The Sissification of American Kids
When I think “free range,” I generally think chicken, not children, but apparently there’s a movement afoot, that of Free-Range Parenting.
I first encountered the term a few years back in a news accounts about a Maryland couple who were in trouble over allowing their children, ages 6 and 10, to walk a mile home from a park. Someone saw the unaccompanied minors and called the police, who collected the children and drove them home.
The officers reprimanded the father, a physicist, and Child Protective Services was called. Threats were made of taking the children away, but after an investigation was completed, no charges were brought.
The parents are staunch believers in Free-Range Parenting, a movement that (according to the website) was created to “fight the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”
Free Rangers are essentially the polar opposites from Helicopter Parents, the term given to hovering parents who help complete every assignment and analyze every decision and seek to eliminate every possible danger, be it bacterial or social or hyper-imagined.
The Maryland parents had educated their children about possible dangers they might encounter, and they’d practiced walking the route from the park to their home. But the outcry from online hordes of protectives was fierce, angrily listing the many risks the children had been exposed to on their walk.
Sometimes, when I think about my own childhood, it seems a miracle I survived. We played for hours in the woods, built dams in the creek, climbed trees, hung upside-down from branches, slept in tents pitched in the back yard.
We got scratches and bruises and stitches and casts. But we knew not to go into a stranger’s house or car, knew to be home before dinner or dark, knew we had to tell our folks where we’d be.
Now, if a kid climbed a tree and then fell, would the parents be cited for neglect?
At what point do we make it illegal for them to be children at all?
So many kids are already living such scheduled lives, going from school to after-school programs to music to soccer to dance. They have organized play dates and meet with college planners starting in middle school and are pressured to achieve in a way that can’t possibly be healthy.
At what point is someone going to call CPS to report paranoid parents who are essentially holding their children hostage indoors, where they aren’t getting proper exercise or sunlight, where they develop obesity and diabetes and fearfulness? Isn’t that also a form of neglect?
Unfortunately, we no longer live in a world where kids can roam as freely as others once enjoyed. At the same time, all this micromanaging is going to make them weak and frightened and incompetent. But if a parent attempts to step away from the uber-organized madness and let their kid be a kid, it’s considered irresponsible and dangerous.
This isn’t a contest to determine who loves their kid most, and we don’t get credited with a win simply by having so thoroughly bubble-wrapped our offspring that they make the passage from infancy into adulthood unscathed.
The goal is to create self-reliant, capable adults — not a generation of Peter Pans, who not only refuse to grow up, but aren’t able.
