In The Arena My Free-Range Parenting Manifesto Helicopter parenting is crippling children and enslaving parents. Can a libertarian senator shake us out of it?

Lenore Skenazy is a keynote speaker, and founder of the book and blog Free-Range Kids. She also blogs for Reason.com. Email her at [email protected].

Back in 2009, the parenting site Babble listed the top 50 “mom” blogs in America—funniest, most fashionable, etc., and “most controversial.”

That would be my blog, Free-Range Kids. Then it was voted most controversial again, a year later.


What crazy idea was I pushing? Don’t vaccinate your kids? Clobber them when they cry? Teach them to play piano by threatening to burn their stuffed animals? Actually, my message was—and is—this: Our kids are just as safe and smart as we were when we were young. There’s no reason to suddenly be afraid of everything they do, see, eat, wear, hear, touch, read, watch, lick, play or hug.

That idea runs smack up against the big, basic belief of our era: That our kids are in constant danger. It’s an erroneous idea that is crippling our children and enslaving us parents.

Luckily, there's new pushback in the Capitol. Last week, Sen. Mike Lee introduced the first federal legislation in support of free-range parenting.

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You’ve heard of me. I’m the New York City mom who let her 9 year old ride the subway alone back in 2008. I wrote a column about it and two days later ended up on The Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News and (for contrast) NPR, defending myself as NOT “America's Worst Mom.” But if you search that phrase you’ll find me there for 77 Google pages.

I started my blog the weekend after the column ran to explain that I love safety—helmets, carseats, seatbelts—I just don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. As people found the site, I started hearing just how little we let kids do at all.

For instance, thanks to a mistaken belief that “We can’t let our kids play outside like we did because times have changed!” only 13 percent of kids walk to school. One study found that in a typical week, only 6 percent of kids 9-13 play outside unsupervised. And Foreign Policy recently ran a piece about how army recruits are showing up for basic training not knowing to skip or do a somersault. It’s like they totally missed the physical, frolicking part of childhood—along with its lessons. How are they going to roll away from an explosion, or skip over a landmine? And then of course there’s the rise in childhood obesity, diabetes and depression.

That rise does not strike me as a coincidence. But here’s the killer irony: The crime rate today is actually lower than it was when we were growing up. (And it’s not lower because of helicopter parenting. We don’t helicopter adults and yet crimes against them—murder, rape, assault—are all down.) We’re back to the crime rate of 1963. So if it wasn’t crazy for our parents to let us play outside, it is even less crazy today. But gripped by the fear of extremely rare and random tragedies hammered home by a hyperventilating news cycle, we are actually putting our kids at risk for increasingly common health risks.

Beyond those, however, there is something even sadder happening to the kids we keep indoors, or in adult-run activities “for their safety.” By having their every moment supervised, kids don’t get a chance to play the way we did—free play, without a coach or trophy or parents screaming from the bleachers.

This is catastrophic. Free play turns out to be one of the most important things a kid can do to develop into the kind of adult who's resilient, entrepreneurial—and a pleasure to be around.

You see, when kids play on their own, they first of all have to come up with something to do. That’s called problem solving: “We don’t have a ball, so what can we play?” They take matters into their own hands. Then, if they don’t all agree, they have to learn to compromise—another good skill to have.

If there are a bunch of kids, someone has to make the teams. Leadership! If there's a little kid, the big kids have to throw the ball more gently. Empathy! For their part, the little kids want to earn the big kids’ respect. So they act more mature, which is how they become more mature. They rise to the occasion. Responsibility!

And here’s the most important lesson that kids who are “just” playing learn. How to lose. Say a kid strikes out. Now he has a choice. He can throw a tantrum—and look like a baby. He can storm off—and not get to play anymore. Or he can hold it together, however hard that is, and go to the back of the line.

Because play is so fun, a kid will usually choose the latter. And in doing that difficult deed—taking his lumps—the child is learning to control himself even when things are not going his way. The term for this is “executive function.”

It’s the crucial skill all parents want their kids to learn, and the easiest way to learn it is through play. In fact, Penny Wilson, a thought leader on play in Britain, calls fun the “orgasm” of play. Kids play because it’s fun—not realizing that really they are actually ensuring the success of the species by learning how to function as a society.

Unfortunately, thanks to the belief that kids are in danger any second we’re not watching them, this kind of play has all but evaporated. Walk to your local park the next sunny Saturday and take a look: Is there any child there who isn’t a toddler with a caregiver, or a kid in uniform with a team?

Instead of letting our kids make their own fun, we enroll them in programs (fearful they’d otherwise “waste” some teachable time), or we keep them inside (fearful they’d otherwise be kidnapped). And if we do boldly say, “Go out and play!” often there’s no one else out there for them to play with.

Can you imagine a country full of people who have been listening to Mozart since they were in the womb, but have no idea how to organize a neighborhood ballgame? My friend was recently telling a high school-age cousin about how he used to play pick-up basketball in the park, and the cousin couldn’t understand how this was possible without supervision. “What happened if someone decided to cheat and fouled all the time?” the kid asked. “We just wouldn't play with him anymore,” my friend replied. Said the cousin: “That’s exclusion!” and that, he added, was a “form of” bullying.

Agghh! We are crippling kids by convincing them they can’t solve any issues on their own. And as depressing as all this is, now there's another barrier to free play: The government.

You’ve all heard the story of the Alexander and Danielle Meitiv, the parents investigated by child protective services not once but twice for letting their kids walk home from the playground in Silver Spring, Maryland. While they were eventually found not guilty on both accounts, it seemed to require massive public outrage before the authorities let them go. Maryland has since “clarified” its CPS policy, which now states, “It is not the department’s role to pick and choose among child-rearing philosophies and practices.”

It sure isn’t. But the authorities have a habit of doing just that. A mom in Austin was visited by the cops for letting her 6-year-old play within sight of the house. A mom in Chicago is on the child abuse registry for letting her children 11, 9 and 5 play in the park literally across the street from her house—even though she peeked out at them every 10 minutes. And I’ve heard from parents investigated for letting their kids walk to the library, the post office and the pizza shop.

Want more tales from the annals of government overprotection? Last year, four Rhode Island legislators proposed a bill that would make it illegal for a school bus to let off any children under 7th grade—that’s age 11—unless there was an adult waiting there to walk them home from the bus stop. Naturally this was presented as just another new measure to keep kids safe. Fortunately—and perhaps just a bit due to agitation by the “most controversial” blog in America —the bill ended up shelved.

Another triumph: A library in Boulder, Colorado, had actually prohibited anyone under age 12 to be there without a guardian, because, “Children may encounter hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors, furniture, electrical equipment, or, other library patrons.” Ah, yes, kids and furniture. What a recipe for disaster!

But that library regulation was beaten back, too.

The biggest ray of hope to date? Republican Sen. Mike Lee from Utah just added a groundbreaking “Free-Range” provision to the Every Child Achieves Act. It would permit kids to walk or ride their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate, without the threat of criminal or civil action—provided this doesn’t pre-empt state or local laws. “’Helicopter parents’ should be free to hover over their own kids, but more ‘Free-Range’ parents have the exact same rights,” the senator told me. “And government at all levels should trust loving moms and dads to make those decisions for their own families.”

The Act, including Lee’s amendment, passed the Senate on Thursday (although in the end Lee could not support the final version of the bill) and now must be reconciled with the House version.

Support for Lee’s provision was bi-partisan. So if Free-Range was once “controversial,” now it is the people’s will. We are sick of seeing childhood through the kaleidoscope of doom. Sick of thinking, “A stranger near the school? Abduction!” “A child waiting in the car while mom returns a book? Instant death!” “A non-organic grape? That kid’s a goner!”

Enough! It is time to stop making ourselves crazy with fear. All we need to do is adopt a new skepticism whenever we hear the words “for the safety of our precious children.”

Those words precede grandstanding and bad laws. They precede sanctimony and scapegoating. They turn rational parents into outlaws and exuberant children into gelatinous lumps on the couch.

The way to keep kids safe is not by forbidding them to go outside. It’s by giving them the freedom we loved when we were kids, to play, explore, goof up, run around, take responsibility and get lost in every sense of the expression. Here, then, is The Free-Range Kids’ and Parents’ Bill of Rights:

“Our kids have the right to some unsupervised time (with our permission) and parents have the right to give it to them without getting arrested.”

Take this bill to your local legislators, or Congress, or the president (or his “Let’s Move!” wife), and remind them: This is how we grew up. Why are we denying our kids a healthy, all-American upbringing?

It’s time to save childhood—and the country. How can we be the home of the brave when we’re too scared to let our kids go out and become smart, successful, resilient, resourceful and independent by doing what we all did at their age?

Playing.