Free-Range Parenting

This week's article summary is I Have to Push My Own Limits to Let My Kids Find Theirs.

Being a parent today is much more challenging than it was one or two generations ago. 

Back then, societal norms afforded kids ample opportunity to be kids and to play and explore without constant adult supervision. Parents weren’t shamed if their children weren’t overscheduled after school and in the summer, complained they were ‘bored’, or broke an arm falling out of a tree.

This article explores today’s parent conundrum of wishing for their children to grow up confident and self-assured while also wanting to keep them safe and protected. The paradox is that too much parent protection stifles a child’s growth, which can create a psychologically fragile, dependent young adult. 

Most parents today know that being a helicopter parent is too smothering, yet they bristle at the other extreme: free-range parenting.

The world today is considered by most to be more dangerous than 10, 20, 40 years ago, even though data shows that today’s kids are growing up in perhaps the safest time in human history. 

In today’s risk-averse society, we need more trailblazing parents to loosen up a bit and give their kids more unsupervised latitude to develop the executive functions skills like resilience and responsible decision-making highlighted in last week's summary..

Joe

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A few weeks ago, my older son’s elementary school took part in National Walk and Bike to School Day, which meant meeting the school’s teachers in a parking lot a mile from the school and walking there en masse — with a police escort. It is remarkable to me that we need a national holiday to encourage people to walk to school, and that the journey has to be so carefully orchestrated.

A few years ago a family in Maryland made headlines for letting their kids, ages 6 and 10, walk to a park a mile away from their home. Local police picked up the kids and delivered them to Child Protective Services.

My son’s childhood couldn’t be more different from my father’s. By the time he finished high school, he had fallen from a tree two stories high and broken both arms; run through a glass door, causing a gash so deep and so near his eye that doctors weren’t sure they could safely stitch it up; raced a homemade go-cart down an impossibly steep hill, nearly killing a cow; and stuck his foot in a vat of 375-degree oil, resulting in months in the hospital.

The drama of these stories overshadows a quieter truth about his childhood. Most days, especially in summer, he would grab a bag lunch at home and spend long hours outside exploring, playing, and getting into his fair share of less life-threatening mischief.

Since becoming a parent, I’ve been amazed by how our culture has so circumscribed children’s freedom of movement, and surprised by my own complicated feelings about kids and risk. Our risk-averse society is not just a benign outcome of our overly litigious age, but also has deep personal and political implications for the kids we are raising.

“Physical freedom models all kinds of freedom, for children learn with both body and mind. When they see themselves demonstrate physical courage, they also learn moral or political courage — and independent thought, which has profound political implications.”

The Maryland parents who made news by letting their kids wander the neighborhood unaccompanied ascribe to a movement called “free-range parenting,” which the Washington Post described as “a counterpoint to the hyper-vigilance of ‘helicopter’ parenting, with the idea that children learn self-reliance by being allowed to progressively test limits, make choices and venture out in the world.”

Our risk-averse society works against the child’s instinct to find a working relationship with chance and risk — otherwise their adventures cannot even begin.

I’m drawn to the values behind free-range parenting, but I’ve always had a hard time living up to those ideals. While my childhood wasn’t as wild as my dad’s, I had lots of good adventures exploring the fields and forests around my house. I walked over a mile to school from second grade on, and spent hours building elaborate contraptions in my dad’s wood shop without supervision.

Watching kids scramble around a playground or sword-fight with sticks, I have to actively fight my reflex to keep everyone entirely safe at all times. As if that were even possible.

Sometimes, as I see my oldest son about to leap from some high peak or scramble across the outer edge of the play structure, I hear my own words as if they’re coming from someone I don’t fully recognize: “Be careful!” “Safety first!” Or, when his 3-year-old brother follows after him, teetering out to reach the monkey bars, I race over to spot him, never letting him learn from falling.

Parenting is full of negotiations and contradictions. For me, no tension is greater than that between wanting to develop a spirit of wild adventure and self-reliance in my kids and the deep yearning to keep them safe, and I’ve recognized the same search for balance between risk and safety in “adventure playgrounds.”

In her research into “the overprotected child” for The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin interviewed Ellen Sandseter, a scholar of early childhood education who has studied “risky play.” Sandseter identifies specific kinds of risky play — like exploring heights, handling dangerous tools, and roughhousing — and explains that they are important to childhood development because they help kids develop their own sense of limits instead of imposing them from the outside. When kids define their own limits, rooted in emotions like fear, excitement, and unease, they learn to master those emotions and negotiate their surroundings.

“Growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions,” Rosin writes. But how do we, as parents, square this with the fierce instinct to do anything we can to protect our kids from harm? I watch my kids careening down a hill on their bikes, or wandering away to go exploring at the park, and I feel it in my gut. How do we decide when to shout out and when to shut up?

These worries persist even in the face of logic and statistics suggesting that overprotecting kids isn’t making them more safe. These fears are visceral and immediate, whereas the threat posed by removing risk and play from kids’ daily lives is one that’s much harder to see from where we’re standing.

When we take those experiences away, we’re making a trade-off: short term safety versus long-term experience. Our control versus their judgment. We think of these things in binaries. If we give up order, we will end up with disorder. If we give up control, we will end up with chaos.

I understand the benefits of risky play in my head, but so much of parenting comes from my heart. What I’m slowly learning is that by listening to my head — without ignoring my heart — I can give my kids space to make up their own minds. Sometimes we have to push our own limits to let our kids find theirs.