A couple of months ago I wrote this note on Facebook, about whether I was crazy or neglectful for letting my kids, ages 6 and 3, play in the front yard without continuous supervision (if you can’t read it, feel free to send me a friend request).  I had a some supporters and some who politely expressed that yeah, I’m crazy.  Since that time, if anything I’ve become less concerned about the level of freedom my kids enjoy.  Just yesterday, I finished reading Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.  It’s been recommended to me multiple times, but I have a hard time getting into parenting books.  I came across the audio book at NetLibrary and decided to give it a go in that format.

From the beginning, I was sucked in by her light, funny writing style.  She uses a lot of sarcasm, which is always fun for me.  The book came about because she wrote a column about letting her 9 year old ride the subway in New York City home by himself.  She was contacted by various news shows to come on television and share her story, where she was usually made to look negligent by various parenting “experts.”  From there, a whole parenting movement took off, which she dubbed the Free Range movement.  The premise is that kids have common sense, and that the world is safe and they should be allowed to explore it.

She uses statistics to back up her reasoning, some of which are surprising and reassuring.  For instance, the likelihood of your child being abducted by a stranger are 1 in 1,500,000.   That amounts to 0.000067%.  She states that violent crime rates peaked in the early ’90s, have been on a steady decline since, and are now at the same levels as they were in the early ’60s.  There are hypotheses about why this may be.  Perhaps it’s better prosecution of sex offenders, a greater police presence, better psychiatric treatments available, something else, or all of the above.  She discusses Halloween as well.  One expert found that there has never been a single case of a child dying from Halloween candy poisoned by a stranger.  Not one single case.

This book takes you through 14 “commandments” for free range parents, and information about why you’d want to live this way.  At the end of each chapter, she gives you ideas for how you can work toward allowing your kids more freedom.  She does a great deal to try to soothe our natural parenting worries, which often are fueled by things like the evening news and Law & Order.  She also spends a chapter addressing specific safety concerns parents have, such as choking, drowning, abduction, and “stranger danger” in general.

My main complaint about the book is that she sometimes lets her personal feelings influence her writing.  One example is her view on breastfeeding, which of course I must address considering my career choice.  I agree with her that babies who are formula fed are going to mostly turn out just fine.  I don’t agree with labeling the benefits of breastfeeding as “supposed” and downplaying the importance of nutrition in general.  It sounds like she had a run-in over formula feeding when one of her kids was a baby, and it has created a 12-year grudge (her words).  I hope she can one day work through those feelings.  She ignores studies on breastfeeding and formula, and states that the only real benefit is that breastfed babies might have fewer ear infections.  Of course, that’s just one of many, many benefits to both mothers and babies.  I’m sorry that she felt harassed by a lactivist at some point in her life; I don’t believe at all that formula is poison or that mothers who bottle feed should be made to feel guilty.  How we choose to feed our babies (and our older kids – she addresses nutrition in general in a similar way as well) is up to us.  However, this was one area where she chose to ignore evidence in favor of a personal bias.

Overall, this book is worth reading.  It has some good information for parents, a fun writing style, and reassurance that no matter what we do, if we love our kids we probably won’t screw them up too badly.