Lenore Skenazy (creator of the Free Range Kids blog and an activist for allowing kids to take risks as they grow up) has just posted the first chapter of her new book (Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry) to Scribd.
Yet here in the nice, safe,
scurvy-free twenty-first century, we worry about our kids riding
their bikes to the library, or walking to school. We worry when we
can’t reach them on their cells. In fact, cell phones–though I love
them dearly–are a great example of how everything has gotten so
mixed up. We give them to our kids because we don’t want to
worry. We say, “They’re for emergencies.” And yet now, if you ex-
pected to hear from your daughter after her Mandarin lesson and
you can’t reach her immediately, you may well start to think: What
happened?! Lost, dead or white slavery? (Which, for our purposes, includes Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, and Inuit slavery, too.)So now the phone–the very device that was supposed to reas-
sure you–is making you freak out when you never would have
freaked before. Back in the good ol’ 1990s, you’d at least have waited
for your kid to be a few minutes late before the heart-stopping
scenarios kicked in. Now anxiety is on speed dial.And so we worry all the time: Is he safe? Is she OK? Did he eat
all his baby carrots? (Answer: no.) And what happens when we
don’t worry?
FREE RANGE KIDS (Intro) by Lenore Skenazy
Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry