Category Archives: Parenting

Book Review: Free Range Kids

Free Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)When I was at the Y the other day doing my elliptical workout, I glanced up at the TV. Some daytime kids show was on. In it, a cartoon child and his animal friends, all wearing fake mustaches, like you do, were climbing a fence. An adult came over and pointed at a sign that had fallen on the ground saying not to climb on the fence. “Ah,” I thought to myself, “this is one of those follow the rules lessons.” But then (according to the closed captioning) she said to them, “Why don’t we climb fences?” The child, now standing on the ground and looking chastised, replied, “Because we could fall and get hurt.” I almost fell off the elliptical. “Seriously?” I said out loud. A few people around me looked at me and I smiled and went back to staring at my heart rate, distance, speed, and calorie burn.

Lenore Skenazy’s “Free Range Kids, How to Raise Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)” (non-affiliate link) grew out of an article she wrote about when 9 year old son asked her if he could go home by himself. They lived in Manhattan and were downtown at a Macy’s. He wanted to take the subway home by himself. He’d done it with her a hundred times, knew how to do it. She let him. And you know what happened? He got home just fine. She then wrote about it for a New York magazine and subsequently got savaged by the press, by other parents, by virtually everyone around her. “How could she be so irresponsible?” She did the morning talk show circuit, usually being paired with one or another “expert” in raising children, who schooled her on how awful she was.

And yet, she wasn’t. Not at all. Over the last few decades (or longer) we have bubble wrapped our children. We’ve locked them inside in the misguided notion that if we never let them do anything, they can never get hurt. But life happens and we are far better off giving them the tools they need to survive in the world. That means taking risks and letting them learn by doing. Sometimes they fall, and sometimes they get hurt. But that’s how we all grow. It’s how we learn. And, really, what exactly are the risks?

This is where her book gets really interesting. She goes into the various risks that are out there. For example, the risk of dangerous pedophiles and/or kidnappers? Actually less than when my generation were kids. And kids (and potential witnesses) all have cell phones now. And, anyway, the vast majority of molestation cases are caused by relatives or close friends of the family. Nothing parents are doing are preventing those. If anything, not educating their children about such things makes it more likely to happen.

Say what you want about Boy Scouts of America (I certainly do), but one thing they get right is requiring parents to sit down with their kids and explain the dangers of sexual predators. Not to scare them, but to instruct them what to look for, how they work, and how to protect themselves, fight back, get away, and tell someone. This is a far cry better than the usual, “No, you can’t go outside! It’s scary out there!”

Skenazy talks about other common fears and debunks them just as thoroughly. Hallowe’en candy? Not one single recorded case in over 60 years of any child being hurt by something done to the candy they were given. Exploring the woods out back? A place of magic and discovery, not one of lurking villains. You get the idea.

The book is written in the form of fourteen “commandments” for parents:

  1. Know When to Worry (Play Dates and Axe Murders: How to Tell the Difference)
  2. Turn Off the News (Go Easy on the “Law and Order” Too)
  3. Avoid Experts (Who Knew You Were Doing Everything Wrong?… Them!)
  4. Boycott Baby Knee Pads (And the Rest of the Kiddie Safety-Industrial Complex)
  5. Don’t Think Like a Lawyer (Some Risks are Worth It)
  6. Ignore the Blamers (They Don’t Know Your Kid Like You Do)
  7. Eat Chocolate (Give Halloween Back to the Trick-or-Treaters)
  8. Study History (Your Ten-Year-Old Would Have Been Forging Horsehoes (or at Least Delivering Papers))
  9. Be Wordly (Why Other Countries Are Laughing at zee Scaredy-Cat Americans)
  10. Get Braver (Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn’t Work Anyway)
  11. Relax (Not Every Little Thing You Do Has That Much Impact on Your Child’s Development)
  12. Fail! (It’s the New Succeed)
  13. Lock Them Out (Make Them Play — or Else!)
  14. Listen to Your Kids (They Don’t Want to Be Treated Like Babies (Except the Actual Babies, of Course!)

These chapters are then followed by an A-Z list of things to worry about that are similarly debunked.

To be clear, she is not advocating abandoning common sense. If anything, this is a manifesto for common sense. Children are 40 times more likely to die in a car accident than at the hands of a murderer, so wear seat belts! Crashing on a bike is common. Wear a helmet. She advocates for intelligent precautions, not paranoia and irrational fear, which is far more prevalent today.

The one place where I fault the book at all is in the writing style. She uses a glib humor to make her points. Often it works but just as often, it comes across as overly snarky or judgmental. I listened to the audio-book version and I don’t think it helped that the reader, Susan Bennett, really played up the sarcasm and snark, possibly over emphasizing the book as-written. Aside from that, the book is spot on and an absolutely necessary read. It makes a great double-header with danah boyd’s, “It’s Complicated,” reviewed previously.

My son recently had a birthday party at our home. He invited a bunch of friends, some from school, some from our community theater. One of the guests, a teenaged girl of 16, drove herself to the party from about 15 minutes away. When she arrived, I overheard her on the phone for over ten minutes calming her panicked parents down because she was at some stranger’s house. She calmed one parent down and then was given to the other and had the same calming conversation again. They were so worried about where she was, who she was with. What was interesting to me was that they never asked to speak to either me or my wife. Instead, she spent all that time talking them in off the ledge about this strange place she’d come to. When she got off the phone, I suggested she buy her parents a copy of Free Range Kids to read.

Book Review: It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

Book Cover of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boydI recently finished reading danah boyd’s1 excellent, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (non-affiliate link). boyd spent over a decade traveling around the United States interviewing teens about their use of social media and has combined these interviews with a lot of research into this amazing, wonderful, and enlightening book. The central message is exactly what I have been feeling and starting to express here: that the vast majority of the evils and ills of social media are vastly overblown by the media and by parents who are largely ignorant of what is really going on.

She divides the book into the following chapters:

  1. identity: why do teens seem strange online?
  2. privacy: why do youth share so publicly?
  3. addiction: what makes teens obsessed with social media?
  4. danger: are sexual predators lurking everywhere?
  5. bullying: is social media amplifying meanness and cruelty?
  6. inequality: can social media resolve social divisions?
  7. literacy: are today’s youth digital natives?
  8. searching for a public of their own

In each she uses a mixture of quotes from her interviews with teens, findings from research performed by her and others in this area, and then her own analysis. Her anecdotes are insightful, sometimes moving, and always interesting. And I was pleased to find that my own thoughts on these matters were validated by her research.

The central message of the book is, essentially, chill out. Every new technology brings with it a certain level of hysteria over how it is going to destroy the world, or at least lives, or eyesight, or any number of other fears. boyd points out how novels were seen as a dangerous thing for women in the 1800s, and TVwas dangerous in the 1950’s (and my other examples besides). Fear of new technologies, especially ones that the older generation does not understand, leads to a mass hysteria of how horrible and evil it is. 

The chapter on addiction really got my brain spinning. I’m thinking back to the parent who raised those panicky issues at that meeting at my son’s school a few weeks ago (as referenced in “Fear and Panic vs. Education and Common Sense”). As I mentioned, he spoke out about his great fear of social media addiction. He was very effusive about it and clearly very concerned. I refuted some of that line of thinking in that article but this particular chapter in boyd’s book coalesced my thinking even more.

Teens today have far less freedom than their parents did at that age. When I was in the second grade, I walked the half-mile-plus to school, going up over the top of the hill my neighborhood sat on to the mysterious land on the other side: the next neighborhood over. When my son was in the fourth grade, we finally, grudgingly, let him walk to school. His school was downhill from our house, three streets down. The walk takes about 5 minutes. And we tended to shadow him to make sure he was OK. boyd points out that teens today have also had many other freedoms removed as well, including places to hang out. Many modern development neighborhoods lack public parks, malls actively discourage teens from hanging out. (The local outdoor shopping center near my house, I am given to understand, will not entertain the idea of teen-centric stores going in because it will increase youth traffic. They also play music that the Weather Channel would refuse to play in the Local on the 8’s weather reports quite loud as a further deterrant. Judging by the crowds of teens there on weekend nights, it’s not working.)

We’ve since relaxed, a lot. My son spent much of his 7th grade year hanging out after school with his friends. Part of this hanging out was to actually leave campus and go over to  the main drag in that part of town city where the local college students tend to hang out. It has a fun mix of eclectic, trendy, and the usual assortment of chain stores. Their big thing was to go into CVS, buy milk, and then go back to school to hang out. This year, school has enacted a 3:45 rule that no one is allowed on campus after that time except for approved activities. Now he comes home early and only sees his friends on weekends, when schedules permit.

What does this leave him and the vast numbers of teens in the same situation? Social media. When a parent says that their kid is always online and being completely anti-social, they are completely missing the point. Their teens are being completely social. They are using the tools at hand to make up for what has been taken away from them from what they need as growing, developing adolescents. boyd points out that in those rare cases where teens really do show the signs of actual addiction, you have to ask what is the underlying causeIt’s not the technology. Take it away, and it will be something else.

Why are things this way? Why have teens had their freedoms taken away? Why do parents misinterpret why they are online so much? What’s really going on here? There are two key factors at play here: First, mainstream media is a business, first and foremost. The companies only survive by getting eyeballs. So, the stories that get printed are the stories that sell. Two girls abducted by someone on My Space? Headlines. Later discovering that they were lovers and trying to escape their parents and My Space had nothing to do with it? Hardly mentioned. Sensationalism sells. Noam Chomsky2 has written a great deal about how the media distorts the truth because it can only print the stories that the public accepts. If the common zeitgeist is that social media is bad and teens are in danger, that’s what they will print. Otherwise, they risk losing customers because they are no longer printing “the truth.” Somewhere along the way, the idea got out that the Internet was a scary place full of sexual predators and causing horrible addictions, and so forth and that meme stuck and now is accepted as the truth with no evidence to back it up. Just scanning my daily search agent for teens and social media this morning, I find articles blaming social media for out-breaks of eating disorders, infantilizing the brain, and other such things. It’s self-reinforcing and, while a book like boyd’s will help, it will take a lot more than just this book to adjust people’s mindsets. It may be that we simply have to wait a generation. (At which time, our kids will be railing against the new-fangled thing their kids are into!)

Some weeks back, a review of the book was posted to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website. One of the comments illustrates the tenacity of these memes beautifully. “Parents have gotten so lax, when the possibility of foul play is so huge, despite what this book states” (emphasis mine). I replied, “The book is well researched, thoroughly documented, and states, quite clearly, that the danger is way overblown. Do you have sources for your contention that boyd is underplaying the risk?”

boyd’s book is a healthy, and much needed, dose of common sense and it should be required reading for all parents of teens. Parents need to be informed about their kids social needs and about how the technology works. They also need to relax and stop locking their kids up inside in a misguided attempt to keep them safe. And they need to learn the difference between a new way of socializing and having friends and when someone is really in trouble. Then they can make informed decisions and we can all stop the knee-jerk reactions that aren’t helping anyone.

1 danah boyd on the capitalization of her name. (Jump back)

2 See and, particularly, this Huffpost article that does a good job of summarizing Chomsky’s controversial views in this area. (Jump back)

Fear and Panic vs. Education and Common Sense

The Scream, painting by Edvard Munch
The Scream by Edvard Munch

I mentioned last week that I’d been to a meeting at my son’s school that talked about the current state of teen social media usage. One of the more interesting, and somewhat disheartening things that happened at the meeting was what I can politely call “concern” and more snarkily call “fear and panic” coming from one of the parents. When talking about Instagram, he asked whether kids know about not geotagging their pictures so that the wrong people cannot find them. When talking about Facebook and Twitter, he asked about the bullying that goes on there. When talking about phones and tablets, he described kids as being addicted to their devices, that they shake and get upset if it is taken away from them (thus showing all the clinical signs of addiction). I initially just did a mental shrug and waited for the conversation to get back on track. But then other parents began saying things like, “Thank you!” (emphatically!) for bringing these important issues up. I saw how fear and panic spreads among parents who are unfamiliar with technology or who base their knowledge on what they hear on the Six O’Clock News (“Coming up at six, are your children downloading drugs from the Googles? Up first, some pictures of a cute puppy!”) The solution is education and some good old fashioned common sense.

Parents today came of age in a time when computer and Internet use was left to the geeks. Now that it has all gone mainstream, these same people who avoided these things are getting phones, tablets, and  computers but do not have the depth of knowledge, experience, or understanding that those of us who have been doing this for decades have. Facebook and a few other apps, and, before that, America Online, are all they really know. This lack of knowledge creates the classic situation of fear of the unknown. And this is compounded by the fact that their kids know so much more about it than they do because they are growing up with it all.

Because so many parents know so little, they fear so much. And because the media (largely filled with the same people with the same fears) reinforce both the ignorance and the fears, a negative feedback loop is created. The solution is, of course, education. I know it is hard to tell someone who is as busy as today’s typical parent is that they have to learn more about something but it is a responsibility of parents to do so. By not understanding, they cannot properly guide their children. Worse, they may simply just refuse to let their kids use these things because of this ignorance and potentially remove an essential part of their growing up into a modern, digital culture.

There will be some natural road blocks, of course, Not everyone can really get comfortable with some of the new technologies, especially if they have had little prior exposure. For these folks, the antidote is to at least be informed. They should know what the real risks and issues are and know where to get good information when they come across a new-to-them situation. (I humbly submit that, in time, this site should become exactly that.)

Going back to the specific fears raised by this one parent, I want to take each of the three and examine them more closely.

Regarding the geolocation aspect, I’ve run into this before. When I was a Cub Scout Den Leader a few years ago (was my son ever that little?) there was a lot of worry about putting pictures of the kids on our website. While I agreed that we not put any names with any pictures, I thought it silly to never put any pictures online. The standard fear was some creep online, seeing a picture of one of the boys would find out who he was and where he lived, and then something awful might happen. While I am sure there are such awful people out there, there are two easy counters to this argument: First, I think the danger is much greater in one’s own neighborhood. Most predators take the path of least resistance and thinking that someone is going to do all that detective work and then travel is unlikely (not impossible, just unlikely). Second, the vast majority of predation is perpetrated  by relatives or other people the child already knows. In either case, the real answer is the same: teach your children to be smart. Teach them what to do if they are approached. Teach them what kinds of things strangers might ask them to do. Teach them to never be alone with a stranger, etc. In other words, teach them common sense. Teens posting pictures and leaving the geolocation turned on can be an issue but let’s not overreact and make it the only problem, or even the most important problem. If we do, then we ignore the larger issue of educating our kids to be smart and safe.

Regarding the bullying aspect, a lot has been written about this but I think the best counter was the two high school students who came to present the apps they use to the parents at the meeting. They said that, sure, sometimes people say some mean things online but it’s usually out of ignorance or due to their attempt at sarcasm or irony not coming through in their writing. Systemic bullying hasn’t been an issue of note. It helps that the teachers are involved and ask the students to keep them in the loop about things like this. Again, it does happen but the incidence is far lower than we are lead to believe. And, again, the solution is education. Parents need to be aware and they need to teach their kids how to handle bullying in any form (online or offline). In fact, bullying online can be actually easier to handle because a screen capture can be made of any online bullying so that even if offending posts are deleted, there is still evidence of the bullying. In the physical world, you rarely have that kind of proof and accusations of bullying turn into he said-she said situations.

Finally, regarding addiction to the phones and to being online, there are a number of different answers here. While I am sure (as with everything else in life) there are some who are addicted and who freak out if they cannot access things at times, the solution (as with everything else in life) is to teach moderation. Children need boundaries and solid rules. They do not need to be draconic rules but some that are quite straightforward. For example, in our family if one of us is talking to our son, he should pay attention to us and put the phone down. If he is in the middle of something with someone online, he is to tell them he has to go for a few and then speak to us and not respond if his phone buzzes. When he is doing homework and when we are having dinner he is also not to be socializing with anyone online. Some families go farther and require electronics to get turned over to parents an hour before bed so there is some offline time.

There is another side to this issue. All of the negative reactions appear to assume that there is something fundamentally less real about online socializing than real world socializing. Parents tell them to get off the phone and engage in the real world and don’t understand why this upsets their teens. My son called me on this recently and he was right to do so. From his perspective, there is nothing at all more or less real about his online and offline friends. In fact, in many cases, his online friends (even those he has never met in person) are as real as real can be for him. We live in a neighborhood where, through a twist of demographic fate, there are no kids his age who live nearby. His school friends are miles away and friends from other activities are similarly far away. On a day to day basis, his at-home socializing (what was, for my generation, going out and playing with the kids down the street) is this online world. To refer to his online interactions as not being real is to send a really bad message to him and invalidate his entire social life. We do tell him  that he needs to give priority to people in the same physical place as he is and to treat video chats as if that person was physically coming into our house. In other words, ask our permission first. (And we also make sure we wear bathrobes now if we aren’t dressed for the day yet. Just in case.)

My point in all of this is not to deny that there are problems and downsides to teen use of social media. As with everything, it is the job of parents to help their children become citizens of the world, including the online world. This means that it falls to parents to learn as much as they can or at least be as informed as possible. It also means that the usual rules of social interactions and personal safety apply to online and offline behavior equally. Teach your children how to be self aware, polite, smart, safe, and to be good, empathetic and compassionate people. It will benefit them offline and on.