You may recall, from just over a year ago, the kerfuffle surrounding columnist Lenore Skenazy's decision to allow her (then) nine-year-old son to ride the the NYC subway by himself. Writing about it in her column, Skenazy said, "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."
Now she's written a book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts With Worry, and today in Salon discusses with Katharine Mieszkowski her thesis that parents are being driven batty by a culture obsessed with predation and a media who profit richly from stories of child victimization, and how kids are suffering for it.
I'm not a parent, so this isn't really my beat. Besides that, I'm sympathetic to some of what she's saying—I recoil at Lysol commercials featuring mothers spraying toys with a disinfectant and yell at the telly that some exposure to germs is necessary for a strong immune system, and I want to smash things when parents are blamed for their children being victimized by a determined predator—but I'm troubled by some of what she's saying, too, particularly with regard to the cultural equivalencies. The Philippines is not New York City, and New York City is not the Houston suburbs, and the suburbs aren't exurbia.
And, for that matter, 1718, when "Ben Franklin was apprenticed to his brother at age 12," isn't 2009. The life expectancy in the northern US in 1700 was 50 years old. Hell, I now live a mile from the house in which I grew up, on the same street, which I had to cross every day when I walked to elementary school almost 30 years ago, and the traffic on this same street has at least tripled. An intersecting street that used to be a little two-lane road is now a four-lane throughway with a 40mph speed limit. Kids in the same neighborhood no longer walk to school like I did because there's too much traffic, not because their parents are overprotective.
So, yeah. A mixed bag over here.
Discuss.
[H/T to Iain.]
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