Bree Ervin was sitting in the shade at a park when her then-7-month-old daughter climbed a small slide and prepared to go down head-first.

Another mom approached to warn her and was shocked when Ervin didn’t rush over to stop her daughter. Instead, Ervin let her go — and then comforted the girl when she realized that sliding face-first hurts. The other mom castigated her, calling her “one of those free-range parents.”

Ervin, who now lives in Longmont with her husband and daughters, 6-year-old Alex and 8-year-old Cody, googled that moniker when she got home and discovered a label that perfectly described her parenting style.

“Whether it is Internet predators, kidnappers, pedophiles, sharp objects, skinned knees or any of the other potential dangers that we are taught to fear, free rangers believe the best response is to prepare our children to cope with whatever life throws at them — and to give them the wits, practice and tools to do so,” she said.

The term “free-range parenting” was coined by Lenore Skenazy, who drew national attention after she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York subway by himself and then wrote a column about it for the New York Sun. She wrote a book, has a website devoted to free-range parenting and regularly proposes events like “take your kids to the park and leave them there” day.

Critics have dubbed it lazy parenting and say parents are taking unnecessary risks with their children’s safety.

But supporters say they don’t want to let fear rule their children’s lives. It’s been called the antidote to “helicopter” parents, who hover over their children, ready to swoop in and solve all their problems — even in college.

“A free-range parent tends to believe that all children, not just their own, are safer and smarter than pop culture leads us to believe,” Skenazy said. “We don’t think that our kids need a security detail every time they leave their house. We don’t think we have to buy a million educational videos, classes and toys to personally knit every synapse in their brain.”

Skenazy said media organizations “obsessed” with news of worst case scenarios, especially missing children, have created a culture of fear. When a parent is trying to decide if a child would be OK waiting alone at a bus stop, she said, an image of a child taken from a bus stop is what pops up — not an image of the millions of children who wait safely every day.

“We see things through the lens of dire risk,” she said. “Pretty soon, you’re scared to let your kid go to the park or ride a bike.”

Jan Hittelman, a Boulder psychologist who works with children and teens, said he mainly sees parents who are too involved in their children’s lives, especially those who micromanage schoolwork in an attempt to make sure kids get top grades and, eventually, into top colleges.

What he likes about the free-range parenting style is that parents can “empower kids to learn through experience.” A middle school student who doesn’t finish an assignment, for example, should face the consequences of the teacher, he said.

“If free-range parenting means to really help your kids learn really good survival skills and coping skills, that’s important,” Hittelman said. “Life is full of challenges. The best way to deal with those challenges is to develop good coping skills. The danger of overprotective parents is they’re not allowing their children the opportunity to learn coping skills by making mistakes.”

But he also cautioned that free-range parenting can be used as an excuse for the other extreme, parents who are tuned out and neglecting their children.

“That’s where I see problems,” he said.

‘Great big world’

Most parents of a certain age can wax nostalgic about their own childhoods, spending idyllic summers roaming with little adult supervision. But many also struggle with giving their children that same freedom.

One stumbling block is that children’s time is often tightly scheduled with classes and camps. Parents don’t want their child to be the lone kid roaming the neighborhood, saying the lack of safety in numbers would leave their child vulnerable.

With fewer stay-at-home moms, there also may not be that same safety net of watchful adults. Many neighborhoods are no longer the tight-knit communities of years past, where everyone knows each other, parents say.

Thea Willey, an Erie mom of 10-year-old boy/girl twins, has grappled this summer with granting her children’s desire for independence while also making sure they’re safe.

She said they live in a nice area, but there’s a busy neighborhood street entrance that her kids need to cross to get to where their friends live. She also wanted to make sure her kids wouldn’t panic if something went wrong, such as a bike accident.

Because they’ve promised to stick together, she began allowing them to take neighborhood bike rides or ride to friends’ houses on the other side of the neighborhood.

“It’s really about teaching them to remain calm and make good choices,” she said. “I think about how child oriented Boulder County is. We have to trust, to some degree. It’s just where those boundaries are and how far do you let them go.”

While Willey is still exploring the free-range approach, Johanna Burian and David James have been staunch supporters of the parenting style since their 18-month-old twin girls were born.

Burian recounted a story about a college roommate who had never done a load of laundry and said she doesn’t want that lack of self-sufficiency for her daughters.

“It’s a great big world out there,” she said. “They need to know how to handle it. You’re not sending them out in the world at 18 not knowing how to do anything.”

With toddlers, they said, being free-range means not buying knee pads as they were learning to walk and not covering sharp table corners with protective pads.

“We have things they can bump their heads on,” James said. “They learn from it and don’t bump into things nearly as much as they used to. They can go down the bigger slide. So the girls have a skinned knee every so often. It’s really not a big problem. The biggest thing is to make sure they have room to try things that are a little bit of a stretch for them.”

‘Uncomfortable conversations’

Longmont’s Ervin said she and other free-range parents don’t just send their children out without preparation.

“I invest a lot of time in talking with my kids and being honest with them,” she said. “You have to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations with your children.”

She also makes an effort to create a stronger community ties. When she moved to Longmont from Boulder, she took walks with her kids twice a day, saying “hello” to anyone outside.

“I made sure everyone knows who my kids are,” she said.

Her biggest fear isn’t child predators, but that someone who doesn’t agree with her parenting choices will call the police or child protective services. Her wish, she said, is that free-range parenting will become the norm.

She lets her daughters ride or walk to a nearby park and play by themselves just about every day. They take a timer and are required to check back in with her every 30 minutes.

At the start of summer, with one on a scooter and the other on a bike, they were a little late coming home. She said she was just starting to worry when her oldest came home alone. The younger girl had wiped out, scraped her ankle and stopped at a neighbor’s house for ice.

“That is the awesomeness of free-range parenting,” Ervin said. “My kids got hurt, they stuck together and they handled it well. They learned that they could trust their neighbors, and that they were capable people. They came home, not in tears needing my help, but exhilarated with an epic tale to tell.”

Contact Camera Staff Writer Amy Bounds at 303-473-1341 or boundsa@dailycamera.com.