Diary of A Gen X Mom: Failure of a free range summer
After my early adventures in extracurricular scheduling described in a previous entry, I quickly learned that quitting extracurriculars and giving kids the time to play does not solve the problem of kid over confinement. Just because I allow my kids free play does not mean they can find other kids to play with.
To start, lots of modern mothers are petrified of free range moms. At a school fair a few years ago, I was behind a large tree and overheard a mom I had recently met tell her daughter in no uncertain terms that she would not ever be allowed to play at our house because I allow children to play outside while I remain in my office.
The tree stood out in my mind, but this was the third or fourth instance of my children losing a playmate because of my “lack of supervision.” They got their feelings hurt over play dates that never materialized. And the mothers were making assumptions. They, for instance, had no idea that my office is in kid space by design. For them, supervision is an all or nothing game, and their children go from all to nothing about the time they have friends who can drive. Now that my kids are a little older, I have experience telling me that the gradual lessening of supervision is wise parenting.
But there is a problem with free ranging: it doesn’t work very well when your family is the only one doing it.
In our nostalgia for the old ways of kids getting off the bus, having a snack, and then going out for a play until dinner, we forget that it requires a few like-minded families to make it work. The kids aren’t all Calvins who prefer to play alone with a stuffed tiger, and who wants their kids to be first?
The kids’ friends aren’t avaliable. When one Little League seasons ends, another seems to come along. There is precious little time for free play. Since I have four children close in age, mine learned to improvise. But while it is hard for adults to go counter cultural — and that’s what Free Range or Slow parenting is, a counter culture — it is difficult for kids to resist without company. They want other kids to play with, or they clamor to sit inside, usually on a screen. And to make them free play, you need to send them out…alone.
One cannot simply go Free Range Mom and give up hovering cold turkey.
If you read the Free Range Kids mom, and I have since she became infamous, then you know about fear mongering, specifically, things like abduction stats. Those stats are high because of family breakdown. Abduction and abuse in broken homes rose. Thus, after the divorce boom, absolute abduction and abuse rates rose. Stranger abductions, however, have remained steady. Still the anxiety remains, hence stories like my behind-the-tree earful. So there is that fear.
It is basic safety that gets me, however. Two summers ago I had the bright idea to have a free range summer and allow, among other things, my eldest to bike to other neighborhoods. Well, the kids he wanted to see weren’t home — at grandma’s and/or a series of camps — but even if they had been, road construction started on our main thoroughfare just before school ended. Was I going to let my 10 year old bike the torn up sidewalks, alone, and up against construction equipment and drivers who haven’t seen kids on bikes in the summer in probably a decade?
A fun little irony, I would’ve let him get himself to a friend’s place if we still lived in London because pedestrian culture is normal there. In Houston, walking or biking somewhere is just weird, no matter how many bike lanes the mayor puts in.
Anyway, he wanted to do the neighborhood biking, but 10 year old boys want to do lots of inadvisable things. I ended up setting some boundaries and rules due to the construction. And one day, he ended up breaking them, which gets to the next problem.
A neighborhood dad saw him break the rule that he figured I’d set. It took him a few hours to call me, however, because he had been trained to think that other parents shouldn’t meddle in others' parenting. He was nervous calling me, like he expected me to blow up. He certainly didn’t yell at my son to not cross at that point on the street. (He did silently supervise.) He was shocked when I wasn’t mad for his “tattling” but was grateful for another parent’s eyes on my son. Kids push boundaries. Other adult eyes are critical.
Allowing kids to build independence needs neighborly cooperation. And that hardly exists anymore.
The only way to get it back is to be it. I think — I hope — that that father, who has since moved away, became a more neighborly dad because he encountered a grateful mother rather than one who was offended because he meddled in her parenting.
I’m all over these reasons kids don’t play outside. (Told you I am a Lenore devoté.)
But we still need more than a single kid here and there following their nose to the day’s adventure. My free range plan would have worked without the construction and if other kids on bikes were around and drivers we looking out for them. But that year, my plan did not go as planned. Like so many things, free ranging is best done with friends.
This series started as a weekly writing challenge from The Writing Cooperative but I’ve fallen off the weekly part. I started my own publication and so missed a week, or two. Previous entry:
