My Free-Range Boy

I found a great blog yesterday. One I’ll actually read, because lordy, there are a LOT of blogs out there & I can spare only so many brain cells. It’s called Free Range Kids & you can see it by clicking here. The author is a professional writer – the lucky duck – & she started her blog after getting rather a lot of attention for the subway incident. You see, she let her 9 year old boy ride the subway alone in New York. Then she wrote about it. Need I say that she got some criticisms. Let me mention here that her child is raised in New York & rode the subways all the time with his parents. In the wake of the unexpected furor, she started up her blog to discuss the generally overprotective trend we’re seeing in child raising today.

They built their own clubhouse! This makes Reid nuts.

I had this in mind yesterday as Reid & his no-school-on-veteran’s-day play-date companion careened around the living room, piling up throw rugs, slapping discordant tones out of the piano, shrieking. “Why don’t you go up to the park?” I suggested. “Yeah! Let’s do that!” Reid shouted. “When will you be ready, mom?” “I looked down at the seam I was ironing, part of a sewing project I’ve been hoping to finish sometime in this century. “Just go on without me. I’ll come up in a few minutes.” The other boy made an amazed face & announced he’d never gone anywhere by himself. I stood there thinking about his age, 9. And about his sometimes out of control behavior. And Reid’s familiarity with the neighborhood & his good sense. And what I was doing when I was 9. I put my hand on the other child’s shoulder & described the walk, instructed them both to behave & cross the streets carefully, & sent them off.

The park I speak of is 3 blocks from our house. You walk up the hill, thru a residential neighborhood, & the road dead ends. There is a long set of stairs winding up the hill & at the top is a very sweet little park with a long slide, a bit of a climbing thing, & a tiny pocket of woods on a steep hill. I first let Reid go there by himself this summer. It kind of caught me off guard. He came running in one day & said the kids up the street were going & could he go too? It left me kind of breathy. His first time out without me! Aww… But it’s a safe enough thing. No major traffic at all.

Lenore Skenazy asks in her free range blog, if you don’t let your kids roam, why not? I’ve spent some interesting moments since then asking myself that. Hmm…I think part of it is that I am somewhat haunted for extremely vivid & graphic imaginings of things going wrong. Also, I can’t see this environment thru a kid’s eyes in my own memories. I grew up in the country. I can’t think what there is to do in a house-thick neighborhood. And a big part of it is that I can’t think what Reid would do to pass the time out there. Sure, he asks to hang out on the sidewalk, & I let him. He slaps at the bamboo with a stick, sometimes he looks at bugs or whittles. But there is no kid gang, there is no empty lot. It’s just house, house, house. All nice yards. No roaming dogs. What is there? A sidewalk. Yippy.

I read to Reid a lot & I have a nostalgic fondness for the world that was gone even when I was a kid as seen in The Moffats, & The Great Brain. In one Moffat story, the 6-year-old Rufus spends most of the day going back & forth to the library in quest of his own library card. This takes him several blocks from home on his scooter, barefoot. In another story, Mama has to go to NY for the day, so she stops by school & tell them to tell Rufus & Jane that they should get their own lunch, which sits heating on a coal stove. Jane is excited in one story when it’s her job to clean & fill the oil lamps. Can you imagine? Leaving kids alone in a house with a stove with a fire? With the house lit with oil lamps? A 6-year-old on his own for hours, across town, barefoot?

A hill, trees, a pond. Right out back?

I can’t imagine. That’s the problem. I would love to let Reid be more free-range, but it’s hard to say when that would happen. Reid has been reading Little Lulu reprints lately. He wants a treehouse. He wants a clubhouse. He laments that there aren’t more kids around. Actually there are kids on our block, 5 in his age range. But like most kids today, they’re all booked up. And when they aren’t doing math club or scouts or swimming, they’re inside watching tv or playing video games. There don’t seem to be any kid gangs anymore of the kind in Little Lulu. This nostalgia can also be seen in the works of Bill Watterson. His Calvin & Hobbes live in a house on a street of houses, with Suzy just down the block, much like our neighborhood. But Calvin’s house apparently adjoins a state park, or that’s my best guess on the frequent wanderings of Calvin & Hobbes into the uninhabited & fertile woods. Calvin’s mom deals with his childish nagging by tossing him outside. While I can certainly identify with her frazzled nerves, the only thing behind our house is the the cranky old man neighbor & his ineptly disciplined hedges.

I’m so often conflicted & frustrated by the over-protection of today’s kids. I want Reid to be safe, but I also want to let him find his own way in the world, I want him to test what I’ve taught him so he can understand why it makes sense, I want him to learn to trust his instincts. He needs to learn to be alert to his world instead of always depending on me. I mean, he should see when a car is coming, or it’s raining outside, I shouldn’t be the one to say every time, watch out, or take an umbrella. But it has become so difficult. Things have gotten really messed up when teaching your child to use their judgment opens you up to criticisms of bad parenting, when good parenting is partially defined as keeping your child under your wing at all times. We’re going to have to come back to some reasonable sense of balance.

By the way…I did wander up the hill yesterday after about 15 minutes. Both boys were absolutely fine. they made it there without getting squished or vandalizing anything, & they hadn’t been captured by insane, homicidal homeless hobos camping in the woods.