Free-range kids: The movement & the New York woman who started it

When we were kids, there was something called “playing outside.” But now, parents are much more hands on and cautious with their children. So, there is an actual term for kids who are allowed to play outside on their own.

They’re called free-range kids. The movement was started by Lenore Skenazy, the mother of two boys, who used to write for the New York Sun. Several years ago she wrote a column called “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” and the article caught fire.

“When my son was nine, now he’s 16, he started asking my husband and me if we would take him someplace he had never been before and let him find his own way home on the subway. My husband and I talked about it for a little bit and we decided, ‘OK.’ You know, we’re on the subways all the time, we know how safe and crowded they are. So one sunny Sunday I took him to Bloomingdale’s and then I said, ‘OK, goodbye!’ I went one way and he went the other way and he took the subway down to 34th Street and he took the bus home.”

Lenore has since written a book on the topic and parents can print out “Free Range Kids Cards” from her website.

“It says, ‘I’m not lost, I’m a free-range kid. If you want to talk to my mom or dad, here’s their phone number.’ I’m hoping that, if you do carry that card, you can show it to a busybody or a cop and say, look, this is not my parents being negligent, this is my parents making a conscious decision that I’m allowed to be outside and I’m very grateful.”

She’s also on a reality show called “World’s Worst Mom,” where she coaches hyper-anxious parents on how to give kids some freedom. She thinks parents who don’t let their children do anything on their own are letting fear dictate their lives.

“We’ve been fed a whole lot of scary stories for the last generation or so, on TV and in the rest of the media, and so we don’t believe anymore that our children are ever safe unless they are constantly supervised,” she says. “The fact that I was letting my son do something unsupervised, and particularly in New York City, which has a completely undeserved reputation for being dangerous.”

Lenore says the world today is actually safer than it was in the 70’s and 80’s, crime rates are down.

But we also have access to 24 hours of bad news.

When she speaks to parents, she doesn’t make rules or guidelines about how old kids need to be to go where. Instead she tries to show them what their kids are missing out on.

“Think back on your own childhood and think about something that you absolutely loved doing that you don’t let your own kids do. I would get on my bike and ride until the street lights came on and my mom didn’t know where I was. I would go with my brother and we would build forts in the forest. I would go meet my friends in the park and we would play Barbies. Whatever it is, they loved doing it. I say, ‘Well if you loved doing it and you feel like it’s part of who you are; you got confident, you figured out how to get home when it was too dark and you missed the last bus. If these are the things that are so important to you, why aren’t you giving them to your own kids?'”

For news anchor Kim Shepard, it was her own free-range childhood that turned her off to the idea of letting her four kids walk the streets unsupervised.

“If my child asked me to ride the subway in New York, I’d go with them. Why wouldn’t I want to spend that time with them and enjoy that adventure with them? Why do they have to do it on their own? He might say that he wants to go do something on his own. But when I was that age, I was somewhat of a free-range kid. They didn’t call it that back then, but I was allowed to do whatever I wanted and had very little to no supervision most of the time. I did a lot of stuff that, looking back, I never should have done. I played on railroad tracks that were in use. I don’t think that it’s necessary, even if a child says they want to do something. They’re a child. They don’t know what’s best for them.”

Kim says kids can learn to be independent with their parents around.

“That’s a lot of the reason why my kids and I are part of Girl Scouts. They lead the meetings, they plan the camping trips, they have to plan the menu. They are so independent and they learn leadership skills. But I’m there, I’m the safety net, just in case something goes wrong.”

Lenore says parents often obsess over the idea of their children being kidnapped.

“If you actually, for some reason, wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, how long would you have to keep him outside, unattended, unsupervised, for this to be statistically likely to happen? Six-hundred-thousand years.”

She does admit some not-so-great things do happen to free range kids: they fall off their bikes or sometimes they miss their subway stop.

But she doesn’t see anything wrong with that.