Free-range Parenting

Two days after the story of their children’s unsupervised walk home from a park became the latest flash point in an ongoing cultural debate about what constitutes responsible parenting, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were still explaining their “old-fashioned” methods of child-rearing.

They eat dinner with their children. They enforce bedtimes, restrict screen times and assign chores. They go to synagogue. More controversially, they let their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter venture out together to walk or play without adults.

“How have we gotten so crazy that what was just a normal childhood a generation ago is considered radical?” Danielle Meitiv asked in the living room of her Silver Spring home as yet another news crew dropped by to question the couple.

She and her husband are facing an investigation for neglect, they say, after allowing their children to walk together unaccompanied from a Silver Spring park along busy Georgia Avenue toward home, a mile south.

They made it halfway before police picked the children up, alerted after someone called.

The parents’ tale of being investigated by Montgomery County Child Protective Services for allowing a walk from the park has lit up social networks and set off a national conversation about parenting styles, children’s safety and government overreach. It has pointed up seeming contradictions in law and expectations. Why, many parents asked, are mile-long walks permitted on school days if they are a problem on a Saturday afternoon?

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:I notice that in India as well. As people get more comforts and exposed to media, they tend to be bombarded with sensational news - obviously kidnapping rape, killing, and other crimes.  This has reduced people's confidence and add to that the comfort has allowed parents to chaperon their kids everywhere. The middle class kids dont go by bus or train anymore.

confuzzled dude wrote:At the center of the whirl are the Meitivs, believers in “free-range” parenting, with its ideas that children learn to be self-reliant by progressively testing limits, making choices and roaming the world without hovering adults. Danielle Meitiv works as a climate-science consultant and Alexander Meitiv is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health.

The idea of free-range kids has been around since 2008, when New York journalist Lenore Skenazy set off a firestorm with a piece titled “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” and developed a following for pushing back against what many saw as an overinvolved “helicopter parent” culture.

More than six years later, Skenazy is still pushing the conversation about giving children more freedom to experience the world. She says many parents are terrified by an outsized perception of danger, driven partly by a constant beat of repetitive crime news that makes horrific events seem much more common than they are.

Federal statistics show that the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically from its peak in 1991 and is about what it was in the late 1960s but lower than in the early 1970s, when many more mothers were at home and children roamed freer.

In the past, children stayed out for hours, slept in backyard tents and wandered their neighborhoods. “These are things we all did on our own, and now we don’t let our children do, and there is no real or rational reason except we’re fearful,” Skenazy said.

The Meitiv family’s difficulties have stirred passionate and conflicted responses from parents, and sparked some intense digital debates.

pravalika nanda wrote:if i had a little kid i'd like to implant a sophisticated little gps chip into its abdominal wall so i know where it is at all times. i would remove it after it turns 22. i think in the near future we can have access to stuff like this at an affordable price like maybe 5K to 12K including the cost of the procedure.