The term “free-range kid” has entered our lexicon recently, mainly after a well-publicized incident involving a Maryland couple who were turned into social services after allowing their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter to walk by themselves to a park a mile away.
Considering that parents today are more apt to dress their kids in bubble wrap and goggles, the uproar that ensued is not surprising. Still, today’s “overly shielding hovering agents” – or OSHA parents – aren’t necessarily doing their kids any favors either.
Careful not to take sides on this issue, all I can do is reference my own childhood and search for the truth. As a free-range kid in the 1970s, I am amazed that I even survived given the fact that we lived in such a dangerous world. After all, weren’t we all supposed to perish as the result of the escalating tensions with our friends in the USSR?
Most of us early free-rangers had to fend for ourselves and discover the world together. It was not uncommon to walk a half-mile alone to and from school at the age of 7 or 8 years old. On summer break and on weekends, our parents would kick us out of the house and tell us not to come back until the street lights came on. We were free to roam safely without continuous surveillance, Amber-Alerts and being tethered to cell phones.
We grew up playing Jarts, otherwise known as the “Arrows of Death.” We didn’t don personal protective equipment to play on asphalt playgrounds, which, by the way were, equipped with spinning merry-go-rounds, monkey bars and three-story metal slides that would leave your bare legs scalded in the summer time.
Mine was the same generation that grew up thinking that bike helmets were for people with medical conditions instead of for riding bikes, roller skating or skateboarding. We often tempted fate even more by building our own bike ramps to emulate the most recent Evil Knievel daredevil stunt.
Children of the ’70s were routinely left alone in cars while parents ran errands or paid the gas station attendant. No one carried their own bottle of disinfectant to school and, in fact, we embraced dirt and rubbed it on all wounds.
We were allowed to make mistakes and reap the consequences. We didn’t have parents for agents who were constantly stepping in to prove that we were perfect, smart, hilarious, bright, kind and generous. We didn’t have inflatables attached to every extremity as we swam, we either learned to sink or swim; besides, there was a paid lifeguard on duty.
We were also of the same generation that rode everywhere in the back of pickup trucks or standing in the car’s back seat. Car seats were nonexistent and we were allowed to sleep unbelted up in the back window in the family sedan whenever we took long vacations or trips to visit grandma and grandpa. After the federal government began to require automakers to install seat belts in cars, many fathers in my neighborhood would, in fact, cut them out of the back seats,
On a hot July day, it was not uncommon to see our parents pick up a six-pack of beer before a road trip. In fact, many road trips were actually measured by the number of beers it would take to arrive to your destination. In 1982 only 26 states had laws that prohibited drinking and driving, until the federal government eventually stepped in and forced the remaining states to come on board in 1998.
It was not uncommon to be exposed to secondhand smoke. I can remember as a boy with asthma sitting in the lobby of doctor’s office watching parents smoke before their kids’ appointments. Even some doctors smoked while they gave your school physicals.
No doubt, the world is different and much safer place than it was in the 1970s, and like every generation, we all learn from the mistakes of the generation before us. As a safety and risk management professional, I would say it is hard to dispute that we are a better world because of all these changes. DUI deaths have dropped significantly, automotive fatalities have been cut by more than half and the smoking rate is down from 37 percent in 1970 to 18 percent in 2012.
However it is of my opinion that before you start cast stones at the so-called free-range parents, just stop and realize that OSHA parents are doing a disservice to their kids as well.
As with everything else, the answer lies in the middle and the next generation must learn to eventually fend for themselves. Most kids today live securely in an adult-constructed world and living out carefully scripted itineraries. Kids can’t develop and mature unless they are allowed and encouraged to visit what I call the frontier of their competence.
A good parent will allow their kids to form and take calculated risks. You need to allow them to go out on the proverbial (and real) limb occasionally. We have to teach our kids that risk is everywhere in everything we do, and they come with both positive and negative consequences. If you don’t take some risks you will suffer no defeats, but you also win no victories either.
Be safe, my friends.
Keven Moore works in risk management services. He has a bachelor’s degree from University of Kentucky, a master’s from Eastern Kentucky University and 25-plus years of experience in the safety and insurance profession. He lives in Lexington with his family and works out of his company’s offices in Lexington and Northern Kentucky offices. Keven can be reached at kmoore@roeding.com.