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LENORE Skenazy’s visit to Bendigo sparked interesting debate across many dinner tables and workplace water coolers this week.
Would you let your nine-year-old ride the subway alone?
Skenazy made international headlines and was given the title of America’s worst mum when she did just that.
But the New York mother turned the experience into a positive, and what followed was extraordinary.
Skenazy started her own blog – www.freerangekids.com – to talk about her parenting philosophy.
She says: “A Free-Range Kid is a kid who gets treated as a smart, young, capable individual, not an invalid who needs constant attention and help’’.
Her website states: “I believe in safety. I LOVE safety — helmets, car seats, safety belts. I believe in teaching children how to cross the street and even wave their arms to be noticed. I’m a safety geek!
“But I also believe our kids do not need a security detail every time they leave the house. Our kids are safer than we think, and more competent, too.
“They deserve a chance to stretch and grow and do what we did — stay out ’til the street lights come on.’’
Turns out, despite many critics, there are also plenty who agree with Skenazy’s view on parenting and how there is little need to wrap our youngsters in cotton wool.
As children, we had the same rules as Skenazy: make sure you’re home before the street lights came on (or, as we liked to remember, when Neighbours started).
We would play by the river, ride our pushbikes for miles in search of the perfect yabbying dam, rollerskate at the fire station, bounce on trampolines in countless backyards or frolic in haystacks – but we knew that if the street lights were on before we got home, we lost mum and dad’s trust.
And that’s what was important.
They knew we knew our boundaries and where and whom we were safe with.
But would they have let us ride the subway? I don’t know.
Would you?
The truth is, I can’t answer that.
If my children had grown up in that environment, then yes – perhaps.
I have a nine-year-old. She is quite capable in many ways, can find her own way home from many places in the CBD and is savvy to stranger danger.
But it’s not her that I don’t trust. It’s everybody else.
And while it’s ridiculous to think every person she passes in the street is a danger, the fact is, it only takes one nasty person to cross her path for something to go wrong.
At nine, does she have the capability of handling a situation that presents? I would think not.
But at the same time, we want our kids to be independent and learn to trust their instincts.
No parent deliberately puts their children in harm’s way.
We all do what we think is best – often conflicting with our views on how we planned to parent.
Every child is different. Every child can be trusted, but at different levels.
I would never let my seven-year-old cross the road alone, but her big sister could have done so at the same age.
It really does depend on the child and their understanding of the world, their surrounds, their boundaries.
Yes, they can grow up confident in their familiar environment, but every child is different in every situation.
Skenazy was confident her son could handle the subway – and he did.
She believed in him and trusted him and that’s something all parents should do for their children.
But you can see why many would not have made the same choice.
Skenazy has done something for all children being raised in modern times, though – she has challenged their parents to take them back to the days of their own childhoods.
And that is not a bad thing.
- Nicole Ferrie is the Bendigo Advertiser’s deputy editor. Email