Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy more freedom for a ten yr old

I'm not a "free range" parent, nor do we live on a farm, so my kids aren't going on the subway alone or milking cows... I think our "more responsibility" for ds10 is in making choices. I try to step back from dictating when he does his homework, or what he has for breakfast. If he has a sleepover, I let him decide on whether he wants to get more sleep or be tired (but not grouchy!) the next day. I do let him walk places alone, or ride his bike, because he's very responsible. I don't let him cook because he's very clumsy. (We've progressed to using the toaster oven and microwave, but that's about it). It's really all baby steps, not some big "now you're ten!" http://www.amphi.com/~psych/responsib.html
I thought that the above link was interesting - there are lots of lists of "chores by age" out there, but this was a very high-level and short overview - things like the difference between being old enough to help out with chores and old enough to evaluate what needs to be done. For our two older dds, learning to think for themselves, helping them to evaluate and process information, was much more important than giving them either responsibility or chores.
Theresa

Me too. I didn't see a lot of hyperbole on her site. Well, except for the news stories quoted there (Pencils banned as 'weapons" by teacher; parents sue school district because child breaks arm falling off swing. School district removes all swingsets from schools...).

I let my two sons (8 & 10) go trick-or-treating alone this year. I've been letting DS10 go to the park with a friend for a while (two years?).

DH and I give the kids more freedom when we're confident that they'll look in every direction before crossing a road. My six-year-old is now allowed to cross our very quiet street to go play with the neighbors.

About 2 1/2 years ago, DS10 was at a birthday party in a park playing hide-and-seek. He walked too far, got lost, and ended up outside the park. He knew he was close to his friend's house but couldn't find it. So he asked a pedestrian if he could borrow his cell phone to call me. Problem solved. I was very proud of him.

I understand that people are concerned about the threat of predators, but the risks are overstated in the media. Here's a paper that discusses the real risk of abduction by a stranger (1:600,000). The paper says that children under age five are actually the least likely ones to be kidnapped by a stranger. But when it happens, the story is broadcast around the country, so everyone remembers the abducted child and not the tens of millions of non-abducted ones. Here's another article that cites a paper saying that over 90% of sexual abuse happens at home, rather than at the hands of strangers.

Alternatively, here are some sobering statistics about childhood deaths and injuries due to car accidents.

I understand that there are bad people out there, but for my husband and I, the risk that one of them will get to our kids is extremely low, and we prefer to let them learn to stretch their wings. YMMV.

Just my two cents.

Val

Currently on the front page of her site:
�What if??� doesn�t take into account probability, or even reality. It just builds big, bright, horrible possibilities and projects them, Power Point-like, into the conversation: �Ha! You tell me not to worry, but LOOK at this! This COULD happen! What if it DOES? Then what, huh? You�re going to say you�re sorry? THAT�S NOT GOING TO MAKE THINGS ANY BETTER! I simply will NOT allow this, that or the other to (possibly) happen to my child!�

Oops! I'd better not worry about anything that could happen to my child, or I'm one of those stupid "what if" parents.

I've seen that site, and even moreso her acolytes, present statistics in misleading ways as well. Nearer to the start of her proselytization, as I remember, she pushed pretty heavily a single statistic about deaths from child abductions, as if that were the only bad result to worry about from implementing idea. IIRC other misleading aggregate statistics that I've seen presented, either by her or her followers, relate to abductions and other subsets of possible bad circumstances, or focusing heavily on the fact that most child rapes occur close to home or are committed by family friends or members-- as if the rest of them are negligible somehow. I also recall aggregate statistics presented regarding the relative accident safety of walking to school vs. driving, which included general highway crash statistics.

In fact, if you review DOJ and other statistics, it becomes apparent that a fair number (about 1/3 IIRC) of all reported child rapes occur when a child is walking through neighborhoods, next to fields, etc. not immediately adjacent to the home. Those are conveniently discarded by free-range advocates. Nor do they discuss the scope of unreported child rapes, etc.

Her basic idea boils down to a sanity check to avoid hysteria, which is nothing original to her AFAIK, and which is of course a good idea. I'm just giving my other 1 cent's worth; we don't need to fully debate the issues here.

Val - we live in one of the safest neighborhoods in our city when it comes to crime rate statistics. Last year an older man tried to lure two neighbor children - 8 and 10 - into his car right on our cul-de-sac as they were walking a few hundred feet to their home. Had the mother not walked out of her house, who knows what would have happened to them. We'd seen the man parked in the neighborhood the day before but thought nothing of it. It was a nice, clean car, and he looked like a grandpa. He wasn't wearing a hat that said predator that would make alarm bells go off.

Satistics may predict probability, but if it happens to your kid, it's 100% and can't be fixed. I'm not willing to bet my kid's need for independence on that kind of risk.

Sorry, I agree with this idea. People consistently overestimate the likelihood of predation and underestimate the danger involved in driving their kids around. Driving is dangerous. Talking on a cell phone while driving is really dangerous, yet people yak away when they drive. Because they're so distracted, they aren't aware of how they're weaving and changing their speed.


I couldn't find these statistics; I'd be grateful if you could point me to them.

But one third is only a disconnected number. You need to know, "One third of how many?" If you don't have this number, you're in danger of misinterpreting statistics.

I found this publication from the US Government that says that 89,500 cases of childhood sexual abuses were substantiated by social services agencies in 2000. This includes abuse in the home, which happens ~93% of the time according to that link I included in my last message.

Double that number (unreported cases) and round it to 180,000. For stranger sex abuse, reduce to 7% of the total: (180,000*0.07)= 12,600 cases of stranger sex abuse. "Sexual abuse" probably includes flashing and inappropriate touching, but I'll go with half of the cases being rape (seems generous to me). That's 6,300 stranger rapes.

There were 72.4 million children aged 17 and under in the US in 2000. So:

6300/72400000 = 0.000087 or a risk of 8.7 per 100,000. This just isn't high enough for me to stop my kids from going to the park.

I know predation happens. But car accidents happen way, way, way more frequently. Yet I don't hear constant newcasts about the dangers of driving with kids in the car. Using the statistics I quoted in the first post, I determined that the risk of a child being injured in the family car is ~2.5 per thousand, or over 100 times higher than the risk that s/he'll be the victim of an unknown predator.

I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do. I'm only saying that it's important to look at the numbers when assessing risk.

But pardon me here; I can't resist: if people are so worried about a risk of 8.7 per 100K, why are they less worried about a risk that's over a hundred times higher?

Val

I liked the "talk, don't stalk" quote. The blog reminded me of 'way back' when ds went basically from breast milk to table-food and MIL worriedly interrupted him While He Was Eating to tell me he was too young to know how to eat real food. I agree with the basic premise that banning isn't the key to safety, education, tools, and experience are. Straight jacket and plastic bubbles are no substitute for good parenting and guidance.
On The Go, I second the suggestion from ABQmom about maybe letting him pick his own clothes in trade for responsible chores duties, or to make sure he still looks good you could keep shopping for clothes togeather but let him choose his own haircut, if he doesn't already.
Quoting spiderman's grandfather and my own bossy mother, "with great freedom comes great responsibility."

Val, it's easy to massage numbers, and I don't have the time at the moment to engage in a full-fledged debate here. I don't accept your number of under 1 in 1,000, based on the opinion piece to which you linked, as being the true number of children who suffer child sexual abuse.

Among the many questions I could ask based on your presented snippets would be, "Why do you assume, based on your chosen opinion piece, that all acquaintance rapes of children happen inside the home?" But like I said, we don't need to get into that here.

I never fail to be amazed when someone puts incidences of child sexual abuse on the same footing as aggregated reports of car accidents, large and small, as if one were no more horrible than the other. Would you go a little further to protect a child from third-degree burns, even if the risk of occurrence were far lower, than you would to protect her from a risk of a paper cut? Also, do you think it's possible that someone could grow up to be an independent, free-thinking, courageous adult without the "free range" approach? Where are those statistics, so we can assess just how unnecessary are the extra risks of predation and other harm caused by that approach, negligible though you may think them to be?

(Trying to resist the urge to put a grand-looking timestamp here. )

About the topic here let's add more respect to more freedom and more responsibilities, they all seem to go togeather. Maybe it shows you trust him more, let's a kid feel more grown up and respected if you start gossiping about the neighbors a little more, or start discussing local news and sports with him.

My mistake. I should have written "in the home or by people who are known and trusted by the child/family."



Not quite sure what you're getting at here; my point was that car accidents are often horrible things, too. They can be lethal, they can result in lifelong injuries, and the emotional scars can last a lifetime. They also happen commonly -- far more commonly than sexual abuse by strangers. I'm not saying stranger sexual abuse is more or less horrible; it's just less common.

All but one of the sites I referenced were reputable: most were .gov and the other was cornell.edu. The remaining one wasn't a great pick, but a google search restricted to .gov sites gave the same kinds of numbers about stranger abuse. Try it yourself.

Sexual predation by strangers is sensationalized by the media. The numbers that I threw out were approximations, but the magnitude was right. This fact is well-established among researchers and government statisticians, but the media doesn't seem to be interested. Put it another way: if kidnappings by strangers are really so common, why do only a handful of stories appear, and why do we hear about kidnappings that happen thousands of miles away? Why do these stories stay in the national spotlight, when a story about a lethal car accident usually doesn't get out of its region, and fades quickly?

All I'm trying to say is that getting the most accurate numbers possible from objective sources is one way to enable informed decision making. I'm not trying to tell others how to raise their kids or advocate on behalf of an Free Range Kids, an organization I only learned about this morning.

Val

Fair enough. I'll try to break it down for you: you can't fairly compare rape of a child to a car accident. I haven't seen risks "overstated in the media", although I certainly have seen the term "helicopter parent" tossed around mighty freely in reference to parents that are simply more cautious than free-range parents. There's no call for excessive hand-wringing over media reports on child sexual abuse compared to car accidents, either. Child rape involves a sensational and heinous crime, whereas few car crashes do. It's simply false to imply that people somehow care less about avoiding car crashes because they watch their kids to avoid, among other things, child sexual abuse, or that their priorities are out of whack. I'm sorry if that paragraph got a little long.

A comparison of child rape to a car accident in this context is especially senseless in light of the huge amount of money poured into preventing and mitigating car crashes, when I would say that the first and best line of defense against child abuse is caring, watchful parents. While some money is spent every year on educating the public about abuse, etc., I'm sure that it doesn't compare to the amount spent on auto safety.

It would be interesting to discover just how many incidents of child abuse are prevented by watchful, nearby parents, as ABQMom seems to have witnessed first-hand; of course those incidents don't, and would never, wind up in any statistics cited by free-rangers. Yet free-rangers feel entitled to spout statistics (often in misleading ways) without consideration given to the preventive effect of watchfulness by mainstream parents. Never is there a discussion of the possible effects if everyone let their kids go without supervision at a young age, just halcyon memories of a bygone time when things were better without those dang helicopter parents.

The Free Range Kids idea, to the extent that it's new at all, boils down to a different choice as to safety levels for kids, coupled with a sneery attitude toward anyone who chooses more safety. It's nothing new, except for its extremity in intentionally skirting the edges of what many consider to be child abandonment or endangerment, and its in-your-face attitude. And in its proponents' attempts to push their movement, they routinely rely on false assumptions and fallacy. Lenore Skenazy sure seems to have hit on a gold mine with her idea, though: capitalize on the "helicopter parent" meme with a catchy new name, and follow up with merchandise.

I'm not out to convince anyone to protect their children to what I consider to be an appropriate level against a horrible, life-changing event such as child rape, as well as other ills of neglect. There aren't enough hours in the day for me to parent my own kids, let alone everyone else's.