A First Grader’s Freedom and the Free Range Parent

Forget magic tricks and fireworks. Nothing truly amazes a first grader more than the line, “When I was your age, I rode my bike around our neighborhood by myself.”

MJ stared at me with awe. “Oh, you did not!” “I did! And your Aunt Bridget and I would walk to the community pool when we were seven and stay there all day without our parents!”

“Tell me more! Tell me more!” she squealed, clapping her hands in glee the way I do when I read a juicy blind item on the Hollywood gossip sites. It’s hard for any first grader to fathom – the freedom we had just 30 years ago.

I know it’s been hotly debated between the helicopter mom and the free range parent – how much freedom do we give a child who has demonstrated she can handle herself? And as MJ grows older and requests more independence, I won’t deny that at times it’s been hard to hold on to my free range philosophy.

If MJ’s at a birthday party at the YMCA, is it ok to leave her at the party and relish in two hours of child-free shopping or am I required to sit on a bench for two hours watching her like a hawk? Do I have to follow her into every public bathroom or can I remain seated in the restaurant booth nearby while she does her business?

The latter example, I learned, can be looked down upon. Recently while shopping, I let MJ go into the restroom while I stayed outside a few feet away looking through the clothes racks. Another shopper turned to me and said, “Did you really let her go in there by herself? There could be perverts. Or people shooting heroin.”

Immediately, the toilet scene from Trainspotting filled my head and I made a mad dash to the bathroom, clotheslining every mannequin who stood in my way and once inside, kicking open each stall door in on innocent women whose only crimes were drinking one too many Starbucks while shopping.

“Mom, what are you doing?” exclaimed MJ, perfectly safe at the sinks but leaving a giant mountain of soap foam in her wake. Grabbing her in my arms, I searched through her Hello Kitty purse for a crack pipe and ripped open her jacket to make sure she wasn’t wearing a coked-up-Hannah-from-Girls yellow mesh top underneath.

Of course she was in one piece and track-mark free – just like the other 20 times I’ve let her go in a public bathroom by herself. But having someone else question her inch of freedom had me feeling like I was failing in my role as a 24/7 bodyguard.

Thirty years ago, I would go door-to-door by myself at strangers’ houses blocks away to sell wrapping paper and nuts for school. Sometimes those strangers would invite me into their houses for cookies and I would go in and eat them.

MJ takes piano lessons three houses down and we trail her to make sure she gets there ok. Seriously, the teacher lives three houses down. MJ is a smart girl who has sat through countless scenarios of what-would-you-do-if-someone-grabbed-you and participated in self-defense classes through her Girl Scout troop.

However, she’s also a people pleaser, and after watching years of SVU, part of me is paranoid that if someone pulled up next to her, her first response would be, “You lost your puppy and you’re offering Ring Pops? Well, scoot over and let me climb up into your El Camino, good sir.”

It’s hard to fully comprehend what has caused such a massive shift in our kids’ freedom over the past three decades. Are our neighborhoods inhabited by more scary individuals than they were 30 years ago or has the media ingrained in our minds that they are? I wasn’t any smarter or more street-savvy at MJ’s age, but in our one daily newspaper and four TV station world, we were blissfully naïve about the dangers in the world.

My own mom, a well-known worrier who once had my dad hunt me down a party when I was 16 because I was an hour late, had no qualms about me spinning off on my Huffy for hours. “Just be home in time for As the World Turns!”

My husband, who grew up on a farm, would disappear for the day, climbing on augers, tractors and other heavy machinery that could turn a rooster into a hen.

At this point in MJ’s life, sometimes I barely let her out the front door. And I know it’s only going to get worse as she goes to her first high school party, climbs behind the driver seat or goes on her first date (when she’s 23). At the same time, I think one of the worst things we can do for a child is hold on too tightly.

I know the world is full of incredible, caring people. One just has to look at the amazing people who jumped in to help others at their own risk at the Boston Marathon. That’s what I told MJ when she heard about the bombing. Look at all the good people, I said, there are millions compared to the handful of bad people in the world.

But as a parent, when my child heads out the door to climb on her bike, it sometimes can be hard for me to remember that myself.