Sometimes, being a parent is terrifying. It's hard to think about all the terrible things that could happen to your heart as it walks around outside of your chest. Diseases, accidents, bullies, pedophiles, murderers, fires, oh my God FIRES, my absolute worst fear. Today, these normal, even rational fears are compounded by a relatively new fear: the fear of being persecuted for letting your kid do stuff. I can't really wrap my mind around the reality of parents being arrested because their 6 and 10 year old children walked home together from a park, or a mother having her 9 year old daughter taken away because she played in a public park while mom was at work. I grew up in the era of latch key kids, when even though many women stayed home, they simply did not accompany their children to, well...almost anything.
Parents like me, those in their 30s and 40s, are often up in arms about the difference between our childhoods and the childhoods of our children. Our generation sometimes decries how our kids are soft, or helpless, too structured, too in control over the family. On the other side, parents argue that the world is different now, it is less safe, people are crazy, you guys the INTERNET, hookup culture, and on and on.
I feel like both of these views are too black-and-white and therefore I feel the need to call a little bit of bullshit on the way we've framed this debate.
On the one hand, there is an argument for "free-range" parenting, a style steeped in the notion that kids need to learn creativity, independence and resourcefulness, that the world is a mostly safe place and our kids are smart enough to traverse its varied roads. On the other hand, there is an argument for "helicopter" parenting, which points out the horrors of modern society that we see in the news every day: cyberbullying, school shootings, child abductions, car accidents, drugs.
But neither of these views comes close to describing how life really is for kids and families.
In part, I think that our collective fear of "just think of what could happen" is borne out of the sensationalism of the media. However, let's be honest. If you are saying that the world is mostly safe and friendly and that the violence witnessed in the media is overblown, you are speaking from a very specific vantage point. I live in a city where life is absolutely, despairingly dangerous for kids. It is not that way for my kids, but my kids are not the only ones who matter. It is no more my place to falsely transfer the fear of other people's violent reality onto my kids than it is to act as if that reality doesn't exist just because it doesn't affect my family on a daily basis. I find it infuriating that parents are being arrested for letting their kids do normal things not so much because I feel it is unfair to those parents, but because I feel like it is a complete waste of resources that could be better spent on kids who need intervention. This should not be a debate about whether allowing your kids to walk somewhere alone makes you a bad parent. Focusing there ignores the fact that there are kids who do EVERYTHING alone. There are kids who are absolutely, criminally neglected by their parents and guardians. There are kids who are abused and prostituted by their parents and guardians. There are so many kids who are paying the price for adults' bad decisions, and so many other kids who live with caring and careful adults who have no control over the larger impacts of the societal structure where they live.
I mean, what to say about my husband? I do not want to be glib and say, oh, we were children of the 80s. Gabe should not have been left to fend for himself, to go hungry, to have to find adults who would raise him, no matter where they lived. My husband at 16 should not have had to ask a friend's mother to take him in so he would not be homeless. He should not have been around so many drugs and shifted around from one place to another. So many kids I knew should not have been in those situations.
Walking home from the park? Please. What happened to real problems?
It's this classism that bothers me, this focus on the idea that people in privilege so often are able to have: the world is either GOOD or it is BAD. By engaging in the RIGHT behaviors and by being the RIGHT kind of people/parents, we can avoid all the BAD things in the world.
This is where I detract from the free range parenting philosophy, even while I sympathize with it. I will never teach my children that the world is an inherently safe and happy place. I would no more know how to do that than fly to the moon. And yet, I fully intend to allow by 6 and 9 year old children to walk home from school together next year--alone. This would shock many people who live around me. Parents often don't let their kids play outside if they aren't there. I used to do that, of course, when they were smaller. Now I send them out, though I haven't yet started allowing them to go to the park alone. Now when I say ALONE, I should qualify that. I rarely did anything in public as a child ALONE. There were always other kids around, if only my brother or one other little girl. Few kids I knew went places ALONE. You might be five years old and walking four blocks without your parents, but there were three of you.
I do not intend to give my kids independence and freedom in order to teach them that the world is safer than many people seem to believe. I actually think the world is pretty dangerous. I just think you have to learn to live in it, within reason.
I fully believe that in many ways, the world is safer now than it was when I was a kid. Hell, the existence of cellphones alone brings comfort to parents who can actually find out where their kids are and whether or not they're all right. Chicago is unbearably violent in many neighborhoods, and yet it was more violent in the 70s and 80s. I grew up in the time of Jeffrey Dahmer. Kids today have language to use about sexual harassment, abuse, they are actively encouraged to confront issues related to bullying. I just don't understand people of my generation who believe that things are so DIFFERENT and BAD today when the world was so bucolic in our youth.
I don't understand it, because it wasn't like that for me.
My mother was fairly protective. Friends often thought she was over the top. They didn't understand why I would not go against her wishes when she told me I couldn't do something. I'd get away with it, we won't tell. HA! Clearly they didn't understand that mother radar. I used to argue with my mom about some of these things. Sometimes I didn't bother to argue. I mean, I wanted a bike and thought we should have bikes like normal kids but a kid a few doors down got killed while riding his bike, so that argument rarely left my mouth. Maybe I wanted to be left alone at 6 to get ready for school by myself, but a family of kids across the street were left to do that and the two year old died in a house fire because his siblings couldn't get him out. So, I didn't argue that point, either. This one was common in my house though: Why could my brother go to the park with his friends to play baseball when they were 5 years old without an adult and I couldn't do that?
Because you're a girl, my mother would say.
She didn't try to make it fair, to treat us the same. It pissed me off to no end. Today we would argue that little boys could be preyed upon as well! Look at the Catholic church! And yes, that's true. But I would argue that in some ways, we have given more press to abuse against boys; abuse against girls often goes unspoken or unnoticed, as if it is EXPECTED. And now is the part where I can tell the story about how it was unfair of my mom to say that to me because pedophiles are rare, they aren't out there, that doesn't happen...
But it does, and it did. I was playing in front of my house with a friend when I was 8 years old. My whole family was home. A man came up to us and I instinctively started to walk backwards towards the house. I didn't trust people, not even then. I thought about what my mother had told me: "What reason would a strange adult have to talk to you? You are a child. You have nothing to offer." "What if they need help, or directions?" "Why the hell would they go to YOU for help? They would ask an adult. You are a child. You can't help." This man told us...that he had lost his puppy. Oh, that doesn't happen in real life, you say. But of course it does. Because it works. My friend started to talk to him. My mother came barging out of the house, and he ran away. She drew a picture of him for the police, who promptly did nothing.
I've written here about being molested by mechanics when my family was standing close by, about having a gun put right at my temple when I got robbed on the Green line, about getting hit by a car while walking home from school at 9 years old and almost dying. I've written about sexual harassment and abuse, being accosted by strangers, being stalked (have I written about that? It happened, when I was 16. A kid would call the house drunk and belligerent, screaming obscenities at my mother and I and detailing everything he knew about me, what I wore, how I walked to school, who my friends were, and she finally called the cops when he screamed PUT THAT ANOREXIC BITCH ON THE PHONE and when the cops came they did, well, nothing, and proceeded to act like I should've seen that one coming), having seizures in public places.
Life is hard. The world is scary. We have to live in it.
My mother did not stop me from doing things because I had epilepsy. I was not allowed to swim in a pool alone, for example, but that is also common sense. Once I got over being afraid of walking to school after my car accident, I was back to the same route with the same group of kids who almost witnessed my death. I was allowed to drive to my job and the mall while that kid was stalking me, though I know it scared my mom to death to let me do that. Hell, when I think about some of the things she let me do, I'm shocked. I went to a lakehouse alone with my boyfriend on my 16th birthday; he drove across two state lines and we spent the day there with no parents and she KNEW that. I went camping at 17 overnight with a 19 year old boy I had known for two weeks. I took the el with friends at 13, 14. I went to clubs on the north side of Chicago at 15. I was babysitting for three other kids, unrelated to me, at age 11--in someone else's house. And yeah, bad things happened then too. I got an obscene phone call once when babysitting when I was 12. I didn't know what to do, so I called my mom, and she came over and came to the conclusion that it was a call from the kids' DAD, and I never babysat for those people again.
I guess I was wrong: I did know what to do. I called a parent and said I needed help. I want my kids to know to do that too.
I'm just saying--I know that bad things can happen to kids. I know there are terrible people out there. I don't want my kids to have to be hard and distrustful and to learn to be mean like me, but I do want them to live in the world that we live in, and to gain independence in it and figure out what to do if something happens. I have no interest, however, in forcing this on them as some kind of character building experiment. I'm not going to send my kid on the subway just to prove a point. My kids have no idea where to go or what there is to do on the subway, but walking home from school or to a friend's house is a different matter. Leaving my just-9 year old home for 20 minutes when she was sick with a fever while I picked her brother up from school was reasonable. Giving her a phone and teaching her when and how to use it is reasonable. Allowing her to go on sleepovers or spend the weekend with a friend's family at age 7 is reasonable (she cried that first time, she missed us, she survived). Leaving the pool the second she gets in the water for swim practice is reasonable. I will never tell her to talk to adults if she feels comfortable with them (not that I would need to--she feels uncomfortable around all adults she doesn't know). I have told her the thing about being useless to adults. I have told her that when adults she knows, such as our friends or her parents friends, talk to her, she should notice something: they are polite to her, they are fond of her, but really? They don't want to talk to her. They want to talk to ME. or Gabe. Just like she wants to talk to her friends, not their parents. Someday, that will change. Maybe when they're 16 or so. But not now.
And at what point, as parents, do we cease to wish the world weren't hard for our kids? Why do we assume that the feeling goes away when they are grown? Is that why we try so hard to protect them from everything when they're small?
Don't you think my mother wishes she could take my cancer away, even though I was 34 years old and a mother myself when it reared its ugly head? Don't you think she would like to take my place? She has said that to me, many times. And then she has said, but I can't. I know I can't. Think about how many times I have cheated death. Each time, I was someone's child. It happened as a child, and it happened as an adult, and there really wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about any of it.
We want to protect our kids from everything, but we can't. We want them to be able to be trusting and naive and happy all the time. Well, we are supposed to want that. I don't know how to want that for my kids because I don't remember being that way. But maybe what we should want is something in between, something that isn't a debate but an acknowledgment of reality: our children are children, but they are also people. They do not belong to us. We are responsible for them but we also have responsibilities TO them, to teach them how to value themselves and their bodies and their safety and to recognize the autonomy and value inherent in other people. While I don't want my kids to experience some of the bad things I have experienced, I realize that from a very young age, I was extremely empathetic. Bad things had already happened to me and I knew I didn't deserve it and I looked out for other people, even when I was little. I wasn't embarrassed to stand up for myself or anyone else. I wasn't of the opinion that the world was particularly safe, or fair. And yet...I was happy, and met wonderful people and lived an interesting life. I learned how to go through terrifying things without feeling particularly terrified.
I don't think our goal as parents should be to try to shape our kids' understanding of the world into something foreboding or whimsical. I definitely don't think our goal as parents is to call the cops whenever we see kids living their lives, especially if we are allowing ourselves to live in a little bubble where the worst thing that happens to kids is they are left to stroll by themselves. I think our goal as parents is to do the hard work of raising children in the real world, as it is, right now. Our world is devastating and it is magical, it is exhilarating and it is painful, it is astonishing in the experiences it allows us and that it shields from us. We are here to love them even when we cannot protect them, to instill in them a sense of their own self worth as well as the worth of other people, no matter their circumstances. We are supposed to be here for them, whether life is good or bad, and it is our job to never, ever look away--no matter what.
