Flabby Brain

I’ve finished Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy, and I’ve been trying a few things to make my kids more independent. I feel sort of like Bill Murray’s character in What About Bob: “Baby steps to the elevator. Baby steps I’m on the elevator. Baby steps…” We’ve done Walking to the Mailbox Alone and now Hanging Out at the Church Carnival With a Fistful of Game Tickets and Without Hovering Parents.

My next step will be to try Skenazy’s suggestion of starting a “walking school bus” – one parent walking a neighborhood gang of kids to school until they get the hang of it and can go on their own. My next-door neighbor and the lady a couple of doors down both have kids that go to my kids’ school. I’m going to ask them to do this bus thing with me. I’ll even volunteer to be the first parent walker.

A couple of things stood out in this book. (Beyond its exceptional hilarity, I mean. I haven’t laughed so hard while reading in ages.) The first was chapter 10, subtitled “Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn’t Work Anyway.”

Control is the crux of our problem. Or the illusion of control is, rather. We think that if we just follow our kids around, poking our noses into everything they do, that nothing bad will ever happen to them. And we think that if we relinquish control for five minutes, we will suddenly become Bad Parents. And worse, our kids might be fatally harmed.

We no longer fear deadly disease (except swine flu). We no longer expect one or more of our kids to die before adulthood, something that used to be common when my grandmothers were children. Our kids are statistically safer than at any previous point in history.  So, as Skenazy says:

The more safe our children became, the more we started to worry about them, because now if anything dangerous did happen to them, it would clearly be our fault. Fate has gone out the window, replaced by parental omnipotence. And it is this belief in control combined with the fear of screwing up that is driving us mad…

Think of a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, says Harvey Roy Greenberg, a Manhattan psychiatrist. That person gets up in the morning and has to arrange the pillows on his bed just so or, he worries, something terrible will happen. He has to avoid touching the doorknob or something terrible will happen. He has to eat his Grape Nuts out of the Flintstones bowl or something terrible will happen. He has all these little things he believes he has to do or – poof – the world will fall apart.

“All of this is driven by a kind of insane feeling of omnipotence,” says Greenberg. It’s a belief “that you can exert all power over all things.” And when it comes to your children, “you think you can lay down a magic carpet and conjure up spells that will guarantee your child absolute security. Good luck to that!”

So what can we do to allay our fears? I mean, besides letting them do stuff and just gutting it out? The answer is found in another part of the book that stood out to me, the chapter entitled “Strangers with Candy.”

Skenazy recounts the story of an elderly lady reading her newspaper with a magnifying glass in her doctor’s office. A small boy comes up to her and as she’s about to hand him the magnifying glass that has drawn his curiosity, his mother swoops him up and exclaims, “He has to learn fast not to talk to strangers!”

That’s not the way to keep anyone safe. And that “Don’t trust anyone!” lesson could conceivably end up making that little boy less safe (not to mention terrified of old ladies). Imagine if, against all odds – and I’m about to tell you just how long those odds are – some horrible guy does come up one day and say, “Hi, little fella. Mommy sent me to get you.” Presto – he mentioned mom, so he’s not a stranger anymore. He grabs the boy even while, just a few feet away with her back turned, a grandma sits reading her paper. Will the little boy scream, “Hey lady! Help! Put down the magnifying glass and call the police!” Or will he not say anything, because she’s a stranger, and Mommy said never to talk to them?

It’s a chilling scenario. But it’s a preventable one with some training. Skenazy outlines a cop’s lesson:

It involves literally showing kids the lures a predator could use: a bag of candy, a leash that supposedly “proves” a guy is looking for his puppy. Then he has the children practice the three things that could help them the most:

1. Throwing their hands in front of them like a stop sign.

2. Screaming at the top of their lungs, “No! Get away! You’re not my dad!” “Your voice is your most effective crime-fighting tool,” he tells them.

3. Running like hell.

By actually getting up and practicing those things, the kids feel ready for the worst… Public safety instructors liken this kind of training to the “Stop, drop, and roll” drill that kids get as part of fire safety instruction. Once again, it is extremely unlikely they’ll ever need to use it, but – it’s handy to have. And rather than creating more fear, it seems to help alleviate it. The more afraid we are of something, the more power it has over us. But the more prepared we are, the more power we get back. Training confers power.

I can vouch for that. I did two years of Krav Maga, the Israeli army’s hand-to-hand combat training, and by the end I felt like I could handle myself in any physical situation. I was less afraid, not more.

Now I feel like I have a way to make my kids safer and ease some of my worries over their growing independence. Hooray, Free-Rangers!

I’ve been one of those hyper-paranoid mothers who cringes when letting her seven-year-old son use a public restroom unattended by a parent because there is sure to be a serial molester lurking within, just waiting for a kid to pounce on. But The Boy is nearly eight, and mommy can’t drag him into the Ladies’ Room anymore, so I let him go off on his own with warnings not to talk to anyone and, for the love of Pete, wash your hands!

Then I use hand sanitizer on him anyway when he gets back because he probably touched the door handle.

I am ridiculously paranoid. In other words, I’m an American suburban mother in 2009. Everyone in my social set is exactly the same way.

But there’s been a part of me that hates this. I don’t enjoy tailing The Boy in every activity he pursues as though he might light himself on fire or get snatched up in a windowless van if my back were turned for 15 seconds. He’s a pretty responsible kid, especially for his age. My mom friends and I lament to each other about how we wish we could let our kids run around outside in little gangs, unsupervised, the way we used to run around when we were kids.

And then I stumbled across Lenore Skenazy. You may remember Lenore’s being in the news recently when she let her nine-year-old son, Izzy, ride the New York subway by himself. He took the train from Bloomingdale’s to their apartment and came home not only unscathed but with a newfound sense of self-reliance. Lenore wrote a column about the experience in the New York Post, and that was the beginning of an international firestorm that ended with her being proclaimed “World’s Worst Mother.”

I was fascinated by Lenore’s story. I started reading her blog, Free-Range Kids, and as I read I felt a growing sense that this lady is on to something. It’s not that I’m suddenly convinced to let my kids ride solo on my city’s sketchy public transportation, but rather that I’m beginning to see my paranoia for the nuttiness it is.

I picked up a copy of Free-Range Kids (the book) and was immediately assured that it would be worth reading when I saw the title of the first chapter: “Play Dates and Axe Murderers: How to Tell the Difference.”

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Ms. Skenazy is flip. She’s hysterically hilarious, but she backs up her assertions with cold, hard facts, and that appeals to the logical part of me.

So I decided after reading a bit to try an experiment. I would let The Boy get the mail by himself.

I know I just heard you snort.

Our mailbox is neither on our front porch nor in our front yard. Instead, it’s about a 1/3-mile round-trip around a curvy street. I cannot see the mailbox without walking roughly 200 yards away from our house. The Boy would have to cross one cul-de-sac and walk about 10 minutes by himself (at least half of it out of my sight) to get the mail.

Allow me to set the scene: it’s a warm, sunny afternoon in suburbia, about 3 o’clock. The lawns have greened up with recent rains, and a mild breeze blows the scent of lantana and fresh-cut St. Augustine. Nary a car rolls by on our quiet street. The Boy sets off with an extra spring in his springy seven-year-old step, and I watch calmly out of the kitchen window until he is out of sight around the bend. Then I calmly pick up a book and calmly step out onto the front porch, where I sit down to await his return. Calmly.

And then the murder car drives by.

It’s not a windowless van, but it is something almost equally alarming. It’s a blue SUV with a girl who’s roughly 10 years old standing up with the top half of her body sticking out of the sunroof. And it’s heading straight for the mailbox.

I am not joking. This actually happened.

In 35 years of life, I have seen only the occasional drunken idiot somewhere between the ages of 18 and 28 sticking out of a moving vehicle’s sunroof, usually at night, downtown, and while making the “woo!” noise. So when I saw this preteen practicing for her very own Girls Gone Wild video on my street at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I was distressed.

My mind leaped to the only logical conclusion: any driver who would let a child hang out of the sunroof of a moving vehicle would also swoop up my seven-year-old boy and sell him into child slavery somewhere in Asia. No doubt letting him hang out of the sunroof all the way to the docks.

I prepared myself to sprint to the mailbox. (The Boy had my car keys, conveniently attached to the same key ring as my mailbox key.)

But then I didn’t.

Instead I took a deep breath and sat back down. And I waited, straining my ears for the sounds of screaming and squealing tires. Three minutes later, The Boy reappeared around the bend, holding a piece of mail and grinning.

He came home unscathed and with a newfound sense of self-reliance. And I took a baby step toward moving him toward adulthood.