Free Range Parenting: The Opposite of Helicopter Parenting
By Shlomo Maital   


   
  So, I guess I am more or less a dinosaur.  I was born in November 1942, grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, in a quiet neighborhood, and I spent hours and hours outside, playing with friends and looking at bugs and frogs in the creek that ran through the neighborhood, a couple of hundred yards from my home.  I came home only toward dark, and in the long summer days   twilight lasted for hours.   
   My mother and father were concerned parents, and made me wear long scratchy wool underwear in the winter.  But guess what.  They let me play outside, unsupervised.  And that’s what all the kids did.   And it made childhood delightful.
    Today, this behavior is regarded as an aberration, and in some cases, illegal. On WBUR public radio, a mother reported being accosted by a police officer, for leaving her small boy in the car for a few moments while buying something in a store.  
    The approved parenting model is in many cases that of a helicopter parent, who hovers over children and protects them from any possible risk, injury, scrape or problem.    Children have arranged structured play-dates and activity circles.  
    A decade ago,  Lenore Skenazy wrote a  book,  Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.   An organization by that name today helps parents fight back against helicopter parenting, and make their children sturdy and independent.   One simple approach:  Give kids assignments or projects, and turn them loose to tackle them, after teaching them safety rules for using tools.  
    The world today is dangerous – probably more dangerous than in prehistoric times when I was a kid.  It is natural to react to it by trying much harder to protect our children. But in doing so, we are taking away a vital crucial life skill – independence, self-confidence, self-assurance. 
    There must be a way to keep kids safe, without robbing them of this skill.  And there must be a way of avoiding having police arrest parents who do this.