperate — And Deprived of Recess

This wonderful Huffington Post essay by Holly Robinson describes her 6th grade son’s misery in school. It sounds so much like my  fifth grade son’s misery, it made me realize that maybe his “school = lethal injection minus the yummy last meal”  attitude  just may be generic.  Having been a girl all my life, I didn’t realize boys could be so out of synch with the whole classroom  thing. I thought everyone  aspired to to  Teacher’s Pet-for-Life.

Guess not.

Anyway, the part that really gets me — in my son’s life and in Ms. Robinson’s  essay — is that when kids are so bored and miserable as to be disruptive, the punishment of choice seems to be: No recess.

Which makes about as much sense as trying to rehab a thief by taking away his day job. Now what’s he going to do?

Probably not start re-organizing his five-subject binder.  So here’s to good old-fashioned recess: more of it, not less.  

(And if we could work on more essays about history or art or  science instead of endless  ”personal narratives,”  that would be lovely, too.  I swear, the New York City public schools are teaching kids to blog! But that’s for another rant.)

Yours on the cusp of summer –  Lenore

Wonder of Wonders: Kids Play Outside, Other Kids Join ‘Em

This is the kind of letter Free-Range Kids loves to see! It comes from a mom in New Mexico. Voila:

You know what I noticed in my neighborhood which really makes me so happy?

We’ve been here for 6 years and in the summer, there was one (and I mean that) one kid that would be outside playing alone.

Well, my kids finally hit 7 and 8 and I finally grew some common sense, and let them hit the street.  For a good month they were the only kids outside.  They were neighborly, too – chatting it up and getting to know “the people in our neighborhood.”

Slowly but surely, I started to notice more kids outside.  A couple on scooters, then a couple on bikes… don’t you know, that there are now around 10 kids that end up playing outside during the day? 

My daughter told me today that next door was almost like a party – all the kids were playing together and when they got hot, they’d sit in the garage.  They’re swapping bikes and scooters and having the best time.

Thank goodness… I am so delighted to know that people noticed my kids outside and started letting their kids have some freedom too.  Before – you’d think this place was void of children.  It’s so refreshing.

Just thought I’d share.  It’s becoming a blissful world in my neck of the woods. 

 

Her advice for making this happen? Simple:

 

I can’t honestly say I did anything but tell my kids to be nice and respectful to the neighbors (so that meant no screaming and yelling when playing and staying out of people’s yard areas).  Outside of that, they’ve always seen me chat with neighbors when we’d walk the dog, and wave to them when we drive, so it was natural for them not to fear the neighbors, but to chat to them too.

They’re always coming home with something now – people enjoy giving them bottles of water, suckers, freezer pops… wanna talk about people freaking out over treats in school!  Ha ha!

The best advice I can give to people is get out there, get neighborly, let your kids see you doing it, let people see you with your kids so that when they’re on their own they are familiar with the parents’ faces too, even if not names, and make sure your kids are capable of being respectful, courteous, and safe.

Here’s to more stories with happy endings like this one — especially as summer beckons! — Lenore

England Takes a Look at Free-Range Kids

Hi Readers!

We’ll return to our regularly scheduled rants — and deep thoughts — in the next post. But first, I just had to reprint this lovely review of Free-Range Kids that ran on Britain’s Spiked Online, a news and commentary site that is similar to America’s Slate.

It’s by Nancy McDermott, a mom of two who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn — a location locally famous for its fiercely dedicated (or sometimes just fierce) moms. Voila:

JOIN THE MOVEMENT FOR FREE-RANGE KIDS

By NANCY MCDERMOTT

Over the long Memorial Day weekend, I let my sons stay up past their bedtime to watch movies. We had already spent several hours of guilty pleasure watching combat classics like Sahara with Humphrey Bogart and Submarine Command with William Holden. Both are still rated ‘G’, but probably only because no one has noticed how much smoking, drinking and shooting they include.

So when my eldest son begged to watch Big with Tom Hanks, it seemed like a good choice all around: no war, no death, no guns, no tanks, and no need to feel awkward about the one adult moment in the film because my son still hides his eyes during the smoochy parts and shouts: ‘Is it over yet?’ (1)

The film tells the story of Josh Baskin, a 13-year-old boy from New Jersey plunged into a grown-up body and the adult world after he wishes to be ‘big’ on a mysterious arcade machine at the fun fair. It’s one of our favourites. I can’t help but smile every time I watch Tom Hanks gnaw a piece of baby corn as if it were full-sized, and his toy-filled loft apartment always inspires my sons to gasp and exclaim: ‘That’s so cool!’

Watching it with them this time, it struck me that many of the things they love about the film have nothing to do with the story. They are things viewers would have taken for granted in the late 1980s when the film was made: things like kids walking to school, riding their bikes, or hanging out in town by themselves. My son was especially amazed to see the boys taking the bus from New Jersey to Manhattan. For him, Big is a snapshot of a world without cellphones, ‘hoovering parents’ or adult supervision, all the more intriguing because it is all incidental and not the main plot line, as it is in Home Alone.

It’s hard to believe the experience of childhood could change so much in only a few decades. Today, the same streets where Josh Baskin rode his bike to school are crowded with cars dropping off children for class each morning. The sidewalks are virtually empty. The ersatz street-game of stick ball has been replaced by the game it aspired to be: kids now play seasonal baseball with uniforms and coaches and trophies. And a child taking a trip on public transport on his own? That can become headline news. Just ask Lenore Skenazy.

Skenazy, a journalist and mother based in New York, made newspaper headlines around the world last year when she wrote about allowing her then nine-year-old son, Izzy, to find his way home alone on the New York City subway. It wasn’t the trip itself that garnered so much attention: it was the fact that Skenazy had the cheek to suggest that letting her son ride the subway was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, that most adults are not ‘predators’, and that there is no reason why a competent young person shouldn’t be allowed to travel the city on his own. It earned her the label ‘America’s Worst Mom’. However, had she met only with condemnation, that might have been the end of it. But something else happened.

It turned out that Skenazy isn’t the only parent frustrated by the ‘can’t do’ ethos pervading childhood today. Her story struck a chord with people across America and around the world. A year after she found herself on America’s Today show facing down a ‘parenting expert’ who looked at Skenazy ‘like I just asked her to smell my sock’, Skenazy has written a book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry, and has started up the debate all over again.

‘The media loves this story like a dog loves not only a bone, but filet mignon in steak sauce’, she tells me – and she’s right. At one point it was possible to go to bed having watched her on Nightline, only to switch on the TV over breakfast to see her again on Good Morning America. And it’s not just in the United States. She has also chatted with radio hosts in New Zealand and media people in Brazil, Chile and Australia. ‘It is a story, dare I say it, that everyone wants to hear’, she says, ‘because I think we really do realise that something strange has happened to childhood and also to the role of parents’.

Of course, some of the interest in the Skenazy story is pure nostalgia for things like ‘pick-up’ baseball or roaming the neighbourhood in drugstore costumes on Halloween. But there are also many parents who would like to give their kids a little more freedom without necessarily recreating everything else about the 1970s. Most don’t understand how we got to where we are, and few have any idea of how to go about changing things. Free-Range Kids addresses all of these concerns and more. It’s part how-to manual, part myth-buster, and it makes a passionate case for giving kids the gift of freedom – all delivered in a funny, good-natured way that makes letting your children roam alone seem like the most straightforward thing in the world.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is comprised of ‘The 14 Free-Range Commandments’, or, as Skenazy calls them: ‘10 Commandments with four thrown in free of charge.’ These are not prescriptions but chapters tackling some of the biggest challenges parents face, whether from their own fears (‘Turn Off the News’), the problems of living in a litigious climate (‘Don’t Think Like a Lawyer’), or dealing with people who believe a fearful parent is a good parent (‘Ignore the Blamers’).

The chapter on baby-safety, ‘Boycott Baby Knee Pads’, is typical. It opens with a vignette about James Hirtenstein, a professional baby proofer who featured on the CBS channel’s Early Show. He was advising parents to buy a device called a ‘toilet lock’ because ‘on average two children a week die in toilets’ (!!). The chances are that, for many parents, the very mention of the words ‘toddler’, ‘toilet’ and ‘death’ in the same sentence would make them, understandably, want to lock their toilets. With chains. Forever. Fortunately, Skenazy actually goes through the trouble of looking into the story. And she finds that, actually, around four children a year drown in toilets. And while that is horrible and tragic, the truth is that it is highly, highly unlikely it will happen to your kid. It’s probably not going to happen to anyone you know or are likely to know, in spite of what entrepreneurial baby-proofers like Hirtenstein tell us (2).

The beauty of Skenazy’s work is not just that it’s reassuring for parents or for anxious house guests who haven’t worked out that it’s only by holding the three buttons down on the toilet lock while pushing it in that the lid opens. Rather, it is that Skenazy has tipped us off to the fearmongers’ chief modus operandi: find a minor danger and convince parents that it’s a major concern. Both in the book’s first part and in its encyclopedic second part, titled ‘Safe or Not?’, Skenazy blows the lid off all manner of worries, such as child abduction, poison Halloween candy, the perils of eating raw cookie dough, and lead in Chinese toys. It’s chock full of examples, inspiration and ammunition to throw back at the experts, doom-mongers and busybodies striving to make kids’ lives safer but duller.

What you won’t find in Free-Range Kids is a guide to the ‘Free-Range Parenting Lifestyle’. There is no such thing. Sure, we need to ‘go Free-Range’ but it’s not really about us. Skenazy’s focus is firmly on children. Nowhere is this clearer than in the chapter titled ‘Listen to your Kids: They Don’t Want to be Treated Like Babies’. ‘When parents don’t trust their kids to cross the street or go where they say they’re going or buy groceries by themselves because everyone else out there is so untrustworthy, kids hear the simultaneous translation “we don’t trust you”. Trusting our kids, it turns out, really means trusting each other. Parents, teachers, relatives and mentors who do believe in us have an impact beyond measure.’ (3)

One such adult in Skenazy’s life was Mrs MacDougall, her seventh-grade social studies teacher and the person to whom her book is dedicated. Mrs Mac asked young Lenore to accompany her on a trip to visit a dilapidated one-room schoolhouse that she was thinking of buying so that her students could experience what it was like ‘in the olden days’. It would mean skipping school, staying over night in a hotel, and lots of driving. ‘Mrs Mac’, Skenazy protested, ‘I don’t have a license’. ‘Do you have a learner’s permit?’, responded Mrs Mac. ‘Yes.’ ‘Then let’s go!’ (4)

The sly question at the heart of the film Big is whether, given the opportunity, we would go back to being kids again. ‘No’, Josh’s grown-up girlfriend Susan decides. ‘It was hard enough the first time.’ And yet, by the end of the film, we’re also sure we wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Tucking in my own sleepy boys, I wondered what they would have to look back on one day: whether it would be the things they did or the things they weren’t allowed to do. For the Mrs Macs of the world, Lenore Skenazy among them, the answer is straightforward. Grab a copy of Free-Range Kids – and let’s go!

Nancy McDermott is a writer and mother based in New York. To see her other commentary on parenting issues, click here. (You’ll love them — Lenore.)

And here are her footnotes for this piece:

1) Big may be one of the last family films with characters who smoke

(2) Free-Range Kids, page 32

(3) Free-Range Kids, pp 144, 141

(4) Free-Range Kids, page 141

Reprinted from: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/6899/

Mom Threatens School For Serving Her Kid A Cupcake

Here’s a wild New York Times piece about a mom who is fighting mad about  her kid’s school sometimes  serving  junk food. While the school lunches are nutritious, the mom is livid that some party treats, like cupcakes, are not. Quote the mom:  “I thought I was sending my kid to P.S. 9, not Chuck E. Cheese.”

Now, not that I am pro-junk food (said your blogger, popping  another M&M thoughtfully). But  I don’t think we are poisoning our children when they get to eat something sugary at a school birthday party. Or any birthday party. Feed your kids nutritious meals, and then? Let them eat cake. 

Did someone else say that first?

 – L.

Free-Range Kids Outrage of the Week: No Biking to School

This one comes from blogger Denise Gonzalez-Walker. It’s the rules for getting to school in a district near Seattle. Please note the bolded words:

Bicycles

Students in grades 4,5 and 6 may ride bikes, roller blades, skateboards and non-motor scooters to school.  According to Highline District policy, a protective helmet must be worn when riding a bike, skateboard, scooter or roller blades to school.  District policy also prohibits the riding of bicycles to and from school by children in grades K-3, even when accompanied by an adult (policy #3424).

That’s right. Parents are forbidden to bike with their kids to school in the early grades. Even if the parents believe their kids are ready. Even if the parents want to show them how to ride safely! As Denise points out, “Policies like this discourage teaching opportunities.”

 Meanwhile, what opportunities do they encourage? Driving! More chance for kids to sit passively and be dropped off.

 Where is the sense in that? In my book, I point out that 50% of the children hit by cars near schools are hit by cars driven by parents dropping off THEIR children because they’re afraid of THEM being hit by cars. So if everyone just quit driving their kids to school, we’d already see a 50% drop in injuries!

A no-biking policy like this calls for action on the part of parents – approaching the PTA or school board and saying, “Who is this policy supposed to serve? We want our kids to be active and we want to teach them how to be safe. This policy thwarts both.”

But feel free to use a stronger word than thwarts. – Lenore