To be the world's best mom...

RAISING KIDS

Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” after reporting in a newspaper column that she’d allowed her younger son, then nine, to ride the subway alone.

The damning criticism she endured, including a threat to have her arrested for child endangerment, intensified her desire to encourage anxious parents to give their children the freedom they need to develop the self-confidence and resilience to cope effectively with life’s many challenges.

One result was the publication, in 2009, of her book Free Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry). A second result is the Free Range Kids Project and a 13-part series called World’s Worst Mom. In it, Lenore (to whom the title ironically applies) intervenes to rescue bubble-wrapped kids from their overprotective parents by guiding the children safely through a sequence of once-forbidden activities and showing their anxious parents how well the children perform and how proud the youngsters are of what they accomplish.

The term “helicopter parents” applies to far more than those who hover relentlessly over their children’s academic and musical development. As depicted in the series’ first episode, it applies to 10-year-old Sam’s very loving mother who wouldn’t let him ride a bike (“she’s afraid I’ll fall and get hurt”), cut up his own meat (“Mom thinks I’ll cut my fingers off”), or play “rough sports” like skating. The plea from a stressed-out, thwarted Sam: “I just want to do things by myself.”

In an interview, Lenore said, “Having been brainwashed by all the stories we hear, there’s a prevailing fear that any time you’re not directly supervising your child, you’re putting the child in danger.” The widespread publicity now given to every crime has created an exaggerated fear of the dangers children face if left to navigate and play on their own.

Statistics speak

Yet, according to Peter Gray, research psychologist at Boston College, “The actual rate of strangers abducting or molesting children is very small. It’s more likely to happen at the hands of a relative or family friend. The statistics show no increase in childhood dangers. If anything, there’s been a decrease.” Experts say there is no more child-centred crime committed by strangers today - and probably significantly less - than when I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, a time when I walked to school alone and played outdoors with friends unsupervised by adults.

In 1979 when my own sons were offered the opportunity to attend private school to escape their crime-ridden public middle school, they said, “What would we learn about life in private school?” So they stuck out those three years and emerged street-smart and confident in their ability to cope, lessons far more valuable than any they might have acquired in a safer school.

Peter, author of Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, said in an interview, “If children are not allowed to take routine risks, they’ll be less likely to be able to handle real risks when they do occur.” Case in point: His college’s counselling office has seen a doubling in the rate of “emergency calls” in the last five years, “mainly for problems kids used to solve on their own,” like being called a bad name by a roommate or finding a mouse in the room.

“Students are prepared academically, but they’re not prepared to deal with day-to-day life, which comes from a lack of opportunity to deal with ordinary problems,” Peter said. “Over the past 60 years, there’s been a huge change, well-documented by social scientists, in the hours a day children play outdoors - less than half as much as parents did at their children’s ages,” he said.

Peter links the decline in free play among young children to the astronomical rise in childhood depression and anxiety disorders, which are five to eight times more common in the 2010s than they were in the 1950s. “Young people today are less likely to have a sense of control over their own lives and more likely to feel they are the victims of circumstances, which is predictive of anxiety and depression,” he said.

There are also physical consequences of restricting children’s outdoor play because there are no adults available to supervise it. Children today spend far more hours indoors than in years past, which in part accounts for the rise in childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes. Many elementary schools have even cancelled recess, believing it is time wasted that is better spent cramming young students’ heads with facts and figures.

As Lenore put it, “If parents truly believe children must be supervised every second of the day, then they can’t walk to school, play in the park, or wake up Saturday morning, get on their bikes and go have an adventure.”