Free Range Kids: Would You Leave Your 7 Year Old Alone At The Park?

Part of what we do as parents is decide acceptable risk. This is so easy when they are small, an almost cruel set up to the later years when our decision making includes the biology of Uncle Gary's drug addiction, teenage drivers crash more frequently with teen passengers, you CAN get pregnant when on your period, the damage they will do to themselves vs. the damage done to them by others and other various ongoing and mind boggling considerations. It's much easier to decipher risk/reward when it comes to crying it out, what foods are best and other small people subjects. Except.

Except when it comes to their safety.

My family on both sides is Southern. I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. Hello, Maggie May.  Growing up, my own parents each had the respective run of their neighborhoods, including both the small and modest homes up and down the tree thick streets and the vast expanses of woods around. My Grandparent's house had a wonderful backyard- a vast green stretch of tall grasses that abruptly ended in a line of trees, and a path, straight through. My mother and her brother and sisters ran through town, ran through the forests and streams and played in the soggy green and blue lakes. I've heard many stories about childhood romps and games from my mother and Uncles, and the year we moved back and lived in Mississippi- I was ten- I found myself sliding from ropes into large mud puddles, jumping off hot tin roofs and splashing in the backyard stream. Like my mother's childhood, there were rules, but no adult to enforce them. One of the rules all the kids in my mom's neighborhood knew was to never, ever play in the abandoned rowboat floating on the lake. Sure. My mother's brother, David, was fourteen when he and two friends made their way to the lake on a sweltering Jackson afternoon.  My Dakota resembles David- the Gardner jawline, the large blue eyes bright with intelligence, carved cheekbones and high lines of ear and forehead. I've seen pictures of David at that age, practically moving off the page with boyish exuberance, lust for life, beauty. He wore long shorts and high socks and had a proper short haircut. His shirt was tucked in and his belt slim. He took off to the lake with his friends, and played in the rowboat, and he drowned in that Mississippi water.

I spent my Grandmother's life wondering if she blamed herself. She wouldn't talk about David. The few times his name came up, she began crying silently, nodding her head 'no'. I don't know if she accepted that children all played free range those days, if she believed she had any other option in that wild Mississippi forest. I don't know if she thought it had been an acceptable risk. I know it wasn't an acceptable loss.

Playing in a lake is a clear and controlled choice- compared to the hotbed of information we have today on the possible dangers to our children, it is downright simplistic. It is the nature of our society today- gobsmacked with information, statistics and you-tube accountings of all and every type of experience- to talk about everything, and it is also the nature of our society today to be unable to put anything in perspective. So we are convinced that brain eating amoebas are as relevant a danger as car crashes.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of the blog and book  Free Range Kids and became a nationally recognizable name when she was infamously published that she let her seven year old son ride the subway alone.  Recently she has been surrounded by more controversy over her newest off-shoot, Take Your Kids To The Park and Leave Them There This movement is a day in a community where parents bring their children ages 7 and up to a local park and leave them, alone, until they come home on their own violition. The idea behind Skenazy's park day, according to her own press, is to promote activity, group play and lessen the 'real risk' of obesity, not obsess on the highly unlikely risks that something sinister will happen to your child. On Dr. Drew, when asked about the possibility of abduction or child on child molest (one of the most common forms of molest) Skenazy was frustrated- " ..that every time children go outside and play it has to be something sleazy.." Dr. Drew countered that in his line of work, he can't help but notice how common molest and sexual assault is.  When Skenazy pointed out that " 90% of sexual molests happen in the home " Dr. Drew quickly clarified that the actual statistic does not say 'in the home' but says ' happens by a person that the child knows.' This can be a person in the home- or a tutor, a friendly adult seen every week at the ice cream shop or a relative. Skenazy's final point was that we let our children ride in automobiles daily- the number one cause of childhood death- and accept that risk. Why, she argued, isn't the less likely chance our child would be molested or abducted a reasonable, barely statistically significant, risk?

You're asking the wrong person, I thought, sitting on my bed next to my ten year old daughter and 17 month old toddler. Meaning- me. If you are asking me, I'd tell you I'm neurotic about car crashes and think about them more often than I care to admit. I hate letting my children go in large steel cages that fly through the air next to other large steel cages driven by pretty much anyone- drunks, elderly people who shouldn't be driving, teenagers with no experience- it's insane that these people are allowed to operate heavy speeding machines next to my children, and yours. But I still let them go in cars. I still drive. And I keep my mouth shut about my fears, and just tell my kids to buckle up. Why?

Because it's an acceptable risk. Because modern life depends on car rides. Jobs, college, family and friends, hobbies- most everything that has meaning to us also includes, one way or another, driving. Unless we are the small percentage who live in towns without freeways, or are Amish. I want my children to live a rich, full life, and driving is inexorably woven into the fabric of our entire society.

But going to the park alone at seven? Is not. 

I can teach them about independence one small step at a time. I can let them play 'alone' without sending them quite that far away. Moderation is possible. I know that sexual assault and abuse is much more common than is reflected in the statistics, I know this in my gut. I know it from a lifetime of listening to friends- both male and female- recount their experiences of child molest to me; some stories small and upsetting and some enormous and grotesquely horrible. These things happen all the time. How far an assault goes is directly affected by the access. When I was right around seven, I was in a bookstore with my mom and sister. I stepped away from my mom and sister and walked to an aisle by myself, browsing the books. A man approached me, with a brown mustache and tight jeans and a shirt tucked in, and he quickly and briefly cupped my vagina through my pants. I stood perfectly still. I was not sure of what had just happened. The man smiled at me, and did it one more time. This time, I began walking toward my mother, and the man walked away. I never saw him again.  I'm glad I wasn't there alone.

What do you think?

PS

As I work on replacing this commenting system with one that works, I have had a few people tell me that if they load the entire Flux Capacitor page, vs just this one post, they see the comment button and can comment. FWIW. xo