Safety and Freedom

With 2 toddlers and a 10 year old in the house right now, one of my greatest sources of anxiety are when these two questions are demanding an answer at the same time: are your kids reasonably safe from risk right now? are your kids getting enough age-appropriate freedom so they can grow up to be confident in their environment? There's the answer I would give, there's the answer some of my neighbors would give, and there is the answer my kids would give, and they are all different answers. What to do?

Sometimes at the playground I meet parents who think I'm a little too far from Douwe because my hands aren't 6 inches away in case he falls. They try to help him out because I'm not right there, and I get the message that I am not making the right choice to let Douwe have a little risk of getting bumped for the sake of his need to achieve more confidence and independence.

When I was 5, I started walking to school and home every day, two blocks. Loved it. I could leave when I was ready, play at school outside a bit if early, and even when my sisters started going to school with me, we all just left when we each were ready to go and rarely walked all together. If I would have been on the bus, it would have been an long ride first one on in the morning, last one off in afternoon

When I was ten, I got my first new 10 speed bike and took myself to Willowbrook Pool, softball games and practices at Veterans Park, the library and Greco Candy or Submarine Port. I had a walking paper route with my sisters on Wednesday afternoons, and a daily bike paper route in the mornings, and the most my parents would help would be with folding papers. Those were age-appropriate freedoms and responsibilities and helped me become a responsible and confident adult.

Now I have a 10 year old, and if I let him ride his bike, even in a clearly defined small area crossing no busy streets, even with his helmet on, even with the company of 2 friends, even with my cell-phone in his pocket to call if he needs something, even with knowing many of my neighbors thanks to block-parties, I am pacing the house for that hour he is allowed to play. What if he does something pesky, what if he gets hurt, what if the neighbors think I am not "watching" him closely enough? I am sort of hoping he comes home late so I can tell him he can't play tomorrow! As there are only a few years of time in a kid's life when they think it is awesome to ride a bike around, it does not make sense to me to tell him to wait 'til he's 14 or 16. It also does not work to follow him on my bike and leave the toddlers at home. So I decide to take the "risk" of letting him play for a little while, knowing that life is "risky" anyway and that kids will not be healthy or confident if they have a hovering adult in their sight till the day they turn 18.

At "Coffee with the Principal" at school, the discussion came up about school arrival and dismissals. There is no funding for busses because it is a small residential grid that feeds this school. Even though we all live close, biking to school is strongly discouraged by school personnel. Walking to school, even with mom, is sort of discouraged as well, because it is such a busy intersection near the school. And driving several hundred children the few blocks to and from school makes for a jam-up in the whole area at 2:30 in the afternoon with 150 cars crowding into a narrow city street, waiting in car line-ups that go around the corner to say their kid's names out the car window so that each name can be radioed inside, then called out over the intercom to dismiss each child one family at a time. This school property was definitely built for walking and biking arrival and dismissal, but even with this school-door to car-door adult escort process, there are parents who think it is dangerous that children's names are being called out over the intercom. What if a stranger is lurking on the grounds and memorizes the name of a child?

How many strangers really want our children? Many adults I encounter in a day seem to enjoy a squirrelly kid in their space for a maximum of 10 minutes. Most foster children in our county have experienced their greatest moments of danger in the company of family or household members. Why do we prefer to believe that strangers or side-streets are so much more dangerous than it can be right inside our own house?

Jeff found a new york times article that he thought I would be interested in and it is comforting to know that I am not the only one who feels caught between wanting my children to learn how to gradually grow into independence yet wanting no overly vigilant community member to accuse me of neglect!

If, as this article cites, 115 children are kidnapped in a year and 125,000 are injured in auto accidents, even accounting for exposure differences, it would seem that a parent could then be considered endangering a child for taking them somewhere in a car. If more kids are becoming at risk for obesity-related health problems because of low outdoor activity, might a parent someday become considered endangering a child for not telling them to get outside and play? Is it possible to live life in a quality way while accepting that risk is never completely avoided?

I'm so, so, so, glad I had freedom to navigate my community as a ten year old when my mom needed to be home with household chores and napping babies. I'm glad I was in a town and a neighborhood where other kids could too. Watching daytime tv all summer might have been "safer," but not better for my developmental tasks of growing up.