Free Range parenting

As an anecdote to take your children to work, this blogger is proposing leaving them at the playground.

Apparently in our quest to make the lives of children safer we have begun to be afraid of our own shadows. My parents divorced when I was in the third grade. My mother commuted an hour and half each way to her government job. My brother and I had to get ourselves ready for school. We had to get to school and we got ourselves home each night. By 5:30 p.m. my mom would be pulling into our lengthy gravel driveway and then it would be time for dinner. I will admit, I was grateful for that driveway that you could see out the front windows of our ramshackle farm house. Plenty of time to stop whatever nonsense you were doing and tidy up the living room.

I'm not sure how she felt about that commute or the safety of her children in a bucolic Southern Indiana town. Truth is, we always had adults around us. Our neighbors were retired and lived at the other end of the gravel driveway. My fourth grade teacher lived next door to them. I guess if we had a real problem, we had adults we could go to. I wonder how I would feel now as a parent not having a cell phone. From the time she left her office until she got home, we had no way of contacting her. No cell phones. No texting. Seems weird now.

Each morning I walked about 20 minutes to the nearest bus stop. I remember spending mornings dwaddling with my other neighbor's horses. Poking around at businesses while waiting for the bus. Some mornings me and my good friend Jenny would purposefully miss the bus. We would show up at the house where the bus stop was, ask if the bus had come and then take a ride from the mom at the house, who didn't want two girls sitting on her porch all day. The kindness of strangers.

At 8 years old, I rode my bike into "town," and got the mail or rented a movie. Maybe if I was feeling up to it, I'd climb on the tank outside the courthouse, or pop by the library, or maybe ride around the town square a few times. Would I allow my child to do that today? Would my mother allowed me to do that if she knew?

I guess she trusted that we had good judgement. That the parenting we got was solid and stuck with us. We had two barns and a pond near our home. I spent hours after school climbing around in those barns full of rusty nails or shoddy floor boards.

We had forts in the woods. I chased cats across the corn fields, and never once jumped in that pond without parental supervision. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, but they didn't. I survived. I marvel now at the freedom I had as a child and wonder if I could allow my child the same risks.