Readers, bybkrknbrd
here’s a look at two world views. Free-Range Kids received both last week:
IT’S ABOUT TIME! I was raised in the 60s & it was nothing for me to take the subway or bus to the N.Y. World’s Fair. I was 8 at the time, & knew enough to be home by dinnertime. Nowadays way too many kids are hovered over & as adults lack the simple skills to be social & accountable in public settings.
Summertime saw me, along with MOST of my friends, earning money cutting lawns, washing cars, etc., & as time went on we all got different jobs so as to be self-reliant & accountable. Sadly you rarely see that anymore. I hope parents wake-up & realize they’re raising a bunch of leeches by not allowing their kids to discover the World for themselves.
And then there’s —
You people are full of crap- your “free-roam” child crap amounts to nothing more than being lazy parents who don’t want to be bothered with keeping up with your kids. There is absolutely NO circumstance when it is ok for a 5, 6, even 7 or 8 year old child to be allowed to roam the streets, walk to school, the store, or any other location, other than the next door neighbor’s house, alone or unattended. It’s not helicopter parenting to watch your kids- it’s call RESPONSIBLE parenting. It’s called caring about and loving your kids. You CAN monitor your children without hovering or being over protective. Idiots like you are a perverts dream- they know they can count on you to turn your babies out for them to do their dirty deeds with- and no, that’s NOT being part of any “panic”- that’s freaking reality. Take a few minutes to learn just how many registered sex offenders are in your area- and note they most likely ALL are repeat offenders. And that number is just the ones that have gotten caught. Think about how all their victims felt, and think about how shitty you will feel WHEN it happens to your kid. Then, think about the family in my town that just buried their little girl b/c they thought it was ok to let her, at barely 7 years old, to roam the neighborhood without adult supervision. She was hit and killed by a car she didn’t see coming. Don’t pull any kind of statistics BS either- you all know it, I know it: people like you that just send their kids out for the vultures of the world because you THINK you are doing them a favor are horrible, lazy, undeserving so-called parents. What a shame that God would bless you with something for which you show such little disregard.
And so it goes… – LÂ
Free-Range Kids: Good or Evil? (Please ignore the baby being abducted. Off-message. I just needed a rights-free illustration.)
“Don’t pull any kind of statistics!” pretty much sums up that response. Why look at facts when you can just have an emotional reaction?
That goes for a large number of other issues in the world, really. So much of our government dysfunction can be explained by too few people understanding how to read statistics. Parents: teach your children statistics and how to critically think about them! If they go to public school they’re certainly not going to learn it there.
PLEASE…I BEG YOU to print the email of the whackadoodle PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE.
I cannot imagine living my life or raising TBH and TBA in a paranoid manner like that.
“people like you that just send their kids out for the vultures of the world”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na7WqSb6sY0
And that’s why publicity is important, and why you have to say it again and again and again. And again. “Don’t pull any kind of statistics BS”: I will grant that statistics can be and are frequently misused and misunderstood, but this “don’t confuse me with the facts; my mind is made up” attitude is a real problem.
So — since too many people make up their minds based on what they’ve seen and heard, without making much of a distinction between fact and fiction, and without regard for probability and logic, let alone good manners — it’s important to speak up, and provide positive examples, much as we’d rather keep our heads down, hoping no one notices and turns us in to someone official.
I think this post reminds us that both “sides” of this discussion can be ridiculous at times. I think a key message here is that parents’ judgment is usually the best resource when it comes to making decisions for kids. Arbitrary rules based on near-0% risk tolerance are wrong, but so is “my kid could do it, why can’t yours?” I like hearing about what is possible or what worked for “your” kids and sharing the same about mine. But if I decide my kids aren’t ready for something your kids did years ago, chances are I’m right, because I know my kids. I also might not want to do xyz because it would not fit the lifestyle of my family. Or my kid isn’t interested. This isn’t the scouts where you have to earn badges for doing this and that.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the statistics course I took my senior year in high school has been one of the most valuable parts of my education. It helped me understand that correlation is not causation, that anecdotes are not evidence, and that looking for 100% in any human endeavor (as in 100% safety) is an impossible task. I really ought to look up Mr. Miller and give him a big thank you.
I know the old saying about three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damn lies, and statistics. But that comes from a lack of understanding about statistical analysis, statistical significance, etc. That anyone can say “Don’t pull any kind of statistics BS” shows a sad lack of trust in science, mathematics, and evidence. Statistics cannot be used to say anything that is untrue–statistics can only be used to say something that has incredibly limited significance. That’s certainly not the same thing as BS.
This distrust of reproducible science makes me feel both tired and incredibly sad.
With the use of ‘crap’ in the second response I knew the rant would be bad. When I saw the ‘idiots like you’ I stopped reading. People who resort to bad language and name calling are unable to conversate intelligently. They refuse to actually listen to other’s opinions because they think they’re right and no amount of logic, statistics and facts will change anything. Let her live in her paranoid world, nothing anyone here says will change her mind.
” That anyone can say “Don’t pull any kind of statistics BS†shows a sad lack of trust in science, mathematics, and evidence. ”
Usually it means the facts don’t match their beliefs. They TRUST their family members, good friends, and other people with whom the entrust their children. So hearing that their trust may be misplaced means their personal judgement is flawed. Much better to believe most molesters are strangers, and they can keep their children from coming in contact with strangers.
Largest flaw with that lack-of-logic, strangers become trusted adults pretty quickly. How many of us have personal relationships with every adult our children come in contact with? In most cases, teachers, coaches, etc are strangers we choose to trust.
Is it just me or does the sex offender list offend anybody else? People get put on the list for being 18 and having willing and consensual sex with their girlfriends. Yes, there are real monsters out there, I get that. Does this neighborhood list include what the offender is in the list for? I have never actually looked. We’re breeding a nation of self obsessed, irresponsible free loaders. I feel bad for my children who have to grow up with them. Where did common sense go? When did teachable parenting moments turn into go hide in your room mommy will take of your problem for you? I fear for our future. These children will be running our country someday.
This is indicative of our political climate as well. Facts are to be ignored when they inconvenience one’s world view. Spew hate and anger and that substitutes for substance.
Lenore, have you seen this slightly NSFW (language) post at Jezebel? Sounds like your letter write can use it!
http://jezebel.com/the-ctfd-method-is-the-greatest-of-all-parenting-trends-816536389
“Then, think about the family in my town that just buried their little girl b/c they thought it was ok to let her, at barely 7 years old, to roam the neighborhood without adult supervision. She was hit and killed by a car she didn’t see coming.”
OK. And yesterday in Philadelphia a mother and her 4 children were struck and killed crossing the road and she was holding their hands. What does supervision have to do with accidents?! When can we all accept that accidents do not equal preventable death?
This super-freak, hyper-vigilant (s)mothering as the norm has to stop. We cannot blame every child death on the parents. It’s cruel and misguided.
And the no kids age 5-8 allowed to walk anywhere “unattended”- where does she live? In an alligator swamp?
It has nothing to do with trust in numbers, logic or stats. These people are all about the “1”.
If it saves just “1” child………..
The death, rape or abduction of “1” child……
How could you live with yourself, if even “1” chid……………..
These people wll not stop until every child conceived lives to be 100 yrs old, with no harm or trauma ever entering their lives. You could eliminate every crime against children there is, and they would move on to the outrage of how dare soceity not have cured the common cold by now. Because the poor little darlings suffer so much from it.
On emotional basis, these people are no different from most terrorists in that they are extremists operating on a belief that they know what is best for the world.
“Don’t confuse me with the facts!”
“You CAN monitor your children without hovering or being over protective.”
Um, yeah, that’s kinda the point Lenore has been driving home with every single post.
Don’t pull statistics out? Why? Because they might prove Mr. or Mrs. Kid Stalking Parent wrong? Heaven forbid that we are truthful about the chances of something actually happening. Never mind that kids are exponentially more likely to be molested or killed by a family member, friend, or someone the family knows. We have to ignore that fact so the letter writer can feel right. Lol.
It’s hard not to notice that the pro-free-range POV is from a large, walkable city and the anti-free-range describes a death-by-auto (leading cause of children in most suburbs) scenario.
Yeah but “pro-free-range” doesn’t mean “abandon your children in traffic”. Geez.
Hey Lenore how dare you try to interrupt this woman’s highly emotional rant with those pesky ol’ facts?
The problem with statistics like ONE in four hundred and seventeen billion, is that some parents/people only choose to hear the “one”…they don’t want to be the “one” (unless they are winning the lottery).They will do everything in their power to not be the “one”. There is a need to be congratulated for all the effort taken. It doesn’t matter if my kid also safe without constant vigilance, because I am more likely to be the “one”…if my kid is safe, we were just “lucky.”
>> Please ignore the baby being abducted. Off-message. I just needed a rights-free illustration. <<
Another image for you, for a future post:
http://www.pacsafe.com/blog/the-child-eating-ogre-of-bern-switzerland/
“…God would bless you with something for which you show such little disregard.”
Why thank you! I *do* try to treat my daughter with as little disregard as possible. I’m glad you have noticed!
hmm, first time I went to the shops alone I must have been about 5, in a country I didn’t speak the language, in a town I didn’t know (we were on vacation there).
Of course the shop was across the street from our hotel, but I went there alone, got the shopping done by pointing out stuff…
How did #2 even end up on this site? I’d love to know if your traffic logs show what search term led them here…
Per SKL’s comment, FreeRanging is not about making Timmy do the same as Jonny next door (riding his bike to the store, walking to school). It’s about letting them rise to their own level of competence, building independence and self-reliance as they go. The other approach assumes that no child is competent to do more at 13 than they were at 3: eat, sleep, and poop.
It’s hard to move a culture but that’s what it will take. Very few of us know personally of any case of a child being harmed by a stranger. Just as Lenore pointed out that the razor blade in an apple threat never happened, we have a lot of people fearing things that don’t exist and assuming that their kids will be willing victims, unable to react, to shout “FIRE” as loud as they can or “you’re not my mom/dad” when someone gets too close.
A life defined by fear is no life at all.
“Another image for you, for a future post:”
Do a search for the Krampus…
Yes, I too knew the rant would be insane as soon as I read the slam against statistics. Then when she threw in that ALL registered sex offenders are repeat offenders, I just threw up my hands, although the two do go together. You have to be able to comprehend statistics to read recidivism reports and understand that the re-offense rate is in tiny, single digits for those on the registry. And yes, Sarah, I too find the registry offensive on a great many levels. The sad thing is that her children will very likely grow up thinking as she does, and on it will go into infinity,
@Gary-
I think this image sums it up….
http://www.ohmypictures.com/parenting-you-re-doing-it-wrong_3019.html
Well, dear anti-free-range person. You go right ahead living in your bubble of fear and anti-fact. I will keep encouraging my 4 3/4 year old girl to climb trees, poke sticks at things, explore our local parks – going out of immediate visual range – without us following or panicking, and generally being a sometimes annoyingly strong willed little girl. When they enter the ‘real world’ after college I will laugh as my daughter continues to become a leader and your poor sheeple is not.
Dear anti-free range person:
Are you aware how little these maps of sex offenders in your area tell? While it is sickening to think someone in your area is responsible for the rape of frail old ladies, such a person would not sexually assault a child.
There are many people on the registry for offenses varying from rape to urinating in an alleyway. You simply can’t tell how many of those pose a risk to your child, but I can assure you it is less than you think it is.
LOL, I’m itching to find out what the sole justification is for sending your kid alone to the neighbor’s house is – well, other than that the note writer has arbitrarily decided that this is safe even though going to school isn’t, and doesn’t know about Sandra Cantu.
And now I really want to tell him/her, just for the lulz.
Some people like knowing who to hate and the sex offender registry is a little piece of heaven for the haters. That list is just so handy and the fact that you can identify danger from the safety of your laptop, well, that is so much cleaner and easier than evaluating actual people and actual events.
I love the suggestion that free range parenting is the “easy” or “lazy” choice. It is a lot more work to teach my kid to be responsible, to carefully monitor his level of readiness for various levels of freedom, and then to let go at just the right moment. It is so much easier to just make him tag along, or attach him to some other adult or group of adults so they can watch him. Just as it is easier for me to clean up his room, wash his dishes, and wash and put away his clothes. Teaching him to do these things, monitoring him, following up, dealing with the inevitable push-back (“Mom, I’m busy now.”) is the hard way.
Wow. Even if the writer disagrees with Lenore, and the rest of us (which she/he clearly does), was all the vitriol really necessary?
Wow. Even if the writer disagrees with Lenore, and the rest of us (which she/he clearly does), was all the vitriol really necessary?
And wow, sorry for the double post!
I love the capitalized ‘when.’ What idiocy.
was all the vitriol really necessary?
Yes. An argument-free argument needs all the ballast it can get.
When someone doesn’t possess the most basic grasp of grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc., I simply cannot listen to his or her point. Luckily for me, that means I am free to ignore most of the internet! (By the way, Lenore, your writing is impeccable).
I suppose “-L” doesn’t want to be dictated to by a bunch of fact checkers *smirks*
Hate to say it, but I can’t see that either advances the debate very much…
But did anyone catch the mis-type in the last line?
“What a shame that God would bless you with something for which you show such little DISregard.” —
Exactly, we have little DISregard for our kids, in fact NO disregard for them– we love them and care for them.
So are we just using Free Range as an excuse for being lazy parents who don’t want to be bothered with keeping up with our kids or are we sending our kids out to the vultures of the world because we THINK we are doing them a favor? Which is it? What is our motivation? Misguided or lazy?
To those people who have that attitude, I don’t try to convince them. I just smile to myself and think how much better prepared my child will be for life beyond childhood than theirs. 🙂
Eh, about the first poster, he/she sounds like the “we walked to school uphill in the snow barefoot” crowd. While I think these are indeed things that kids should be doing, I think that these are things that kids are doing. At least in the neighborhoods I’ve lived in. And I wouldn’t necessarily call those neighborhoods free range.
About the second poster, I agree with marie that when you have an argument free argument, you add vitriol and think that’s an adequate substitute. So true.
@John Sousa
I read Jezebel every so often but had missed this article. Thanks for posting, that made me smile. Perhaps you are familiar with the kids book “Go the f*** to sleep”. Audiobook available read by none other than Samuel Jackson.
@Carl and Gary,
I’ll see your child eating ogre and Krampus and raise you a Francisco Goya.
http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/francisco-goya/saturn-devouring-his-son-1823-1
@John Sousa,
Forgot the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_the_Fuck_to_Sleep
A 2 year old in our community was killed by a car walking across the street holding her mother’s hand. Bad things happen and we can’t always stop them.
I’m very sorry for the little child hit by a car. But why is the author blaming the parents who tried to rise an independent child, why doesn’t he even think of blaming the person in the he car? Or the urban planner who didn’t plan for people walking but for “cars”? I live in a country where not only teachers but even the police encourages 5 year old children to first of all walk and secondly walk alone to School. And most of the children do it and it’s just a pleasure to see all these kids walking or biking to School. My kids walk to School alone and they sometimes spend one hour on the way home (1.3km) because they are exploring their neighborhood, playing with other children or just having fun being without an adult! And I don’t let them walk alone because I’m not responsible but because I want them to having fun and be able to tell me all the nice things they did or saw on the way home!
Something the second emailer has obviously not considered is that it’s actually a lot more work to teach a child to do something for him/herself rather than doing it for them. It’s not lazy in any way. You need to spend a lot of time initially, helping the kids to understand how the world works and how to keep themselves safe in it, and offer them opportunities to practice. You need to have a strong relationship with your child to know what types of situations they are ready to handle at what ages. Consider this example: asking a two year old to clean up the yogurt he just spilled on the floor is actually a lot more time-consuming, stressful, and messy than just cleaning up the spill yourself. The two-year old will probably be wearing the majority of the mess with the rest of it smeared across the floor. But by asking and teaching the child to clean up his own mess, you have just made an important investment in his future, and next time he will be better able to handle this type of problem on his own.
How do qe get from sex offenders to a car accident. Why IS IT that we blame the parents when a driver his a child. Maybe we should consider following down the traffic and making our streets safer for children a pedestrians.but that is a whole nother issue. If we had more people, children and adults, and made it less convent for prices or streets would be safer and we mighbtwvwn get to known one another again.
Sometimes I wonder about people who hear the words Free-range kids and interpret that as meaning ignoring your kids.
Perhaps they forget that farmers switched to battery farming because it was more convenient for them than allowing their hens to roam freely, or that the switchback started because it was unhealthy for the hens. Free range farmers have to know their hens well enough to find their eggs, or to entice them home to lay.
H
I cannot stand people who write in the manner of the second letter – the author used crude language and a gross lack of wisdom and then ends the missive saying “What a shame that God would bless you with something for which you show such little disregard.” They invoke God as if that makes it ok for them to have used such language and lack of knowledge, as if sticking “God” at the end gave some sort of authority to what they said, it doesn’t work like that and adding that sentence only served to make them look even more foolish.
I assume the sender of the second letter NEVER allows his/her child in a car under any circumstances. Cars are child-killing machines. WHEN, not if, something unfortunate happens to a child in a car, it’s clearly the parent being lazy for allowing the child to ride in the car.
You keep using this word… I do not think it means what you think it means.
Quoting the rant: “What a shame that God would bless you with something for which you show such little disregard.”
“… such little disregard.”
Little. Disregard. In other words, the something in question is highly regarded.
Freudian slip?
An attack of this nature comes from a kind of anger, but anger is a secondary emotion stemming from the primary emotion of fear. What we just saw was a massive output of adrenaline in the form of vitriol. It reminds me in many ways of the reactions of racists against people of a different culture from their own. I’ve seen it several times, in very similar words, aimed at me when I suggested that we were going overboard with our lockdown policies at school. People are really afraid of a lot of stuff, apparently, and the less educated and more emotional they are, the less likely they are to be reasoned with. We really, really need basic education on statistics and risk in schools. If George Zimmerman, for example, had understood statistics well enough to know that young black men are far more likely to be victims of violence than the people in his gated community, his fear might not have taken a life. A huge life lesson for me has been to understand that people who are afraid of something cannot be reasoned with, cannot themselves reason, cannot be taught or retain information, and usually cannot be trusted to act reasonably or predictably. Which is why advertisers, governments, and media use it to make people suggestible and vulnerable to manipulation. Fear seems to be central to our economy and governance, and this is a problem. Another life lesson was that the “opposite” of fear is not courage, in the binary way we are trained to think. Usually what people mean by courage (as in the “stand your ground” kind of courage) is aggression, and aggression, as I pointed out, is actually just sublimated fear. We need to learn a whole new way of being and thinking.
I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to blame the drivers, or the traffic engineers, for the child being hit. People foolishly walk in front of cars because they aren’t paying attention, every day.
That said, we don’t know the circumstances. We don’t know that the child did anything wrong rather than the driver, or that the same accident couldn’t have happened to an adult who wasn’t paying attention. Sure, a 7 year old is perhaps more likely to be careless in crossing the street if she hasn’t been thoroughly trained in traffic safety, but the problem is not *limited* to children.
There is, of course, good reason NOT to fear:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/07/18/f-vp-schlesinger-wonderful-world.html
So why are we so afraid? I think it’s complicated:
http://natureofnurturing.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/speculations-on-the-culture-of-fear/
Haha – the second parent sounds exactly like Ellen from “Welcome to the Nuthouse” (except for the language as far as I can tell). She is sooooo convinced!
I guess that amazes me the most, that absolute certainty that she’s right and therefore everyone else is wrong.
Such certainty comes either from someone very informed on the subject, or from someone very uninformed. In this case the phrase ‘not hindered by any knowledge’ comes to mind.
Re: that last sentence: “And you have a nice day, too!” < I think that's a healthy way of dealing with insulting letters like this 😀
Re: FRK good or evil: I'd like to know the result of your Human Test first 😛 After all, you could be an alien who came down to Earth in 1980 to teach us all a (parenting) lesson!
@In the Trenches. Great post on the fear/aggression link! Thank-you!! The bottom line is: we can only sympathize with people driven by fear; we cannot reason with them or change them.
So when can I let my 6 y.o. son discover the world? When he’s in his 20s? I think what I fear most of all is raising a child that’s scared of the world. Once he is physically strong enough to navigate the world on his own, he won’t be emotionally strong enough to handle the responsibility.
The author of the second communication reminds me of a poster on an internet board I frequent who was similarly vitriolic in her assertions that she could NEVER forget her children in a car and that anyone who might possibly suggest that a temporary slip of the mind regarding one’s children could happen to anyone is a terrible person and an irresponsible parent. I think that when people have resorted to all caps, poor grammar and the hurling of insults in this manner they’re not only behaving emotionally, but they are behaving defensively. It’s almost like they are taking others’ assertions that accidents happen, that parents are not perfect, and that it is possible for people to differ in their views of the best way to raise children as being personally being attacked as “bad parents”. This causes them to freak out and strike back at their presumed opponents in any way they can.
Today is the 1 year anniversary of the Aurora shootings.
Why did I need to know that?
Why do we always have to mark the anniversaries of every horrible thing, just in case people let it fade enough so they can go to the movies without fear?
When was the last time anyone marked the 1 year anniversary of something good happening? For that matter, when was the last time the news reported something unexpectedly awesomely good happening?
About statistics:
The old saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics comes about, not because statistics lie, but because they’re so easy to manipulate.
Last year in America, much was made about the fact that ‘the 1%’ pay almost 50% of the taxes. As far as I was able to confirm, that’s true, and it sounds really impressive – right up until the point you learn that those same people earn almost half the income and control over 90% of the savings.
It’s not the statistics that are the problem, but whether you look at them in context or not. When you’re talking about 1 child, are you talking about 1 out of 2 or one out of 3 million?
Darn…the second one had me going along for the fairly well-stated rant (hey, I like a good argument) until the last three words. Pretty sure it should read “such little REGARD.”