Free-Range: It's Not Just For Poultry

Here's an interesting blog that I found recently. Free-Range Kids, run by columnist and mother Lenore Skenazy, operates under the assumption that those of us who are parents today were raised with the freedom to explore the world unsupervised, and that many of our safety-obsessed parenting methods limit that freedom and, ultimately, hurt our kids and their ability to grow into confident, capable adults.

In some ways, this takes me back to my most recent entry here and the idea of stepping back from my micromanaging parenting. If I were to not only allow my children a bit of sloppiness, but also encourage them in exploring the world around them, would they become more savvy and able to negotiate the world?

Taking this farther and into my professional life, I wonder if a lot of the young students I see—the ones who make poor decisions in their personal and academic lives, the ones who are surrounded by “helicopter parents,” the ones with severely stunted interpersonal skills–are the result of the kind of parenting Skenazy denounces. And is her argument validated by college students and young adults who don't leave home, go to college, get jobs, get married, start families, etc.?

This could also apply to the phenomenon of the “boomerang kids,” those young adults who, having left home for college or to start a career, return to their parents' home after graduation or at some sort of personal crisis and move into their old bedrooms and routines. I don't know if this trend has become more pronounced during the current recession (during the housing boom it happened why a new grad couldn't afford a house), but I would not be surprised if this is becoming even more common.

(As an aside, I realize there are many situations in which living with your parents for a short period is the right thing to do, and that everyone's situation is different, but the sheer scope of this is what troubles me. My generation's general fear of commitment appears to extend to committing to being grown-up and making the sacrifices involved in moving out and moving on.)

Finally, I am interested in the spiritual implications of this theory. In my efforts to teach my children and keep them from making the big mistakes that can ruin their lives, do I too often get overzealous and limit their ability to learn from the smaller mistakes? It seems I’ve heard of the approach that would ensure that everyone only made good decisions and never messed up, and I think I remember that plan being a bit of a failure…But I distinctly remember making a lot of miscues and saying and doing a lot of stupid, foolish, and reckless things in my formative years, and I often learned more from those experiences than I did from the (few) times when I did things right.

And while I think there is some validity to the argument that the world in which our children live is more complicated and (at least potentially) more dangerous than the one in which we grew up, I wonder to what extent that is a creation of mass media and a culture of shock and scandal. The threats our children face are in many ways the same as always, and those risks that are more pronounced may in fact necessitate the kind of street smarts that Free-Range Kids believes can be fostered through a more independence-minded approach to parenting.