Balancing Your Preschooler's Independence with Safety: Part I
In 2008, journalist Lenore Skenazy provoked a media firestorm when she allowed her nine-year-old son to ride the subway in New York City alone and wrote about her decision in her newspaper column. In her new book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, Ms. Skenazy makes her case that the world is a safer place than many parents imagine. She provides research to show that many things parents worry about are exaggerated, and critiques many products of the “child safety industry,” such as baby knee pads to avoid getting bruised knees while crawling.
Free Range Kids makes some good points and is interesting reading. I agree that children need the freedom to try things out on their own even if they might make mistakes or get hurt. I also agree that we adults cannot create a risk-free world for our children and that, in trying to do so, we risk harming them. As the mother of a child we’ll call “Ariel” told me, “I tried to protect Ariel from everything. I never let her climb up a playground structure for fear of her falling. I didn’t let her play in a swimming pool because of germs. And I kept her away from children and activities that might stress her too much.
“Then, when she was almost eight, Ariel got terribly sick. As I sat with her in the hospital room, I thought about all the fun my fear had kept her from having. When she thankfully got better, I decided to set my fear aside and take more risks. Ariel has broken her arm, got head lice, and had to cope with bullying. But her joy in doing new things has been worth it!”
The reality is that, on a statistical basis, a child’s biggest risk of being killed in the United States is from being a passenger in a car. However, by taking reasonable precautions such as using seatbelts and car seats and not text messaging while we are driving, we can reduce the risks in exchange for the benefits of using our cars. The same approach makes sense about other decisions adults make for children.
No matter how careful we are, we need to accept that bad things might happen that are simply out of our control. We want to take reasonable precautions and teach our children the skills they need to empower them to go out and enjoy their lives, rather than living in an unnecessarily restricted, fearful bubble.
So what are reasonable precautions? In order to make wise decisions, parents and other caregivers need to assess the abilities and vulnerability of each child and the potential problems in each situation. We can then determine whether this specific child is ready to handle this specific situation independently and, if not, what this child would need to know and be able to do in order to become ready.
We need to remember that children develop their skills at different paces and have different personalities. When a child has learned a set of skills, the next step is to help this child learn how to generalize the use of these skills for different locations and situations. What is going to be safe for one child at a given age in a given situation might take longer or require extra precautions for another child.
In our family, we did allow our eight-year-old son to ride his bike in our neighborhood, because he had shown that he could be trusted to keep his bike helmet on, watch where he was going, stay on quiet streets, avoid dangers, and get help if he needed to. And our neighborhood is a calm and relatively low crime place. Once, when he was riding, a man he didn’t know yelled at our son to, “Get over here!” Instead, he sped up on his bike and came home to tell us what had happened. I was somewhat freaked out, but my son wasn’t upset because, as he explained, “I didn’t have to worry because my body just knew what to do.” He had the Kidpower skills and life experience that he needed in order to deal with this threatening situation when it arose. To be continued...
