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Dripping Life July 11

The extinction of free-range children
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For safety reasons, kids are driven to, and picked up, from school by their parents. Today’s children rarely walk or ride their bikes or skateboards to school. I get it.

I remember, as a youngster, when the family was at church or a movie theater, and kids would run up and down the aisles, my mom would comment, “Look at those kids. They’re just running wild. I wonder where their parents are?”

From that, I could only assume, running wild wasn’t a good thing. However, when we were growing up, that’s what we did. Ran Wild. In summers, we kids would pick a day and leave our respective homes about 10 a.m. with brown-bag lunches. 

We’d go to the park or the creek or to play in someone’s backyard and around noon, we’d stop to eat. For a beverage, we’d drink out of the nearest garden hose, and if we were away from our neighborhood, we’d knock on someone’s door and ask permission to take a drink from their hose, and don’t remember anyone turning us down.

As for boundaries, I don’t believe the neighborhood moms ever set limits, other than when we were to be home for dinner. Whether on foot, skates or our bikes, we could go just about anywhere. We traveled in packs.

The other day I heard the term “free-range children” for the first time.

Since we have chickens, I initially thought the speaker was speaking, sarcastically, about the “caged” immigrant children housed along our state’s border with Mexico, but instead they were referencing the children of middle-class America…our kids who spend their early days, going from cage to cage.

As I understood it, these “cages” were spaces – often chosen by parents – where kids spend time each week. Moms pick up kids after school (a cage) and take them home for a snack, maybe to do homework. Then it’s time to go to the next cage – a piano lesson, dance studio, swim lessons, baseball practice, club sports, cheer or gymnastics practice, etc…and until about age 12, there are the play-date cages, mom-managed and parent-supervised relationships with selected children – sometimes from the same neighborhood or perhaps they’re new friends from one of the other after-school cages.

No judging here. This is the evolved reality of childhood in America’s 2000-teens. For safety reasons, kids are driven to, and picked up, from school by their parents. Today’s children rarely walk or ride their bikes or skateboards to school. I get it.

For safety reasons, younger children rarely play in their front yards, nor do they meet-up with neighborhood buddies to organize a game of touch football or enact a fantasy, starring their favorite Disney character or divide into teams of cops and robbers. 

Most kids these days haven’t ever made their own kites or heard of Jacks or pick-up sticks, games we played for hours. They may not have permission to leave the back yard…and in all honesty, I never felt comfortable, leaving my grandchildren in either our yards without supervision.  We also didn’t allow them to walk to the neighborhood pool without us or run the jogging path moseying through our subdivision.

Instead of being “free-range” kids -- like we were -- our grandchildren have not been as fortunate as our backyard chickens. Why? Because the chickens are let out of their coop every morning to roam freely around the backyard, something it’s not always safe for our kids to do. 

Free-range kids learn problem-solving, decision-making, how to get along with neighbors, role-playing and improvisation. Free-range kids don’t have phones glued to their ears, relentless joysticks in their hands or the glow of computer screens in their eyes. 

Free-range kids learn cooperation, focus, sharing, how to follow rules, take turns and how to obey without debate when parents say it’s time to come home.

I know what you’re thinking: “She sounds like she wants us all to go back 50 years…she’s talking about the ‘good ole days.”

No, the America I’d like to see is one where we know our neighbors, where it’s safe for kids to be outdoors without constant supervision. I’d like to see the pace of life slowing enough so we have time to demonstrate the courtesy and respect our parents demonstrated to us and our teachers are given time to teach students more than how to pass state-mandated tests. 

So, could we start here? Baby steps? Not racing from morning to night, not making sure our kids are caged 24/7, but finding safe spaces where they can, as Mama used to say, “Run wild?” 

Like the kids caged on the border, our children are our future. It’s our task to make it possible for the new generation to learn all they can, have all the experiences they can have, make mistakes and even fail so they can be better next time. 

It’s up to us to let them out of their cages and allow them to fly. Let’s hope that’s still possible.

 

Dripping Springs Century-News

P.O. Box 732
Dripping Springs, Texas 78620

Phone: (512) 858-4163
Fax: (512) 847-9054