Free Range Kids
Rid yourself of all forks and knives you have brought for this newest piece, for it’s not one to complement Swift’s Modest Proposal. No recipes, no tips, no cooking temperatures.
At age eight I took my six year old sister’s hand and left our home located in the middle of a city that once was Poland’s capital. Father had come home drunk, and home sweet home became purgatory. Things may have gone well if he fell asleep, the very unpleasant alternative best left to imagination.
With a few coins in hand we left to find mother.
To this day, much of the city is well preserved in my mind. The streets, where they connect, and which parts of the city they lead to have been firmly impressed in the mind of a child with a vivid imagination – a child that stacked white, large bricks in the shapes of the then emerging computers, and drew on them keyboards, screens, and buttons with labels to mark their importance.
Despite knowing much of the city, the trip to the small, home style fast food booth owned by my uncle and aunt at the entrance to the black market was out of reach. It’s one thing to remember the streets visually, another when it comes to their names and the public transport routes. The routes consisted of buses and street cars with schedules as mysterious as father’s regular and unpredictable behaviour.
My sister behaved better than she did in the company of an adult, leaving me to hold her hand and ask the bus drivers for directions. “We need to get to the black market. Will your bus take us there?”
No direct transit route connected the stop at the corner of our cobble stone street to the black market. The operators gave information on the best options, which routes we should take, and where we need to switch to another. The money for the trip was either enough, or pity chipped in to make up the difference.
Some two decades later, the mother of a nine year old Izzy leaves him at the New York subway with a metro card, a subway map, and $20.
Later she writes in her column “Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”
Just like my sister and I navigated without incident the public transit to find our mother, Izzy, left by his mother arrived home on time, proud, confident, and a step closer to the kind of independence he will later require to begin a life as a capable and responsible adult.
I can imagine the face of Izzy’s mother upon his arrival home, for I’ve seen that of my mother when we finally arrived at the fast food booth. Later, we sat in the back of it on crates, ate fries and drank pop, while I told the story of how and why we had come.
The best lesson a child can learn is one of self sufficiency, for there are many more scenarios than anyone can imagine and prepare for. With self sufficiency, you needn’t imagine them all for your child to come through the day unscathed.
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If you want to leave a comment or question for Izzy’s mother, or interact with the many parents looking for a healthy balance between safety and self sufficiency, visit Free Range Kids.
True, independence and self-sufficiency are necessary skills for any human being; but we all arrive there by different routes. (And some people’s trains never do quite make it into the station, if you know what I mean…) And though the end result may be similar, the process by which we get to that end result can make all the difference in the world. Parallels between you and Izzy are but situational; Izzy’s push to independence was guided and loosely “monitored” (for want of a better word) by his mother, whilst yours was foisted upon you by circumstance, as it were.
Giving a child the freedom to play, to explore, to discover on his or her own – to call that child abuse is hogwash. But some of the fears of today’s parents are understandable. Nostalgia allows us to hark back to “the good old days” when kids ran about freely all day long and into the night. Dangers existed then, too, of course, but with the times have come advancements in technology and an explosion in the population which have made preying on children much easier and more accessible to the average nut case. Even though it’s unwise developmentally and emotionally, part of me can’t blame parents for wanting to keep their kids on a leash (metaphorically speaking). [As an aside, I'm totally against those stupid harnesses so many tots are forced into. Your dog at the end of one leash, your child at the end of another? Now that should be called child abuse... But I digress.]
In your case, I’m (obviously) glad it all worked out: that you arrived at your destination, and that the experience emboldened you and left you with a positive feeling, rather than leaving a bad taste in the mouth. But at the same time, I think the impetus that pushed you and your sister out your front door is an unfortunate one, a sad situation that no child should have to go through.
Of course, I don’t advocate that each parent send their child on a wild trek without supervision. Well, yes, I probably do, as long as we don’t agree on timing the event using something arbitrary like chronological age.
I think there is more danger to a child playing outside as a result of all other kids being inside, than technology. (It’s a numbers thing.) I imagine “can you help me find my puppy” still trumps anything technology can accomplish. And if not, then chances we are dealing with an individual so dedicated to abducting a specific child, the pope’s prayer won’t do any good. (Bad example, but I am feeling generous today.)
In the end I am already guilty for much of the negative attitude in the air, and therefore partially to blame: Seeing 10 preteens on bikes “loitering” at the park at dusk gives me a cold chill, if my path leads before their noses. I could be justified in some respects, but the negative attitude is likely of my own devising and unfair.
I also think that “the good old days” has more to do with nostalgia and past ignorance than a shift in hard, criminal statistics… but here I admit a heavy load of speculation and unsubstantiated opinions. :)