babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
How much are you willing to risk to let your kid realize a dream?
There are parents like me, who thought it was risky business when I recently sent my 3-year-old daughter about 100 ft. away to a neighbor’s house while I watched from the front door instead of walking with her to ensure her safe arrival.
And then there are the parents of a Dutch teen who let their daughter sail around the world by herself for a year.
I don’t know how a parent gets from letting a kid walk solo on a sidewalk to sail solo around the world. But I think it’s safe to say I’m not a parent who would ever make that kind of leap when it comes to the safety of my kid.
Free-range parents are well aware of the risks of helicopter parenting: micromanaging your kids can lead to problems later. Parents get burnt out trying to provide enrichment for their kids every waking moment, and the kids arrive at college not knowing how to cope with independence.
Then at the other end of the spectrum, there’s Amy Chua, who will probably hand deliver her oldest daughter to Harvard in her personal helicopter. There are those who think you can’t do too much when it comes to ensuring success for your child.
Now, in an essay for CNN, Michael Schulder explores the far edges of the helicopter end of the spectrum. He calls this “extreme parenting”. We’re talking about the parenting equivalent of running a marathon barefoot here.
Are you a free-range parent, or do you hover like a helicopter?
Babble has a great essay up by Elizabeth Floyd Mair on the balancing act between helicopter parenting and free range kids. It’s a topic of tension for every parent I know.
We all have the same goals. We want our kids to grow up confident, secure, capable and safe. We want our lives as parents to be rich and interesting, a combination of quality time with our kids and space to relax and do our own thing.
The compromises we make to achieve those goals define, in some ways, who we are as parents. Are we the moms who take our kids to the park and leave them there, or the ones who attend after school enrichment programs with our kids every single day?
At the edges of this spectrum, we almost seem to form opposing teams: the free range parents vs. the helicopters. In reality, most of us are in the middle, tilting towards one side or another, depending on the specific issue. Mostly I fall toward the free-range side. But only mostly.
The New York Times Complaint Box coughs up another rant about parents neglecting their kids in favor of their tech toys. This time, it’s about playgrounds.
Yes, playgrounds have become the new home office for a lot of working parents. They’re a place where you can, with relative safety, ignore your happy, busy child for an hour while checking your e-mail.
I, for one, am not complaining about the change.
As a mom, I always hated the playground. Don’t get me wrong, I like pushing my kid on the swings for hours on end as much as the next mama, and I build a mean sandcastle. I’ve even been known to follow my toddler down a twisty slide on occasion.
What got me was the parents. Playgrounds are full of parents. They’re lurking at every picnic table and behind every climbing structure, just waiting to spring out and strike up a conversation. Maybe they want to brag about their babywearing prowess, and compare notes on carriers. Maybe they spot me breastfeeding my toddler and want to offer up a long, apologetic soliloquy about why breastfeeding just wasn’t an option with their child.
Some of these conversations are enlightening, but more often they feel like a subtle game of one-upmanship. Who’s the best mom? The Most Attached Parent?
Worse, there’s the Looks. When the Good Mothers are hovering over their tiny angels, cheering on each heroic rung their child crosses on the monkey bars, I’m sitting in the shade with a book. It’s not that I don’t like to play with my kids. It’s that I honestly think they’re better off being allowed to play on their own.
That’s not simply an excuse for lazy parenting: there’s a mountain of research demonstrating that young children thrive best when they’re given long periods of unstructured play without adult interference. Try telling that to the quietly disapproving parents kneeling in the sandbox with their kids, though.
Being the only mom sitting down on the playground, letting my kids wander practically unsupervised 20 feet away, was a pretty lonely road.
Then came smartphones.
I’m enjoying the summer here in Buenos Aires. I’m also seeing firsthand evidence to support the idea that helicopter parenting is a particularly American phenomenon.
The other day I took my girls to a park, where we played happily together. We went up and down rickety wooden slides with rusty bolts. I pushed them on the swings. We made a sandcastle in an uncovered sandbox. We said hi to a stray dog. We rode on the extremely tall and steep see-saw.
This wasn’t a derelict playground. We were at a busy park in an affluent neighborhood, surrounded by chic moms with their adorable, fashionably dressed toddlers. No one seemed concerned that a child could theoretically be injured on the equipment.
At the park, I noticed something else odd. I was the only mother on the see-saw. Or on playground equipment at all. The other moms sat on park benches talking to each other while the children played. Alone.
It’s just one visible symptom of a larger attitude: parents here don’t hover the way parents do back home.
In a ridiculous abduction case going on in Florida, a 14-year-old boy has been arrested for “kidnapping” a 3-year-old girl because he tried to help her find her mother after coming across her lost in a department store.
Edwin, who the Sun Sentinel identifies only by his first name, was shopping with his mother when he saw a little girl wandering alone looking for her mom. Surveillance videos captured what happened next: Edwin spoke to the little girl, and offered to help her find her mom. He got his own mother involved, and the two of them began looking for the girl’s mom.
Seeing a group of women standing outside the door, in the mall, Edwin walked out of the store with the little girl following to see if her mom was among them. She wasn’t, so they returned to the store, where they located the mother and returned the child.
End of story, right? Wrong.
In the meantime, the mom had urged a store employee to call 911, and when police arrived on the scene, they arrested Edwin for kidnapping and led him out of the mall in handcuffs, paraded in front of TV reporters.
In a world where, “Don’t talk to strangers” is often trotted out as rule #1 for keeping kids’ safe, offering to watch a stranger’s child for even a few minutes is a radical act. Rachel Federman shares her experience doing just that on Free Range Kids today.
Rachel found herself at a playground recently where her toddler was playing with two other small boys. The other kids mom was trying to round them up to run home for a few minutes and move the laundry from the washer to the dryer. They were resisting, as children at playgrounds will.
Then Rachel did something wild: she offered to watch the other woman’s kids. They didn’t know each other. And still don’t. But for a few minutes she stood guard over their safety at the playground while their mom did her laundry.
I’ve done this myself. It’s appalling how unusual it is, and how transgressive it feels. Why don’t moms help each other out like this all the time?
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
4