"free range children"

[Jolie Rouge]

Why you should leave your kids at the park on Saturday
-- without supervision
By Lenore Skenazy Thu May 20, 3:37 pm ET

New York – Mark your calendars, get out the sunscreen, and for goodness sake turn off Nancy Grace! This Saturday, May 22, is “take our children to the park … and leave them there day.”

Yes, OK, so I declared it myself. Somebody had to, otherwise a whole lot of kids – including my own – would probably be spending yet another spring day in front of a screen, or at a baseball/soccer/lacrosse clinic with a grown-up telling them what to do and how to do it and now it’s snack time and don’t forget: next week is team photos, bring a check.

Instead, Saturday will be a day devoted to the quaint notion that children age 7 or 8 and up can actually play outside, with one another, period. Without their parents and maybe even (I can dream, can’t I?) without a squeeze bottle of Purell. They’ll be fine!

Except that a lot of folks are saying, “No they won’t.â€

“What about food, water and restrooms?” someone commented on one of the blogs (not mine) discussing the idea. “What happens when a fight breaks out? What happens when an accident takes place?”

Well, let’s see. Food is something kids can live without for an hour or two. In fact, they probably should. Kids used to play so hard they’d forget to eat. Now it’s the opposite.

Water? Maybe they could use a drinking fountain or bring a bottle. Restrooms? Let’s not obsess. Most of us managed to play outside without bathrooms being our primary focus. Our progeny could, too. Especially since the idea is for the kids to stay at the park just a short amount of time, if this is their first solo flight – an hour, or even half an hour – heck, 10 minutes! – simply to get them acclimated to free time free of us.

So what happens if a child gets hurt? Here’s what Diane Levin, a professor of education at Boston’s Wheelock College, noticed when she took a group of grad students to Ireland earlier this year. They visited a school where about a hundred first and second graders were running around at recess, on the asphalt, “And my students are looking around and saying, ‘I can’t believe this!’ ” recalls Levin. “I say, ‘What do you mean?’ They say, ‘There’s not one teacher dealing with one problem!’ Then two kids bump into each other and fall down and before the teacher can even get there, there’s another kid helping and then they go back to playing. My students were blown away.”

If a kid falls on the playground and no adult hears it – or kisses it, or calls a lawyer – did it really happen? Maybe it just gets shrugged off.

And if it’s a serious accident? Well, those are extremely rare. From 1990 to 2000 the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 147 deaths of children on playgrounds, or roughly 15 a year. About 70 percent of these were on home playground equipment. So kids are actually safer at the park.

Still, about four children a year do die on public playgrounds. That is tragic. It is also tragic that about 2,000 children die each year as passengers in cars. If we are too scared to let our kids play on the playground, we should be absolutely terrified to drive them anywhere, ever.

OK, so what about the biggest fear of all: Predators circling Saturday on their Hello Kitty calendars.

The good news is that we are in the midst of a historic 20-year drop in crime. Crime is lower now than in the 1970s and ’80s, when most of us parents were playing outside without our parents plotzing. Of course it doesn’t feel as safe, because that was before the onslaught of gruesome, in-your-face media, from CNN to CSI: to Law & Order (RIP).

On TV, kids are being snatched 24/7, making it feel as if they’re being snatched 24/7 in the real world, too. But are they? Warwick Cairns, author of “How to Live Dangerously,” crunched the numbers and puts it this way: If, for some strange reason, you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep him outside, alone, for this to be statistically likely to happen?

About 750,000 years.

That’s a lot of take our children to the park … and leave them there days.

Not that there is no risk to this idea at all. Of course there is. There is always risk in life. That’s why trying to minimize it makes sense (think: bike helmets), but trying to eliminate it does not (think: never riding a bike at all). And let’s not forget it is risky when we don’t let our kids do some things on their own. There’s the risk they’ll sit on the couch and get diabetes and start worshiping the Sham-Wow.

Free play turns out to be crucial to child development. (And, oh yeah, fun.) When a kid says, “The tree is jail!” she’s developing communication skills, and creativity and even compromise, if she wanted the jail to be the swings and got voted down.

The idea of our children doing this on their own may seem radical in our hyper-vigilant age.

But with a little practice, starting Saturday, our kids could get so used to playing with their friends that they’ll run outside after school and come home for dinner sweaty, hungry, happy, developmentally on target and maybe a little sunburnt.

How radical is that?

Lenore Skenazy is a public speaker and author of “Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry).” She blogs at freerangekids.com and ParentDish.com.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100520/cm_csm/302880/print;_ylt=AgvgczZd_dX3j_x0Jld.lP.7e8UF;_ylu=X3oDM TBvajZzaTFyBHBvcwMxNQRzZWMDdG9wBHNsawNwcmludA--

comments

And what do you have to say in defense of the parent whose child IS kidnapped and the parent goes to jail for negligence for not being their supervising??????

Ridiculous, terrible idea. If you need break from you kids regularly why have them????

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Even when I was a child over fifty years ago, we weren't allowed to leave our street-we had to be where my mother could see us when she came to the door, or we could hear her if she called. We weren't allowed go anywhere until we were 12 to 13 years old. Seven and eight is too young to be left anywhere unsupervised by adults. Crime may have dropped, but children go missing all the time, it only has to happen once and your child could be gone forever. You are an idiot, and shouldn't be giving advice about anything.

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I am just letting my 8 year old play outside with his friends in front of our house without direction supervision. But I don't think I'd even let him go to the park at the end of our street without an adult. I'm trying to give him a little more room to learn, but I still want to protect him from all the ills of the world.

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I think what you are saying is great. My children are all grown now, but I do know over the last 25 yrs. or so I heard some teachers lament that most kids don't know how to just play anymore. Most kids lives are supervised by adults more & more. So therefore even at recess at school they are more likely to be expecting an adult to tell them what to play. Is it safe? Who knows? I'm 53. How many trees did I fall out of ? I don't know. If I got hurt bad enough I went home. We had to be home when the street lights went on or when in the neighborhood my mother kept a bell we could hear a block away, I won't say nothing really awful didn't happen to me. But I'm still here.


This is the same person who - amid much controversy - let her 9YO ride the NY subway alone .... http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-alone
Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone
By LENORE SKENAZY | April 1, 2008

[janelle]

Well I don't know if announcing you are dropping your kids off at a park and where it is and when is a good idea. Ripe pickings for pedophiles. Let the kids play outside but close enough to home so they can run there if they want anything.

No one likes to have to supervise your kids for you. We were either in the backyard or at our friends house and yard. We ran around the neighborhood but we knew most of the neighbors and the kids.

[Quaker_Parrots]

I forsee someone either getting their kids taken from them one way or another, whether it be from a predator, or CPS for neglect.

My kids are 11 and 12. They stay in my yard unless the little girl is visiting across the street. I know where my children are at all times. It saves me alot of heartache and worry, and little neighborhood hoodlums getting them in to trouble.

[Breezin]

Ooops I thought this article was going to be on my neighbors kids :vroam:

Seriously, 7 or 8 years old left in a park in New York -- I don't know if I could do it OTOH at 8 years old I was definetely free range, I would go out to play and not come home until supper time, I had to tell my mother I'm going to Lisa's house or I'm going to play stickball down on XYZ street and I had to know what time it was and be back on time for supper or I was in trouble

And at around 8 years old my kids were allowed to ride around the block with friends or down to a friends house and call me when they got there.

[Breezin]

My dh's first reaction to this was "is it national pedophile day"

[Breezin]

Blame
Posted on May 21, 2010 by lskenazy

Hi Readers! I’m writing this today, because by evening tomorrow, I have a feeling I will be in the crosshairs for something that has happened to some child somewhere in this country, or even another country that has heard about Saturday’s “Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day.”

After doing nine TV interviews, a couple dozen radio interviews, and being written about in papers that called me everything from ”crazy” to “moron” – and one that even ran a political cartoon showing despondent kids abandoned by their drunk parents, who are raising a toast to ”unsupervised play” (because no one except drunks would even consider the notion of taking their eyes off their children, ever) — the media has succeeded in doing to me what it does to most Americans on a daily basis: It is making me think in terms of the worst case scenario. It is making it hard for me to remember that what I am recommending is what children do all over the world — play at the local playground, with each other, without constant parental supervision, once they reach the age of 7 or 8. That is, once they reach the age that most children in other countries start walking, without their parents, to school.

So tomorrow, when, thanks to the odds in a country of about 60 million children, one of them fractures an arm or, God forbid, suffers anything worse, I can see where it could very easily become, “We told you so!” and, “It’s all her fault!” on the part of the media. Media that will not know who to point to when another child tests positive for diabetes, or learns that he has high blood pressure brought on by a sedentary childhood, or dies in a car crash, as 5 or 6 kids do every day.

No, when it comes to kids venturing outside on their own, the media now has a villain, and it will be very easy for the evening news to ignore the “everyday” tragedies of car accidents and ill health, because, of course, it already does. Sure, those things kill kids. But there’s no drama in them.

Yesterday, on CNN, the anchor quoted some Dept. of Justice statistics about the lower crime rate today and then said “even if these are true,” (even if?) children are still not safe. Then he provided a quote from the father of murdered 12-year-old Polly Klass, who said that letting any children ever play outside, unsupervised, is a “knuckledheaded” idea.

Interestingly, Polly was kidnapped from her bedroom.

Naturally, CNN does not interview the parents of children killed in cars when it does a story on road trip vacations, or on a new movie that people will have to drive to the theater to see, because this would not make sense. What could the parent say? “I’m begging you: Never drive your child anywhere! It’s a knuckleheaded idea to put your child in peril that way. Look what happened to mine!”

And of course, 40 times more children are killed in cars each year than are killed, as Polly was, by a stranger.

So all I can say is: I’m bracing for blame and trying to remember that the whole idea of kids getting out of the house, and meeting each other, and playing on their own, even for just 10 minutes, is a worthy thing. – Lenore


http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/blame/

[Jolie Rouge]

I can see letting your children run and play without it being a "structured" event with adult "supervision" that often turns into "intervention/interference" ... but not just dropping them off at a local park unattended.


We used to run the neighborhoods, we had a five block boundry and came home when the streetlights came on. We played "Night Chase" running through ALL the neighbor's yards, over fences; up in the trees. No more.... never again.

[Jolie Rouge]

'Helicopter' Parents Have Neurotic Kids, Study Suggests
Rachael Rettner Writer LiveScience.com – 24 mins ago

BOSTON - Overly protective parents might be leaving a lasting impact on their child's personality, and not in a good way, a new study finds.


The results show having so-called "helicopter parents" was associated with being dependent, neurotic and less open, a slew of personality traits that are generally thought of as undesirable.


The study, which surveyed college freshman, is one of the first to try to define exactly what helicopter parenting is, and measure it. The term was originally coined by college admissions personnel when they started to notice a change in parents of prospective students - parents would call the admissions office and try to intervene in a process that had previously just been between the student and the college, said study researcher Neil Montgomery, a psychologist at Keene State College in N.H.


While the findings are only preliminary, and more studies are needed to back up the results, they suggest this type of over-parenting might lead to children who are ultimately not ready to leave the nest.


"I think what the helicopter parents did is they decided, 'OK we know what good parenting looks like, we're just going to ratchet it up to a new level, and our kids are going to be even better,'" Montgomery said. "The problem is, when they ratcheted it up, they went too far, and in fact, caused an expansion of childhood or adolescence."

Hovering parents, neurotic children

Montgomery and his colleagues surveyed about 300 freshmen with a questionnaire the researchers specifically designed to assess helicopter parenting. They focused was on college students, because college is a "crisis point" in the relationship between the helicopter parent and the child, Montgomery said. At this stage, the parents no longer have control over their child's life and can't keep track of them like in the past.


Participants had to rate their level of agreement with statements such as, "My parents have contacted a school official on my behalf to solve problems for me," "On my college move-in day, my parents stayed the night in town to make sure I was adjusted," and "If two days go by without contact my parents would contact me."


About 10 percent of the participants had helicopter parents. The rate was higher in girls than in boys, with 13 percent of the females being helicoptered compared with just 5 percent of males. And it was mainly mothers doing the hovering, Montgomery said.


Students with helicopter parents tended to be less open to new ideas and actions, as well as more vulnerable, anxious and self-consciousness, among other factors, compared with their counterparts with more distant parents.


"We have a person who is dependent, who is vulnerable, who is self-conscious, who is anxious, who is impulsive, not open to new actions or ideas; is that going to make a successful college student?" Montgomery said. "No not exactly, it's really a horrible story at the end of the day."


On the other hand, in non-helicoptered students who were given responsibility and not constantly monitored by their parents, so-called "free rangers" the effects were reversed, Montgomery said.

Future outlook

Montgomery notes that the findings only show an association, and not a direct cause-effect link, meaning all children with helicopter parents don't necessarily turn out this way. However, he thinks the research should encourage parents to think about what they are doing as they raise their children, and be aware that there is such a thing as over-parenting.


He hopes the work leads to more research in the area, including large studies on different populations of children, such as high-school and middle-school students. Future studies will hopefully bring about a clearer picture of helicopter parenting, Montgomery said.


"People keep talking about it like everyone knows what it is," Montgomery said. "And it's not clear that anyone really knows what it is, other than the people they know personally who are doing these things."

The results were presented May 29 at the Association of Psychological Science Convention in Boston.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/helicopterparentshaveneurotickidsstudysuggests;_yl t=AguewT0QDGtBtOpNsVVy3dSs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTRyOGJwYz kyBGFzc2V0A2xpdmVzY2llbmNlLzIwMTAwNjAzL2hlbGljb3B0 ZXJwYXJlbnRzaGF2ZW5ldXJvdGlja2lkc3N0dWR5c3VnZ2VzdH MEY2NvZGUDbW9zdHBvcHVsYXIEY3BvcwM4BHBvcwM1BHB0A2hv bWVfY29rZQRzZWMDeW5faGVhZGxpbmVfbGlzdARzbGsDMzloZW xpY29wdGVy

[Jolie Rouge]

NYC Mom Charging Parents $350 To Let Kids Play in Unsupervised Park
By COLLEEN CURRY | Good Morning America – 17 hours ago

Parents in New York are raising their eyebrows at the latest after-school activity offered for their children: unsupervised play time in Central Park for $350.

Lenore Skenazy, a former journalist who has championed the "free play" movement, cheekily launched the after-school program to try and encourage parents to let their children to play without structure or supervision.

"I'm always trying to figure out ways to get kids back outside playing with each other," the mother of two told ABC News. "It's a great thing that has sort of evaporated from the American landscape."

"And New York City is used to paying money for things so that's the money thing," she added.

Skenazy, who authored the book "Free Range Kids" and writes a blog of the same name, said that she noticed when her two sons, who are now 14 and 16, were growing up that children were never just outside playing. Fears of kidnappings and other dangers have led parents to keep their children indoors or enroll them in structured after-school activities, she said.

"I'd say go downstairs and play and they'd look out and say no one's there. Even on sunny days. It distressed me so much because I was positive there were kids looking out windows in buildings opposite ours telling their moms that there is no one out there to play," Skenazy said.

Free-play, as Skenazy calls it, allow children to learn how to negotiate social situations on their own.

"In a child's case, it's how you learn to cooperate, to pay attention. Is the ball coming to your square in Four Square?" she said. "What is lost if we don't give our kids freedom to play, to be on their own, to believe that they're okay on their own without constant supervision? There's the confidence, the focus, and the joy. Versus diabetes and obesity."

Skenazy has a history of pushing parents' perceptions of what freedoms should be allowed for their children. In 2008 she attracted scorn and ridicule for allowing her son, then age 9, to ride the New York City subway by himself. Since then, she's organized one day each year when parents are instructed to take their children to the park and leave them there.

"People thought that was crazy too, but it's been running for three years now and I hear from parents who say, 'I did let my kids go to the park today.' It takes something to start breaking up the ice, this thick layer of ice over childhood, and if I'm giving a little tap with an ice pick to crack, than I'm happy to. "

Skenazy said she knows the facts about crime and dangers to children, and the world is much safer than most parents think it is.

"I don't think I'm a crazy mom. I think I'm a mom who was a reporter for 14 years. I'm a fact finder at heart. I've done my research, and right now is pretty much the safest time in human history to be a child. The crime rate was higher in the 1970s and 1980s, and here in New York City there's been an unprecendented crime drop."

"A lot of people say, 'I loved playing outside as a kid, those were my happiest times, but I can't let my kid because times have changed.' I say, well, times have changed. Crime is lower."

Skenazy said that she's had no takers for her new after school program yet, but if any children ages 8 through 18 were to sign up, she would sit at a coffee shop a block or so away from the park with a cell phone, in case of emergency.

http://gma.yahoo.com/nyc-mom-charging-parents-350-let-kids-play-183149182--abc-news-topstories.html

comments

Is this lady a lunatic? First of all, she doesn't own the park, why would someone pay $350 for her to not supervise the children? Also, you don't have to take the kids to a huge park with tons of strangers and leave them in order for them to play outside. Most kids don't mind their parents supervising them at a park anyway. They enjoy their parents taking them to a park & I highly doubt 16-18 year olds will need supervision cuz they usually go with friends. PAY her for WHAT???

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Skenazy said that she's had no takers for her new after school program yet"....Yahoo news about a program with no customers? Great to get FREE Yahoo ad. By the way you don't need to pay anyone to let your kids go wild at a park. It's free anyway.

..

So, $350/kid to sit a block away with a cellphone? She's not stupid--anyone who 'hires' her is.

..

Sad fact, but true...kids don't have unscheduled time to play anymore. However, I think unscheduled (i.e. no soccer games, lessons, and other intrusions) does not mean unsupervised...one has to be realistic and be aware that there are some places that kids play that are just not safe for them. What to do? Use sanctified common sense, and adjust accordingly. Kids will not grow up weird from not playing outside, but if they are the victims of crime, they will not grow up at all. I see this mom's point, but I would still not take her up on her offer of "free play" in that particular area of the country. Times, sadly, HAVE changed since I was a kid....like it or not. Parents have to be more vigilant and aware of dangers, like it or not.

[Jolie Rouge]

A Nation of Wimps
Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.
By Hara Estroff Marano, last reviewed on February 19, 2013

Maybe it's the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path... at three miles an hour. On his tricycle.

Or perhaps it's today's playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And... wait a minute... those aren't little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.

Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children.

Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational "accommodations" he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written—and obviously costly—one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. "She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious—the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old "couldn't see the big picture." That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT.

Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. "Kids need to feel badly sometimes," says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. "We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope."

Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation. "Life is planned out for us," says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. "But we don't know what to want." As Elkind puts it, "Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement."

No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps.

The Fragility Factor

College, it seems, is where the fragility factor is now making its greatest mark. It's where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. It takes a variety of forms, including anxiety and depression—which are increasingly regarded as two faces of the same coin—binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection. The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that, says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "it is interfering with the core mission of the university."

The severity of student mental health problems has been rising since 1988, according to an annual survey of counseling center directors. Through 1996, the most common problems raised by students were relationship issues. That is developmentally appropriate, reports Sherry Benton, assistant director of counseling at Kansas State University. But in 1996, anxiety overtook relationship concerns and has remained the major problem. The University of Michigan Depression Center, the nation's first, estimates that 15 percent of college students nationwide are suffering from that disorder alone.

Relationship problems haven't gone away; their nature has dramatically shifted and the severity escalated. Colleges report ever more cases of obsessive pursuit, otherwise known as stalking, leading to violence, even death. Anorexia or bulimia in florid or subclinical form now afflicts 40 percent of women at some time in their college career. Eleven weeks into a semester, reports psychologist Russ Federman, head of counseling at the University of Virginia, "all appointment slots are filled. But the students don't stop coming."

Drinking, too, has changed. Once a means of social lubrication, it has acquired a darker, more desperate nature. Campuses nationwide are reporting record increases in binge drinking over the past decade, with students often stuporous in class, if they get there at all. Psychologist Paul E. Joffe, chair of the suicide prevention team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contends that at bottom binge-drinking is a quest for authenticity and intensity of experience. It gives young people something all their own to talk about, and sharing stories about the path to passing out is a primary purpose. It's an inverted world in which drinking to oblivion is the way to feel connected and alive.

"There is a ritual every university administrator has come to fear," reports John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. "Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm's way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy."

Heavy drinking has also become the quickest and easiest way to gain acceptance, says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, professor at Indiana University Southeast and founder of its Shyness Research Institute. "Much of collegiate social activity is centered on alcohol consumption because it's an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills," he says. "Plus it provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong."

[Jolie Rouge]

Welcome to the Hothouse

Talk to a college president or administrator and you're almost certainly bound to hear tales of the parents who call at 2 a.m. to protest Branden's C in economics because it's going to damage his shot at grad school.

Shortly after psychologist Robert Epstein announced to his university students that he expected them to work hard and would hold them to high standards, he heard from a parent—on official judicial stationery—asking how he could dare mistreat the young. Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, eventually filed a complaint with the California commission on judicial misconduct, and the judge was censured for abusing his office—but not before he created havoc in the psychology department at the University of California, San Diego.

Enter: grade inflation. When he took over as president of Harvard in July 2001, Lawrence Summers publicly ridiculed the value of honors after discovering that 94 percent of the college's seniors were graduating with them. Safer to lower the bar than raise the discomfort level. Grade inflation is the institutional response to parental anxiety about school demands on children, contends social historian Peter Stearns of George Mason University. As such, it is a pure index of emotional overinvestment in a child's success. And it rests on a notion of juvenile frailty—the assumption that children are easily bruised and need explicit uplift," Stearns argues in his book, Anxious Parenting: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.

Parental protectionism may reach its most comic excesses in college, but it doesn't begin there. Primary schools and high schools are arguably just as guilty of grade inflation. But if you're searching for someone to blame, consider Dr. Seuss. "Parents have told their kids from day one that there's no end to what they are capable of doing," says Virginia's Portmann. "They read them the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You'll Go! and create bumper stickers telling the world their child is an honor student. American parents today expect their children to be perfect—the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can't get the children to prove it on their own, they'll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are."

What they're really doing, he stresses, is "showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit."

And subjecting them to intense scrutiny. "I wish my parents had some hobby other than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child's day, eager to solve every problem for their child—and believe that's good parenting. "If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."

Arrivederci, Playtime

In the hothouse that child raising has become, play is all but dead. Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees.

"So many toys now are designed by and for adults," says Tufts' Elkind. When kids do engage in their own kind of play, parents become alarmed. Anderegg points to kids exercising time-honored curiosity by playing doctor. "It's normal for children to have curiosity about other children's genitals," he says. "But when they do, most parents I know are totally freaked out. They wonder what's wrong."

Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they've never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. "They've been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who's won and what's fair. Kids are losing leadership skills."

A lot has been written about the commercialization of children's play, but not the side effects, says Elkind. "Children aren't getting any benefits out of play as they once did." From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it's in play that cognitive agility really develops. Studies of children and adults around the world demonstrate that social engagement actually improves intellectual skills. It fosters decision-making, memory and thinking, speed of mental processing. This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, the human mind is believed to have evolved to deal with social problems.

The Eternal Umbilicus

It's bad enough that today's children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are overmonitored and oversheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college—or perhaps especially at college—students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: "Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?"

"Kids are constantly talking to parents," laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they're not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. "They're not calling their parents to say, 'I really went wild last Friday at the frat house and now I might have chlamydia. Should I go to the student health center?'"

The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, "they're constantly referring to their parents for guidance," reports Kramer. They're not learning how to manage for themselves.

Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we've had the privilege to know. "But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do," says Anderegg. "They've never internalized any images; all they've internalized is 'call Mom or Dad.'"

Some psychologists think we have yet to recognize the full impact of the cell phone on child development, because its use is so new. Although there are far too many variables to establish clear causes and effects, Indiana's Carducci believes that reliance on cell phones undermines the young by destroying the ability to plan ahead. "The first thing students do when they walk out the door of my classroom is flip open the cell phone. Ninety-five percent of the conversations go like this: 'I just got out of class; I'll see you in the library in five minutes.' Absent the phone, you'd have to make arrangements ahead of time; you'd have to think ahead."

Herein lies another possible pathway to depression. The ability to plan resides in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive branch of the brain. The PFC is a critical part of the self-regulation system, and it's deeply implicated in depression, a disorder increasingly seen as caused or maintained by unregulated thought patterns—lack of intellectual rigor, if you will. Cognitive therapy owes its very effectiveness to the systematic application of critical thinking to emotional reactions. Further, it's in the setting of goals and progress in working toward them, however mundane they are, that positive feelings are generated. From such everyday activity, resistance to depression is born.

What's more, cell phones—along with the instant availability of cash and almost any consumer good your heart desires—promote fragility by weakening self-regulation. "You get used to things happening right away," says Carducci. You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendship and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail—perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression.

[Jolie Rouge]

From Scrutiny to Anxiety... and Beyond

The 1990s witnessed a landmark reversal in the traditional patterns of psychopathology. While rates of depression rise with advancing age among people over 40, they're now increasing fastest among children, striking more children at younger and younger ages.

In his now-famous studies of how children's temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be overexcitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.

As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They're easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.

While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn't turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the overexcitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.

A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.

There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life's day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies. "Children need to be gently encouraged to take risks and learn that nothing terrible happens," says Michael Liebowitz, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and head of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. "They need gradual exposure to find that the world is not dangerous. Having overprotective parents is a risk factor for anxiety disorders because children do not have opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world." They never learn to dampen the pathways from perception to alarm reaction.

Hothouse parenting undermines children in other ways, too, says Anderegg. Being examined all the time makes children extremely self-conscious. As a result they get less communicative; scrutiny teaches them to bury their real feelings deeply. And most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to be experimental and playful. "If every drawing is going to end up on your parents' refrigerator, you're not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes," says Anderegg.

Parental hovering is why so many teenagers are so ironic, he notes. It's a kind of detachment, "a way of hiding in plain sight. They just don't want to be exposed to any more scrutiny."

Parents are always so concerned about children having high self-esteem, he adds. "But when you cheat on their behalf to get them ahead of other children"—by pursuing accommodations and recommendations—you just completely corrode their sense of self. They feel 'I couldn't do this on my own.' It robs them of their own sense of efficacy." A child comes to think, "if I need every advantage I can get, then perhaps there is really something wrong with me." A slam-dunk for depression.

Virginia's Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in—less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.

Endless Adolescence

The end result of cheating childhood is to extend it forever. Despite all the parental pressure, and probably because of it, kids are pushing back—in their own way. They're taking longer to grow up.

Adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends, according to a recent report by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank F. Furstenberg and colleagues. There is, instead, a growing no-man's-land of postadolescence from 20 to 30, which they dub "early adulthood." Those in it look like adults but "haven't become fully adult yet—traditionally defined as finishing school, landing a job with benefits, marrying and parenting—because they are not ready or perhaps not permitted to do so."

Using the classic benchmarks of adulthood, 65 percent of males had reached adulthood by the age of 30 in 1960. By contrast, in 2000, only 31 percent had. Among women, 77 percent met the benchmarks of adulthood by age 30 in 1960. By 2000, the number had fallen to 46 percent.


Boom Boom Boomerang

Take away play from the front end of development and it finds a way onto the back end. A steady march of success through regimented childhood arranged and monitored by parents creates young adults who need time to explore themselves. "They often need a period in college or afterward to legitimately experiment—to be children," says historian Stearns. "There's decent historical evidence to suggest that societies that allow kids a few years of latitude and even moderate [rebellion] end up with healthier kids than societies that pretend such impulses don't exist."

Marriage is one benchmark of adulthood, but its antecedents extend well into childhood. "The precursor to marriage is dating, and the precursor to dating is playing," says Carducci. The less time children spend in free play, the less socially competent they'll be as adults. It's in play that we learn give and take, the fundamental rhythm of all relationships. We learn how to read the feelings of others and how to negotiate conflicts. Taking the play out of childhood, he says, is bound to create a developmental lag, and he sees it clearly in the social patterns of today's adolescents and young adults, who hang around in groups that are more typical of childhood. Not to be forgotten: The backdrop of continued high levels of divorce confuses kids already too fragile to take the huge risk of commitment.

Just Whose Shark Tank Is It Anyway?

The stressful world of cutthroat competition that parents see their kids facing may not even exist. Or it exists, but more in their mind than in reality—not quite a fiction, more like a distorting mirror. "Parents perceive the world as a terribly competitive place," observes Anderegg. "And many of them project that onto their children when they're the ones who live or work in a competitive environment. They then imagine that their children must be swimming in a big shark tank, too."

"It's hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now," says Elkind. "How best do you prepare kids for that? Parents think that earlier is better. That's a natural intuition, but it happens to be wrong."

What if parents have micromanaged their kids' lives because they've hitched their measurement of success to a single event whose value to life and paycheck they have frantically overestimated? No one denies the Ivy League offers excellent learning experiences, but most educators know that some of the best programs exist at schools that don't top the U.S. News and World Report list, and that with the right attitude—a willingness to be engaged by new ideas—it's possible to get a meaningful education almost anywhere. Further, argues historian Stearns, there are ample openings for students at an array of colleges. "We have a competitive frenzy that frankly involves parents more than it involves kids themselves," he observes, both as a father of eight and teacher of many. "Kids are more ambivalent about the college race than are parents."

Yet the very process of application to select colleges undermines both the goal of education and the inherent strengths of young people. "It makes kids sneaky," says Anderegg. Bending rules and calling in favors to give one's kid a competitive edge is morally corrosive.

Like Stearns, he is alarmed that parents, pursuing disability diagnoses so that children can take untimed SATs, actually encourage kids to think of themselves as sickly and fragile. Colleges no longer know when SATs are untimed—but the kids know. "The kids know when you're cheating on their behalf," says Anderegg, "and it makes them feel terribly guilty. Sometimes they arrange to fail to right the scales. And when you cheat on their behalf, you completely undermine their sense of self-esteem. They feel they didn't earn it on their own."

In buying their children accommodations to assuage their own anxiety, parents are actually locking their kids into fragility. Says the suburban teacher: "Exams are a fact of life. They are anxiety-producing. The kids never learn how to cope with anxiety."

[Jolie Rouge]

Putting Worry in its Place

Children, however, are not the only ones who are harmed by hyperconcern. Vigilance is enormously taxing—and it's taken all the fun out of parenting. "Parenting has in some measurable ways become less enjoyable than it used to be," says Stearns. "I find parents less willing to indulge their children's sense of time. So they either force-feed them or do things for them."

Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they've maintained over their children. The goal of parenting, Portmann reminds, is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later, he says, most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity. Parents may find it easier to give up some control if they recognize they have exaggerated many of the dangers of childhood—although they have steadfastly ignored others, namely the removal of recess from schools and the ubiquity of video games that encourage aggression.

The childhood we've introduced to our children is very different from that in past eras, Epstein stresses. Children no longer work at young ages. They stay in school for longer periods of time and spend more time exclusively in the company of peers. Children are far less integrated into adult society than they used to be at every step of the way. We've introduced laws that give children many rights and protections—although we have allowed media and marketers to have free access.

In changing the nature of childhood, Stearns argues, we've introduced a tendency to assume that children can't handle difficult situations. "Middle-class parents especially assume that if kids start getting into difficulty they need to rush in and do it for them, rather than let them flounder a bit and learn from it. I don't mean we should abandon them," he says, "but give them more credit for figuring things out." And recognize that parents themselves have created many of the stresses and anxieties children are suffering from, without giving them tools to manage them.

While the adults are at it, they need to remember that one of the goals of higher education is to help young people develop the capacity to think for themselves.

Although we're well on our way to making kids more fragile, no one thinks that kids and young adults are fundamentally more flawed than in previous generations. Maybe many will "recover" from diagnoses too liberally slapped on to them. In his own studies of 14 skills he has identified as essential for adulthood in American culture, from love to leadership, Epstein has found that "although teens don't necessarily behave in a competent way, they have the potential to be every bit as competent and as incompetent as adults."

Parental anxiety has its place. But the way things now stand, it's not being applied wisely. We're paying too much attention to too few kids—and in the end, the wrong kids. As with the girl whose parents bought her the Gestalt-defect diagnosis, resources are being expended for kids who don't need them.

There are kids who are worth worrying about—kids in poverty, stresses Anderegg. "We focus so much on our own children," says Elkind, "It's time to begin caring about all children."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200411/nation-wimps

[Jolie Rouge]

The Wimps Checklist
How to know whether you're overprotecting your kids.
Published on March 7, 2008 by Hara Estroff Marano in Brainstorm

Like lovers, parents must always negotiate a fine line between nurturing and controlling. But many parents these days step way over the line into controlling, engineering their children’s lives from an early age. Hyperinvolvement, however, is always counterproductive, as parents transmit anxiety to their kids and create psychologically fragile creatures who, once they leave the protective cocoon of home for college, can’t handle the normal vicissitudes of life. It’s ironic that those who mean only the best for their kids wind up bringing out the worst in them.


Here's how to know whether you are one of those parents:

You have an image of your child silk-screened onto a tote bag.

You have a Nannycam.

You have thought of hiring a consultant, or actually hired one, to child-proof your home.

If asked, you might describe your role as executive manager of your child’s life.

You will not seat your kid in a shopping cart unless you bring a shopping cart liner.

You have a life plan mapped out for your three-year-old.

You believe that free play is a waste of time that detracts from achievement.

You believe there are far too many sex perverts out there to let your kids play outdoors.

You have done your child’s homework or written a paper on one or more occasions.

You have emailed or called a teacher or administrator to protest a grade your child received.

You have called school demanding that your child be given a part, or a better part, in a play.

Your baby is more than three months old but you won’t leave him even with your own parents.

You’ve hired a psychologist to test your child in the hopes of finding a problem.

When your kid struggles with something, that’s your cue to take over the task.

You pay your kid every time he or his team wins a game or every time he gets a good grade.

You’ve made a trip to school just to bring a paper or homework your child left at home.

You’d feel like a failure if your kid didn’t get into Harvard, Princeton, Yale or some other Ivy.

You have GPS on your kid’s cellphone.

You’ve told your son or daughter he or she is brilliant.

You’ve told your child that second best is not good enough.

You call the dean of student affairs rather than coach your kid how to handle a roommate problem.

You suspect you might be doing too much for your child—after all, no one did so much for you and you turned out OK—but you fear that without your vigilance your child will be “left behind.”

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200803/the-wimps-checklist

[Jolie Rouge]

Just to make you laugh ...

Reasons Why Going Outside Is Overrated

Puddles are larger than they appear.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr05/2013/8/23/11/anigif_enhanced-buzz-8182-1377271675-40.gif


Sports may cause bodily harm.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr06/2013/8/23/11/anigif_enhanced-buzz-19246-1377272345-15.gif


The possibility of getting eaten is very real.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr05/2013/8/23/11/anigif_enhanced-buzz-19901-1377272606-0.gif


Crossing the road requires a doctorate in gymnastics.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr03/2013/8/23/13/anigif_enhanced-buzz-32287-1377277267-33.gif

[Jolie Rouge]

'Free range' parents investigated again

April 13, 2015 8:17 AM CDT
Posted by Kara Foxx

http://www.wafb.com/clip/11383883/trending-video-free-range-parents-under-investigation-again


http://www.wafb.com/clip/11383883/trending-video-free-range-parents-under-investigation-again

Child Protection Services is again investigating a Maryland couple who sparked a debate earlier this year for their ‘free range' parenting style.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were accused of neglect for allowing their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter to take a mile walk home from the park alone in December 2014.

The kids were taken into police custody again on Sunday after a neighbor called 911 and reported they were outside unattended.

Officers picked up the kids and kept them in the back of a cruiser for two hours without informing the worried parents, according to Danielle. She claims she and her husband went frantically searching for the children when they missed their 6 p.m. curfew.

“They kept the kids trapped there for three hours, without notifying us, before dropping them at the Crisis Center, and holding them there without dinner for another two and a half hours. We finally got home at 11 p.m.,” Danielle wrote on Facebook.

Before taking their children home, the parents had to sign a document agreeing not to leave them unattended, WTTG reports.

The family's free-range parenting philosophy is part of a movement that counters the idea of ‘helicopter' parents.

“Giving them an opportunity to learn to make their way in the world independently is the best way to prepare them for adulthood — and that it is safe for them to do so,” Danielle writes on her blog.

CPS found the Meitivs guilty of unsubstantiated neglect in the first incident, which prompted a national debate about the government's role in parenting styles.

The couple says they will appeal the neglect accusations.

Sunday's incident remains under investigation.

http://www.wafb.com/story/28786219/free-range-parents?clienttype=generic


... after a neighbor called 911 and reported they were outside unattended.

While I may not agree with letting them walk home alone from a park a mile away ... I think that investigating them for "neglect" because they let them play outside "unattended" is a bit much. My kids play outside alone all the time. I think it was cruel for the police to basicly "hid" the kids ... to see how long before the parents came looking for them ?? WTH ?

[3lilpigs]

I see no problem with a 10 yr old walking home on his own. I'm kinda ''iffy'' on the 6 yr old though. Not sure if that's quite old enough.

I'm somewhat familiar with the area these people live in, and it's fairly an upscale neighborhood. I'd think it's pretty safe......not like they were left to wonder the streets of Washington DC!

I don't agree with what the police did, and I don't agree with the media splashing pics of these kids all over tv........now every pervert around knows where these kids live, and that they walk alone.