When I was teeny tiny, my mom decided that we would make a paper chain for the Christmas tree.  My older sister remembers her cutting out the long thin rectangles for us, and then letting us assemble them ourselves with paste, and, no doubt, a few hijinks (I have this vision of me as l’enfant terrible pasting one to a cat.  I was always doing terrible things to the cats.)  Did we stop at red and green?  Oh no, not us.  We assembled the technicolor dreamcoat of paper chains:  loud, clangy, and marvelous.

We wound that same paper chain around the tree every year of my childhood.  Even though we’ve all moved away including my mom, she still keeps it in storage somewhere.

For giving your children a fun Christmas activity that’s very nearly free, and a memory for life, this is one of the best.  You can make paste with flour and water, or you can use Elmer’s glue, as you like.  A word on fancy paper – it’s your own Christmas destiny, and I mustn’t interfere.  But in my humble opinion, nothing says love like a pack of good old multi-color construction paper.

If you’re a bit nervous and in search of instructions, there’s a lovely how-to guide for paper chains, salt dough ornaments, and cranberry and popcorn strings here.  Go forth and craft, dear Slow Christmas parents.

Many people questioned my criticism of sign language for infants in my last post. Let me try to reframe my statements so that my intentions are interpreted as I mean them to be. Sign language is a skill that is encouraged by well-intentioned parents. Their children may very well be enriched by the experience. Signing will most certainly not harm children (other than possible language delay), but the evidence is mixed as to it’s overall benefit [abstract].

While those parents who point to the potential value of signing  are certainly valid, their disagreements are not relevant to my argument that baby signing for children who are not deaf is an unnecessary skill that has been marketed to parents who are eager to nudge their children toward success.

I am no more disapproving of parents who sign with their offspring than they are of me for not signing. Different parents try different things for different reasons, so my comments were not meant to judge others for making their choices. Put simply, I’m questioning whether parents are being pressured to sign, whether signing has become a marketing scheme, and whether it’s optimal to teach an insular language before a community language. For instance, a man recently spent three years teaching his baby Klingon. One could argue that teaching a fictional alien language is his choice, that Klingon may benefit his child’s intelligence, but even still, I would be annoyed if story time were to be rephrased in the insular language of Klingon (and yes, I know the analogy is slightly unfair, but I’m using it anyway).

All this brings me to the latest edition of Time Magazine, which has a feature article about helicopter parenting, which reminded me of other well-intentioned parenting choices in which I have differed; choices that would have me contradicting the good intentions of school districts, parents, friends, and family.

For example, why are kids being denied recess? Isn’t play an important skill that prevents academic stagnation? Time Magazine mentioned the National Institute for Play as an advocacy group for recreation and recess, and I really want to echo their agenda here. Let the students out for play!

Time Magazine also mentions Lenore Skenazy,  of the Free-Range Kids blog, who makes it her mission to question the stifling culture of over-protection that has smothered many children in a layer of bubble wrap, despite the evidence that our communities are safer than ever. Some parents are worried about giving their children the freedom and responsibility to ride their bikes a few blocks to school. I would never overtly judge the individual parents who wish to keep their children safe by driving them, but I would question the culture of concern that has branded pedestrian school traffic as dangerous and unsafe.

Time Magazine has even given space to authors, John Buell and Etta Kralovec, who advocate in their book The End of Homework that children need less work to take home and more time to be kids. I happen to agree with this, but I wouldn’t use my opinion to judge my friends who spend several hours every night helping their children by reviewing and assisting with the massive amounts of homework they bring home.

It’s hard to strike a balance between questioning of parenting choices and hating on those choices. I know that this blog has crossed that line in the past, but that will inevitably happen when writing about parenting. I don’t apologize for taking a hard line in favor of vaccines, but there are other times when people have rejected my entire blog because one post challenged their lifestyle (see spanking article). I feel bad about the times when controversial topics have turned readers away, but the feedback and dialogue provided by you are always welcome, even if we passionately disagree.

For a more hard-lined opinion on the topic, see George Carlin’s take:

Just out today, it’s already making the rounds as Time magazine’s most e-mailed story, its new cover piece: Can These Parents be Saved?

” … We just wanted what was best for our kids”, Nancy Gibbs’ piece begins, before detailing the ways in which extreme, fear-based safety practices, and efficiency models best left at the corporation door began infecting childhood. She writes:

We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development.

The backlash against overparenting has come, she says, in part driven by changes in the economy:

…  a third of parents have cut their kids’ extracurricular activities. They downsized, downshifted and simplified because they had to — and often found, much to their surprise, that they liked it.

The article is a fascinating snapshot of the conundrums many parents face. We want to protect our children and give them opportunities, yet for some this has come with the dawning realization that many children are overcoddled, over-directed, and robbed of down time, free play, exploration, and the confidence and mastery that can come with making ones own discoveries and mistakes. In short, it’s the realization that, for all the attention, we are not doing our kids any favors.

Gibbs quotes Slow Movement pioneers Carl Honore and the Slow Family Living workshop folks, whom I have blogged about at length, as well as Lenore Skenazy, whose book, Free-Range Kids, is a tome of common-sense parenting in an often hysterical age.

Last weekend, I attended a lecture by Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, author of A Parent’s Guide to Building Resilience in Children and Teens, which I highly recommend, as it walks parents through the set of tools children need to grow and prosper. Ginsburg cautioned against the perfectionistic streak in many parents who unwittingly add stress to their children’s lives by trying to professionalize their activities, and by being involved in harmful, rather than fruitful, guiding ways — including attempting to eliminate stress, rather than teach children ways to cope with inevitable stress.

I was struck, too, when Ginsburg said that creativity was a component many young adults now lacked. This was exhibiting itself in an inflexibility in the workplace and in relationships, no matter the field. How to foster creativity in the young? Play with them, encourage them to play on their own or direct the play (if you’re involved). In short, have fun and get out of the way.

For more Slow Family Online pieces about children, slow (joyful) parenting and play, see:

Gopnick: Babies Learn by Playing

Why Can’t She Walk to School?

An End to Overparenting?

Huffington Post Book Club Pick: In Praise of Slowness

About Slow Family Online

Photos: Miika Silfverberg, Susan Sachs Lipman

We can all remember what it was like to be a kid in the old days. We ran outside with no shoes on, played in the creek, went to the mine and explored. One time, one of the children fell into the water by the mine. We tried to pull him up countless times but couldn’t do it. Who knows why, maybe because we were all under 7 years old? Who knows, but we were pretty determined to do it ourselves because each and every one of us had been warned not to go there. The water was dangerous and the poor kid was getting scared. We finally did go get a parent to help and I can’t remember if we stopped frequenting the mine though. I doubt it, there was allot of Iron Pyrite there Fools Gold and we were young and foolish, so it was right up our ally. We played where ever we wanted to because the town was our playground. We ran around the neighbourhood as much as we wanted to and it was normal.

I used to live in Lynn Lake Manitoba when I was a kid. I guess I was about 5 or 6 years old at the time. We were one of the few families in my group of friends that had TV. During the day in the summer while our parents were at work my sister and I would invite the kids in the neighbourhood to watch with us. We weren’t allowed to have anyone inside the house so they watched from the doorway.  I can still remember the look on their faces as they watched TV standing by the door hoping we would give up and invite them in. There was a forest behind our house on Silver Street that we would play in. We ran around there to our hearts content. One time we were running away from some drunks in the forest and one of my friends fell and got glass in their eye. I will never forget watching her dad use his tongue to lick it out. We were all thoroughly grossed out and fascinated all at the same time. If we got bored we would draw pictures and sell them door to door in town for a nickel. We felt rich after selling just a few pictures because in those days you could buy a piece of candy for a penny. Every When we had sold all our pictures or got tired of going door to door we would just go to the local candy store and fill our pockets with candy. We were alone during the day, no babysitter. My sister who was in grade 2 at the time babysat me during the day. If we got hungry she would whip up some oatmeal on the stove. That is until the kitchen caught fire. The tea towel was hanging too close to the element. It was an honest mistake that anyone could have made. we were very responsible little girls. I remember it very well. When the flames started licking at the wall we calmly went looking for the animals that were in the house then once they were found we went to the neighbours( it was an main floor in a house) and told him that the kitchen was on fire. My mother quit her job in the jewellery store after that. I remember being very proud that I knew how to walk from one end of Lynn Lake to the other. It was a safe little town, bliss for a kid at that age or was it just an average town and the real bliss was the freedom to explore and be free. I asked my mother about it years later and according to her there were allot less child molesters and criminals in those days. I think not.

The media and the global network makes news easier to spread. I highly doubt that 33 years ago my mother would have heard about a child being raped and killed in Saskatoon or in Toronto. But today in our modern society if we as mothers hear about a child disappearing in Utah or Edmonton and we pull our children closer. Our grip tightens and our fear grows. I moved to Iceland in part because of this. I had become one of those parents who wouldn’t let my child walk to the park alone. I barley let them play outside, and felt that allowing them to walk the 10 minutes to school by themselves was a big thing. I felt my anxiety grow with each kidnapping, killing rape and murder that I heard about in the media storm that is unavoidable these days. When I moved here to Iceland things changed pretty fast but that is another story all together. I was inspired to write this post after reading www.FreeRangekids.wordpress.com

I am not done with this subject but I am done with today.

Drifa Ulfarsdottir

by Edward C. Woodward

Although standing vigil over Sam in the shallow waters of Hillsborough Bay at Ballast Point Park, he grabbed a broken glass bottleneck. I’d only looked away a few seconds scribbling notes. Luckily, I grabbed the glass before Sam cut himself.

But the moment made me think about outdoor boundaries. I’m confident that nixing a lake swim with a loitering alligator won’t strangle my kids’ free spirit. But barefoot outdoors? Go for it! Grip the dirt with your toes and run faster. Hear the grass give way to your weight? Sounds like a rustling plastic bag, to me. What do you hear? Loosening the reigns often elicits entertaining observations.

I once took good-natured flack from some friends for allowing our kids to walk barefooted in our front yard. I heard a pinworm comment. I took it one step further. They might even step on a bee! Imagine learning a life lesson through experience? Or being aware of living things underfoot in the spaces we share as small as your step? I don’t want to raise porcelain dolls. More like worn gloves that have played the game.

So I let Sam explore the shore while I visually filtered his play area with a keener eye. The litter-strewn shoreline, though disheartening, is an ideal teachable moment. Maybe somebody tossed trash into the bay. Or maybe it was carried on waves of rain rushing into storm water culverts.

Some 1,000 pipes drain to five watersheds in Tampa, according to Michael Burwell, planning and environmental division head of the city of Tampa’s Stormwater Department. That watershed includes the Hillsborough River and its destination, Hillsborough Bay. Last November volunteers collected about eight tons of trash along the shores of the Hillsborough River, said Burwell. By my calculations, that’s about 188,500 “trash” popsicles, converting the grams of our favored brand to pounds. That’s context your pint-sized environmentalist can comprehend and act upon: a city program offers volunteers plaques illustrating where litter drains that they can attach to neighborhood culverts.   

Play soon moved from the shoreline to the playground for toddler trailing; the perfect disguise for adult play. I can swing on monkey bars and slide with abandon sans weird looks. Why wouldn’t I? But be forewarned. The monkey bars are still challenging. However, the slides have improved. Plastic is more skin-friendly than hot tin, but you sacrifice speed, man! Another upside? Modern day playgrounds enable good views. The play bridge at Ballast Point might as well be a birder’s lookout. During some visits, pelicans have flown low enough that I saw the brown feathers of their underbellies.

During this outing, Sam spotted a squirrel in a young oak tree and ditched the playground. I held Sam closer to the squirrel, which was perched about 15 feet high. Then I called the squirrel, a talent culled living in a squirrel sanctuary, also known as our backyard.

Who knows what squirrels think when you call them? The young one in the oak just stared at me, perhaps incredulous that I lacked food. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit Sam wasn’t fazed either, which tells you how often I speak squirrel. Next we gravitated to the sea wall by the boat ramp where Sam channeled his inner-crow and unearthed a worn, yet colorful trinket: a Heineken bottle cap. Note to self: teach Sam to squawk so we can score a free trip to New York for David Letterman’s Stupid Pet & Human Tricks segment.

The final word on Ballast Point. Though I love taking my kids to preserves with hundreds of acres of green space, sometimes they get bored. My kids are 6 and under and they’d rather run wild like wildlife than watch it. At Ballast Point you get both. And with the backdrop of downtown Tampa beyond the bay, you appreciate the forethought of green space in an urban setting.

Better yet, Ballast Point can be a litmus test for rural outings if you or your child are tentative woods wanderers. Get them hooked on identifying wading birds, then plunge into the woods at Hillsborough River State Park where you’ll find riverside trails and playgrounds. And maybe, depending on the day, glimpse the rarest of creatures: a father and son squirrel barking/crow squawking duo. This wildlife you’re encouraged to feed; Goldfish crackers, if you got ‘em.

Edward is editor and co-founder of paddleandpath.com, a resource for exploring Florida’s waterways and woods.

A kid with three school suspensions under his belt (2 sexual harassment related charges: as a 12 yr old calling a temp teacher a “blow job”, as a 15 yr old “mooning” his gym teacher. Thirdly a terrorist stunt as a 12 yr old involving a garbage can being used as a make-shift bomb) – I still find ways to exasperate teachers 10 years after graduation.

“To Whom it May Concern:

We appreciate the time and effort you have put into facilitating the Peer Tutoring program; at the present moment we do not give permission for Ariel to participate.

Our concern is that it limits Ariel’s access to recess and unstructured play time, which we feel is vital to his well being.  Our fear is that less play will diminish the quality of his learning for the remainder of his school day – its already a long day for a 7 year old.  Add homework to the mix and it all adds up; he often becomes disinterested (burned out) in books when we want to read with him at home.  When asked if he would prefer spending a couple lunch hours reading with a Grade 5 student or playing outside, there is no hesitation in his response.  No doubt this may change as the thermometer continues to drop …

If the program can be integrated with his regular classroom time we have no doubt it will enhance the quality of his learning experience and our full support is given.

If you have concerns that we are off our rockers and are jeopardizing his long-term socio-economic success by not participating in the recess program please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we value your input as educators.

Thank you,

Jeff & Amanda Sutherland”

The Case Against Homework

Homework is a Free Range Topic

This afternoon The Bean and I had a lovely time playing in the sunshine in an outer suburban playground with fencing all around. It was a weekday afternoon; only a few parents (mostly mothers) and their toddlers/babies were in attendance.

A little girl – about 2.5 years old – came over to sit on the swing next to us. She was walking about six metres ahead of her mother – who was none too pleased about this state of affairs, as evidenced by the shrill admonishments that followed:

Zoe! Don’t run off! Why were you running ahead of me? You know you shouldn’t do that, don’t you? It’s very naughty, isn’t it? Yes. Very naughty. Don’t do it again. You must stay with mummy. You understand? You must stay with mummy!

What if someone took you?!

Now it would be very easy for me to be smug about this. Hell, my parenting is pretty Free Range compared with hers. And there was absolutely no reason for this mother to imagine that any of the other parents enjoying a sunny afternoon at this park were actually child predators with a big white van waiting around the corner. I feel sorry for that kid, and the fearful person she may grow into.

But I’m not posting this to anonymously shame an anonymous woman I saw at the park. She could well be suffering from an anxiety disorder or post natal depression or have been a victim of child abuse or have an estranged spouse who has threatened to take her child — there could be any number of scenarios I’ve not been privy to that would make her behaviour seem less bizarre.

There is a tension that parents face every day, between wanting to keep our children perfectly safe and allowing them to learn about the world for themselves. I remember when Bean was a few days old, just sitting and crying while I looked at her face as she screamed in hunger and frustration at my breast. I wanted to put her back in my womb where she had been nourished and protected. Always warm, always embraced.

And how do we - those of us who have faced hardships like molestation or neglect or bullying or abuse - learn to trust others to keep our children safer than we ourselves were? How do we do this without causing harm ourselves through our ‘helicopter parenting’?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that most parents could do with a little more kindness and understanding. We live in a world where some people tsk and frown at parents who put their toddler in a harness to keep hir close by in a crowd, and an equal number of people rant and complain at parents who fail to keep a toddler completely quiet in a cafe. In an ideal world we’d all find a happy medium between appropriate supervision and allowing children to develop their own resilience through learning natural consequences, and we’d be supported in that by a child-tolerant society.

But then, in an ideal world, child abduction wouldn’t merely be rare, it would be non existent. In an ideal world our worst fears would be far, far less frightening. And in an ideal world all parents would take their responsibility to protect their children seriously, and would love them.

On that score at least, the woman at the park is doing okay. We have that much in common.

I keep seeing twitter comments along these lines: Sex offenders hand out big candy bars, razors, drugs, & hugs, or some such nonsense.  Which is so interesting to me because I live in Phoenix, which is a pretty big damn city, one also known as the kidnap capital of the US, but I can’t think of a time I’ve ever heard of an abduction or other child sex crime on the news around Halloween. So before I run out and buy The Offender Locator, let’s look at some facts, and CHILL THE FLOCK OUT. Instead of psyching yourself out over something that is highly UNLIKELY to happen, how about worrying about the things that are LIKELY to happen… like your child getting plowed down by a vehicle because you were too busy looking for sex offenders to look both ways before crossing the street… or some of there other tragedies that are far more likely to happen to your child.

Researchers looked at a 9-year period, saying even before increased awareness and enforcement, there were not significant spikes in sex crimes against children around Halloween.

“Reasonable parental supervision and vigilance on Halloween is appropriate, but there does not appear to be cause for alarm concerning sexual abuse risk in particular,” the study found. “Increased vigilance concerning risk should be directed to the summer months, where regular seasonal increases in sex crimes are readily seen.”

The report also notes that it could be more worthwhile to have police focusing on traffic-related incidents on Halloween over monitoring sex offenders.

“The wide net cast by Halloween laws places some degree of burden on law enforcement officers whose time would otherwise be allocated to addressing more probably dangerous events.”

via Sex crimes against children don’t increase at Halloween, says Lynn University professor | Extra Credit.

via Let’s Get Real About Halloween.

I’ve finished Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy, and I’ve been trying a few things to make my kids more independent. I feel sort of like Bill Murray’s character in What About Bob: “Baby steps to the elevator. Baby steps I’m on the elevator. Baby steps…” We’ve done Walking to the Mailbox Alone and now Hanging Out at the Church Carnival With a Fistful of Game Tickets and Without Hovering Parents.

My next step will be to try Skenazy’s suggestion of starting a “walking school bus” – one parent walking a neighborhood gang of kids to school until they get the hang of it and can go on their own. My next-door neighbor and the lady a couple of doors down both have kids that go to my kids’ school. I’m going to ask them to do this bus thing with me. I’ll even volunteer to be the first parent walker.

A couple of things stood out in this book. (Beyond its exceptional hilarity, I mean. I haven’t laughed so hard while reading in ages.) The first was chapter 10, subtitled “Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn’t Work Anyway.”

Control is the crux of our problem. Or the illusion of control is, rather. We think that if we just follow our kids around, poking our noses into everything they do, that nothing bad will ever happen to them. And we think that if we relinquish control for five minutes, we will suddenly become Bad Parents. And worse, our kids might be fatally harmed.

We no longer fear deadly disease (except swine flu). We no longer expect one or more of our kids to die before adulthood, something that used to be common when my grandmothers were children. Our kids are statistically safer than at any previous point in history.  So, as Skenazy says:

The more safe our children became, the more we started to worry about them, because now if anything dangerous did happen to them, it would clearly be our fault. Fate has gone out the window, replaced by parental omnipotence. And it is this belief in control combined with the fear of screwing up that is driving us mad…

Think of a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, says Harvey Roy Greenberg, a Manhattan psychiatrist. That person gets up in the morning and has to arrange the pillows on his bed just so or, he worries, something terrible will happen. He has to avoid touching the doorknob or something terrible will happen. He has to eat his Grape Nuts out of the Flintstones bowl or something terrible will happen. He has all these little things he believes he has to do or – poof – the world will fall apart.

“All of this is driven by a kind of insane feeling of omnipotence,” says Greenberg. It’s a belief “that you can exert all power over all things.” And when it comes to your children, “you think you can lay down a magic carpet and conjure up spells that will guarantee your child absolute security. Good luck to that!”

So what can we do to allay our fears? I mean, besides letting them do stuff and just gutting it out? The answer is found in another part of the book that stood out to me, the chapter entitled “Strangers with Candy.”

Skenazy recounts the story of an elderly lady reading her newspaper with a magnifying glass in her doctor’s office. A small boy comes up to her and as she’s about to hand him the magnifying glass that has drawn his curiosity, his mother swoops him up and exclaims, “He has to learn fast not to talk to strangers!”

That’s not the way to keep anyone safe. And that “Don’t trust anyone!” lesson could conceivably end up making that little boy less safe (not to mention terrified of old ladies). Imagine if, against all odds – and I’m about to tell you just how long those odds are – some horrible guy does come up one day and say, “Hi, little fella. Mommy sent me to get you.” Presto – he mentioned mom, so he’s not a stranger anymore. He grabs the boy even while, just a few feet away with her back turned, a grandma sits reading her paper. Will the little boy scream, “Hey lady! Help! Put down the magnifying glass and call the police!” Or will he not say anything, because she’s a stranger, and Mommy said never to talk to them?

It’s a chilling scenario. But it’s a preventable one with some training. Skenazy outlines a cop’s lesson:

It involves literally showing kids the lures a predator could use: a bag of candy, a leash that supposedly “proves” a guy is looking for his puppy. Then he has the children practice the three things that could help them the most:

1. Throwing their hands in front of them like a stop sign.

2. Screaming at the top of their lungs, “No! Get away! You’re not my dad!” “Your voice is your most effective crime-fighting tool,” he tells them.

3. Running like hell.

By actually getting up and practicing those things, the kids feel ready for the worst… Public safety instructors liken this kind of training to the “Stop, drop, and roll” drill that kids get as part of fire safety instruction. Once again, it is extremely unlikely they’ll ever need to use it, but – it’s handy to have. And rather than creating more fear, it seems to help alleviate it. The more afraid we are of something, the more power it has over us. But the more prepared we are, the more power we get back. Training confers power.

I can vouch for that. I did two years of Krav Maga, the Israeli army’s hand-to-hand combat training, and by the end I felt like I could handle myself in any physical situation. I was less afraid, not more.

Now I feel like I have a way to make my kids safer and ease some of my worries over their growing independence. Hooray, Free-Rangers!

I’ve been one of those hyper-paranoid mothers who cringes when letting her seven-year-old son use a public restroom unattended by a parent because there is sure to be a serial molester lurking within, just waiting for a kid to pounce on. But The Boy is nearly eight, and mommy can’t drag him into the Ladies’ Room anymore, so I let him go off on his own with warnings not to talk to anyone and, for the love of Pete, wash your hands!

Then I use hand sanitizer on him anyway when he gets back because he probably touched the door handle.

I am ridiculously paranoid. In other words, I’m an American suburban mother in 2009. Everyone in my social set is exactly the same way.

But there’s been a part of me that hates this. I don’t enjoy tailing The Boy in every activity he pursues as though he might light himself on fire or get snatched up in a windowless van if my back were turned for 15 seconds. He’s a pretty responsible kid, especially for his age. My mom friends and I lament to each other about how we wish we could let our kids run around outside in little gangs, unsupervised, the way we used to run around when we were kids.

And then I stumbled across Lenore Skenazy. You may remember Lenore’s being in the news recently when she let her nine-year-old son, Izzy, ride the New York subway by himself. He took the train from Bloomingdale’s to their apartment and came home not only unscathed but with a newfound sense of self-reliance. Lenore wrote a column about the experience in the New York Post, and that was the beginning of an international firestorm that ended with her being proclaimed “World’s Worst Mother.”

I was fascinated by Lenore’s story. I started reading her blog, Free-Range Kids, and as I read I felt a growing sense that this lady is on to something. It’s not that I’m suddenly convinced to let my kids ride solo on my city’s sketchy public transportation, but rather that I’m beginning to see my paranoia for the nuttiness it is.

I picked up a copy of Free-Range Kids (the book) and was immediately assured that it would be worth reading when I saw the title of the first chapter: “Play Dates and Axe Murderers: How to Tell the Difference.”

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Ms. Skenazy is flip. She’s hysterically hilarious, but she backs up her assertions with cold, hard facts, and that appeals to the logical part of me.

So I decided after reading a bit to try an experiment. I would let The Boy get the mail by himself.

I know I just heard you snort.

Our mailbox is neither on our front porch nor in our front yard. Instead, it’s about a 1/3-mile round-trip around a curvy street. I cannot see the mailbox without walking roughly 200 yards away from our house. The Boy would have to cross one cul-de-sac and walk about 10 minutes by himself (at least half of it out of my sight) to get the mail.

Allow me to set the scene: it’s a warm, sunny afternoon in suburbia, about 3 o’clock. The lawns have greened up with recent rains, and a mild breeze blows the scent of lantana and fresh-cut St. Augustine. Nary a car rolls by on our quiet street. The Boy sets off with an extra spring in his springy seven-year-old step, and I watch calmly out of the kitchen window until he is out of sight around the bend. Then I calmly pick up a book and calmly step out onto the front porch, where I sit down to await his return. Calmly.

And then the murder car drives by.

It’s not a windowless van, but it is something almost equally alarming. It’s a blue SUV with a girl who’s roughly 10 years old standing up with the top half of her body sticking out of the sunroof. And it’s heading straight for the mailbox.

I am not joking. This actually happened.

In 35 years of life, I have seen only the occasional drunken idiot somewhere between the ages of 18 and 28 sticking out of a moving vehicle’s sunroof, usually at night, downtown, and while making the “woo!” noise. So when I saw this preteen practicing for her very own Girls Gone Wild video on my street at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I was distressed.

My mind leaped to the only logical conclusion: any driver who would let a child hang out of the sunroof of a moving vehicle would also swoop up my seven-year-old boy and sell him into child slavery somewhere in Asia. No doubt letting him hang out of the sunroof all the way to the docks.

I prepared myself to sprint to the mailbox. (The Boy had my car keys, conveniently attached to the same key ring as my mailbox key.)

But then I didn’t.

Instead I took a deep breath and sat back down. And I waited, straining my ears for the sounds of screaming and squealing tires. Three minutes later, The Boy reappeared around the bend, holding a piece of mail and grinning.

He came home unscathed and with a newfound sense of self-reliance. And I took a baby step toward moving him toward adulthood.

Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk.

 Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

I ought to be hauling That Stuff I can see from where I’m sitting down the stairs and put it all away in the basement. But I’ll blog first because, you know, that’s just how I roll.

M is out at a friend’s house for a playdate. He walked there himself, which was great. In case anyone has missed it, I am a firm believer and participant in the Free Range Kids ethos. I think kids learn to become confident, competent adults by mastering their world in age-appropriate ways. I do not think the world has become more dangerous since I was a kid. I do not agree that sexual predators, or another other kind of predator save mosquitos, are a realistic threat to my kids. I believe that cars are the most dangerous thing in my neighborhood, that dirt is good for you, that cough medicine is a placebo, and that kids fall asleep best when left alone in a dim room without any parent, music, or food.

Hence letting M walk to the neighbor’s house alone.

K has been walking to her neighborhood playdates alone for at least six months, probably longer. She learned to look both ways while crossing streets and alleys EVERY TIME much earlier than M. I peered out the window as M approached the street. He looked both ways about sixty-three times, ostentatiously, before inching out past the parked cars, looking again, and carefully crossing. He has a friend now, you understand, who he really likes. Who lives one street-crossing away and up about three blocks. He wants to earn the privilege of visiting on his own, independently, without relying on parental willingness to escort. He’s been working hard all summer and today he’s passed the first test of his new resolve.

K is at the neighbor’s, I can hear her next door, whooping.

J is napping before work. N is upstairs in his new office, at work. I occasionally hear his voice through the ceiling as he talks to his coworkers. The dogs are all snoring.

My house is quiet. It’s very, very strange.

Tonight the gang is coming over for Beatles Rock Band. While J and I were cleaning out the kitchen (so N can fit some of his stuff in it) I found two bottles of wine. Perhaps Abbey Road makes more sense with wine? We might test this theory later.

Alright, enough stalling. The butcher-block table under the windows is covered with a host of small items to be taken down to storage. I think I’ll get going on that, in the quiet and stillness of the sleepy late-summer house.

So I woke up this morning and had a notification that a coworker had accepted my invitation to join Facebook. This was puzzling, since I don’t solicit people to join facebook if they’re not already on, unless you’re family anyway. I also seem to have a lot of email on my blackberry, for it being not quite 5AM… and strangely, some of them are out of office replies from vendors that I hadn’t emailed from work and who I’d never given my blackberry email to. Then I get an actual response from another coworker to an email I apparently generated, inviting them to view my pictures on facebook. I couldn’t have been more mortified… I mean, my kids & dogs are real cute, but most of the time that you get an email from someone you don’t really know inviting them to view your pictures… well… they’re not of cute kids & dogs.

I think my son, who has only been on facebook for a month, showed me a text he’d received from an uncle, telling Tyler he’d just signed up for facebook. I told him he could add his uncle this weekend, but Tyler was having trouble sleeping last night, and I strongly suspect he went online at some point with the intent of “friending” his uncle. The late hour may be why he didn’t realize he was in my account and not his, or that the “friend finder for smartphones” was not going to work on the kiddie lojack cell phone that he carries to & from the school bus stop… but it does would explain why he’d asked me yesterday evening what kind of phone he had/if it was a smartphone. It looks like he unintentionally sent invitations to join facebook to everyone in my blackberry, which wouldn’t be too big of a deal if I only had personal contact in my blackberry, but I sync it with outlook at work… so that request would have gone out to HUNDREDS of people. Literally. I’ve worked for US Airways for almost ten years and I probably have at least 1500 contacts in oulook.

So long story short/short story long… if you got an invitation to be my friend or view my pictures, please feel free to disregard or accept as you see fit. I only ask that either way, you never mention this little fiasco to me or anyone else for the rest of your natural life…

My mother in Law recently gave me her copy of The Week from July 31st, 2009.  It had an article she knew I would love called Childhood’s Lost Wilderness by Michael Chabon.  It’s an excerpt from his upcoming essay collection – Manhood for Amateurs.  This essay says exactly what I have been saying since I had my own children a few years ago – let them play!

Not just that, but let them play alone, out of your site, out of your hearing, without your (or worse, their) cell phone glued to their ear.  If you have a corner store within a couple blocks, let them walk there and buy themselves a treat after dinner with their allowance – which they earned by doing work.  Let them walk to school, or ride their bike.

My first grader is not allowed to ride her bicycle to school, or walk there alone until she is in the third grade.  From my front door I can watch her all the way to the end of the road, one turn and then she’s at school.  Several of her friends walk past our house every morning.  In “the olden days” she would have heard them coming, run out the door and walked with them to school.  But now we are all too afraid.

Of what, I still have no idea.  It turns out that abduction rates are actually lower now than when we were children!  Crimes against children over all are either the same or lower than they were in the 70’s and 80’s.

Remember The Bridge to Terabithia – who of us couldn’t identify that magical place.  Who of us hadn’t emulated it to some degree, at some point in our childhoods.  Every kid I knew had at least one secret world tucked away in their back yard, or at the end of the cul de sac.

We all had our range, mine was pretty big because of where I lived.  I had a whole mountain behind my house that was MINE, there was an abandoned cabin that was our club house when we wanted to be really outside adult influence.  There were abandoned mines to explore, an old smelting shop to climb around in, and a creek where I taught myself to catch fish with my bare hands.

Now when I take my kids up the canyon to explore the wilderness were I was raised I have to apologize.  The smeltery is off limits now, barbed wire is wrapped around the building, dotted with no trespassing signs.  All of the mines are sealed off so no one can explore them anymore, or accidentally drown as many of them had water.  The cabin that served as my childhood clubhouse has been torn down.  The canyon has been child proofed.  Why, I’m not sure since no one lets their children outside anyway.

I used to spend half my summer sitting at the edge of the driveway selling lemonade and homemade cookies to the bicyclists who pedaled up and down the canyon.  The last dozen times I’ve been up that way I haven’t seen a single lemonade stand.  Not one.

Michael Chabon wonders what all this protection is doing to our kids.  It’s not keeping them any more alive than kids of our generation.  As I said our kids are just as safe as we were.  But it’s killing their imaginations, limiting their scope.  We talk about the importance of self esteem in kids, yet we don’t give them any way to gain it.  We force teachers to reward every child if they are going to reward one, despite the fact that we know that if everyone is special, no one is.  We don’t give our kids space or opportunity to learn how to problem solve, to challenge themselves and meet those challenges.  That is how self esteem is made.  That is how children learn, and how they become productive members of the world.  It’s not enough just to keep them alive.  We have to push them to actually live.

If you want to read some more about this type of thinking I highly recommend Lenore Skenazy and her Free-Range Kid’s blog at http://freerangekids.wordpress.com

For myself, even though I’m raising two girls, I know Michael Chabon’s book Manhood for Amateurs is on my to read list!

There have been a few items in the  last few days on the interwebs that have made me think about childhood agency. The question of how much independence parents should give (and how much kids can demand) is a serious one and it doesn’t get nearly enough coverage.
The New York Times published a piece on Saturday about English teachers who are taking the radical step of letting their students pick their own books. The issue is mostly framed around the difficulties of teaching them dang kids to read these days. The teachers get all weepy when they see a student picking up a book – even if the book is by James Patterson. Here’s the article’s central conflict:

… fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Critics of the approach say that reading as a group generally leads to more meaningful insights, and they question whether teachers can really keep up with a roomful of children reading different books. Even more important, they say, is the loss of a common body of knowledge based on the literary classics — often difficult books that children are unlikely to choose for themselves.

I’m all for child-guided learning. Thanks to my mother who was probably the most radical Palo Alto Unified School District PTA president in that organization’s proud history, education is the issue where I’m probably the most radical. I want to abolish private schools and grades. And grade levels. I like letting kids decide things and I can’t help but be on the advocates’ side. But as an English major, albeit canon-hating, I still can’t fucking deal with kids reading James Patterson for class. That’s like putting on Gossip Girl instead of Nova because at least they’re watching something. Unacceptable.
The truth is that classrooms shouldn’t be all student-directed any more than they should be all teacher- or administrator-directed. All classes are collaborations between students and teachers. Any time a student asks a question, that kid is redirecting the class. It’s always an ongoing project. I think my ideal middle-school English class protocol would have teachers challenge students to take on books. That way students can suggest something if they have an idea and/or teachers can offer something that the student hasn’t seen. Want to get the kid who loves baseball interested? Give him Malamud’s The Natural. Want to get the 13 year-old me to shut the fuck up? Tolstoy. And no James Patterson to be seen. I can understand some kids not liking To Kill A Mockingbird, but I got a lot out of it and it would’ve been good to get that suggested to me instead of the fantasy crap I would have picked. Add that to some sustained silent reading (SSR, as we called it) at the beginning of class during which students can read their damn Janet Evanovich if they want to and I think we’d have some literate adolescents.
This program does require a few things: teachers who know a lot about books, teachers who know a lot about their students and  lastly school boards and parents who can chill out. The last one is crucial, imagine the freak out when people hear that a teacher assigned Lolita to an eighth-grader. Get over it, you ninnies. The idea that there exist parents and bureaucrats who would rather see a kid reading chick lit than Henry Miller makes me want to go and organize a wave of elementary-school occupations. Black blocs of kickballers, I swear to god. It’s just wrong.
Which leads me to my second item, the ad below:

Seriously weak. The part that really gets me is the use of kid narrators. It verges on patronizing to parents, who are all apparently really bad at their jobs. If you can’t bring yourself to have a serious conversation with your kid, choosing instead to release them into the world without this literally life-saving information, then you are a coward and a negligent parent. Sorry, but that’s the state of the World. “Just tell us to wait”? Here’s a hint: if your child is asking for ignorance, then you’re doing something very wrong. Tell your kids the damn truth, wuss.
The last item I stumbled on somehow, it’s the blog and “movement” Free Range Kids. Okay, so their stuff is a little goofy. It’s run by child-freedom advocate Lenore Skenazy who let her nine-year-old ride the subway solo. She seems a bit righteous for my tastes, but not really wrong about anything. I added their RSS feed because I’m really into experimental parenting. Basically the agenda of this post is to give kids Bret Easton Ellis novels  and condoms then let them run in the street. I stand by it.

I first sailed to Bermuda when I was 14 years old.  It was a pretty significant milestone in my life.  From what I can remember of it today, more three decades later, it was also a significant accomplishment, psychologically, emotionally and physically. Of course, I was on a 128′ tall ship with 20 other adolescents and there was also this other little factor that the ship was under the command of a master mariner.

This morning, Mike Perham, a 17 year old Briton, became the youngest person to solo circumnavigate the globe.  Mike’s prior experience included crossing the Atlantic at the age of 14. Here’s a BBC video/audio report upon Mike’s arrival this morning.

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times,  Pete Thomas wrote an interesting article titled More Teens Choose High-Seas Journeys.  A more accurate title for the article might have been Younger Teens Choose High-Seas Journeys as the race today is less about who will be the fastest around the globe but rather who will be the youngest.

While I find it difficult to make a definitive statement with an absolute age on this controversy, it does seem to be getting a little ridiculous. I guess there will always be 2 schools of thought about these types of things with freedom of choice on one side and youth competency and parental responsibility on the other. Mankind has always been designed to push the limits, whatever they might be.

There’s an interesting conversation over at the Free Range Kids blog that you should check out if you are at all interested in this controversy. And from a slightly different perspective, check out the comments on BoingBoing.

Here are the websites of the youth sailors so you can read their own words about their adventures.

• Mike Perham website / blog (17 years old)
• Zac Sunderland website / blog (17 years old)
• Abby Sunderland’s blog (16 years old)
• Laura Dekker (13 years old) English version under construction.
• Jessica Watson (16 years old) (website / blog)

Maybe my comprehension is getting fuzzier. Yesterday, for the first time, I heard about “free-range” kids. I’d heard the term free range before, so I thought I knew what the phrase meant. Nope. I thought it was about kids eating free-range beef to be healthier. I found out, hilariously, it means kids allowed to range free (like cattle?!)

It’s amusing that this phrase is used to describe something that used to be the norm (see Mad Men.) Kids, rightly or wrongly, were allowed to be out of sight and out of mind. Parents had more important things to do, like have drinking, smoking, card-playing parties (again, see Mad Men.) I remember (pre-free-range) being able to be out till 9:30 roaming the neighborhood with my friends on Halloween. Kids being able to play without supervision is so rare now that its comeback has a phrase. 

I think the happy medium might be the way to go. Excessive overprotection isn’t good, but not allowing kids to roam outside a little isn’t good, either. Just watch out for the free-range cattle roaming around, too (haha)…

Outrage of the Week: Dear Abby! « FreeRangeKids

I have to admit… when my oldest (now thirteen) wanted to use the men’s room solo at age four, at the airport of all places, I made him sing the ABC song so I would know he was OK. I was a single parent at he time, so it was the first time he’d gone into a public restroom alone (assuming his father accompanied him into men’s rooms during their time together). I also have to admit that I was probably as worried about him playing in the sink as I was about a pedophile. 

I’m proud to say that I eventually chillaxed and I don’t think he was singing in public restrooms past the age of five. At the same time, I still don’t let my youngest (six and a half) go to the restroom unaccompanied in a lot of public places. Living in a large city, when we’re out shopping, we’re usually at a large store. I send a sibling along with her to make sure she gets there and back without getting lost in the aisles more than anything else… but being an “After School Special” kid myself, the possibility of her being abducted is present in my mind.  This is part of the reason my tween carries a lo-jack equipped cell phone when he walks to the bus stop.

I live in a big city, and while I don’t watch a lot of news on TV, I follow my community news pretty closely… A couple years ago two men in a truck pulled alongside a girl walking to school and the passenger tried to pull her into the vehicle… two blocks from my house.  A year and a half ago, a girl was snatched in front of several witnesses when leaving a friend’s home.

“She happened to be standing outside in front of the home … they grabbed her in broad daylight … threw her in the vehicle and took off,” said Roberts.

“Here is the perfect example of a young girl who has nothing to do with this, her family has nothing to do with this, she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Two weeks ago, on the day he was released from prison, Salvador Medina kidnapped three sisters, ages 11 to 15, from the parking lot of a shopping center a few miles from my home. He sexually assaulted both 15yo girls before releasing the three girls.  In another parking lot 15 minutes later, he approached two women with a three year old.

“He asked them for money and put a knife to the abdomen of one of the women when she refused,” said Thompson.  “Seeing the child, Medina pulled the child from the car and threatened to take the child if he wasn’t given money and the car.”

While I agree with a LOT of what is posted on the FRK website, I can’t dismiss what I know has happened so close to home. Am I buying into media induced paranoia? Maybe… but maybe not. I live where I live and there are a lot of reasons behind that, which I don’t expect most people to understand… so I have to temper my desire to give my kids the rural free range lifestyle I grew up in with the reality of the inner city we live in today.

via Outrage of the Week: Dear Abby! « FreeRangeKids.

I always like to joke that when my oldest son Cashel was born, he landed – like a colt – right on his feet. Only, unlike a colt, he wasn’t the least bit unsteady on his pins. He immediately started running…straight for the monkey bars. I exaggerate only slightly. When he was four – FOUR – I watched him as he pushed himself time after time until he could get himself, hand over hand, across the overhead parallel bars. He shrugged the blisters off. He was always the first to try everything: scooters, skates (ice and roller), skis, tree-climbing, the high dive, and, now that he’s a teenager, the scariest thing of all, dancing with girls. Lucky for him, he has a mom who’s always encouraged him and little brother Charlie in such adventures. (I’ve always been the one wringing my hands.) But even Cashel and Charlie’s mom can’t hold a candle to New York Post columnist Lenore Skenazy when it comes to trusting kids to do what kids do best: play until they skin their knees…and then play some more (with a band-aid on).

Skenazy has been vilified throughout the nation as the “World’s Worst Mom” ever since she wrote in her column that she’d allowed her nine year old boy to travel by subway…by himself. Personally, in practice, I’ve regarded nine to be a little young for such an outing; Cashel has yet to try it and he’s thirteen. But Skenazy’s got a point. The point being: what’s the worst that can happen? If you think you have the answer, or even a thousand of them, read Skenazy’s new book, Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.

Abduction? This is where our imaginations all tend, fueled with feverish pictures planted by tabloid journalism and CSI: Special Victims Unit. It turns out that, statistically at least, such worries are, well, irrational. The chances of an American child being abducted and murdered are 1 in 1.5 million, a figure which has been trending downward for decades. The odds are far, far greater that – God forbid — your child will die in a car accident or drown than be swept away by a maniac. And yet we don’t outlaw automobiles or swimming pools (although sometimes we seem to be getting there).

Are we afraid the kid will get lost? He lives in the city, so he knows his way around the same as adults do. And he’s got a cell phone.

Some sort of accident? The odds of that are small, as well. (When I’m worried about my kids, I always try and remind myself that when I was their age, I — like most humans — actively tried to avoid trouble and accidents, and for the most part succeeded. And…well, I could have an accident NOW. One doesn’t have to be a child.)

Skenazy’s point is that we’re not doing the kids we love any favors by sheltering them to the ridiculous degree that many of us do. At the very least, we’re not preparing them for the rough-and-tumble, complex matrix of decision-making and risk-taking we call life. Free Range Kids takes aim at the full shooting gallery of boogey men and bugaboos, from formula feeding (unproven to be harmful)  to tainted Halloween candy (a rumor run amok, with no documented cases – nada, zero). Her portrait of the querulousness of modern parents is painted in bile, and her zeal infectious. Skenazy is a contributor to Mad Magazine as well as the Post. If her zingers are sometimes corny, her points are well taken. Who can argue with the facts she lays out? In my day, 66% of American kids walked to school; today the figure is down to 10%. I’ll lay dollars to donuts that that 10% doesn’t overlap much with the obesity statistics we keep hearing about. My eleven year old Charlie recently started walking home from school alone, a distance of about a mile or so. The boy is proud of it, and he should be. His own feet and his own brain got him from point A to point B.  He doesn’t need to be delivered like some inert sack of potatoes.

Inevitably, there will be a Halleluiah chorus of naysayers reacting to the book’s central thesis that independence for children – at least the same amount of independence we enjoyed a few decades ago – is a good thing. “After all,” such people ask, “what if your child is that one child killed by an aluminum baseball bat, or abducted by a predator, or [insert your own irrational fear here].” If we are going to run with that point, why don’t we all go for broke, and raise them all in germ-resistant plastic bubbles, with vitamin formula intravenous drips for nutrition, and interactive electronic edutainment their only stimulus? Don’t laugh. Sometimes we seem to be getting awfully damned close.

For more ino on Skenazy’s work, including her new book: http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/