Raising free-range kids

"Where did you go" "Out."
"What did you do?" "Nothing."

Hey, I think I still have that book. Must be someplace in Mom's basement.

THE BRAT IN ALL OF US
Being a 12-year old boy has certain responsibilities. One of them
is occasionally making your mother worried sick by endangering
your health in some idiotic stunt. You would think mothers of
disabled children wouldn't have to worry about this rite of passage.
Think again. The brat in all of us always comes through.
While some kids had bicycles I had my own set of wheels, my
electric wheelchair. My first electric wheelchair was one of the
earliest ones made. It was BIG. No one could push it. It had
bulky tires. When I drove it, I was king. kinda like a SUV in
school. On the other end of the spectrum, was Scott, my buddy, a
freckle-faced kid. (Side note: didn't we all have at least ONE
freckled friend in school?) He owned an amigo scooter. It
weighed maybe one fourth of my chair. His parents could LIFT
IT IN THE CAR for crying out loud. What kind of chair was
that?
One day we’re all out on the schools basketball court. It's just a
40 by 60-foot chunk of blacktop outside surrounded by grass.
Scott and I were just fooling around when Scott says, "Let met
hit you broadside"
"Why" I ask.
"I dunno. Just see what happens" ,
"I donlt think so"
"What are you, chicken?"
Now I don't care where you live, who you are, how you were
raised or anything. If you're a 12-year-old boy and someone
calls you chicken, by God you're gonna do what he wants no
matter how stupid it is.
Now here I am in my Sherman tank of a wheelchair watching
Scott go 40 feet away from me in his little nothing of a scooter.
When he lined himself up properly he waved his arm as to say
"here 1 come, last chance to back out".
I replied with a smirk and a "just bring it" gesture. With that he
cranked his scooter to max speed and started towards me. As
He sped towards me many thoughts raced through my head.
Maybe he'll hit me, my chair will move a couple of inches, and
we'll look at each other, laugh and move on our way...that didn't
happen.
Or maybe, he'll stop short, laugh at me, call me crazy, and
move on...that didn't happen.
Or just maybe, he'll hit me, and the wheels of his scooter will
falloff, a little puff of smoke will come from his scooter as a
dying breath and I'll have the last laugh...that didn't happen.
Well, what happened? I'm not quite sure. The next thing I remember
I'm lying on a beanbag chair in the schools physical
therapy room, kind of nauseous, with a huge headache. If you
look carefully, you can still see the faded scar on the right side
of my scalp. If you took an x-ray, you'd see 1 have a hairline
fracture in my skull.
Was this stupid? Of course. But isn't being stupid what childhood's
all about?

Ebert: Wow. And...ah...what happend to him>?

Ahh, the lament of the baby boomer. I think you need to re-watch "Pleasantville", Roger.

Things were always much simpler when we were kids because we were kids. We didn't start to worry about the evils in the world until we started to grow up.

Dear Roger,
I saw a movie recently (can't remember the name, some documentary I think) about a young cub scout who is left to wander unsupervised and ends up shanghaied on a floating house to South America! It all ended okay, thank goodness, but it really makes you think.

I think people often underestimate The Children. Kids are quite often a lot smarter, more observant, and thoughtful than adults give them credit for. They just need to be taught to use these tools sooner rather than later. Less protecting, more teaching, exposing, challenging. Sure the world has changed, but its still changing. Always has been, always will be. I believe the kids CAN keep up. The problem is in the collective societal neurosis that we have developed of over diagnosing this 'problem' or that, and believing in these myths of danger.

I'm only in my late 20's and often talk about the same thing with friends. Originally from Southern Ontario, I think I am in the last 'free range kid' generation. My siblings, about a decade younger than me, grew up in a much more protected environment; I can't remember them just bike riding off on their own around neighborhoods like I did when I was 6-10 years old. During the summer we would be out all day every day, exploring the forests around our subdivision, going to the arcade and buying penny candy from the local convenience store.

Sadly, I've also become a contributor to the over-protectiveness. Now living in Las Vegas with two young sons, my wife and I fit your description - play with friends is scheduled with 'play dates' and/or scheduled park trips, where we stay and monitor their interactions with others. They mostly play in our gated yard which has eight foot cinderblock walls. And we live in an [ungated] Las Vegas neighborhood I would describe as fairly safe compared to most. I don't deny that I hope to move to a gated street though, for even more feeling of "safety" (however illusory). Other days, I want to move to a small town, perhaps in the Rocky mountains or the Pacific Northwest coast, where my kids could have more physical freedom.

I think a large part of the "problem" is just media reporting and incredibly fast and widespread dissemination of information. Even if it doesn't make the corporate news, events get "Twittered" and "Facebooked" across networks. Hearing stories from my mother about our small Northeast steeltown I grew up in, I believe there were always plenty of alcoholics/addicts, domestic violence, molesters, drug use, rapes, crime, etc. It's more reported now. After this gets to the authorities, and as you mentioned, that is now News for the masses. There are obvious beneficiaries of our terror: newspapers, TV stations (News Corp et al), police departments, government agencies, security companies and others can boost their revenue and funding after having worked the people into a paranoid frenzy. Who will save us? How will we know for sure whether our neighbor is a pedophile rapist car thief? Our Saviors will be there!

I completely agree.
I remember walking more than a kilometer to elementary school when I was just 6 years old, and even further to visit my buddy.

I have three toddlers and I want to afford them the same freedoms that I had growing up, but as a modern parent, with so may horrible stories coming across the news almost daily, I may have a difficult time actually letting them get out of my view. Luckily, I still have time to work myself up, as they are only three and four years old now.

The neighborhood we live in now is much different than one I grew up in. Back then, it wasn't uncommon to see the streets and fields and nearby woods teeming with groups of children, playing games, and running around like maniacs.

Nowadays, if I see a child walking by himself, I look around concerned, wondering where his parents are. I have to remind myself that I too used to walk the streets unescorted when I was that age.

We live in a society of security, where everyone has to be protected at all times from every conceivable threat, real or imagined.

I know a lot of what I have to say is almost parroting your comments, but these are thoughts I've had on my chest for awhile now. Thanks for providing me a medium to express them.

Roger, I agree with you that there might be no solution to this, but to answer one of the questions you posed in the closing lines " Are more people alcoholics because booze can be purchased legally? " , I think the answer is "yes". 2 things 1) I live in India and once some time ago my state decided to prohibit alcohol. People had the choice of sneaking out of state to drink or get it illegally. Since the law was implemented fairly seriously, people couldn't get booze illegally easily which at least might have delayed if not stopped the new kids ,who might have tried out the booze rather sooner, if it was available legally. 2) Legalizing something would be the first step of making something socially acceptable. What would you answer a kid when he asks "if cigarettes or alcohol is bad why does the civilized world allow it to be sold in unlimited amounts to its citizens "?

Ebert: Prohibition didn't work out so well here. It's my impression that Indians in general do not drink nearly as much as those of many other nations.

When I was a kid (I was born in '71), if you had a problem with a bully, your mother told you to punch the kid as hard as you could and to Make That Punch Count. Nothing says "Leave me alone" cleaning a guy's clock. It worked many times but nowadays we are told that this leads to a lawsuit or a fatal shooting.

We've created an Eggshell Society, a fragile society so afraid of lawsuits and reprecussions that kids today are safeguarded and scotchguarded until they have no experience that prepares them for the harsher realities of life. I have always believed that dealing with bullies and learning to stand up for yourself prepares you, in a lot of ways, for the world.

I wonder if our Eggshell Society hasn't been brought on by the creation of 24 hour news and the internet. We get stories on every murder, every kidnapping, every pedophile, every creep, thug, murderer, rapist and serial killer on the streets until we've felt the need to shelter ourselves from a phantom masked man.

"let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could."

...I don't get it

Ebert: The kid who got away became a priest. The kid who got caught became a criminal.

Kanes childhood sequence, the puppet show and the tragic Sea in 400 Blows, Zero for Conduct--these spring to mind. I think Mr Ebert is too fond of the past, of comparing then and now. Some things change, some don't. Flux is the law, the arrow returneth never, never, never, never. More things have improved, fewer deteriorated. Once upon a time there there waren't no Bomb neither.Life is beautiful. Life is ugly. Life is everything. Life is.

I'm 41 years old and I remember being a kid in the 70's.

I grew up on Chicago's South Side in the Roseland neighborhood. Then in the early 80's we moved to what is now University Park.

My friends and I jumped rope, walked to school, and when I got a little older, rode bikes and went to the neighborhood swimming pool. Without our parents. Tired of that, we went to the air conditioned public library and rifled through the (gasp!) card catalog hoping to find good books to read (remember Judy Blume and Lord of the Rings!).

It all seems so far away now, but the best part about being a kid then was being allowed to explore and experiment with other kids without your parents watching your every move. It gave us a sense of independence and freedom that I wonder if today's children will miss.

Would I be less wide-eyed and more cynical? Would I be fearful?

I'm not sure. My parents worried, for sure. They taught me how to walk confidently and make decisions in emergencies. They taught me a healthy regard for my gut instincts and to always be aware of my surroundings.

I remember we were at the park one beautiful summer day in the city near my grandmother's house, and we were watching the older baseball teams play. One of the games broke out into a fight. It started out as a fist fight. My little brother wanted to watch. Something told me to grab my little brother and get out. I don't know what made me move so fast. But as we were about three blocks away, we heard two or three gun-shots.

Thank goodness I had already decided we should make a move. My parent's response? "You are not going back to that park." Their response was NOT "we'll never let you out of our sight." Perhaps they would think differently, today.

I had a free-range childhood. So did most kids who grew up before about the Vietnam era.

It has hung on here and there. My mom would tell me to "go out and play" never telling me where to play or asking where I had been when I returned. I can remember running around in the summer as late as Jr High (1988) I'd ride my bike up and down the main street of my little town (never once wore a helmet, I luckily missed out on helmet laws) and being an expert klutz, would manage to hit a bit of loose dirt or sand and crash, sometimes hitting hard enough to start to black out. I'd just get up , brush myself off, walk my bike till I stopped feeling light headed and then hop back on and ride around some more. Good times.

My mother works in her local school district as a speech pathologist. She dreads the parent meetings because, she has observed, an alarming number of them are ready to burn the school down if their child's time in school is not spent exactly as they expect it to be spent.

Ironically, many of her students bond really well with her, and from her observations, those parents often don't have a clue what their children are feeling or experiencing. It's a source of considerable sorrow for her, and it makes both of us glad that as I was growing up in the late 80's and early 90's, my brother and I were allowed to free-graze the neighborhood. Which sometimes literally meant going to a field and chewing a stock of grass.

Hi Roger.

As a free-range child of the 60's myself, and a parent of two boys on more medicines than I can possibly keep track of (Mom can!), I totally get this excellent post.

One of those boys is the 15 year-old referenced in your second graph who just last Monday took his first unsupervised bike ride to the park. Let me update you on that story. On Wednesday by noon, his beloved beautiful BMX bike with 4 pegs and a hamburger-shaped bell on the handlebars was stolen outside of the Public Library. He was free-range for two-and-a-half days in our small sleepy town before his freedom was taken from him.

He's crushed. I'm furious. Who would steal a young man's bike? Can't they know the pain it would cause?

It's scary to be a parent these days, tougher to be the child.

One more story if you don't mind, taken from this:

If your child seems strangely reluctant to go to school, it may be about more than a dislike of school. Kids know what's going on, and may have reason to fear.

The same son has had a tough time in school over the years - picked on. I underestimated how tough. I was travelling so much for business that I didn't hear him when he was trying to tell me. One night, though, I heard something catch in his voice - the despair - when I casually asked how he was doing on the bus. "They give me a hard time", he said.

I delayed going to work the next morning, and parked down the street out of sight from the bus stop, watching. He was the first one there. He was soon joined by three much bigger kids, who marched straight up to him, knocked him to the ground, and began pummeling him. I raced my car up to the stop and yelled "get off of him", which surprised them all. I had to through the other kid's parents (as you said) and the bus driver (who said it was none of his business) and the school (who were very helpful), but it stopped that day. I became my son's hero that day, but way too late.

I asked him that night, how often that had happened to him. Monthly? Weekly? "Every day, Dad."

It's a mean world right now. Scary to be a parent. Tough to be a kid.

I'll get him a new bike. Promise.

Randy

Ebert: Who stole it? Other kids, probably. As I said, I sure don't have the answer. I think it all begins with better primary and secondary education, and then trickles down as time passes. I've said this before: If I were running things, I would put other programs on hold and simply double every teacher's salary, to make the profession more attratctive.

Even in the Chicago suburbs of the '60's, in a safe town, our local school ran the "Don't take candy from strangers campaign," and warned us not to get into cars with people we didn't know. We all had a healthy suspicion of strangers. So dangers have always lurked in nice towns, yet nothing horrible ever happened to anyone, at least not that I know of. As five-year-old kindergartners, we had to walk about three quarters of a mile to school, crossing streets in the dead of winter, and no one ever thought anything of it. Parents rarely drove us to school, unless the snow was piled so high on the sidewalks that we would have had to walk in the street.

I feel mostly sad that a lot of kids today have such rigorous schedules, even for fun things. Are they being cheated out of learning how to make their own entertainment? As kids of the 60's, we had plenty of unstructured dream time to read, create, play, and do what we wanted (within reason, sometimes without reason). Maybe it makes a difference that our parents' schedules were less hectic, in the sense that one parent could make a living for the entire family, allowing the other parent (at that time, usually Mom) to be at home, so parents weren't so rushed.

Of course, I can recall my parents and their friends, when TelStar was launched (which allowed us to see live TV from Europe), commenting that we kids were growing up in the fast-paced space age, and as lucky as we were to have that modern technology, we didn't have the simpler pleasures they did, growing up in the 30's and 40's.

T'was ever thus, I suppose.

Roger, you make the mistake of assuming that the "war on drugs" is a sincere effort to eliminate drug use in our society. It isn't. It is a calculated policy of social control, meant to keep the poor and black population (the majority of drug arrests) in their place. It is also used to justify increased police presence all over the country (god forbid those DEA agents had to find a real job).

"We believe that all undesirable things can be eliminated by legislation."

Too true. What do you think the cure for this is? It bothered me deeply that in the 2008 debates, Obama and McCain talked exclusively about the new things they would make government do as President. It struck me that there was an unspoken sentiment that government *should* attempt to solve more problems, and it felt like the two men were buying votes on this premise.

I'm the product of a free range childhood. At least I think I was.

My neighborhood was sandwiched between two elementary schools and a middle school, so it was geared towards raising kids. A nice big park was on one side of the elementary school I went to, and the public pool on the other. I was allowed to ride my bike from the railroad tracks to the freeway, from the very back of the park to the comic book store I worked at. This area included a movie theater, several parks, the library, a bunch of coney island restaurants with cheap chili dogs and milk shakes, every field I've ever played a sport on, and the local Blockbuster Video, where I studied the cover of every movie I could get my hands on but didn't have the allowance to rent.

My free range existance is likely attributable to the fact that my mom worked at a Ford factory during the hours in which I was most likely to get in trouble. I roamed around with my pack of friends, loitered in backyards, played pick-up games of football, and avoided doing some of their dumber stunts. When my mom would come home late at night to see what I'd been up to, I'd answer with the dreaded "Nothing much," and leave it at that. That's still my answer, but more often than not, it's true these days.

As somebody born in 1988, I think I got lucky. My particular group (sadly, not the whole generation) grew up at the tail end of the era where it was fine to go outside. It was encouraged. If you didn't go outside, you were crazy.

At the same time though, kids got a whole lot meaner as the 1990's dragged on, for whatever reason. Some of the people I hung out with in elementary school I had trouble looking in the eye in middle school. When I (voluntarily) went to Detroit for high school, I stopped talking to all but one of the people from my neighborhood, and he wasn't a friend until I needed somebody to endure summer movie season with.

I guess I've been blessed by not having helicopter parents. My mom let me see 25 Detroit Tigers games one summer, most of which I paid for and went to myself. There aren't many parents who let their kids go to Detroit alone, even if it's the well-lit, well-lighted parts of Woodward Ave. Nevermind the parts of Detroit I drove through to get to school once I was free of the carpool or the bulletproof restaurants I went to for lunch. I was a free man, unless I wanted to see the sequels to The Matrix.

I hate to make a glittering generality, but kids seem to be stunted by this new environment. Sure, parents are always there, but they're not always monitoring what they see, listen to, or visit on the web. Just today, I was at an ice cream parlor, leaning against the side of the building with a friend. A kid, maybe a freshman in high school, was telling this awful story about how he didn't want to go outside and play capture the flag with some other people. Next to him was his 10 year old brother, who replied "F****** a," before rattling off a lot of nonsense about capture the flag. His brother and his friends looked at this little boy and laughed at this six year old's endearing vulgarity. Based on some of the profiles I have seen on MySpace of kids that age, this is a spreading epidemic.

As an aside, I never made it to the stage where they hand you a scout knife. I quit Scouts to play football, before they dressed kids up like Robocop to do it. My promising career ended for two reasons: cluster headaches (wikipedia's picture of it is a pretty accurate description of the feeling, and, as I'm told, I'm one of a select number of folks who was diagnosed with these before adulthood...maybe even the first), and my weight, which I was tired of constantly battling to avoid being the lightest guy on the varsity team. Some parents thought I was dangerous to their kid's safety, and that was just during practice.

In retrospect, I'd take the scout knife over the two trophies I have from championship games I didn't get to play in.

Mr. Ebert,

Thank you for touching on this subject - it is one my wife and I talk about often. We grew up predominantly in the 80's in small town Oklahoma, and we both were "free range kids." We would leave on our bikes in the morning, and the only rule was to be back at the house before it was too dark for mom and dad to see you riding up the driveway. Our parents had no idea what we might be doing, but we knew what the boudaries were. And we stuck to those (as far as they still know).

Now, as parents of three growing boys, we find ourselves expecting things of them we would have never been expected to do. Helmets for riding a bike, for goodness sakes! Don't EVER walk down to the creek by yourself! You can never ride your bike to school! What has happened to us?

I have a theory on this: We, as modern-day parents, are so dependent on the validation of having our children's love, that we have gone overboard in protecting them. What causes this? When did this start? Is it too late to reverse these effects? I don't know...but the crazy thing is, I still don't want them out of my sight...

Mr. Ebert,

I can't be sure, but I think the whole idea that today's kids are over-protected is caused by the same media hysteria that causes these unfounded kidnapping, injury, etc fears that you believe are driving said over-protective behavior. I'm 30 years old and the meat of my childhood took place in the late 80s to mid 90s.

Even then I remember stories from my older relatives about the supposed freedom they had that I lacked. But let me tell you, my parents gave me a pretty wide berth. I should preface this by saying that I grew up in a mid-sized suburb not far outside of Philadelphia proper. Many of the things you describe as being allowed to do during your childhood are the same things I was allowed to do. I had no idea what a play-date was until I reached adulthood. I was getting myself up, dressed, and off to the bus stop on my own by the time I was 12 years old (my mother and father left for work early in the morning). I was allowed to roam free in the neighborhood with my friends on non-school nights until at least 9 or 10pm as young as 11 years old (within limits: if i remember correctly, I was not allowed to go past the park 5 or 6 blocks away at night without permission). During the summer, I went to the community pool on my own (or really anywhere I could realistically reach on a bicycle and meet my deadlines) and didn't need to be seen or heard from until dinnertime. In the latter years of my youth, I got myself in some pretty bad trouble on a number of occasions. Trouble ending up with me being picked up by parents are the police station. In none of these cases was the book thrown at me nor was I branded a bad seed to be marked for observation and eventually removal from society. No: I was treated like the stupid kid that I was, had sufficient amounts of the fear of God put into me, and was sent on my way.

Perhaps this is just another one of those generation things. Music was better in my day. Film was better in my day. We knew how to have fun in my day. And on and on. Are the children of today going to grow up and lament the lost freedom of childhood to their own grandchildren in 2050?

I'm still in high school, but my parents have been good about not being too protective. I'm not like that poor kid who just rode his bike alone in the park.

Another bad thing I've seen is that a lot of these sheltered kids, when they finally are released, can go crazy with freedom. It's like this pressure is building up and then BAM!, they act irresponsibly because they haven't had enough experience in running their own lives.

Anyway, the way people perceive the world today is definitely a lot different than it used to be and I fear that all this sheltering is doing more harm than good.

I am a proud parent of 2 Free Range Kids. As they are still pretty little the remain in the yard, but we go in the house and do what ever it is parents do. The best compliment I ever received was from a friend from England who said "Your L**** acts like we did when we were young. She's a real child, not one of those video addled ones you see mucking about the shops"
Proudest moment of my fatherhood.

Two weeks ago, my wife Kate and I had our first child. Today Kate's Grandma Barb and Great-Grandma Grace came to see the baby, and while they were here we began talking about the very issue discussed in your new post. Like you, Roger, Barb and Grace spoke about the way things were when they were growing up, and when their children were growing up, and how that world has left us; and what a shame that is.

I believe this culture of fearful parenting has sprung out of the 24-hour news media machine of the last decade. It is not simply that more children are being abducting, molested, etc. these days, it's just that the reportage of such cases is much more widespread, and much more dwelt upon than they have ever been.

We are only reaching the apex of the hysteria. A model of fearful parenting has progressed (regressed?) for decades. Parents have grown more fearful with each passing generation, as media coverage has become more graphic (as you note, there was a time when term "rape" would have never been used in newspapers).

During our conversation, Great-Grandma Grace told stories about Kate's Grandpa Denny growing up in Cerra Gordo in the '40s and '50s: Little Denny running around the countryside with his dog, swimming in creeks; mischievously taking apart farm equipment that his father had spent all week cleaning and assembling; climbing into his father's truck, barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel, but able to start it up and drive around in circles (he learned to drive the stick-shift truck by watching his dad shift gears); Denny generally scaring her half to death with everything he did. That was a childhood! Grandma Barb told similar stories (in terms of freedom, but minus the farming aspects) about her kids growing up in the '60s and '70s. "But it's not like that anymore. You can't turn your back on kids these days. You never know what they're going to do, or what's going to be done to them. All the crazy people out there."

My wife and I nodded in agreement. Then Kate added that, when she was growing up in Bloomington-Normal in the '80s and '90s, her mom and dad rarely let her go anywhere by herself. She said that they let her ride her bike to her friends' houses only if she stayed on a well lit path that ran throughout the town--giving all the creeps and deviants little chance to abduct her or worse.

Though I grew up at the same time as my wife, I did not share her experience, and I doubt I shared the experience of most of the members of my generation. You see, I didn't have anything to fear when I was a child. And though my mother was a bit overprotective, she never made me feel that there was anything to be afraid of when I left the house. I never looked over my shoulder or dreaded a bogeyman, because for me, the bogeyman did not exist.

Growing up in a small town (pop. 1200) an hour south of Urbana, I remember having a sense of freedom and comfort that I can't imagine kids having now. I remember riding bikes with my friends for hours, all over town; walking up to the town square, to visit the library or to pick up some things for my father at the hardware store; delivering newspapers at five o'clock in the morning; playing baseball late at night under the street lights; running two miles to the park to shoot baskets with my little brother; playing hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids after dark; jumping into ditches after heavy rains; being outside at all hours of the day; being a kid.

After leaving my hometown, meeting new people, hearing about the childhoods of my new friends, I discovered that my experience was far from the typical modern childhood. My hometown was (and still is) very much stuck in the days of The Andy Griffith Show. Which was great for me. But at the same time, my experience only makes me feel sorry for the rest of the people in my generation who didn't grow up in really small towns (or friendly neighborhoods). They seem to have truly missed out on one of the greatest times of life, when responsibility is minimal and possibility is endless, when the most difficult decision you have to make all day is whether to ride bikes or play basketball with your friends (after you mow the lawn or clean the bathroom floor, of course).

So childhood remains in the smallest of towns.

Now I live in Urbana (which is a small town compared to Chicago, but a large town compared to Home). I've noticed that kids don't run around here in the summer the way they do back Home. That's too bad; but I can't say I'm surprised. I can say that I'm disappointed. Disappointed for the kids who have missed out on the purest form of childhood: one free of worry; one fostered in a society that encourages growth, rather than mere survival; one characterized by a sense of wonder and a spirit of honest fun. Yet most of all, I'm disappointed for the future generations of kids who will grow up in a social climate that will essentially make them prisoners, unable to go outside and play out of their parents' sight. I'm afraid that is the world my son has entered, and that we will have keep our eyes on him at all times to make sure that nothing ever happens to him. But that is not the experience I want for him, and I will do whatever I can to make sure that his childhood is every bit as moral, educational, fun, and free as mine was.

Ebert: Congratulations on the newcomer, and on a wonderful post. You sound like a good father. Society is making that more difficult than it should be.

When I was a kid, makes me sound like I'm eighty I know (I just turned twenty)anyways, when I was a kid my parents would lock us outside so we (my siblings and I) wouldn't become couch potatoes. At the start of the day we wouldn't want to stay out and by the end we wouldn't want to come in. The one thing I remember was my mother would give each one of us a large picnic blanket and with that one blanket each of us had we could play for hours. One of our favorite games was chasing each other around holding the blankets so we looked like giant butterflies. I love remembering things like this, but there is alaways this feeling of melancholy attached to these memories. I know this has almost no connection to what you wrote, but I guess I just wanted to know where being a child became complicated?

Roger, I think the big difference between today's children and the children of your time is technology and information.

I am 20 and I have grown up in an era of safety. I have been around many children and many peers. After all I have been though, all I can say is: you wouldn't believe the things children are capable of when left alone. When you went to school, how many of your friends made Drain-o bombs? I knew many people that knew how to make explosives that were strong enough to uproot a tree. I knew kids who could get on a computer and cripple a country or drive enemies to the brink of suicide. I've met people who could tell you how to make meth even if they have never take the drug, or have ever been interested in making it.

Yet I can also tell you of people that know more about the world then any kid during your time. I myself have became fluent in a foreign language simply with the help of the internet and a pair of headphones. I have seen films that were never translated because they weren't popular enough for companies to do so. I've seen TV shows that are translated by fans because many companies take months to give out poor quality and chopped versions. I've met with others like me using the web, fellow atheist that I could not meet anywhere else.

Sure things are more safety oriented, but technology made it that way, but it also opened up many doors. There are manuals on creating high grade explosives from home made equipment. Yet there are also manuals on how make a symphony with your own two hands.

Is more safety justified? I don't know for sure. But the world hasn't just changed, kids have changed too. The kids of the future are light years ahead of the kids of the past.

Ebert: You sound light-years ahead, but a lot of people have some catching up to do.

Dear Roger,

Another good one. And, that childhood you describe didn't end in the Vietnam Era. You've been describing so much of my own childhood (from the 70s), except that I was the Pakistani/Muslim kid in the neighborhood. I'm suspecting that there was not a Pakistani or Muslim kid in your neighborhood, but perhaps some other first generation immigrant. Maybe German or something.

One of the real problems in our society is definitely this culture of fear (rather: fear-mongering). But, I think that this fear-mongering culture was -- to significantly lesser degree, perhaps -- present in the era of your childhood (i.e. the Cold War). Perhaps it wasn't as suffocating as it is now?

I suspect that one major difference between your childhood's era and mine is that there was much more of a focus on *dignity* in your era. And, that is one thing I appreciate about our president: anyone can say what they want about his politics, but he definitely conducts himself -- at least in front of the camera -- with an air of dignity. There is something not only necessary, but also appealing about dignity (in the way we conduct ourselves, and dignity in the way we interact with others). That ties in with manners, chivalry, etc.. Perhaps that dignity was part of John Wayne's appeal, and that brutish lack of dignity is part of the repulsiveness of someone else you blogged about. If I am correct in this point, then it is interesting that the dusty cowboy was full of dignity, and the guy in the business suit is the brute. [And, I'm definitely not claiming to be any sort of posterboy of dignity.]

Regarding legalizing drugs, there are plenty of arguments in both directions, and many of those arguments are based on unsubstantiated hypotheticals. For example, just as you mention that it would take away the profit motive for the cartels, I suspect that the legalizing of drugs would have Drug Lords jumping for joy, knowing that the market is now wide open for them, while looking for some multi-national corporation to buy them out. My point is that the discussion has to be restructured, otherwise it will turn into a back-and-forth (even by people who haven't chosen a side).

To help facilitate the drug discussion, we have a few issues:

1- First, we have to find what everyone can agree upon. For example, regardless of a person's opinion on drugs (use, dependency and legalization), I suspect that all sides agree that a big problem is the problem of dirty needles, and tainted drugs (that might have been pre-mixed with things like rat poisoning). That is not to say that we all should push for clean LSD, but I suspect that we can all agree on some issues, and find as many of those issues as is possible.

2- One problem in the discussion is that we've given one term -- "drugs" -- for a wide variety of these substances. Each one has to be dealt with individually. The discussion for marijuana will be different than the strategy for tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, etc.. The skeptic in me suspects that the drugs most likely to be legalized are going to be the drugs that are most easily taxed.

And, this applies to your whole entry, I think the search for "answers" will leave us with a handful of unanswered questions. Rather, if we speak of "goals" -- tangible, specific goals -- then we can speak of steps and plans. Then, we can perhaps ease our collective lament (without drugs).

Anyways, thanks again. I hope all is well.

Omer M

Side point - I don't like to nitpick on typos in blogs or comments, but is it just me, or is the word "Guidelines" all the way at the bottom of the screen misspelled?

Omer M

Ebert: The fact that it has taken a year for someone to notice this suggests the Guidelines are not attracting a lot of attention.

I think so much of this depends on where you live.

As a young child in the 80's I had the freedom to run, walk, or ride my bike anywhere I liked. I grew up in a small Michigan town only about 40 minutes from Detroit. At the age of 12 we moved a little further north to a rural area, and still my parents had no problem letting me roam free.

I don't have children now, but I know that here in Chicago I wouldn't always feel safe letting my children go where they please. If I move to a different city, small or big, maybe I'll feel different. If I moved back to my hometown, I know that little has truly changed, and my children would be free to explore.

Technology and information sharing has been mentioned on a few posts here, and I agree that things have changed for the scarier. But even still, we can't keep children, who are only little people, in a bubble. If we do what we can as parents to teach them, and to help them understand the world around them, perhaps they will make wise choices. And then again, maybe they won't. But a parent is not the child, and the child must decide for him/herself.

To follow up on Maurio's comment about how technology came bringing the good and the bad with it...

There are days when I can just feel the inevitability of things hanging over us all. Nothing seems to be able to stop the forward march, for better or worse. Every solution seems to bring about more problems. Every problem seems to provide a solution to something else. When I watch "Baraka" and see people who have next to nothing but seem happier than very knowledgeable people I know - think of Johnny in "Naked" but if he were actually in decent circumstances - well, I dunno, it just seems like maybe Buddhists have it right. The best thing for us all to do is nothing... Simply be at peace. But then again, I don't think I could ever do that. I'd be tired of it or bored eventually... Like I said, you can't stop the forward march. People are gonna do what they do in the end. Mankind is gonna go where it goes (and then be gone forever). Or, at least, it feels like that...

I grew up in a very small town with 560 people in Oregon.

As a child we played sports every day. We hiked, made forts and got into trouble. I must have broken all my fingers before I was 12. I broke my arm three times and my ankle twice. I was very active.

Of course there are horrible people out there and every year a deadly accident happens to a young one. I remember a boy who impaled himself on his own bike! I didn't ride mine for a month because of that story. But I eventually moved on and I was jumping ramps and dirt hills before you knew it (without a helmet!).

So I think parents have to simply allow the universe the grace that things will work out. This might include tragedy but in most cases it doesn't. No one want's something horrible to happen to their kids but safety, happiness and good will are not a guarantee.

Besides, I think bad parents are the real danger.

--

Part of this whole "bad kid" nonsense has to do with popular culture, in particular music. I'm sad to say, the "Hip Pop" genre (if you can call it that) has definitely influenced the image that many teens think is cool. Now, I'm actually an avid rap/hip-hop fan, but for some reason today's radio-friendly music has distorted the image of this once brilliant genre of music. Nowadays, every rapper has to rap about his fancy cars, his multiple girls, his "bling", and so on. This image translates to the public, in particular the fashion/attitude trends of teenagers.
You'd be surprised at how many teenagers I go to high school with try to act this way, how many girls try to dress like the models in these videos, how many kids start fights with each other just because they think its cool to do so. Strangely, most of these kids have lived in suburban, predominantly white neighborhoods their entire lives.
I think this type of distorted image has made its way to countless teenagers because of the globalization due to new technology and media. When I lived in Manhattan, basketball, rollerblades, Nintendo 64, and yo-yo's were what was cool to us kids, believe it or not. Years later, after moving to Canada and still just a teenager, small kids are obsessed with text-messaging, the newest Playstation consoles, and Facebook chat. Every other teenager I've encountered on the city bus either has a pair of earphones plugged into their I-pods, a cell phone for texting, or both. Most of the time its both.
Just my theory.

Ebert: You sound light-years ahead, but a lot of people have some catching up to do.

Yep. We're the flintstones. Technology has us obsoleted. I wanna be reborn.

Reply to: Ebert: If we imported drugs, we could supervise their distribution and sale, imposing conditions such as now apply to alcohol. Fewer Americans would spend years or the rest of their lives as part of the world's largest prison population (by percentage). I don't know what the solution is. I really don't. What I do know is that something fundamental has disappeared from the American landscape,

(1) America used to be an isolationist nation. If China or Russia had massive problems, they didn't affect us.

(2) Then, World War II. WE decided to get involved, to stop Hitler.

(3) As of May 31, 2009, the Earth's population reached ~ 6,763,557,000. Asia accounts for over 60% of the world population with 3.8 billion.

World births have levelled off at about 137-million-per-year, since their peak at 163-million in the late 1990s. However, deaths are only around 56 million per year, and are expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050. The world's population is expected to reach about 9 billion by the year 2040. About 9.4 billion by 2050.

Look at a map. Where are we going to put an extra three billion people?

America's population increases by one percent a year. Forty percent of this growth comes from immigration. Most immigrants settle in cities like New York; Miami, Florida; Houston and Dallas, Texas; and Los Angeles.

Do you want to know what the solution is? The solution is easy. Reduce the world's population below 3 billion and keep it there.

Most of America's problems are being brought in from other nations.

Our cities are in crisis. The freeways back up, and travel time has cut off the suburbs. We're not going to build a new mega-city, we're just going to keep increasing the population density of our current cities. Los Angeles is being hit hard.

I lived in the Greater Chicago area (Tinley Park) for a year. The winter was so harsh, I was sick all the time. I moved to Los Angeles. I understand why immigrants want to live in Los Angeles. I just want to sell a couple of scripts, and make enough contacts that I can work from northern California.
But that's not a solution to the greater problem.

The greatest, most serious problem we're facing is the extra 2.8 BILLION earthlings who will appear between now and the year 2050.

You can travel the globe, look everywhere, and you won't "see" that problem anywhere. But it will be here. Soon.

In some movies, you see "Death Squads." We take precautions against a biological attack. But what we don't do... is discuss the possibility of solving the problem. We just close our eyes and go "No, no, no, no." It would be unthinkable to impose mandatory birth controls. The right of people to have children should be unregulated?

Legalizing drugs isn't going to change anything. I'm sorry, but if you expected a brilliant analysis of what legalizing drugs would do to American society, I just don't have it in me. Twenty years ago, I would have loved to debate this topic. Today, it's just a diversion that keeps us from having to think about the real problem.

Kids can't go out and play... they can't be free-range kids... because our cities are too crowded.

Reply to: have a theory on this: We, as modern-day parents, are so dependent on the validation of having our children's love, that we have gone overboard in protecting them. What causes this? When did this start? Is it too late to reverse these effects?

For this generation, it is. But if you look at a generation that starts in, say, 2050, you COULD reverse the trend. If you're willing to say that 3.8 billion people in Asia is a clear and present danger to the American quality of life. The current Chinese plan to build a national freeway grid is going to double gas prices.

Take heart Roger, things haven't changed so much. Im 26 years old and how you've described your childhood, is in many ways very similar to my own. My parents were very much in favor of the FREE RANGE childhood, although they would call it simply childhood. Bad things happened when they were kids, just the same way that bad things happened when I was a kid. When I was a kid the Columbine shooting happened, when they were kids the University of Texas shooting happened. When they were kids it was the soviets making everyone paranoid, now it terrorists.

My parents were aware that drugs were available, that predators existed and that like you said "s**t happens" but they insisted that me and my brother explore the world, even if that only meant our neighborhood. They knew the risk was worth it, that what was gained was important, essential even.

The only thing I see as being fundamentally different is peoples method of getting "information". When my parents were kids they had Cronkite and Murrow, people who's intend was to inform. Now we have O'Riely and Hanity, people who's intention is to shape information to make sure we don't click away, usually by scaring they hell out of us.

I think its a mistake to assume that the world has changed, that even people have changed. There is simply just more of us. The more times you flip a coin the more times it will come up heads, it doesn't mean its happening more than tails.

I have a home in Portugal. Here, the possession of any and all illegal drugs will warrant a citation requiring an appearance before a magistrate. At that point it ceases to be a criminal issue, it is a health issue. The "offender" is offered a variety of options which s/he may choose to accept, or not. If you think you have a drug problem and would like to overcome it, you will be given the tools for as long and as often as you need the help. Seems to work out pretty well.

The U.S. has 5% of the worlds population, and 25% of the worlds incarcerated. Seems that we are either the worlds most evil of peoples, or that our fears have seriously distorted our perceptions of ourselves and of our innate humanity. Either way, this train has gotten pretty far off track.

(BTW: If that video was of "The World's Worst Mom", then heck. My mom was way worse than that... and God bless her for it!)

A new friend recently invited me to the annual pool party at her home. While having a beverage and becoming acquainted with all the guests I noticed she had a diving board. A diving board! At her house! Alas, here in Houston diving boards and slides have become a thing of the past. It seems as though Big Insurance and Its Line of Lawyers has removed the fun from summer. Well, almost. I thank my friend for having the nerve (and the pockets) to rebel against the tyranny of safety, and for allowing me to glimpse again back into the well of my youth. What a great day.

Hiya, Rog:

Younger than you by about twenty years, I had a similar childhood. "Get outside and blow the stink off ya" my dad would say. Being inside the house meant cleaning inside the house or doing homework (except for watching the Red Skelton show on Tuesdays). My friends and I were always moving, always running, riding our bikes, playing. I have never had a particularly good diet, but I never came close to being overweight until I slowed down and became an adult.

That is one thing I am surprised you didn't touch upon in your post: today's inside-kids are fatter than yesterday's outside-kids. People complain about children getting fatter, but when the only time they run is on Monday evening's soccer game, is it any surprise they put on weight?

People say "kids today don't do anything but sit on their butts playing video games and watching tv", but when every other activity is considered "unsafe" unless under adult supervision, what's left? One of my children has pretty much never been unsupervised in his entire 12-year-old life. Indeed, he gets nervous if he has to be alone, even in his own house. To visit his friend six blocks away, he must arrange a ride with his mother or his friend's mother or the visit ain't happening. (I don't live with the boy, or I'd walk him myself.)

Kids are getting fatter because their parents won't let them "go outside and play" by themselves and with friends. Trying to make our children safe now is setting them up for obesity-related illnesses as young adults. How is that safe?

To the Maurio commenter above, you sound incredibly bright at any age, but exceptionally so for someone who is 20. As you have met folks who can do all the things you listed, I have met many bright young people like you. They are tuned in with information, technology, and seem to have an edge that previous generations did not. But after getting to know many (20 somethings) in more depth, peculiar character traits come to the surface. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it's a certain disconnect that is related to lack of direct personal interaction.

I don't think this is the same old "you damn kids with your loud music" stuff. I co-run an Internet media company. I live eat and breath this stuff. But there is definitely a massive shift taking place, perhaps as important as the transition from hunter-gather to agricultural societies.

I consider myself lucky enough to have gone to school when cell phones where like small car batteries. Something always feels not right, seeing a 10 year old kid on his/her bike, talking on a cell phone. I know, incredibly old fashion thinking. I should just be happy kids still ride bikes.

Wow, Roger. Keep it up with this stuff and you just might qualify to take Andy Rooney's place when he leaves 60 Minutes. Imagine Steve Croft ending the program by announcing, "And now, a few minutes... with Roger Ebert".

Then perhaps you might go on to rant about how people are too trigger-happy, or about how kids are too easily vulnerable, or about how marijuana is all over the place, or about how "Hoop Dreams" should have gotten a nomination for Best Documentary (or Best Picture). Sound like an interesting job to you?

Ebert: Been there, done that.

ebert, you didn't say you think drugs should be legalized, but i wish more people would consider it a real idea like you did. there is something to it.

Reading this reminded me of the great Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin film Little Fugitive, about young boy, no older than 8, who runs off to Cony Island after being tricked into thinking he killed his brother. That film, from 1953, would be a thriller if it were made today. Film in general is very representative about the greatness of childhood. The great films about childhood are all about being without supervision, being in danger, getting in over your head. I'm 21 and not a parent, but I have a niece and nephew and while I worry about them (thinking about how vulnerbale they are at every moment can be frightening), I also think it's a shame they're so confined to planned activities and the comfort of their living room and backyard. At my niece's age I was riding my bike to a park halfway across town with my friends, on those endless, sometimes horrible, sometimes magical afternoons. The most adventure she has is plugging in a Hannah Montana videogame into the tv. I think children crave avdenture and new experiences, but are being conditioned into adopting their parents extreme caution. The first few times I babysat my niece and nephew alone, my niece insisted on carrying a piece of paper with her address and phone number in her jacket pocket, because nearly all of her trips outside were ones where she was closely guarded.

Even films have changed. Nowadays the only time we see children alone, it's as a result of economic circumstance, poverty, or war, like the kids in George Washington, Chop Shop, Ratcatcher, City of God, and Turtles Can Fly.

More than anything I think kids are being deprived of that feeling of astonishment and amazement that comes after a new childhood adventure, where exploring a new part of your city can be as thrilling as skydiving.

I had a similar meditation in my own blog about a month ago. Maybe the summer season brings it out:

Kids, cover your ears — I learned how to drink beer in the Boy Scouts.

It seems like a very long time ago, and it is, comparatively. I was an active Boy Scout from 1964 to 1971, when I became an Explorer Scout. I earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and that’s something you always are, never used to be. I once had an editor who was quite proud that his newsroom contained two Eagle Scouts, myself and a humorless but uber-competent photo wrangler. “Journalists almost never come from the ranks of scouting,” declaimed this editor. “That’s because journalists question authority.”

Not quite. If you don’t question authority, how do you find out stuff? At any rate, being an Eagle Scout in a newsroom generally meant only that you were often called upon to fix stuff. Be prepared, and all that.

But back to the beer.

Right in the midst of the Vietnam War, my scoutmaster was an Army captain, and his assistant, an Army lieutenant. I suspect they preferred dealing with a bunch of eager beavers instead of resentful draftees.

Campouts occurred deep, deep, deep in the hills of Pupukea, often several miles past the established Boy Scout property. Their only rule was, whatever you want, you have to carry in yourself, and then you have to take it back out with you. By the time we’d humped everything over the hills, we were almost too dog-tired to set up camp. But there was no choice. Either you prepped and policed the ground and pitched your shelter-half yourself, or you slept out in the open. The scoutmasters would sit and smoke littler cigars and call out helpful hints, but not lift a finger to help. You learn pretty quick that way how to keep the rain off your head.

After dinner — Vienna Sausages, FGS! — we’d pull out our hoarded cans of beer and take some sips. No chugging. Every 12-oz can had been carried maybe five to ten miles over hilly trails. Even a six-pack gets amazingly heavy when it’s on your back or hip that long and that far. Those few sips were like heaven, because we’d paid for them in sweat.

The point wasn’t drinking or getting drunk. These scoutmasters had a healthy appreciation for liquor and knew we’d be consuming it soon, being normal teenagers with normal boozy parents. It was a way of easing us into inevitable liquor in a controlled environment, reinforcing the notion that alcohol consumption is primarily a social activity. Binge-drinking, the way kids do now, is all about who passes out first, not who’s having the most fun, and it can only be done with a total lack of parental supervision.

Scoutmasters are the nearest thing to a parent-figure substitute, and in some ways, you try harder to please them — because they aren’t family and they aren’t stuck with you, no matter what. It takes work.

This little anecdote will likely horrify current scouting executives, these guys who also hound gay scouts out of their troops. We had some kids in our troop who were likely gay, and they’d be the butt of teasing, just like any other teenage boy who’s a little bit different.

This was the only time I saw my scoutmaster get angry. He lectured us like Patton On The Mount. Everybody’s different, he said, but what we all have in common is that we’re part of a team. We have to work together not in spite of our differences, but because of them. In America, everyone should get an equal shot, particularly in a public function like the Boy Scouts. We’re all in this together, all the way from a group of boys around a campfire to every citizen in the nation.

My scoutmasters eventually rotated out of Hawaii back to Vietnam, and I lost track of them. When I was drafted a few years later, I wondered if we’d serve together.

Today, I can hold my beer, and when I hear about teenagers getting drunk and stupid and dangerous, I know they had easy access to it and also that no one was watching out for them. Every once in a while, I lift my glass and toast the Boy Scouts of America.

Ebert: I take it this was not a member of your troop:

http://fairimmigration.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/boy-scout.jpg

I'm 33 and was a free-range kid. I have two young kids and really want them to enjoy some of the freedom that I felt as a kid. But I do worry. Just this morning I read the following in The Boston Globe:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/06/30/prosecutors_say_kidnapper_drugged_hanover_girl_6/

Just a six year old riding a bike. It shouldn't be this way, but it is. It's so sad. You can kind of understand why that 15 year old's parents waited to let him ride through the park. Each of us fears that the next story in the paper could be about our family. But at the same time, I want my kids to know the joy of being outside all day in the summer, playing sports, going swimming, riding bikes - all the fun things I used to do.

My two are still too young to be on their own, but when the time comes, I'm not sure what we'll do.

I kinda understand what Maurio is saying, I guess courtesy twitter, facebook, google information is available so easily. A generation ago, information came with wisdom, not anymore.

So kids probably have lot more information today than we ever did and a lot less experience/wisdom simply cos they are kids.

I am an Indian, and I have been in chicago for a few years now, and often I do feel that the new generation is literally getting an "Eggshell" world of extreme political correctness and over analysis of every event....
and not just about events with a larger social impact...even smaller personal events are overanalysed and overassessed to death!

I hear soo often sentences like " I have an eating disorder because when I was 12 I didnt have a date for the prom and my mom suggested I wear a darker color and not the pink dress I soo wanted ", "I am commitment phobic because my parents had a very cold marraige", "My shrink told me that due to my nagging mother I can never enjoy sex in my own bed..."....

I guess this is a consequence of the kind of world kids are growing up in, or the kind of world we are creating for them to grow up in, a place where its the world's business to make sure it always presents its safer , prettier side to you. And if it breaks that rule, then you have every right to react in any which way you chose.....

The common threads that run through many responses seems to be the twin childhood talismans of freedom and exploration. Our humanity is linked to the joy that comes from our childhood imagination, which is tied to our sensual experiences. These thrive when we are allowed to explore and be free, to experience.

I don't think that safety and freedom are mutually exclusive. Surely, as parents, we should protect young children from pernicious influences, particularly with regard to technology and the internet. We also teach them to protect themselves, to trust themselves, to set goals that are their own. Do we play catch with our children because we want them to enjoy a great game, or because we want them to be great athletes? A free range kid will astonish you with their radiance and vitality.

Time to go read my favorite poem of all time, Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill. It captures completely what I'm talking about.

http://www.bigeye.com/fernhill.htm

Ebert: Yes. I just added this among the YouTubes at the bottom of the entry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg-_ah0JfhU

It seems like a lot of parents feel like their children won't learn about the dangers of the world unless they are constantly exposed to horror stories about them. By keeping them on a tight leash, they're teaching children to avoid problems by skirting them, rather than to deal with them while still leading a normal life. I was raised by an American mother and Brazilian father in a Brazilian city with about 4,000,000 people and a murder rate well over 60 per 100,000 inhabitants. My mother, brother, and sister have all had their cars robbed at gunpoint, with the latter two being taken to ATMs with the thieves to empty their bank accounts. Despite all this, as kids we were encouraged to go about and ride our bikes and play soccer with street kids and walk to the beach and do whatever we wanted to, as long as our parents knew where we were. I think that being given liberty and trust in an environment like that makes children more responsible and enhances their common sense. In the end, you're still a little paranoid and suspicious of everyone when you're out and about in a "dangerous world," but isn't that more worthwhile (and fun) than being paranoid while avoiding certain activities altogether?

Ironically, I moved to the US (Washington, DC: not particularly known for its safety around here) in large part because I didn't want any children I might have living in such a violent area, but I had no idea of the parenting environment that has been promoted in this country since I moved here. It says a lot when several respected media outlets suggested Lenore Skenazy as a contender for "Worst Mother in the World" because she allowed her child to ride the New York City Subway alone at age 9. We'll see about that in 20 years or so.

When I was a kid my mother had wished that I would learn piano but I was too busy literally climbing a tree, flying a kite or taking a hike. American kids may not have jobs in the workforce, but exploring was my full-time occupation.
When the Army transfered my family to Japan we went everywhere and saw everything. I'd wander off on my own – a white kid in a land full of Japanese okasans who would coo over my brunette hair and hazel eyes. My parents, either out of respect for my independence or wariness of trying to keep up often "let" me roam solo, sometimes in inopportune locations.
There was the time I became fascinated by sliding doors in Shinjuku station, my brief jaunt as an amateur geologist off the trails of Mt. Fuji, or my fascination with Meiji-era armor at the Imperial palace.
Physically, I was one of those kids you'd see take a header over the handlebars then bounce back up and keep riding. The real threat was my social behavior. I was a loose canon In a land where etiquette & manners spoke more than Britannica volumes of words ever would.
Priceless calligraphy set? I painted a motorcycle.
Sacred temple bell? Drum solo.
Precious silk worms? Tasty snack.
To me, being a kid meant having fun and being yourself was more important than following rules–even if it was dangerous or just embarrassing.

Ebert: He was a brave boy who first ate a silkworm.

"let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could."

...I don't get it

Ebert: The kid who got away became a priest. The kid who got caught became a criminal.

isn't that similar to what happened in mystic river? instead of a priest, one became a police officer. and who they got away from was different too, but still...

back in 1980, when both i and the drinking age were 18, drinking and driving wasn't focused on the way it is now. my friend mike and i were driving to the shore from north jersey with a six-pack between us. as we went through a toll booth on the garden state parkway, there was an officer lurking at the booth, and he told us to pull over. we were terrified, as should anyone be at that point. he didn't give us a ticket or arrest us. instead, he made us feel stupid for what we were doing, then he let us go. it's possible that we were grateful for the mercy, and that's why i've never done that again. if he had thrown the book at us, we might have done it again just to show that we could get away with it the next time.

I'm not sure when the shift occured in American culture, but I was a free-range child of the 80s. But ... my circumstances were slightly different than most Americans of that decade. I grew up mostly overseas. And I can specifically recall the freedom my parents let me have growing up in Bolivia and Brazil in the late 80s because I can't see that amount of freedom being granted today.

When I was 8-10 years old (86-88) I lived in La Paz, Bolivia. At an altitude of 11 to 12 thousand feet (depending on which region of the city!) this is the highest capitol city in the world, but I would have to say one of the nicest. We lived in a rich residential neighborhood, about a mile or two from the international school, and surrounded by shops and houses and a great big river. That part of the city basically ran out in those days, ending in partial slums and boxcar canyons. My friends and I did a lot of exploring, on terrain reminding me of an old John Wayne movie, climbing up into the hills, trying to look down on our neighborhood. We talked with the locals, honing our Spanish, went to the arcades that were 3-4 years out of date, and in the last 3 months that I lived there, La Paz got its first McDonalds, which was treated as fine dining. We basically had the run of whereever we could walk or ride our bikes to. The city was too big and too much mountain (NOT hill) to cover entire, and we weren't allowed to take a taxi unless we asked permission, so it was basically the neighborhood where the diplomats lived and surrounds, but we took it all in, and unsupervised. I walked to my piano lessons, and during the summer I would take 5 bolivianos (currency) every day from my father's top dresser drawer (where he told me to) to go up to the open air markets and browse GI Joes and sucker-rings (candy).

Basically, except for the movies, which the lower area of La Paz did not have, it sounds a lot like the kind of child hood that you and a lot of children of the 50s had, but I don't think it would have been possible if it weren't overseas.

I think I will pause for a while and present the Brazil (88-90) and India installments (91-94) at some other time.

Your friend in Astronomy,

Miles Blanton

PS I know this comment has nothing to do with Astronomy, but its all about brand recognition :)

In response to Bill Hays:

So the solution to making the world safer for our children is to kill over half of its population? Seems a little counterintuitive to me.

Incidentally, I think the American involvement in World War II wasn't so much a choice out of some moral imperative, but rather direct retaliation for the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

I hope you were going for satire, but that ain't no modest proposal.

As for the “world’s worst mum…”

In the late ‘70’s, when I was around 14, I lived in Bergen county, new jersey, right near giants stadium. A common summer day included an 80-cent train ride to Hoboken and a 50-cent subway sprint under the Hudson river to penn station beneath Madison square garden. we’d visit the empire state building or the world trade centers or macy’s. we’d play elevator tag until we got kicked out of the building. We’d buy hotdogs on the street, and sometimes we’d find someone selling fireworks that we’d smuggle home. We’d use those to blast half a soda can about 20 feet in the air.

When my mother asked what I had done on those days, my answer was, “we took a train over to new york.” The policy, which was never stated but observed, was that I wouldn’t be in trouble if I were honest, and if I would be told if I did something wrong so that I wouldn’t do it again. i hold that policy with my kids, who are 11 and 14.

Looking back, I now have to ask if my mother was very trusting, or is it possible she was very unaware of the dangers of what I was doing? Did today’s dangers exist back then? To what degree? Maybe they were always there, but they weren’t publicized the way things are today. Maybe “today” is really the same as back then, but back then we didn’t know it because nobody talked about it and there was no internet or CNN to tell us about all those missing kids snatched off the streets.

We used to play outside til "Zorro" came on and then you could hear all the kids on our corner yelling "Zorro is on"! On rainy days we used to play jump rope made out of rubber bands in someone's basement. On sunny, hot days we would all ride our bikes to the town pool. When you changed into your bathing suit and came out you had to have someone check in between your toes (I could never figure out why when I was a kid) And every hour we had to get out of the pool to "rest" while the lifeguards swam and put on shows for us. Then out for ice cream and ride our bikes home where you came in hot, tired, sunburned and feeling great.

Ebert: Nobody ever checked between my toes. What were they looking for?

I usually bristle against sepia-toned ruminations on the good old days, when placed in the context of how kids these days don't know what they're missing, but this is a well-reasoned and thought-provoking piece. Thanks.

(Also: I wish you'd revisit The Royal Tenenbaums for possible inclusion in your great movies series, for many reasons but not the least of them is that this topic is rather lovingly addressed in the movie)

dear parents,

you claim you want your kids to ride their bikes in the park and through the streets, but you're afraid of what might happen. how about putting down the remote, getting off your ass, and going with them?

kids don't want your money or all those things you're buying to make them happy. they want your time and attention. if your kids put more value in the things you're buying for them instead of the time you spend with them, then that's your fault because you taught those values.

i bet you can use some exercise too.

I don't think this obsessive concern with children has anything really to do with safety. Like you, I roamed freely on my bike - played on trestles - made gunpowder - repaired motorcycles and rode them at 10 - stayed out all night with my telescope - had a few illicit beers with my buddies - walked myself to the ball park for games, which my parents attended later - and walked myself home (loved the sound of cleats on pavement - metal cleats).

My parents loved me more than modern parents love their kids by letting me live. And this was not a small town - it was suburban Atlanta, that "dangerous!" city. I think what is going on is that our narcissistic parents see the children essentially as extensions of themselves, and not as individual people. I know this is not conscious but it is real. They are possessions, like expensive gadgets - investments. Dear God, don't leave the cover off the Porsche! God forbid Johnny get a scratch. Or catch a crawdad.

I feel sorry for modern kids. Not just because they are missing out on so much fun and discovery - but because they must endure their obsessive, narcissistic parents.

-drl

Ebert: I take it this was not a member of your troop:
http://fairimmigration.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/boy-scout.jpg

Well, he IS wearing "proficiency badges,"

Over-parenting is a phenomenon afflicting the yuppie middle-class in well-heeled cities and suburbs.

It's much less common in working class cities, where free-range childhoods are still very much in vogue, and where yuppies remain a minority class. You want your kids to run around in the woods all day, raise them in Pittsburgh.

Ebert: Wow. And...ah...what happend to him>?

suspended for a day. Can you imagine the lawsuits if it happened today?

Ebert: I pictured him being thrown over your chair and landing on his head.

When some parents began reining in their kids from wandering around the neighborhood freely (whenever that might have been), did it make the remaining kids who roamed freely appear more vulnerable, since they were on the streets and in the yards in increasingly vacant and (seemingly) menacing neighborhoods? In other words, I can see how this protectiveness (or over-protectiveness?) could cascade quite quickly.

The notion of allowing kids to range freely (as I did in the late '50s and early '60s) appeals to me. In my hometown of 10,000, though, my dad, a local businessman, once boasted to me that he knew every family in town. I'm sure this wasn't literally true, but I can see how the degree of exaggeration might not have been all that great.

It seems to me that to have free-range-safe communities now, we'd have to build from scratch. And for that to happen--since this is mainly a matter of trust--the communities would have to be small, and everyone would need to have at least a nodding acquaintance with most of their neighbors. It wouldn't be a bad project.

Roger,

Thank you for your continually thoughtful posts. My wife and I have tried to allow our kids to be kids. We try not to program their time into too many planned "activities", other than maybe allowing them to choose one that they love. Part of this is for economic reasons, and part for the chance to allow them to just go out with their friends and play.

I think one of the reasons we have less kids being kids is that we have a serious shortage of adults acting like adults. As you said, we try to legislate undesirable things out of existence, somehow selfishly believing that we all deserve happiness. Where is that written? Even the founding fathers only allowed for the pursuit of it. We can't bear to see our kids hurt or fail, so we work to prevent those occurrences instead of allowing them to mature by learning from failures and mistakes. I'm reminded of Pixar's "The Incredibles" in which the hero laments the celebration of mediocrity.

I also believe the media sensationalism of tragedies involving children has hurt us as well. Of course, it needs to be reported, but it's a shame that positive news doesn't sell.

I think we need more mature adults willing to be role models and examples. Fathers and mothers who want to leave a legacy in the people they raise. And people of all ages who have learned the value of selflessness. And of drinking water from the garden hose.

Ebert: I suppose it's not a great idea, but whadelse ya gonna do?

Ahh, mumbledypeg. We played that. We constantly had scabs on our knees from bike accidents, climbing accidents, whatever. We'd wander down to "the fields" behind my grandmother's house and have our adventures. If we were doing something especially stupid, some adult in the park would yell at us. Nowadays they'd be afraid our Dads would come back and beat them up, I guess. I was only born in '71 but things have changed so much so fast.

As for drugs, I've seen their destruction up close. Obama's first step in treating it as a disease instead of a crime is one in the right direction. I'd legalize marijuana immediately, though I've never smoked it. Regulate the hell out of the rest. Imagine Hollywood without cocaine. Would movies ever get made? Heh. Sometimes I think legalization can never happen here, but 5 years ago I thought I'd never see a black President. So maybe we can grow up as a nation, but too many people make money off drug enforcement and the prison industry.

Free Range Children: Our daughter Laura was eight in 1965, when she asked us if she could ride the bus from tiny Park Ridge New Jersey into New York City with seven of her friends. No escorts, no parents, just eight kids. We said yes. I had an office in a midtown art studio, and right on schedule, Laura and her friends checked in, went out window-shopping, and as I remember, returned in time to stick me with the bill for lunch. I think we rode a commuter bus home together, but at age 85, my memory of a 44-year-old event is not reliable.

The culture of parental overprotectiveness probably got started from a few different things:

1) The "don't talk to strangers" campaign (mentioned earlier in this thread). If you look at statistics about molestation and kidnapping, one of the ugly truths is that a lot of kids are molested or abducted by someone they know -- a family member or close relative. Since this wasn't something they could talk about directly at the time (the idea that children were being routinely molested by their own families was unacceptable), they had to shift the blame to the all-purpose "Stranger With Candy".

2) The "parenting without parenting" mindset. Dump the kids in the school, ferry them to ball clubs and swimming lessons, but don't actually try to, you know, be a parent. Don't bother going out into the backyard and helping them build that fort out of cardboard boxes even if they want it. The end result is a lot of parents who talk a lot about their kid's "progress" as if they were responsible for the manufacture of a car.

3) The media certainly haven't helped either. But the first two seem to have had the most immediate impact.

Ebert: I pictured him being thrown over your chair and landing on his head.

nope not even a scratch'

By the way, Roger, that sociologist you quoted who attributes problems with the schools to their being run by women has been pretty much thoroughly debunked. (For starters, school policy-making is not dominated by women, statistically, and secondly, the modern school system was developed by men -- namely people like Dewey and Taylor -- for boys. The idea of universal female education wasn't even on the radar when modern schooling was developed. Could it be actually that some of the problem is that there's an ingrained attitude that Boys Should Be Boys, and therefore can't -- and don't -- get taught how to behave in social settings? Someone did right by you, so it isn't universal.)

Also, I'm going to have to take exception to Bill Hays' contention that "America used to be an isolationist nation." The United States was never an "isolationist nation." As far back as 1775, the US was already expansionist and interfering in international territories (with the capture of the formerly British-colonised New Providence Island in the Caribbean, in case my link doesn't work).

Roger,

My wife and I live in a lower middle class New York town in an apartment complex. We see unsupervised children (3 to ten years old) wandering around without parents all the time, and it's a rather big complex on a busy road complete with woods. These are free range kids and nobody gives a second thought.

Also, I've done some sociology study in inner cities and there people still do indeed whoop their kids and let their neighbors whoop them too if needed.

I suspect there is a relationshiop between economic success and over-protectiveness of children. Maybe its due to more education or perhaps, and I strongly suspect, an awareness of being on the top and being wary of those beneath you...and a wish to protect your children from the unfamilair "other."

In other words, perhaps as social stratification increases so does the overprotection of the winners.

Interestingly, perhaps as the recession continues, and maybe gets worse, we'll see more free range kids as people start getting dropped from the upper income tax and education bracket.

My Child Will Have the Advantage...

I have always believed that the perception that childhood is so much more dangerous than it once was is a little screwy. The folks who dish out "news" need to make money, and nothing grabs the attention of a parent-consumer like a child in danger. The trick, I think, is to sift our news for the occasional fact, setting aside the vast bulk of hype and opinion.

That said, I'm not sure that there is any increased danger to any individual kid. Not only is the total population of kids higher; the total number of competing media outlets, all seeking quick, attention-seeking headlines/teasers, seems to have grown (this doesn't include newspapers--clunky old devices that used to force folks to sift through large amounts of what were once called facts, making it very hard to find important things like the fate of Phil Spectre's hairpiece). Anyway...with more kids and more excitable reporters, comes the perception of much more danger. Perception is not reality, however, and I refuse to raise my kids based on what I saw on the "Bart's People" segment of my local news.

Now, how I raise my kids is my business, and I'm not going to bore anyone with the details, but here are some results:

My nine-year-old gets straight A's, and loves school. When we go out to a store or restaurant, he holds the door for others. At a Cub Scout related campout, he helped me set up the tent (without me asking), then went to help his friend and that father set up their tent (his friend kind of stood confused on the sidelines). Both at his latchkey program at school, and at Scouts, I've seen other kids ask him to settle their disputes (Matthew, tell him I had these Legos first!). After we moved to a house about two miles away, he started riding his bike to his best friend's house, with no ill effects.

My three-year-old tends to order other kids around, as in, "Okayyy, lets go on the slide now kids! You go first! Now it's my turn!" (Everything he says ends with an exclamation point).

I don't know for sure, but I think that my kids may be having a lot more fun than some of their peers.

Roger,

A quick thank you for addressing this topic. My girlfriend and I have spoken about this very topic at length and have committed that our marriage should be marked by the same careful but open-handed parenting that we were afforded only a few decades ago. I tramped through the streets of Moscow at the age of twelve, and at nine she braved the Wisconsin forests armed with a little hatchet and the empowerment of parents willing to let their children experience the world. Both of us look back at our childhood situations as one of the key reasons for any of the circumspection and confidence we can lay claim to. Thanks for giving us an expert (ahem) to back up our cause.

And your movie writing ain't bad either.

we're neutering the intellect and resourcefulness of our children by not allowing them to find and overcome challenges by themselves.

Thank you very much for this column. I think the benefits for Free Range Children far outweigh the litany of possible concerns.

Having lived in Europe for the last 7 years, I can confirm that children there are required to be more responsible at an earlier age and are generally better for it. You can go just about anywhere by public transport and by age 9 most children do. Parents can write a note with a child and send them down to the corner store to buy groceries, even cigarettes and alcohol. It is assumed that the parent is responsible and aware of the child's actions.

The difference I believe is how it is played in the media. Europeans ask me why America is so dangerous (they hear about it) how do people survive? - I don't think it is any more dangerous, but certainly movies, the news, and television would have you believe it.

It's nice to hear a Progressive liberal talking about how some prohibitive laws don't work. Which ones do? We have speeding laws but people drive the speed they think is safe. They don't want to obey the laws because it's the right thing to do, but because they fear being caught. When they don't fear being caught, they ignore prohibitive laws.

You're wrong about the prison population in the United States being the largest in the world by percentage. It is the largest period. There are more people in jail in the United States than any other country in the world including China. Source:

http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/28647949

Most of the people in jail in the United States committed victimless drug crimes. It should not be a crime, and indeed it is not a crime, regardless of what the state says, to hurt yourself. Laws against murder and theft have become so codified in human civilization that at this point they don't even need to be written down. We all understand that it is wrong to steal and kill. Those laws exist, not for the Utopian ideal of stopping the activity, but to create justice for the victims of the crime.

We need to eliminate the tens of thousands of prohibitive laws on the books, eliminate federal law enforcement agencies and devolve security to local communities.

I appreciate your crediting drug legalization to libertarians like me, but I wish you hadn't capitalized the "L". It could have been a sign of respect, but it might lead to identification with the un-libertarian Libertarian Party.

EBERT: "I've said this before: If I were running things, I would put other programs on hold and simply double every teacher's salary, to make the profession more attractive."

As the spouse of an elementary school teacher, I appreciate the financial boost--but I would add "and halve the average classroom size." Combined, the cost of such changes would be massive--but the long-term benefits incalculable.

Of course, another problem remains: the parents. On one end are the negligent/abusive ones; on the other, the hovering helicopters who are certain they know what's best for their child's education/socialization, and do not hesitate to offer their sage advice (Read: Pester the teacher, principal, school board.) I know some people in the latter category--nice people who love their children dearly. But when they complain to me about what's happening at school and what they're going to do about it, I cringe for the teacher--and for the children of these folks.

Short version: Love your children by setting them free (thank you, Sting), don't panic (thank you, Douglas Adams), and hope for the best. That is all ye can do on earth, and all ye need to do (sorry, Keats).

I was raised in New Zealand in the seventies/early eighties. Just yesterday I was talking with a friend from there about how lucky we were to be part of the last generation to be able to try risky stuff. I remember spelunking through long stormwater drains Harry Lime style and throwing tomatoes at passing cars and having fights with neighbourhood kids and parents wouldn't even come into it. Hours and hours of unsupervised time. It was bliss, even though I didn't really get it then.

Now I catch myself being anxious about my two year old son and all the ways he could possibly be hurt and I remind myself that being a perfect father is not being a giant man sized wad of cotton wool.

I’m a Chicago-born author now living in Lake Worth, Florida. I’m also a terminal cancer patient near the end of my life. For obvious reasons, I don’t spend a lot of time looking forward. I do, though, spend hours each day looking back to the time, in the late 1940s and almost all the 1950s, when I grew up on Chappel Avenue in South Shore. I remember that all we neighborhood kids – and there were a lot – played outside as much as we could without fear of any criminal or ominous happenings. I remember heading to the Avalon Theater on 79th Street almost every weekend, one of a group of a dozen or so boys and girls, unconcerned about anything other than my fear that Virginia Ross, my neighbor, would grab a seat next to me. Of course some of us were hurt – one boy suffered a broken leg when we were playing football in the street – but there was little fear in my heart or in my mom’s and dad’s. We had sword fights using sticks as weapons and garbage can lids as shields. We had wars firing spit balls at each other and played cowboy and Indians as much as possible.
Of course there were dangers. If someone I didn’t know offered me candy or tried to get friendly, I knew enough to follow my dad’s instructions and “run like hell.” All my memories of those free-range days, though, are happy.
After time in the Air Force, I returned to Chicago in the 1960’s as a student at the Art Institute. After dropping out as a hippy goof-off, I worked for Kroch’s and Brentano’s, eventually managing the store on the Outer Drive just north of the Chicago River.
I know you won’t remember this because you’ve no reason to, but you and I once sat at the same table in some Irish bar in Old Town (can’t remember the name). I have no idea why we were there other than to drink but I do remember speaking with you about something. People I meet now are not at all impressed by me though I’ve published a number of books. They are impressed when I tell then how you and I were buddies in the old days.
Kieran Doherty

Ebert: I have a feeling it was O'Rourke's. Rememebr a big photo of Brendan Behan saying the F-word? See my entry, "King, you're one of the best."

I'm not going to say, "Get well soon," because I also have had cancer troubles and I always want to ask people, "How exactly would you suggest I do that?"

Great essay.

The change started to happen in my young lifetime.

In the 80s, at our elementary school, we had a giant wooden labyrinthine structure that we referred to simply as "The Fort." It was the greatest piece of playground equipment ever. Built chaotically, the entire thing was climbable, with nooks and crannies. Perfect for any running, hiding, tagging, or make-believe game. Perfect.

Kids fell off it all the time (it was pretty tall). It was also made of wood, so we were constantly getting giant splinters from it. Kids were always getting hurt on it, one way or another. We didn't care. We were kids!

By the end of the 80s, it had been replaced by one of those plastic structures that are now ubiquitious in playgrounds. No splinters, not very tall, less chance for injury. No imagination required.

The Fort, RIP.

Perhaps this is an awfully naive and morbid idea, but I wonder if the fact that parents are being so overprotective of their kids nowadays means that those who would find it in their nature possible to do harm to a child must be more aggressive than they would have to have been years ago - thus the very horrific nature of crimes against children that we see today. I'm almost certain there wouldn't be any actual statistics to validate this idea though.

It would follow that to wonder whether parents' being a little less neurotic and fearful and actually allowing their children to live normal lives would not only fail to increase the rate of crime against children but would make those terrible crimes that do happen perhaps less gruesome. Not to mention the terribly healthy thing about children's living normal lives.

I was a free-range child and I'm grateful for the experience. Society has shut everybody in. It is kind of sad, but a sign of the times.

Who stole my son's bike? Other kids?

You are probably right, and I can't be too mad at them. Who knows what their circumstances are. Maybe they needed it more.

You might appreciate what I did last night to help alleviate my son's crushed spirit with humor: I stopped at the video store last night and picked up the perfect movie about a stolen bike:

Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Hilarious. It helped. Thank you, Pee Wee Herman.

You don't have the answers, and neither do I. But here are some random thoughts that popped into my mind as I read your entry.

I had a free range childhood. Growing up in a small town, I spent long summer hours exploring the neighborhood, which included a creek and small wooded area. The library was a five minute walk away, the park was two minutes by bike.

Later, I found out that they were dealing drugs out of the house two doors down, which my grandma called The Hoopie House. And once when I was in high school, while walking home from the library, a man followed me down the street in his truck with his penis in hand, yelling obscenities. I flicked him off and kept walking. I never told my grandmother.

Even knowing the danger, I still wouldn't have traded my free range childhood for a cloistering.

As an adult, I moved to the nearest bigger city, and I now teach at a Catholic school where most of the students qualify for free breakfast and/or are considered low income (we have the second highest percentage in the diocese). My students live in a very different world, and yet some of them still have free range childhoods. Others do not. Problems come from both camps. I have one eighth grader who has many freedoms, and two babies of his own as a result (though I'm not saying that this can't happen to any teenager). Another student in the same grade is practically smothered, but is also mean, manipulative, and was recently caught torturing small animals in his backyard.

Alternatively, one of my most promising students has quite the liberties, which her mother tells me is important, even if it is difficult to allow sometimes. For instance, someone once tried to pick her up as a prostitute. She is 14 years old.

I think that, in the end, it is parents that truly care, that go out of their way to instill values rather than restrictions, that really make a difference.

On a separate topic, from a teacher's perspective, trying to modify a student's behavior has become so difficult and frustrating. I am not allowed any power. I cannot give detentions, as that would force a parent into finding alternate transportation (in fact, a parent once called the principal to complain, and she overturned the punishment). I cannot keep a child in from recess, as that inhibits exercise. I cannot chastise a student in the hallway, as this looks bad to any outsider in the school. I cannot chastise the student in the classroom, as this hurts self-esteem. Once, an admittedly disturbed student threw a chair, broke a window, and attacked me physically. When I showed the bruises to my principal, she said that it was not appropriate to come to her. She didn't appreciate that I was showing her those bruises, as that was treating the student like he was a criminal.

Also, thanks to new legislation, I can't keep chemicals for experiments stored in my room, even under lock and key. I can't keep cleaning products, and crayons must be kept in their original boxes because that's where the information is printed. I'm regularly inspected to make sure I don't have too much chalk dust in my room, as a student might breathe that in.

Finally, as one of those women "running the school system", I can say that I have as many female "problem students" (I hate that term) as male, and currently more girls on those drugs than boys. I don't want my students to be docile, just decent, principled people who can control themselves enough to accomplish something. I invest a lot of myself into my profession, which is becoming more and more draining. It becomes worth it when a kid can learn to handle the challenges of this world with dignity.

Sorry so long. End rant.

Back in the day, one parent (almost always Mom) was home all day. Someone wants to entice a kid away, they have to do it where there's no parents around who might see them, they have to take them where no parent will see them take the kid out of the car. Still do-able, but harder.

So neighborhoods had lots of adults around. So, if you're elderly and don't get around so good, well, if there's a problem one of those adults will probably help you out. They certainly know you're there, so if they don't see you for a day or two they'll come investigate. The elderly didn't have to go into a "nursing home" quite so quickly then; they had a community around to provide at least some support.

So you have all those at-home parents and elderly around in the neighborhoods. Again, harder to get away with anything. On top of that, just as they know who the elderly are, they know who the reclusive ones are, the ones that don't fit in, the ones who will be suspected first if something bad happens.

Win some, lose some. Neighborhoods were safer, but if you were different (for example, an atheist), well, and I word this carefully, God help you.

You know, though i'm not a huge fan, your post makes me think immediately of "Home Alone". What a bold film that is! I just think of it in terms of today's standards of child safety and it's just revolutionary. Encouraging children to subsist completely on their own, hang out with homeless, fight burglars with fake parties and super hot door handles? Though the level of ridiculous torture inflicted on the two men borders upon the horror genre, the film's brute rebellion against the overly safe is perhaps bold. It also takes place in Chicago.

But you're definitely onto something here. It's a bigger problem than children. We don't yet have children, but have faced this perceived danger more in terms of locations to live. The desire to live in the budding midtown section of Birmingham last year was met with countless warnings of crime and un-safety. I believe there was a night club shooting from several years back that pretty much provided the narrative for the entire area for the forseeable future. The battle for safety has led to a mass withdrawal from city centers, draining resources and the population needed to sustain a healthy community.

A quick reference of the FBI website's crime statistics would show that the homicide rate in the 1950's hovered right aroune 4.5 per 100,00, which in the 00's has hovered around 5.7. that's about a 25% increase. Not great, but enough to justify such an increased fear? Certainly not. Yet, what I certainly feel convicted about is the need to address the problem at the heart of increased crime rates. As portions of cities decay from the flight from the city, how can we expect such a dying facet of our cities to not produce situations where people become desperate? The answer is complicated, but fear will only bring about more fear.

In an even earlier post about Urbana you mentioned the mountain ash tree, one of creation’s finest. It’s fruit is a bundle of medium size red berries which are a bit dense and good for throwing. These berries make excellent make-believe grenades and are produced in such great quantities that only a few plants are needed to supply a make-believe war month after month.
Playing war with yard forts is widely seen as characteristic of ‘idyllic’ childhoods. A good yard fort is hard to defend and the finest ones are a constant battleground. I suppose it was swift education in the Darwinian side of life. If you are an expecting of a planning parent and there are no grenade-trees in your neighbourhood then I suggest stealthily uprooting some nearby trees and replacing them with mountain ash.
I think Roger’s general cynicism here is justified, but I imagine there is a socialization gap which sets kids with a programmed lifestyle and kids whose parents haven’t catered their social life to them on down different paths. For this reason it’s better to have schedules then the alternative of being stuck inside. Of course there are parents who don’t manage one or the other. I must admit my parents have treated my two young sisters to much less freedom then they gave their boys, but have tried to compensate with taxi service.
Frankly though, children in my town’s booming Asian community have itineraries more likely to include maths tutoring than play dates, a childhood replete with robust friendships liberty, and adventures is, I fear, a doomed ideal sensible people are surrendering to the necessary conditions for success in a globalized economy. Darwinism has no exceptions for children.
Enough of that though. The best way to put those elbow pads, helmets, and mouth guards to good use it to built a very steep bike ramp facing someone’s lawn and take flips off of it just like on X-TREME channel! Some days you’d rather risk cracking your neck then riding to the mall again.

It is a much different world than my childhood, and I am only 37. When I was a kid we would wander from my house to my grandmother's to my great grandmother's, only reappearing before adults to eat lunch and supper. No one thought anything of it, until the Atlanta murders of the early 80's. Even then, we had great liberty. Now I live in what was my grandmother's house but don't let my daughter out of my sight. It is a less free childhood she has, but I can't risk the alternative. Stand By Me would now take place in some virtual world online, with the four boys never actually meeting online. And one would probably be a predator anyway. :(

Great post.

I grew up in the Edgewater neighborhood (until the 'burb exodus of 1977...family exodus, that is) from 1970-1977. We were on N Paulina, near Clark and Ridge. They were busy streets, and I wasn't to go past Ashland on the east, or Ridge on the north. South and West were OK, within limits. My wife (Buffalo Grove-raised) is still amazed to hear that I rode (with two other classmates, mothers-created group) a CTA bus to school. I had my tokens from my mom in a change purse (stuffed in my book bag), and I was responsible for them. I was also responsible for my lunch, and I was given a dime to buy honey-roasted peanuts from the odd-smelling vendor who loitered outside the school.

My parent moved us to the 'burbs, and I was excited, as my "boundaries" (wasn't that always the term??) expanded hugely. I was one of the bike kids...on the saddle from morning to sundown. At sundown, I had to stick to my block, and it seemed so CONFINING!

I have no kids now, but I can't even imagine allowing the same freedoms (and I feel guilty about it).

I wonder if it's not a combination of retrospective arrogance and an unwillingness to afford kids the same responsibilities we enjoyed.

-Tony
UIUC '92

Dear Roger,

The free-range children have not died out entirely. I'm twelve and a half, and my three friends and I, ages thirteen and fourteen, will walk around our neighborhood, doing all sorts of things most people wouldn't even think of letting their kids do, such as putting a dollar on the steps of our houses, ringing the doorbell and pulling it away from our parents; building forts out of window wells and holes in the ground, and running through metal tunnels supporting driveways. I'm incredibly grateful for having that experience.

Ebert: Your parents fall for that? Or are they just good sports?

The world today is no more dangerous than it was in, say, the 1950's (that mythical, halcyon era when All Was Right In America). There were crimes against children then, too; sometimes horrible ones. I'm sure many of you heard recently about the man who thought he'd been kidnapped on Long Island back in the 1950's. Turned out he was wrong, but some poor little boy was taken.

The crimes that happen now, happened then as well, and have happened since humanity first came into existence. I read a book once, Over the Wine Dark Sea, where some Greek traders, the good guys in the novel, ponder kidnapping a young shepherd boy that they see tending his flock, knowing they can fetch a pretty bit of coin for him. The book is fiction; the attitude it depicts is not.

We always need to remember that the crimes have been with us forever and likely will. The only thing that's changed is our level of paranoia about them, and the media coverage that causes that. To parents out there, please remember the odds against your child being kidnapped are millions to one. Don't treat your kids like fragile little hothouse flowers, and don't try to keep them from growing up, because remember: the true goal of childhood is to become an adult, not to stay a kid forever. Try that, and you end up with Michael Jackson.

The most dangerous thing a parent can do is shelter their kid. I think the assumption that we can keep them safe is more naive then the one that assumes there is no danger.

The idea of "preparing kids" seems to be lost. I see parents raising their kids in bubbles. They want to protect them, but they don't realize that bubbles burst.

I'm only 20, but seeing how fast culture moves, I am dismayed at how parents will raise their kids. Even with all the free range I had, I could still see cultural paranoia creeping into the edges of my childhood. My mom had the idea that watching "Alice in Wonderland" would introduce me to the world of narcotics. Actually, I learned all I need to know in order to be a connoisseur of drugs from D.A.R.E.

20 years ago, a school yard fight was simply that. A fight. Kids would scuffle, bloody a nose, perhaps a teacher would break it up or it'd resolve itself. Kids fought. That was the mentality.
Now a kid throws a punch, he's charged with aggrivated assault and the school is sued for damages. He's no longer just a child with a beef, no instead he is a maladjusted delinquent with behavioral problems. POLICE are brought into these scuffles now. That's how absurd we've become.

That's how outlandishly over protective our society has gotten. No longer can boys be boys or can a child experience life. A knee scrap is a parental failure and I know that as a result, those raised in the "Safety First" generation will be ill-prepared for the world at large.

And isn't that one of the biggest disservices you can do to your child?

Reply to: In response to Bill Hays: So the solution to making the world safer for our children is to kill over half of its population? Seems a little counterintuitive to me.

If you reduce the number of births below the number of natural deaths, global population drops. You don't have to kill anybody.

I said up front you wouldn't like the solution.

Mandatory bith controls could easily prevent that extra 2.7 billion that will be added by 2050.

Reply to: Ebert: I attended the reunion of Chaz's class from Crane High School in Chicago. After the banquet and before the band started, they played a game called Remember When? "Remember when...we dressed up neat to go to school? When there were no drugs? No drive-bys? When there were no serial rapists? No kidnappings? When we got to play outside until the streetlights came on?" ...We live in a reign of terror. Outside the home, molesters and drug pushers lurk. Children drown, are hit by cars, shot, electrocuted, bullied, burned, stabbed, attacked by pit bulls, or kidnapped and end up with their photos on milk cartons.... I don't know what the answer is. I understand why parents are frightened. If your child seems strangely reluctant to go to school, it may be about more than a dislike of school. Kids know what's going on

I'm just saying, What Changed between now and the time Roger was a kid?

The population of the world has gone up. Drastically. That's the WHY.

Nobody is going to do anything to stop it. It's not politically correct to even discuss the issue.

Two points:

#1: The idea that society is somehow going to hell in a handbasket is not borne out by out by actual crime statistics:

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/are-kids-safer-because-we-never-let-them-out-anymore/

Across the board, all types of violent crime- against both adults and kids- are down from their peak in the 70's when, ironically enough, is when I experienced my healthy and happy free-range childhood.

The problem, to my mind, is mostly mass hysteria.

#2: This idea has filtered down into our social customs. In 80's, when I came of age, one generally appended a goodbye with a message such as "have fun", "get some sleep", "say hi to so and so.." or some other such message appropriate to the situation. Unless the recipient of a goodbye was on his or her way to climb a mountain, I can't recall anyone ever ending an encounter with today's near ubiquitous sign-off "be safe." But today, everywhere I go, in every context, it's the goodbye de rigeur.

I was a part-time free-range and part-time shut-in kid. The biggest shift to staying indoors was, for me and many of my friends, probably during the mid-90s. I'm going to sound like a conspiracy nut for a moment: I blame it all on technology!

As we became more amused by the computer in the dining room or the video games in our bedroom, we pushed less and less for more time in the backyard. As our pleadings to spend more and more time outdoors began to fade into scarceness, our parents' refusals became stronger and more pronounced. Eventually, as we spent hours and hours in front of a screen (I remember once playing the same video game for 14 hours without getting up from the floor), our mothers would actually begin to ask us to go outside! Oh, nothing turns a youngster off faster than a heavy parental suggestion, especially during the teenage years. But when we refused to go, our parents learned very quickly to live with the fact that we would be a much less "outdoorsy" bunch than they were. After all, the news reports on all the new 24-hour news networks were playing on a constant loop stories about child abductions and other frightful things that happen about as often as lightning strikes people in their yards. And what is there to learn out there with the grass and the trees and the pollution and the bugs, anyway? Surely, with the fixation that we have on education today, our children can learn a lot more from these profound technological innovations!

It would seem that the Internet and video games and television and packaged, processed foods are not getting much less desirable to young people nowadays, and so I blame technology and what technology affords us for the fact that on the streets of my old hometown (pop. 5,500), it is a great rare thing to see a child riding his bike down the street or causing chaos in the yard.

I was born in 1986, and was extremely fortunate that my parents seemed to be of the same mind as yours, Roger.

One of my favorite recurring memories from my childhood is waking up at 9am during summer vacation in order to meet up with my best friend so we could bike to the neighborhood pool (do such things exist anymore?) when it opened at 10:30, stay there all day gorging on beef jerky and pool candy and swimming well before 30 minutes had passed, then come home when the pool closed at 11pm.

All unsupervised. I was in the 3rd grade.

It seems like a self-perpetuating process: an inventor comes up with an idea that will save the lives of many children, like the carseat, and it is manufactured for profit. Consumers begin to adopt this new product, and since no reasonable parent wants to allow his/her child to die when they could have purchased something that would have prevented it, it becomes more or less standard. Other manufacturers see the money being made and jump on the bandwagon, maybe adding a new feature that makes it even safer. What other possible outcome is there? Of course, the problem arises when the media hysteria makes well-meaning parents crazy, or when things like this get legislated.

I think it was just as dangerous "back in the good old days", but that such things usually weren't spoken of.

I'm sure the parents of the Grimes sisters, or the Schussler boys would agree: http://www.weirdchicago.com/grimes.html

Honestly, I'm surprised my friends and I got through our childhood without dying or suffering some life-debilitating injury. I grew up in Wyoming, and my friend's family who lived across the street had a rodeo-sized arena with horses, cattle, etc (yes, just how you pictured Wyoming would be). They had wild ponies, and we would have our own little rodeo and ride those ponies. We would last about 2 seconds before being thrown to the ground, but we'd get up and do it again, because if you didn't you were labeled a wimp (I cleaned that up, you'd be called the p-word). I guess it was a stupid, childish way to try to move into manhood. Our parents didn't know about it, but if they did they probably wouldn't have told us to stop. This is why I'm hesitant to have my own children

Amen Roger. I grew up in the late 80's and 90's in North Phoenix, AZ. Myself and all the friends I rode BMX bikes with were free range children. Our parents were of a different mindset than these Gen X'er parents controlling every little thing in their children's lives. My life growing up pretty much paralleled yours and mine was, as mentioned above, in the 80's and 90's. Something changed and it must be corrected. I had a childhood that was full of imagination, very little responsibility, play, group and experimental learning. I feel sad for all the children that are missing out on some of the best days of their lives, before the responsibility, before the tireless job.

There's a little girl missing locally. She was walking home from her friend's house, six blocks away, like she'd done dozens of times. She's gone.

The best case scenario is that she's lost--if she got lost following a familiar route in the middle of the afternoon. Everyone with a child reading this just got that cold clench and drop in their stomach, because they did not immediately flash on the best case scenario. They're thinking of the parents, who are even now being flogged via the internet for daring to allow their child outdoors. They're suddenly trying to decide which would be worse to live with--never finding her, or finding the body and hearing exactly what she endured.

I was a free range child, but the fact that nothing untoward ever happened to me--why was that? We lived in a small town? I was big for my age and looked like I'd put up a fight? I had a reputation for throwing my peers against the walls when they teased me?

So much of it, then and now, dumb luck.

I was a free range child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I would ride my bike to St. Hubert AFB to watch the jets take off and land, or ride my bike across the Jacques Cartier bridge to St. Helen's island to play among the forts (real forts), and my friends and I would routinely ride the train or trolley into Montreal and spend hours wandering around downtown, admiring the huge stores like Eatons, or the dinosaur fossils in McGill University. In the summer I'd spend my days exploring the Yamaska river for miles upstream.

That left me with a stong sense of self-esteem and the sure knowledge that I could pretty much accomplish anything I wanted. Was I in danger some of the time? Probably, but I wouldn't have missed those adventures for anything. All these years later they are still vivid.

If this gives you any hope, I'm a 19-year-old who was a free-range. When we were little, maybe seven to ten years old, all the neighborhood kids would get together and play tag, and we used the whole neighborhood block as our terrain. We would climb walls, hop over fences, go on other people's roofs, etc.

But I think one of the worst things that can happen to a child nowadays is when his parents restrict his media. I know so many kids who when they were little were not allowed to watch The Power Rangers due to its 'violence' (although I'm well aware that The Power Rangers has the ability to "deaden our imaginations"), or even watch The Simpsons due to its adult humor, which despite what many adults seem to believe, children never notice sexual/political/satirical subtext in the things that they watch (I'm looking at you, Jerry Falwell and the purple Teletubby).

I even remember going to the arcade or movie theatre by myself a lot. My dad actually dropped me off to a movie theatre when I was ten to see [the rerelease of] The Exorcist, back when we were allowed to go into Rated R movies without a legal guardian, until Columbine changed that. (which, being a kid whose intellectual capacity for movies didn't go beyond The Power Rangers, made it so I didn't find The Exorcist that scary. What? All that little girl did was barf on the guy!)

Though it does come down to child safety, I think a lot of it has to do with adults' supposition of 'childhood innocence,' and their constant willingness to 'protect' it, regardless of whether they really comprehend or know what it means, either to children or to them. Like a MacGuffin for their superstitions.

Personally I can't even explain what childhood innocence means, I can only try to remember what it was like to be a kid. So if I could summarize it the best I could, when we were kids we would constantly pretend to be adults, but I think that was just our subtle way of growing up.

My best friends son killed himself. They lived in a distant suburb. He had what any set of parents would consider everything. Everything except a knowledge of a wider world than his neighborhood. At half his age I use to go (by myself) to downtown Chicago by bus. I read old newspapers on the microfich. Try to get to the tops of the tallest buildings and have a $1.99 steak at Ronnie's on State. Knowing the possibilities of the world got me to adulthood. I often wonder if it might have saved him.

Oh, another anecdote, I remember when I was in, I think, 3rd grade, I took a school bus to and from school, even though I lived about a half-mile away from the school. One day I accidentally missed the bus at school, so the school had to call my mom at work to get her to pick me up. She asked the office if they could just let me walk home, and the office wouldn't allow it, and they got into an argument about it (though on the school's part, I could understand their legal trouble were something to happen to me).

My school would have an 'Early Day' about every month, where we would leave an hour early from school. On these days, we had to wait for the bus for about twenty minutes (the school buses were usually there right when school ended), so my friends and I just took the ten minutes to walk home, and it was probably the happiest and 'adult' experience I've ever felt.

I thought that coincided with your Subway story.

I think how children are sheltered now depends less on the ever-changing and threatening outside world and more on the parents raising the child.

About twenty years ago, my cousin was kidnapped from his home when I was about eight years old (he managed to escape unharmed and is now in his early thirties) yet my parents never made my sister and I feel that we should be afraid of the monsters out in the world any more than we should feel free to be adventurous, to be explorers and be happy. We rode our bikes around the neighborhood, caught lightning bugs and roller skated. We spent the summer running around the house with friends, playing in the woods behind my grandparents' house, swimming in my other grandparents' pool all day or walking around downtown. We were taught not to walk on other people's grass, to ride on the right hand-side, to say please and thank you and that if we were going to be late, we should call. We were taught not to speak to strangers, to stick to the plans that were made, to run to the houses with the red hands in the windows if there was ever trouble and to stick with the group (don't know what a trio of ten year olds would do if faced with danger, but at least we all were together). Being respectful and kind were most important.

I worry that those lessons have been lost as we take away our children's freedoms and give them whatever they desire monetarily to replace their lost youth. Kids aren't expected to work those lemonade stands, cut lawns, wash cars, or babysit in order to earn pocket money (I started babysitting when I was twelve - bought my own 13-inch tv when I was fourteen after saving up the funds). Teens don't spend the summer at the ice cream shop saving up to buy that cool car - if their parents are rich enough, mommy and daddy buy them the BMW or Range Rover when they turn seventeen. I worked in a local shop from the time I was fourteen till I graduated college - except for birthday and christmas presents, my parents' have not provided luxury items for me. I bought my own clothes, cds, books etc. from the time I was fourteen. I paid for college on my own - no loans, no student debt - one of the few of my graduating class. My highschool classmates who had everything handed to them now struggle with the real world.

Video games and tv were around when I was a kid, but so were books and art projects. So were starry nights and green grass. And best friends, camp fires with smores, Grandma's house, croquet sets and basketballs.

Guess what? They still are. The parents need to choose to be guides for their children - not guards.

I'm a proud parent of a 10 year old child who just made national news in Fort Myers. My wife took my son and a buddy of his to lovely Fort Myers beach a couple of weeks ago. As my wife was sitting at the beach (probably reading a book) and allowing the kids to "free-range" on the beach, they happened to come across a fruit-bat floating in the water. My son, along with a couple of other kids, decided to hold it. A teenage girl came along and told the kids they shouldn't be holding it and then my boy told the girl "Why? It's not even scared of us", and then decided to give it a little kiss.

I happened to find out about this a week later after I read a news bulletin from our local NBC News website stating "Boys sought after holding and kissing rabid bat". Long story short, his last rabies shot will be given to him on Monday.

The reason I'm even writing this, is because in our local news paper's website, people were leaving comments to the story stating subjects like: "Where were the parents?", and "Who's raising these kids today?".

Now I'm sure at some point in my son's young life, we as responsible parents instructed him to not play with wild animals, such as raccoons, snakes, bats, etc. He should have known better, but he learned a life lesson the hard way for sure and one we'll never have to worry about again.

But what gets me fired up the most is the "more responsible" adults questioning my wife's parenting skills while at a public beach. I grew up in Fort Myers and have fond memories of going to the beach and playing with my friends. Being next to my parent's side while at the beach is not part of any of my memories when I was his age. I doubt there were many 10 year old boys tied to their parent's chair that day either.

Basically, my son was playing at the beach with his friend doing what boys do best, being boys. But now I doubt his grandmother will ever let him out of her house again while he visits her…

Ebert: I would have picked up the bat, too. I once brought home a dead fox and claimed I had shot it with my Daisy Red Ryder BB Carbine Rifle. I was asked, "How many day ago did you shoot it?"

During the times you speak of, usually Mom was at home full time - this usually isn't the case today.
People used to ride in cars without seat belts all the time - now, you can't buy a car without them, and for good reason. Think of a bike helmet as a "head belt" for the bike.
Things are good until something bad happens, and things are safe until danger is perceived.
Congratulations on the privilege of three grandchildren, and hope your health permits your continued enjoyment of your life and family.
Thanks for reviewing the movies - I saw "Up" this afternoon - wonder if the scene where Russell's mom searches frantically for him will show up on the DVD?!
All the best.

My brother and I had the fortune to grow up in Hawaii for most of the 1970s, and what a fortune it was.

We played all kinds of games that would make modern-day parents shudder. We lived up on Tripler Hill (the big pink Army hospital overlooking Honolulu) and we had the woods behind the housing area as our playground. We would hike in those hills all day long, and we carried axes and knives. We had been taught totemship in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, so we knew how to use them. Only one kid ever was injured using his axe, and the Tripler emergency room fixed him up. Two days later, he was back in the woods with us.

We climbed trees and built forts. We also played street baseball, football and kickball, rode our bikes and skateboards up and down the street. We especially loved to play "smear the queer," which was a game requiring EVERYONE to tackle the kid who was carrying the football. We had no pads or helmets, and played on a 45-degree angle slope. And if it was raining, the game was EVEN BETTER.

Since it was an Army post, there were always families moving in and out of the quarters. We used to pick up the moving boxes and use them as sleds down the hills. Best of all was to pile four or five kids in a big box and slide down the hill, at least until the bottom of the box gave out. And if our heads knocked together, you shook it off. If you got a headache from it, you went home and took an aspirin. When the headache went away, you went back out to play.

We had a healthy fear of the cops (MPs, in this case) because some of them would give us static for riding our skateboards on the outdoor concrete basketball court (that no one ever seemed to play basketball on), but we also knew that if we needed any help, we could call on them.

Our parents required us to be home by dark, or when summoned. My mother had a big cowbell; when it rang, my brother and I had to hightail it home.

Later, as we grew up, we got bus passes that would take us to downtown Waikiki and the Ala Moana mall. We could go to the beach if we wanted, but we usually went to the movies or the video game parlors. And a driver's license really expanded our freedom, as now we could go to the "good" beaches.

We never got "busted" or came to any grief. Our parents wanted to know where we were, but let us enjoy our lives within their rules. We were comfortable with that.

Now I have a daughter of my own, and I hope that I can allow her to be a "free-range" kid. I feel the angst that the "eggshell society" (thanks to the original poster - I'm going to use that phrase from now on) puts on me as a parent, but hopefully I can teach my child how to be self-reliant and know when to fight and when to run.

The good old days?

...when criminals committed murder they wound up in the electric chair (and not after 15 years of appeals);

...when women considered homemaking a worthwhile vocation;

...when narcotics were for the seedy underbelly of society, not a mainstream phenomenon;

...when black people lived in the other part of town and their children were not bussed to your neighborhood school nor yours to theirs;

...when almost every kid in your school had a dad at home;

...when high school girls would suddenly "disappear" (ostensibly, to take care of a relative or somesuch) after getting into "a family way;"

...when the police arrested homosexuals on vagrancy charges;

...when children said "sir" or "ma'am" to their elders;

...when there were no IMAX screens, THX-certified theaters, or Dolby Digital sound systems!

Ebert: I hope you are saying they were not all that good in some particulars.

This article is absolutely true. The crime rate has not gone up, but the reporting of crimes has increased dramatically. You can't turn on the news these days without hearing about a kidnapped or sexually assaulted child.

But in fact, in most places in America it's actually SAFER now than it used to be. The violent crime rate in America has dropped by about 50% in the past 20 years. That's actually true, go look it up.

When I become a parent, I won't make this mistake, I'll allow my kid a reasonable amount of freedom. The problem is, he won't want it... there won't be any other kids out there to play with.

I occasionally spend some of my free time on the website Yahoo Answers. It's a place for people to ask questions of any kind and receive answers from all the bored people browsing the site. Kind of a waste of time but sometimes it's interesting to help someone with a tough question, or see everyone's opinions about something.

I always had the impression that overall, people are somewhat more protective of their children now... but I had no idea until I read the Parenting section of Yahoo Answers. Virtually every question starting with "should I let my child" is answered with "of course not, are you insane?"

The first one was memorable to me. "My 12 year old wants to ride his bike to his friend's house after school, it's half a mile but he has to ride around the corner so I can't watch him go all the way there. Should I let him?"

Almost immediately, a dozen people responded all with the same thing. "NEVER let him out of your sight. It might be only a quarter mile, it might be only a minute, but do you have any idea how many murderers and rapists are out there?" This woman even said she lived in a nice neighborhod. But I guess even the wealthy are plagued by child rapists hiding in the bushes every 100 yards or so.

I really, really hope that this mother is at least willing to drive her son to his friend's house. It's upsetting to think that this overprotectiveness is keeping children everywhere at home staring at a TV instead of spending time with their friends. Not to mention all the kids are missing out on.

Hi Roger –

This has long been a favorite topic of discussion at our house (more so lately, inspired by your recent reminiscences). We’ve tried to raise our daughter (now 14) as “free range” as possible: lots of time outside, limited screen time, lots of family and friend interactions, minimal “programmed activities” (sports, lessons, etc.), plenty of encouragement to get dirty (and even “dangerous” in non-life-threatening ways). Knock on wood, so far so good – she’s happy, comfortable with herself, socially well adjusted with others, smart, funny, well mannered, hard working, good decision maker, etc.

She’s a great kid and I’d like to take all the credit here, but to be honest, parenting has been pretty much a “monkey see, monkey do” proposition for us. My wife and I were both raised very “free range” in the 70’s, and feel like it served us well, so we’ve stuck to what we know.

Of course, what we’d describe as a happy childhood would sound like criminal neglect to a lot of parents these days. By about age 6, I could get to school, church, and every park, playground, vacant lot, or friend’s house in at least a 5-mile radius from home entirely on my own. Ditto every store and burger joint. I covered that range on foot or bicycle pretty much every day from kindergarten upward. This was no big deal – everyone did it, nobody died. When I arrived at any of those destinations, I knew how to conduct myself politely. I could talk with other adults, participate in activities, complete my own purchases, and order from a menu without adult supervision.

By the time I was about 8 I usually had my own money to do a lot of these things. All summer long I could walk to the end of my block in the morning, get on one of the random buses the local farmers sent around, and work all day picking commercial produce for piecemeal wages. You could work your way through the different harvests pretty much all summer – strawberries, raspberries, cucumbers, beans, you name it. The farmers sat on the back of the flatbed truck and paid us in cash - a few bucks for each flat or bushel we picked. At the end of the day we got back on the bus and got off at the stop closest to home (or the one near the store where we could blow the earnings on toys or comics or candy). There were no rules, no permission slips, no contracts, and our folks generally had no idea exactly where we were all day. We could even set our own hours - If we wanted to make some cash we’d hop on a morning bus, if we wanted to do something else that day, we skipped it. We learned about the correlation between work and reward without a single lecture from anyone. We learned to handle ourselves with employers and co-workers, and take care of our own money: as an ambitious 9-year-old I could clear $500 in a summer, easy.

When I was about 11, we moved from the burbs to a little hobby farm just outside of town (exurban Portland, OR). Every day I spent a couple of hours taking care of horses, cattle, chickens, and a big garden. Nobody every wondered if this was stunting the growth of my inner child. As under-agers we routinely drove cars, motorcycles, and farm equipment around private property without anything resembling a license. We camped out in the woods overnight with no adults. We shot firearms, used potentially hazardous power tools (even welding equipment), made assorted home-grown explosive devices, rode horses, swam in non-designated or lifegaurded bodies of water, swung on long ropes from one second-story hay loft to another over a concrete barn floor 10 feet below, and went everywhere in the open beds of trucks. As we got physically big enough to handle jobs like haying, noxious weed abatement, or helping out on the local farms, we could easily make enough dough after school or summers to buy a car, keep it running, and keep us in dates or parties on the weekends.

This is not to say that these things always went well. Did we screw up sometimes? Sure, sometimes quite dramatically. Sometimes someone got hurt. In four years at a high school of about 1200, a couple of kids died. You know what, these incidents aren't any less likely now in the time of hypersupervision than they were then, I guarantee I learned at least as much from my bad decisions as I did from my good ones, and I'm ultimately a better, smarter, more capable individual for having had them.

A lot of this improvement can be attributed to the fact that when we crashed and burned (either literally or metaphorically) our sins were on our own heads – we understood that, and everyone else did too. I expected to take my lumps and I was equipped by (sometimes sad) experience to do so when they inevitably came. This made me much smarter and more careful about my choices in the future. By the time I was 17, I was ready to venture out of my very happy home and make my way quite comfortably in the world. Why? Because I’d largely been making my way in that world for a decade by then. The vast majority of my peers from the same era would tell a similar story.

I think the success of our free range upbringings had very little do with the particulars of a particular situation or a particular geography - Most of the personal details people are sharing here differ a great deal, and we all know plenty of folks who can describe the urban “old neighborhood” equivalents of the same free range childhoods. I also don’t think this is particularly a generational thing – there are plenty of twentysomethings telling similar tales here.

Speaking for myself, I was born in 1967, well after the supposed golden years of Eisenhower era. I grew up in a post-hippie world populated largely by adults reluctant to put their hedonistic tendencies behind them. It’s already been pointed out that strangers are very rarely the perpetrators of crimes against children, and if anything the better awareness and reporting of these crimes have reduced the rates of abuse since the largely unregulated days of my childhood. This is true of crime generally, as well as Divorce rates - the statistics and sociological studies agree that things are no more dangerous for kids now than they were in 1978, and in some ways things are much improved.

From where I sit, the illicit drug angle is largely bunk well. I saw pot routinely as an elementary and Jr. High kid, coke and other drugs occaisionally, they were cheaper and every bit as easy to get when I was a kid. This was pre-Nancy Reagan and "Just Say No" - attitudes toward illegals drugs (among both kids and adult authority figures) were much more casual. As a result these things were MUCH more widely used by my peers than is the norm among teens these days.

The media angle doesn't hold much water for me either. The movies and TV were every bit as violent and sexual then (indeed, often more so, and much more realistically). The music (Metal, punk, etc.) was every bit as aggressive and transgressive (in fact, most of the supposedly outlaw bands of today seem to be much better behaved retread tributes to the heroes of my youth). The idea that kids are at so much more risk now seems to have much less to do with an increase in child predators than an increase in litigious parents and 24-hour satellite news channels.

So if “successful free range childhood” isn’t a function of an idyllic time and place, why does it still seem to work so well, in so many different circumstances?

At least as I see it, a lot of “the trouble with kids these days” (not to mention the trouble with the adults these kids eventually become) can be traced directly to the fact that it’s really hard to develop decent decision making skills when you spend your supposedly formative years never being allowed to make any decisions. There’s a direct correlation between the independent way you grew up and the fact that you were able to become a bona fide professional newspaperman as a very young teenager – for years you’d been honing life skills most modern teens have never even imagined, let alone encountered. Getting to a functional adulthood seems to be a lot like getting to Carnegie Hall, and it’s not reasonable to expect successful Free Range adults to come from institutional factory farms.

This is the terrible irony here: By protecting our kids from just about everything we essentially ensure that they will be woefully unprepared for just about everything.

Ugh.

What you are describing here is the Solari Index, a concept created by Catherine Austin Fitts. She has been an investment advisor,entrepreneur, government official and investment banker. I'll let her explain:

"The Solari Index is my way of estimating how well a place is doing. It is based upon the percentage of people in a place who believe that a child can leave his or her home, go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle and come home alone safely.
When I was a child growing up in the 1950s at 48th and Larchwood in West Philadelphia, the Solari Index was 100 percent. It was unthinkable that a child was not safe running up to the stores on Spruce Street for a popsicle and some pinball. The Dow Jones was about 500 and the Solari Index was 100 percent.
Today, the Dow Jones is over 9,000 and my favorite hairdresser in Philadelphia, Al at the Hair Hut in West Philadelphia, and I just agreed that the Solari Index is in the tank -- both in the streets of Philadelphia and throughout America.
Life on the street isn’t sweet any more. I watched the slide of the Solari Index as a child. A lot of it had to do with narcotics trafficking and the people that narco dollars put in power on our streets -- and in City Hall, in the banks, in Congress and the corporations and investors that surround the city.
Once a month I drive to Philadelphia from my home in Hickory Valley, Tenn., to attend a board meeting. I stay in a lovely little apartment in the first floor of a rowhouse owned by my friend Georgie, not far from where I grew up in West Philadelphia.
Georgie is one of my favorite people in the world. One day, Forest, my dog, and I were up in Georgie’s apartment to enjoy a fresh plate of scrapple that Georgie had fried up that morning. The conversation turned to narco dollars. Georgie said that looking at the big picture was simply too overwhelming. Couldn’t I explain this in terms of a neighborhood in Philadelphia? So we got out a blank piece of paper and started to estimate.
We assumed that two or three teenagers on a Philadelphia street corner dealing drugs could theoretically do $300 a day of sales each and work 250 days a year. We guessed that their supplier got 50 percent, and maybe ran his net profits of $100,000 through a local fast-food restaurant that was owned by a publicly traded company. Assuming that company had a stock market value of 20-30 times its profits, a handful of teenagers could generate approximately $2 million to $3 million in stock market value for a major corporation, not to mention a nice flow of deposits and business for the Philadelphia banks and insurance companies.
OK, that is what a handful of kids can do. Let’s look at all the organized crime profits, narcotics trafficking and everything else. If the Department of Justice is correct about $500 billion to $1 trillion of annual money laundering in the U.S., then about $20 billion to $40 billion is a reasonable estimate for what should move annually through the Philadelphia Federal Reserve district.
Assuming a 20-percent margin for organized-crime profits and a 20-times multiple on the stock of the companies being used to launder the money, the stock market value that could potentially be "addicted" to organized crime profits flowing through the Philadelphia area from $20 billion to $40 billion in narco- and organized-crime revenues could be as much as $160 billion. If you add all the things you could do with debt and other ways to increase the multiples, you could get that even higher, say $250 billion.
Imagine what would happen if all these teenagers in the Philadelphia area stopped taking and dealing drugs? Now do you understand what Philadelphia mothers and dads are up against when they try and make sure their children are safe?
Last summer, I made a presentation called "How the Money Works on Organized Crime" to a wonderful group of about 100 people at an annual conference for a spiritually focused foundation in Philadelphia. This is a group committed to contributing to the spiritual evolution of our culture.
After about an hour walking through the various profits generated by narcotics trafficking, financial fraud and other types of organized crime, as well as the intersection of this money with the stock market and campaign fundraising, I asked the group what would happen to the stock market if we decriminalized or legalized drugs?
The stock market would crash, they said.
What would happen to financing the government deficit if we enforced all money-laundering laws? Since most bank wire transfers are batched and run through the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this should not really be that hard, right?
Their taxes might go up. Worse yet, their government checks might stop, they said.
I then asked them to imagine a big, red button at the front of the lectern.
By the power of our imaginations, if they pushed that button they could decriminalize narcotics trafficking or whatever actions were necessary to stop organized crime and stop all money laundering in the United States.
Who would push the button?
It turns out that in an audience of approximately 100 people committed to spiritually evolve our society, only one person would push the button.
Upon reflection, 99 would not. I asked why. They said that if they pushed the button, their mutual funds would go down and their government checks might stop. I commented that what they were proposing is that an entire infrastructure of people continue to market narcotics to their children and grandchildren to ensure that their mutual and pension funds stay high in value.
They said, yes, that was right.
Which is why I say that America is not addicted to narcotics as much as it is addicted to narco dollars."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T40QWrlGRiY

http://solari.com/

to add to Maurio's excellent comment about technology, where he said:

Is more safety justified? I don't know for sure. But the world hasn't just changed, kids have changed too. The kids of the future are light years ahead of the kids of the past.

Parents have changed, too. Because of technology.

At the end of my street, with moderately nice 70's era split-level houses, is an apartment complex. Nothing particularly noticeable or scary about it.

One day that perception changed.

My wife's best friend, a social worker, stopped by. "Have you ever checked the State of Illinois sex-offenders database website", she asked? No. So they did.

Five registered sex-offenders in that single 20-apartment complex.

Five potential monsters.

Yes, they can play outside in the neighborhood. But, "don't go near the apartments!".

Technology arms parents with knowledge, too. And makes us wary.

Randy

I never knew I had been a free range child nor that I would one day be considered a vanishing breed. My cousins and I were deemed responsible enough to venture outside our neighbourhood by the time we were 8 or 9 years of age. During the heat of summer we drove our bikes 15 minutes away to the city park where we spent all day at the public pool swimming and getting sugared up on popsicles and Pixy Stix. Other times we’d hop a 45-minute bus ride to peruse the new monthly crop of teen magazines all the way downtown. And in the early seventies, there were left-over hippies downtown - a suburban parent’s worst nightmare. Who knows, we might have returned home painted with peace signs and smelling like patchouli.

But they still let us go.

Every generation has had it fears, however the reaction was usually proportionate to the odds of a catastrophic event occurring. When parents became concerned about A-bombs falling on their family during the 1950’s and 60’s, kids were taught to duck and cover, and then promptly sent out to play with lawn darts while drinking radioactive-red Kool Aid made from garden hose water. (Who didn’t drink from the garden hose? Unfortunately, we girls didn’t have the option of peeing outdoors afterward like you did, Mr E.)

Now terror has become something to micro-manage. Ever since Mom and Dad decided that the quiet guy who lives alone across the street is a potential serial killer - which, by the way, is strictly hypothetical since they’ve never met the man because no one actually knows their neighbours anymore – they’ve instituted preventative measures found only in sequestered juries. Offspring are driven to and from school (even though it’s only 3 blocks away), given cell phones for emergencies (But Mom, like, tweeting my friends about a cute guy in gym class is totally an emergency!) and provided with everything they could ever want so they never need to leave the house and go out into the big bad world (Hello 30 and still living in your parents’ basement).

Despite all the good intentions, are kids really threatened more than we were decades ago? As you’ve mentioned, unfortunate incidents are widely reported in our non-stop news cycle and in grand detail. Fear mongering has become a cottage industry for some media outlets that thrive on taking the hysteria one step further by running commercials days before their broadcast. If you weren’t alarmed at the beginning of the week, you will be after repeated ads asking “Are your children at risk?” And if there isn’t anything genuinely scary enough to report, the suggestion of prospective threats works just as well: “Does your air conditioner cause ADHD? Are plastic water bottles stimulating prehensile tail growth? Can using the microwave make your poodle depressed? A new study says it might. This week on the news at six.”

So feel free to keep the little ones tucked away in the safe confines of the house where they won’t be in harm’s way. Except for the fact that a) most tragic accidents happen in and around the home, b) little Timmy has been using his downtime to build IED’s with stuff he found in the garage, and c) your darling daughter spends all day in online chat rooms with creepy middle-aged men who tell her they’re really 12-years-old and are into the Jonas Brothers.

Drinking from the garden hose pales by comparison.

Roger, thanks so much for this.

While, obviously, your talent as a movie reviewer is legendary and unparallelled this and your many other recent "social issue" pieces have been a real gift.

Thoughtful, insightful, thought provoking, funny, sad - they generate a wide spectrum of responses in me when I read them but - rather than addressing a single movie which I may or may not see - they address the human experience itself, in which we are all both actors and audience.

Who says there are no more philosophers?

Our modern society makes it less safe for kids. All the nasty violence happening around have a direct relationship to poor upbringing and broken homes whose kids do not have role models to look up to, other than their own peers who also belong to broken families.

I say that if only there were less divorces, that most parents learn to work out their differences and cared much more about the well-being of their children and raised them right, we would have a lot more Free Range kids today.

You mention boy behavior and schools. There's a great book about this called "Raising Cain." It covers how we both expect too little of boys (boys will be boys, treating them like little kings) and too much of them (sitting still, etc.). Very, very good book for any parent or teacher of boys.

This is something of a clue as to why you had "some stubborn need for closure" while watching "Public Enemies". A bit of topic but: A weakness in the film or a conflict in the viewer?

Dear Readers:

I'm reading and enjoying these comments particularly. I seem to be responding to fewer than average because most of them don't really call for a response, other than, "well said." But they are well said. I just wanted to check in.

Roger

When I was a child we walked or rode our bikes everywhere. I think we walked more when our parents did not carry us in the car. The elementary school, playground and ball field were across streeet. Living on a deadend street the children on the block played in the street most of the time, and went to the playground to ride the swings, merry-go-round, and play on the monkey bars. In restrospect I don't believe we were ever without adult observation even when we went off the block. That's because there were always adults in the houses. Back then women were called housewives. That term evolved to homemaker, and now stay at home mother. My parents knew a family on at least every other block. Somebody was keeping an eye on us but we didn't know that's what they were doing.

We were taught about Mr. Stranger Danger in school. There were stories of Chester the Molestor too. My mother told me to scream bloody murder if someone tried to harm me. Since I took everything literally I wondered why she didn't instruct me to scream as loud as I could because I doubted I would remember to say Bloody Murder! Bloody Murder! if a stranger attempted harm.

Since I was a fraidycat I didn't roam much. As a teenager I rode my bike to my cousins in the Altgeld Gardens. The ride was about 4.5 miles each way. Last year I told my mother about my visits. She said she didn't know about the rides and asked where she was. I don't know where she was. All I know is I made it to my cousins and back on a bike with no headlight or bell, and likely no reflectors. I certainly did not have a helmet.

Do you remember when a child car safety seat was the parents right arm?

People who want drugs will get and take drugs legal or not. If the DEA ever succeeds in stopping cocaine and heroin the addicts will use or create a domestic drug. People already sniff paint and glue, grow marajuana, and cook crystal methamphetamine. In other words I don't have any answers either.

Ebert: I'm picturing the boke route you must have taken. Wow. That's free-ranging.

Is it really more dangerous now than it was then? How far back does the Catholic clergy scandal go? Youths being molested and killed... I grew up in the shadow of John Gacy. Lenore Skenazy touched on it this month: statistically, crimes against children are down. Like you said, once upon a time, newspapers didn't use the word "rape". And now, the motto of the 24-hour news cycle is, "If it bleeds, it leads.".

As a first grader in 1980 Northbrook, I walked the mile to school, sometimes with the neighbor girls, but often alone. I could bike to friends' houses, and after a year I lost the parental escort to cross Dundee Road at Pfingsten. I just had to call once I got to my destination. One of the neighbor boys and I pushed our explorations into the industrial park behind our neighborhood, and after a while, that was kosher as long as we waited 'till after hours when traffic dried up. Ditto the public library, halfway across town. By fifth grade, anything within the village limits was in play. In eighth grade, Science Olympiad fell the same weekend my family was spending in Lake Geneva. Somebody's mom dropped me at the train station, and my folks fetched me at the end of the line in Fox Lake. I politely declined the advances of strangers, I knew to spot Block Parent signs in front windows. I knew not to bother with pay phone change, the pre-911 operator would get me the police, and if it came down to it, I'd make as much noise as I could and fight as if my life depended on it. Could I have been any better prepared? Was I any better prepared than you?

What's different now? Traffic on Dundee is a lot heavier. The Swiss Army knife I got as an 8th grade graduation present would now get me expelled from Glenbrook North. The pay phones dried up at the same time you could Lo-Jack your kid's cell phone. Parents keep their lawyers on speed dial. Sure, the city has wider economic and gang problems it didn't have when my parents grew up on the North Side. But we kept it out of Northbrook, and I never felt any less safe exploring Champaign and Urbana late at night in college.

But are the idyllic adventures of our youths really too dangerous to continue?

Following up on Chris; June 30, 2009 1:15 PM

I read a few years a go a study which reported that kids who were exposed to the D.A.R.E. program were slightly more likely to try an illegal recreational drug at some point during their school careers but less often and usually for a shorter period than kids who tried drugs but had not been exposed to the D.A.R.E. program.

D.A.R.E. kids were also less fearful of police and more likely to approach a police officer for assistance.

Overall, I'd consider the effect to be beneficial, though not exactly what was intended.

Following William Carter; June 30, 2009 3:48 AM

I was specifically scrolling through looking for any mention of the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal.

there is an excellent article about this in the July 2009 issue of Reason magazine which concludes:

"We have debates all the time now about things like drug policy reform and decriminalization, and it’s based purely in speculation and fear mongering of all the horrible things that are supposedly going to happen if we loosen our drug laws. We can remove ourselves from the realm of the speculative by looking at Portugal, which actually decriminalized seven years ago, in full, [use and possession of] every drug. And see that none of that parade of horribles that’s constantly warned of by decriminalization opponents actually came to fruition. Lisbon didn’t turn into a drug haven for drug tourists. The explosion in drug usage rates that was predicted never materialized. In fact, the opposite happened."

The full article is online at

http://www.reason.com/news/show/133856.html

Finally, as a comment on our culture of over protectiveness; when my daughter was very young (she's 14 now) and playing in public areas it was astonishing the chastising glares I would get from other parents when she fell down, tripped, or whatever and I stayed where I was rather than rushing over to her. Funny thing, 99 times out of 100 she would bounce back up (or at least pick herself back up) and go on with what she was doing. The children whose parents rushed to their aid at every spill tended to stay down, look around for their parents and then burst into tears.

Now if my daughter expressed distress I would, of course, be there for her, but she learned that not every discomfort is a crisis.

We do not know children. Hard to believe that these seemingly simple, naive beings could be so complex, but it's true. We were all children once, yes, but even the youngest amongst us has only brief, fragmented view of our youth; even if you have photographic memory, the essence of who we once were is probably lost. Life -- puberty, love, school, employment, interactions both social in the real world and even reacting to a more global community through our televisions, computers and newspapers -- has twisted us. At the same time we are still the same person that we were in 6, as hard as it is to believe on a certain level, but everything has shaped that past blob of clay into a more specific shape or design.

Life outside the home, i.e. social interactions with their peers, has more effect on kids than any other influence. Kids are always near an adult, like their parents or teachers or baseball coach or bus drivers, and so on, but they may be more observed than understood.

Because we don't truly understand kids, we can't truly understand how they could run into the street and get hit by cars, or take candy from a stranger and then get abducted, or even take abuse from a fellow schoolmate and not say anything at all. I don't know if any of things could ever be truly prevented; keeping a constant gaze on children and wrapping them in bubble wrap may, in reality, stunt their growth in exchange for, maybe, 1% less risk. We just don't want to be "that parent" who is on the news sobbing. We want to do anything possible to prevent our nightmares from coming true, except our efforts could lead to a different nightmare entirely.

We can't stop living in big cities and interacting with other people; there are too many people in this world and not enough space. We shouldn't have to wait until drug use and pedophilia and car accidents and gun violence and cancer are all extinct before we can feel safe again. Our kids are in a large community (school), but what about parents? We have become a more insular people. Robert Frost said "Good fences make good neighbors," and the good neighbors these days are the ones that we don't know at all. Not everyone can take time from their jobs and other commitments to host a block party, but perhaps it's time to get to know the people who are raising the people that our kids are interacting with every day.

We used to know our neighbors, not just the next house over but even those down the block and beyond. We used to have extended family within blocks of us, so an uncle or grandparent could be counted to keep a watchful eye; nobody sticks around in one place long enough to become a true part of a community.

However, we can't be expected to go back to the 1950's, just like we can un-invent video games and iPods, or cause all poppy seeds and marijuana seeds to go extinct. The world may always be changing, but there is one thing that should always stay true: rather than hovering and watching over your child, interact with him and/or her and become a part of their lives. Just being there is only half the battle.

Well, about drugs:

http://www.maps.org/media/hmma/VillageVoice9.88.pdf

It's from 1988, but still relevant. Some relevant quotes from the article:

"The truth about drugs cannot do harm. It may offend sensibilities and disturb those who do not want to hear it, but it cannot hurt people. On the other hand, false information can and does lead people to hurt themselves and others...People make decisions on the basis of the information available to them. The more accurate the information, the better their decision will be."

"[on Reagan-era drug hysteria]I think there's a politically motivated drug panic...Some of it is because elections are approaching. Some of it is to divert people's attention from issues that more serious. Some of it is generated by the news media, which have learned that fearmongering sells programs and papers."

"...the policies that we've followed have created the phenomena that we're afraid of. The reason we have kids using crack today is because of the approach we've taken in trying to deal with this through criminal law. It has made drugs attractive and it has made worse forms of drugs come into existence...The end result of them is to stimulate interest and curiousity on the part of people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in them. It also, I think, encourages the drug taking in negative ways: to act out anger and resentment against authority, especially when information is presented in a hypocritical manner as this society is now doing. {Drug Free America Act] there's no intention to include alcohol and tobacco. The government continues to subsidize tobacco addictions, and cigarettes are the worst form of drug abuse."

"...I think it has to go hand in hand with real drug education. What passes for that today seems like thinly disguised attempts to steer people away from drugs we don't like by exagerrating their dangers, and while not paying attention to drugs we do like....There are two basic strategies: one is teach people to satisfy their needs without using drugs at all...And I think it is important to encourage those people to use drugs sensibly [those who do]."

"I think there is no illegal drug that comes near alcohol in dangerousness. All you have to do is law enforcement agencies about the association of alcohol and violent crimes."

There are also medical benefits to some drugs. Chewing cocoa leaves is a safer way to use the drug, but it also has many medical benefits for diabetes and digestive health etc. or just to use as a stimulant, rather than cigarettes, or maybe methadone for heroin addicts as a replacement for hard drugs etc. There are also medical benefits to take MDMA, for psychiatric disorders; education in the educational field as well about drugs.

Andrew Weil is being interviewed who wrote the book "From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need To Know About Mind-Altering Drugs" which kind of directed at teenagers. You can read the introduction at Amazon.com, which primarily directed at teenagers(click "search inside this book"), which almost itself makes the case about legalizing drugs http://www.amazon.com/Chocolate-Morphine-Everything-About-Mind-Altering/dp/0618483799/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b#readerquotes:

As a kid who grew up in the 70's (born in 66), but has no children, I find all this fascinating. I was definitely a Free Range Kid.

My Dad had a boat that we kept at a small marina off Oneida lake in upstate New York. The marina was on a creek that led to the lake. Sometimes a group of us kids from the marina would get in a rowboat and paddle around the creek. We were probably all between 7 and eleven and I don't think any of us ever wore life jackets.

Once we went a little further than usual downstream, away from the lake. An older man saw us and motioned for us to come over, he had something to show us. Not being programmed to fear strangers, we rowed to shore and followed him into his barn. In the barn was hanging a bear that he had shot. It was gutted and you could see the rib bones from the inside. He showed the hole in the bear's head where he had shot it.

I don't remember much about the music lessons or little league games from around that time, but I can still see that bear and I still remember that day.

I'm 13 -- I'm not allowed outside my house, even the backyard, unless my parents are there. I can't walk around the block unless I have my dog (and I don't have one anymore) or my friend or my parents with me. I don't ride my bike out alone because I don't have one. These days, I wander my house and listen to music, read books or get on the computer and write on my novel. My parents aren't like little hovering helicopters, as one person before me aptly put: they don't pester and they don't nag. But they are genuinely concerned for my safety, and evidently every stranger I meet is obviously going to kidnap me. I get worried about that too, sometimes. I probably have a morbid imagination, or something of the sort. I am an introvert at heart and found the first twelve or so years of my life fairly uneventful. I sat at home and wrote, or played instruments or did whatever kiddish things we "young'ns" do today. XP

Lately, I've gotten a bit of an itching to just go, though. Probably me and Rabelais are both looking for The Great Perhaps, or maybe it's the fact that we've moved to a strange state where I don't know anyone and all my friends are six hours away. Ah well. I'd like to go for a walk, and talk to people in my neighborhood. I don't see people out much though, these days. I don't watch them through the windows, but the times I do take a peek into the outside world nobody's there. Nobody my age, especially -- more cause for annoyance, therein. (Hah.) I never really was the kind of person who'd go out running with her friends or go shopping at the mall. Not really interested in the mall, anyways. Maybe now I am, but it's the wrong time. There's no one to go with.

I get my kicks out of books. I just have to pick up anything and I'll go somewhere else. It's not hard. I live in a world created by myself and my imagination seeps in through the cracks. I don't know if my non-free-range existence has impacted me negatively. I don't think I'll ever know. I'm thankful for my imagination, though, and even if I can't run or swim or go to the lake and fish as much as I'd like and maybe I can't walk four blocks to the grocery store or whatever and perhaps I can't regain what was lost. Ah well, time to get back to my books! XD

- A kid.

Ebert: As I say, don't know the answer. Your parents have your best interests at heart, and who knows how much free range I'd allow a Kid of my own? You know you are loved, which is essential. Whatever you've done in life so far, it has made you an excellent writer and thinker. Emily Dickinson did okay upstairs in her room.

I don't know think this qualifies as free-range, but kids are being molested by those that are close to them. In my case it was by a friend of mine who was older than me (I was about 6-7, he was about 9-10). I was kind of free-ranging around the aparment complex, and I think I might have been sitting on some isolated monkey bar dome watching the baseball field on the other side of the fence where I think I knew my said "friend" was playing. I was kind of loner kid. Then when he got home after the game I was still there, and I was molested by him in his apartment while his parents/dad was at work. It's possible that some other older kid who I didn't know really know also did it, that lived close by, who invited me to his house for some chips he just bought from the store. I don't know, but it seems strange that I had to go into an empty apartment (again) to eat some chips. Very large chunks of my childhood are blurs from that time. I think when I went to a party at the time that everyone in class was invited to go that I went into a corner and stared at the wall. So, that kind of explains the blurs, but mainly that I didn't really have parents that really cared about what was going on. So, free-range kids seems like an okay idea, but all the other things about parenting still applies, which I might add probably should include kids having friends their own age, because molestations occur in the family as well. I've had a girlfriend who was molested by her older brother, and I think that's pretty common.

I say, if you want to destroy illegal drug trade, make drugs into a corporate enterprise. Corporates have this funny little habit of destroying smaller business competitors, especially in the US. Of course you'll still have the side trade here and there, but corporate products are just so convenient that really, who wants to go through the trouble and risk their necks for some high? Hell, if we want to eliminate criminal drug activity, just make it legal and carefully regulated – anyone knows it's better business than black market schemes.

roger,

do you add comments spontaneously as our entries come in, or do you pull some of our entries over to a folder to go back and add your comments later?

combination?

Ebert: I quickly upload comments that don't seem to need my reply, and then go back to dawdle.

It must be a scary world, with all that goes on nowadays. You pointed out earlier that parents freak out if they have not heard from their kids in more than a few hours. The same is true of everyone, I think. I am eighteen right now, and the constant notion of death lurking around the corner is a frightening thing; if my sister goes out for a bike ride, and I don't hear from her for a little while, do I know that she's safe? No, I do not, and that's truly sad indeed. I guess it could be sad that I was never able to live in the time period you describe, in which life was more-or-less considered "safe." I understand the paranoia that's going on right now, and, as I look at myself, I feel that it's only going to get worse; if I am eighteen and already worried about these things, what's next?

Many people around my age talk about the legalization of certain drugs, and, while I tend to be quite against it, I agree that nothing can stop someone from getting something he feels he needs. The thing is, alcohol is, in itself, a very risky substance, and having it out in the open the way it is, one would wonder why other substances could not be legalized. Any drug can do harm to someone, no matter what. If you put all of the drugs on the market, you'd be allowing people to hurt themselves, but we already do that anyway, so what's the point? Would it lead to a bigger likelihood that others could be hurt, too? I don't know. It is a big problem, and one that seems to only be getting bigger; my generation is a very odd one, one that shifts from having incredibly strong opinions about certain things, and then having nothing at all to say about others. I cannot predict the future (sadly), but I sure do wish that we will do something about all these problems so that everyone could live in a safer, more "human-friendly" world.

That's certainly optimistic, though.

Savvy

I was overcome with a feeling of nostalgia for the between years of 7 and 12 while reading this. For I too was a raised free ranged. I was particularly fond of the summer months. Get up 7am and bike to the local pool for swimming and diving lessons/team at 8am. Leave the pool at 11am and bike to a friend's house. Their parents weren't home, they were at work. We avoided the hottest hours of the days indoors playing video games. Mid afternoon we'd bike to the 7-11 and get Slurpees. Then just ride around and explore. Head to the park and play basketball or football. Maybe even head back to the pool. Just be sure and be home by 6pm, that's dinner time. In the evenings I'd read a book, then go to bed. Wake up, rinse and repeat.

It all started going down hill when middle school hit. Less concern with having fun and more concern for growing up. And I can't say this was just something kids wanted. Everyone was saying it, parents, teachers, etc. Prepare you for high school. Prepare you for college. Maturing is a good thing. But this wasn't maturing, we had no idea what that really meant. That's something that happens naturally over time with the right kinds of encouragement (or by making the right kinds of mistakes). Instead, it was the illusion of maturing, i.e. drugs, sex, alcohol, skipping school, etc. that actually followed. The vast sprawling suburbia I lived in may have been excellent for the young child still at wonder with the world. But for the angst ridden teenager it was a barren wasteland of boredom and monotony. You needed a car to get anywhere of interest for a teen, and by the time the teen had a car, they were more concerned with rotten habits picked up in the meantime than the adventures of youth they wanted to grow with them. The ones that matured fastest got out of this cycle quickest or were the lucky ones that saw it for the sham it really was and never got involved to start with.

Right on Mr Ebert...
.As a kid I could leave at 8 am and come back 6pm and my folks would think nothing of it. I used to carry a knife to school. My friend had his hunting rifle on a gun rack in his truck that he drove to school. I went back to my school recently and they have completely RUBBERIZED the outdoor playground so kids won't hurt themselves. We are bubble wrapping our kids at our own peril. Who will be the next Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer??? How will our society compete against kids in India and China?? Will our kids take risks? Part of the blame is our OVER LEGALIZED society. Lawyers and lawsuits are metaphysically killing our kid's souls with excessive risk aversion, rules, laws, monitors, cops etc. TOO MANY DAMN LAWS AND RULES.
Too many social workers/experts/ritalin...
Parents let you children go out and play. Let them fall down. Let them fight. Let them be free...

Mr. Ebert,
I'm 25... based on your perspective, I'm either still a baby, a young man, or (in the eyes of my 5 year old nephews) an 'old fart.' I was one of those children lucky enough to be free range growing up. We lived out in the country, and about the worst crime that ever seemed to occur was the occasional vandalism. I was able to stay home with no babysitter at age 7. Out of necessity, I could take care of myself by age 8 since both mom and dad had to work. I think that's why they did a good job - they knew that their time with me was limited. They treasured the time they could spend with me, because they knew it was their job not to run my life and protect me from everything - but to teach me about the world so I could behave accordingly and protect myself. Nothing was ever censored. Nothing. I grew up embracing the world for all its adventures and pitfalls. I am eternally grateful for them giving me the opportunity to shape my own path. They empowered me to make decisions, and not be afraid of every shadow.

I think that's what's changed. The focus has gone from preparing children to deal with the world, to protecting them from the world at all costs. People don't seem to realize that when you raise children knowing only to fear boogeymen, they won't be prepared to handle those boogeymen when mommy and daddy are gone.

I think you might note a scene from the movie "No Country for Old Men." When Tommy Lee Jones is speaking to the elderly lawman about how times have gotten worse. His older colleague gently reminds him that things have not, in fact, gotten worse. There have always been evil acts perpetrated by evil men, and there has always been uncertainty and some amount of fear.

Thank you for the awesome article. I think I need to call my parents and say thank you.

You are an idiot. An idiot for believing all that "remember when" BS. All of that is contradicted by reality. Back then there were parents who acted just like that, keeping kids in, kids getting killed, drugs available (though distribution and potency of the base product were both less, but now it is counteracted by drug sweeps and fillers, respectively)... this is all BS. It's just more visilbe now, and the OMG SCARE sells newspapers or blog subscriptions or whatever. Let's all make fun of you on Fark.

Mr. Ebert,
I'm 25... based on your perspective, I'm either still a baby, a young man, or (in the eyes of my 5 year old nephews) an 'old fart.' I was one of those children lucky enough to be free range growing up. We lived out in the country, and about the worst crime that ever seemed to occur was the occasional vandalism. I was able to stay home with no babysitter at age 7. Out of necessity, I could take care of myself by age 8 since both mom and dad had to work. I think that's why they did a good job - they knew that their time with me was limited. They treasured the time they could spend with me, because they knew it was their job not to run my life and protect me from everything - but to teach me about the world so I could behave accordingly and protect myself. Nothing was ever censored. Nothing. I grew up embracing the world for all its adventures and pitfalls. I am eternally grateful for them giving me the opportunity to shape my own path. They empowered me to make decisions, and not be afraid of every shadow.

I think that's what's changed. The focus has gone from preparing children to deal with the world, to protecting them from the world at all costs. People don't seem to realize that when you raise children knowing only to fear boogeymen, they won't be prepared to handle those boogeymen when mommy and daddy are gone.

I think you might note a scene from the movie "No Country for Old Men." When Tommy Lee Jones is speaking to the elderly lawman about how times have gotten worse. His older colleague gently reminds him that things have not, in fact, gotten worse. There have always been evil acts perpetrated by evil men, and there has always been uncertainty and some amount of fear.

Thank you for the awesome article. I think I need to call my parents and say thank you.

Sadly, I was born in '96, by that time the whole scare was almost as crazy as it is now.
I've been plopped down in the middle of a world where most parents (thankfully not mine) would call 911 if they haven't heard from their kids every 30 min.
I would have liked to live in your time, Mr. Ebert, or at least a time where free-ranging wasn't so looked down upon.
It makes me nostalgic for a time that I'll never experience, and that's possibly the saddest thing of all.

Parents are becoming much more overprotective. Who can blame them? With the media constantly sensationalizing stories, making it seem as if their is danger around every corner, it is very easy to start believing there is. Just look at the coverage of Swine Flu: it was being hailed as a worldwide pandemic, when in reality it was killing less people than the regular flu virus. Most people don't question or think critically about what they see in the media either. They are more likely to just equate the high coverage of crimes with the prevalence of these crimes.

I grew up with overprotective parents. However, based on my experience, I don't know if children are being shielded to the degree parents believe. Despite parents best attempts, children can often circumvent parents rules and restrictions. I, along with most of my similarly shielded friends, just devised ways to break the rules imposed on us while our parents remained none-the-wiser. Throughout my childhood and teen years, I still did all the things my other friends did for the most part: bicycled long distances without adult supervision, played around with BB guns, played around with bows-and-arrows, got into fights, went on dates, went to high school parties and done various illegal teenage behavior (underage drinking, public mischief, etc.). My parents knew very little of this. In fact, most kid's parents knew very little of this. The only difference for us kids graced with "helicopter parents" is that we had to try a little bit harder to get away with the stuff.

So maybe we can all take a little comfort in that children may not be as coddled as adults tend to think. They are smarter than we often give them credit for.

Dear Roger,
I think the combination of technology and media sensationalism has increased parental fears greatly.

For one, we're aware of things like sex offender databases and crime maps--my mom once thought about moving to a town with an online crime map--a map with little red dots for every crime committed in a mile radius of an address, over the last year. And you could roll over the dots to "see" the type of crime: theft, assault, rape, etc. Needless to say, no neighborhood/real estate listing she looked at seemed "safe" enough--too many red dots!
We often talk about how we went places without cell phones too, with a sense of surprise at our then-bravery :)

Another interesting story: When I was in high school, around the time of the Columbine shooting, there was a shooting at a little dive restaurant a few blocks from my school. Sadly, one of the local radio stations reported this shooting (between two young men, not students, most likely a drugs/money dispute) as a "school shooting"! I had to call my mom, who was driving to another city for a work appt., because I was afraid she would hear the report on the radio station she listened to and needlessly rush home.

Now this was a downtown school, laughably considered an "inner-city" HS (as a smart teacher of mine told me), by county officials in my relatively-safe smallish town, but nothing bad ever happened to me there. After I graduated, I realized I would have felt much safer as a freshmen had I known that--I remember being slightly scared because of all the cultural baggage attached to my high school, mostly likely because it was located downtown. Essentially it's the "white flight" mentality in action.

The real title of this piece should have been "Ebert finally succumbs to Alzheimer's", since he seems to have conveniently forgotten that there were PLENTY of serial rapists, murderers, and pedophiles back in the golden days of his youth- there just wasn't the information infrastructure to report it to the rest of the world. But I guess in his mind, if he didn't hear about it, it didn't happen. I'm reminded of my equally crazy grandpa, who once told me that "The Government invented cancer, because there was no cancer when he was a kid".

Ebert: Perhaps you are displaying symptoms of that complaint. Did you forget these words in my entry:

We have three times as many children in America now. Therefore, three times as many crimes against children. I don't have the statistics but you know what I mean. The rate has not gone up. But crimes against children are played big on the news.

What do you imagine I meant by them? Perhaps that things were as bad then as they are now?

Like kids always follow the rules. Parents can make as many rules as they want...kids will just find a way to break them. Further, there are probably just as many serial rapists and gangbangers out there as there used to be; we just hear about them more now. I think this argument is bad. The ways in which kids break the rules, and the reasons for rules being set are different; but I believe the dynamic between child and parent are still the same. It is just a basic human quality that no perceived amount of nannying will do away with.

Mr. Ebert,
Thanks for the great article.
Your description of the childhood of the past, and the poem by Dylan Thomas, brought to mind one of my favorite songs about childhood nostalgia by Tom Waits; "Kentucky Avenue"

Eddie Graces buick got 4 bullet holes in the side
charlie delisle sittin at the top of an avocado tree
mrs storm'll stab you with a steak knife if you step on her lawn i got a half pack of lucky strikes man come along with me lets fill our pockets with macadamia nuts then go over to bobby goodmansons and jump off the roof hilda plays strip poker and her mamas across the street joey navinski says she put her tongue in his mouth dicky faulkners got a switchblade and some gooseneck risers that eucalyptus is a hunchback theres a wind up from the south let me tie you up with kite string and i'll show you the scabs on my knee watch out for the broken glass, put your shoes and socks on and come along with me lets follow that fire truck
i think your house is burnin down
then go down to the hobo jungle
and kill some rattlesnakes with a trowel
we'll break all the windows in the old anderson place
and steal a bunch of boysenberrys
and smear em on our face
i'll get a dollar from my mamas purse
and buy that skull and crossbones ring
and you can wear it around your neck
on an old piece of string

then we'll spit on ronnie arnold
and flip him the bird
and slash the tires on the school bus
now don't say a word
i'll take a rusty nail
and scratch your initials on my arm
and i'll show you how to sneak up
on the roof of the drugstore

take the spokes from your wheelchair
and a magpies wings
and tie em to your shoulders and your feet
i'll steal a hacksaw from my dad
and cut the braces off your legs
and we'll bury them tonight in the cornfield

put a church key in your pocket
we'll hop that freight train in the hall
and we'll slide all the way down the drain
to new orleans in the fall

Ebert: Now that's good writing.

More power to you, Ms. Skenazy! And bravo, Izzy. You go explore, kid, and don't come back until dinnertime! When I was growing up in the late '70s and early '80s, I'd sometimes go along on business trips out of state with my dad. He'd go off to work and I'd be set loose with a bit of walking money to check out the town. A 12 year old boy with some money in his pocket in a strange city could get up to a world of adventure and mischief in the span of eight unsupervised hours. I'd check out bowling alleys, docks, comic book shops, video arcades, churches, museums, bus stations, highway underpasses... When I finished with a city, there was barely a gutter or coin return slot in town that had gone unchecked for change (scrounging change, even when I had cash on me, being one of the Great Missions of my childhood). That kind of thing builds character and self-confidence. Well, self-confidence at any rate. I suppose I'm actually of somewhat questionable character. ;)

"If some kid tells you to go f*** yourself and you whoop him, you'll be seeing his parents in court."

Last time I checked, assaulting someone just for saying something bad to you is still illegal, so isn't that what should happen?

Ebert: Yes. I may have to reword that.

I don't know how my timing is so bad. I generally check out your blog every couple of days, and yet you always manage to post something about 10 minutes after I'm here, so I'm always 2 days late and 2 bucks short, with a million erudite comments to catch up on.

Yes, I see what looks to me like overscheduled, under-daydreaming kids. My dad likes to tell about a feature story he read about a little leaguer who wanted to quit his team so he could go play ball with his friends. From what I read and hear from my nephews, bullying isn't more prevalent now. It's just reported more. Drugs and pressure to use have been around, depending on your neighborhood, for more than 2 generations; before that it was drinking anyway. And on and on. Maybe not much about the world has really changed, except the perception. It brings to mind the juxtaposition in "Bowling for Columbine" of the lead story in an American newscast, full of bloodletting and fear, and a Canadian one, where there is concern about the positioning of a new speedbump. Or maybe there is too much pressure for kids to be too old too fast, with 5-year-old girls expected to get the jaded sexuality of Bratz dolls before their brains can even form the concept of irony, and teenage boys expected to play sports with professionalism and to the point of injury once expected in a pro athlete with half his career behind him, leading them in desperation to the sweet relief of just letting steroids handle it.

But not only kids are losing out, and I can't tell myself if this also is from legitimate fear or paranoia. I didn't realize how much innocence the adult me had lost until I took a week's vacation at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. After over hundred years of careful development, it's grown from a summer tent camp where Methodist ministers could round out their educations by studying subjects outside religion, to a summer town with a grand hotel and picturesque little cottages, restaurants and a movie theater, an outdoor auditorium, concert venues and its own farmers' market, among other things, all beside a beautiful lake. It is a place where anyone can study subjects outside and including religion. People come there to learn without pressure, and to relax and enjoy the atmosphere. It is the original chautauqua, as "chautauqua" is an Iroquois word that describes the lake there.

Chautauqua Institution is most easily traversed by bicycle. I was encouraged in the literature to bring mine, and I did. I rode it everywhere I went. I never locked it once. Mind you, it is not some Walmart special but a Cannondale, and at the time, it was brand new. I parked it among all the other unlocked bikes, usually with my full backpack on it when I went to eat. Then I went to my lectures, went to meals, went to the farmers' market; I parked it outside overnight at the little apartment I'd rented. I could visit the studios and chat with the artists about their projects. I could go for a swim. I could take in a movie at night by myself. Everywhere I went, I struck up conversations easily with others and at mealtimes shared tables with strangers. I made new friends. People asked me about my interests, and told me about theirs; they were open and friendly; it was like when I'd made friends as a child. I let down my guard so quickly people probably wondered what that "clunk" was. I had not had such freedom, nor felt such relaxation of my adult vigilance, in... well, I don't recall exactly when it had become lost.

In Chautauqua, they have houses and garden plants to encourage and conserve populations of what they call "Chautauqua Butterflies" which would be bats. When your population is well-educated and does not thus easily succumb to fear-mongering, they are open to the fact that not all bats are rabid and that a healthy population of them is one of the best ways to keep mosquitoes and other pests down. (It reminds me of a nature walk I went on at the shore with a biologist friend. She picked up a decaying shorebird to study it more closely and point out the process. When I parroted my mom's old concern for disease, she let me know just how unlikely that was - just as I had always secretly suspected.)

Until I went to Chautauqua, I never realized how suspicious and hard my view of the world had become. Perhaps that is because I had never thought it could be any other way. I know it is a charmed place, and has been carefully molded to be what it is (it is gated and guarded, for instance, from the outside world, and a week, let alone an entire summer, there is not cheap). But feeling the immersion into childhood-style freedom from an adult perspective was something I would never have known to wish for, let alone expect to ever experience.

By the way, I love the quote at the end of that second Youtube video. I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but the 29th, the day of your post, would have been Antoine de Saint Exupéry's 109th birthday.

Man, everytime I see something like this it just reminds me what I'm missing out on. I'm 14, born in 1995, and I have been outside of my house without a parent once.

I was 12, and I went to see a friend in the middle of the summer for no real reason. At one point, we took her dog for a walk out of boredom. We went around her neighborhood for about 15 minutes before getting a call on my cell phone from her mom. Yes, I had a cell phone. It was there because I'm emergency-prone.

Anyway, the call was frantic. She was screaming about how my mother called her, and asked how I was doing. When she said I was with my friend walking her dog, it went to hell. Fast. I'm barely allowed out of my parent's line of sight, and they absolutely do not trust me.

In fact, it wasn't until my most recent birthday that I was allowed to walk down my driveway alone. We live in a VERY wealthy neighborhood in New Mexico, average house is $4 million. There's a close to zero crime rate.

I never really minded not being allowed to ride a bike, though, as I have TTP, and I don't feel like bleeding to death if I was to fall off, but there still has to be some element of freedom in childhood, even if it means walking six country blocks for ice cream.

And not just that, but I've noticed that most parents, including mine, are fine with their kids playing violent video games and having unrestricted internet access. It's almost like they have no idea what you can find online. And if their kid stumbles upon a pedophile-filled website or hardcore pornography site, the parent is never responsible. They always, ALWAYS blame the website and the fact that the government doesn't regulate those things in much the same way they "regulate" heroin.

Maybe they wouldn't have to worry about it if they just gave their kid a damned bike.

Ebert: If you can, go away to college. But don't run wild. Easy does it.

Something fundamental has gone away. That something is ignorance. Dictators and power hungry regimes have always sought the means for world domination, corporate citizens have always been willing to forfeit the public good for a better dividend, and children have always been the number one prey of human predators. What has changed is that since we now live in an information society, we all know about it. Many more members of society have a much fuller grasp of the evils that have always been present in our civilisation. With that increased awareness has come increased fear and anxiety, as well as an impulse to try to make the bad stuff go away. via legislation or stricter control of the uncontrollable.

My brother is a service manager for a national chain of automotive service stores. A very frequent phenomenon is when a mechanically disinclined person comes in to have their vehicle checked due to a funny noise or change in handling characteristics. After a summary inspection they receive the news that the brakes or some other critical system on the vehicle are almost shot and need to be replaced at the earliest opportunity. On the way in, these folks drive in a way that reflects blissful ignorance on how close they are to a calamity, on the way out they drive much differently due to the knowledge gained that, yes, mechanical failure might be imminent. Same principle.

I felt a tinge of sadness after reading your blog and realizing just how right on the money you are about the effect of being a "free range kid". If there's such a thing as "free range kids", then consider me a "factory farm kid". I'm living proof of the negative effects of raising your children like Foster Farms chickens.

My parents immigrated from Mexico with next to nothing in their pockets, speaking not a hint of English, and working long hours every day - forget a 9 to 5. My two sisters and I were raised in one of those tucked away areas of San Francisco that tourists don't visit...because where I lived the most interesting thing to do was buy Handi-snacks at the corner store. Nothing but houses as far as my eyes could see, many of them housing children whom may have also been kept indoors; if those children were there, I rarely ever saw them. I was very much a product of the 80's; by then the idea of free range kids had already become a rarity. I was raised on "don't talk to strangers" and public service announcements about the evils lurking around every corner. If I was a product of the 80s, so were my parents. They took all the lessons the 10 o'clock evening news and paranoia service had to offer and lived by them. My parents wanted to ensure that I would grow up to have a better life than they had; in their minds, that meant no child labor and no hunger. It also meant that as a kid I would never be allowed to wander beyond a 1 block radius of my house, go to house parties, have childhood sweethearts, curse, get into fights...you know, free range kid stuff. I was dropped in a Catholic school environment (several, actually), with all the uniforms, and more rules, and the knowledge that God was watching my every move.

By the 6th grade I caught on to the fact that God didn't seem to have the effect on other kids that it had on me; by then I'd become institutionalized by a lifetime of living by the rules, and I took them SERIOUSLY. This was before my parents lost the house they bought and we had to move to the ghetto. There I had one uniform - black, because I was no longer allowed to wear red or blue. Not that it mattered much; as far as my parents were concerned, staying indoors was the only way to stay safe. Needless to say, books and video games became my friends. By the time I finished 8th grade, I was a good nerdy student with one actual friend, and an entire student class that was cooler, more hip, more social, more knowledgeable about all things pop culture than I ever was. The urge to be "popular" filled me with the usual pre-teen angst, but I never even mastered the art of just being "liked". I tried so hard to fit in, and I'd failed miserably; being a fat kid didn't help at all. I was the butt of every joke and mean spirited prank. If my parents had been gun nuts, I'd have probably brought Columbine to my school years before those kids did.

By the time I graduated high school I was given somewhat more autonomy, but lacked the confidence to do much of anything. I lived the life of a nerd without reaping the benefits of one; I skipped out on all the school dances, never got high, never drank, avoided sports, and I still got mediocre grades. I didn't have my first kiss until I was 18; I've had three girlfriends in my entire life, one of them online (does that even count?). Now, I still live with my parents, am a currently unemployed college graduate, and I've never had sex. I'm 25 years old.

I have three cousins in Mexico who were in fact, free range kids, around the same age as me. Their childhoods were spent playing soccer on dirt roads with the rest of the neighborhood kids - about 15 of them. They kicked dirty soccer balls into traffic and picked fights with each other. They played with the stray dogs, fleas and all. They wandered into the city on the public buses at age 10 to visit the arcades and do errands; by age 14 they learned to drive. They excelled in sports, as well as their studies. They were the most energetic, healthy, and HAPPY kids I've ever met. Now they're each college graduates, each with fantastic careers in law and culinary arts, and most important of all, they are strong, confident MEN, unafraid of failure, optimistic, willing to set goals and accomplish things. Success is drenched into the very fiber of their being.

There's something to be said about confidence. I was especially touched by the psychologist from the Lenore Skenzy video you posted. He said confidence doesn't come from being told 'you're great', 'your wonderful', It comes from kids accomplishing things. In fact, that statement alone really said it all. As a kid the conditions I was raised in didn't instill confidence in me, an already shy kid to being with. No matter how much my mother told me I was special, no matter how many lectures my father gave me on the virtues of hard work and being a man, they were only words in the end; I didn't have many opportunities to prove those things for myself. Instead, the void left by my lack of confidence was filled with self-loathing, pessimism, cynicism, and ultimately, nihilism.

Many people will say that these things are my fault and they're absolutely right. My parents had little control over many of the environmental factors that shaped my mind. They raised me to the best of their ability and worked their ASSES off for my well-being. I do not believe in blaming others; I only have myself to blame for my shortcomings. I'm just not sure how to proceed. It's not in me to ever be sure of anything.

If chickens raised in cubicles are a pathetic sight to behold, imagine what it does to children. Parents, let your children explore the world, even if they might get hurt. Allow them to ask questions about anything and everything, don't make them ashamed of their curiosity. Mothers, resist the urge to be so motherly that you emasculate your sons. Allow them to grow up to be men. And if you don't think you can provide a free range atmosphere for your kids, for the love of God, don't have any.

Ebert: I put your entire post in boldface because it is so eloquent. It demonstrates that along the way you became a powerful writer. Take my word for it: Anyone who can write that well is eventually going to have sex. There's no timetable for it. If it's any consolation, a surprising amount of the sex one has before 25 is futile, because it often takes place between genitals, not people.

I totally agree drugs should be legalized. For instance it was always easier for me when i was under 21 to buy pot, shrooms or whatever else i pleased then buying a 6 pack. (Given i think alcohol is actually much much worse then most illegal drugs) I was a pothead for a while and the "gateway drug" thing is completely off base. Maybe if i didnt have to go to the "bad" side of town to talk to joey four fingers to get a bag i would never be around all the other drugs. If i could have gone to a gas station to buy a pack of marlboro greens i would have been happy to do that instead. When you make the drugs illegal you lose all control of sells/receives them.

Also maybe, just maybe if we took all the money we spent on trying to stop drugs coming into the country and used it to fix the addiction problem we would get somewhere. If demand is there supply will always surface especially when its made as lucrative as it is by the american taliban.

Loved it overall, Roger. But hitting kids? Not cool and never good.

Ebert: Not recommending it.

There where child molesters, rapists and all sorts of bad people in the 50s. The difference today; when a little girl is kidnapped anywhere we know about it. We take fear, any fear, and nationalize it. We have become a nation of fear and teach our children the same. I think it started with my generation (I'm 39). I can distinctly remember being terrified to walk 3 blocks by myself to the corner store at 10 years of age. Where did that fear come from?

Last weekend my 6 year old nephew stayed with us. He brought his bike (and bike helmet of course. He showed me the new "trick" he had learned. While riding his bike down our very steep driveway he suddenly popped off the sit and stood, crouching on the handle bars and heading right for the street. He quickly sat back down and braked at the end of the driveway. It was over so quickly I couldn't do anything but run down to him. He beamed a mischievous smile at me. I didn't scold or yell but offered him one important piece of advice. "Drew, don't do that in front of adults".

Hi Roger. In your post, you briefly discuss legalizing drugs as an option. No country on the planet has legalized drugs. However, one country has decriminalized all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. In 2001, Portugal ignored the naysayers, and ended all criminal arrests and prosecution for possession of any drug for personal use.

What have been the results? In brief, other than a handful of right-wing nutcases, no one in public or in the government has any interest in returning to the old system. In other words, it has been an amazing success.

The Cato Institute has published a white paper written by Glenn Greenwald outlining the results, and I think that you and your readers will find it of great interest. The entire report (about 20 pages of very readable text) is available for download at

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

In these days of the Patriot Act and suspension of habeas corpus, which it appears our current administration wants to continue, perhaps the Free Range Children movement can evolve into a Free Range People movement. Not only are we denying our children the freedom to take chances and grow (with all associated risks), we are also denying ourselves the same. And this is all in the pursuit of some unattainable mirage of "security." I wonder if anyone at your reunion even thought to mention habeas corpus at the "Remember when.." game.

I'm very interested in your response to the Cato Study. I hope you'll consider writing a separate post about it.

Ebert: Well, it's a very large field experiment!

Perhaps the solution is not legalization but decriminalization.

I get what you mean Roger. I grew up in the 90s, and even back then seemed safer and more carefree than today. I think the change in periods is twofold: people tend to romanticize their childhoods, and we learn or adjust to experiences, such as crimes, injuries, etc. Looking at movies about the Eisenhower era, everything was perfect and safe. But the increasing controls and fears holding people back are for a reason. Im sure there were kidnappings, murders, rapes etc. since this country was formed. Our method of dealing with these events is to adjust to stay safer. As time goes on, more bad stuff happens that scares us that we'd like to avoid seeing happen to our loved ones.

Oh, I don't know... I've thought the same thing myself, having grown up in the 60's and 70's. What we got away with in those days. How miserable it must be to be a kid these days. Free roaming around the countryside, daring each other to walk across the 500 foot high railroad bridge (no one ever did walk across it), taking an inner tube across the KY river, sneaking off to the country store for pop, smoking ciggies and choking, seeing a triple feature for 25 cents (the films were: Fail Safe, Atragon, and The Transmitted Man) We didn't worry about anything. It's no surprise that one of my favorite films is Stand By Me. That was my childhood, right down to the adventures, the wild kid with the abusive father, and degrading a friend's mother being held in high regard.

Trouble is, I find myself echoing what my parents used to say. They said pretty much the same thing when I was a kid. How simple it used to be. How terrible things had become in the 60's. I suppose their parents said the same thing, what with the depression, and swing, flappers, jazz, dope, cocaine, illegal alcohol, all being popular among kids in the 20's and 30's.

If you look back in history, you find examples of when it was worse, and somehow humanity persevered. Care to be a Jewish child in Germany in the 1930's? It was worse then. Much worse. How about being a British child in the 1850's when cholera was sweeping through London, and no cure was known? A Rwandan child ten years ago?

Somehow, we seem to persevere, and survive. We've survived worse, we will survive this. And our children will survive, just like we did. We will monitor our children carefully, and they'll circumvent our supervision, just like we did.

And so it will always be. Kids will push the envelope in their own ways, parents will worry. They just do it in different ways, and so do we. What will our children be saying, 30 years from now?

1964. I am born.

Meanwhile...

The Beatles land at JFK International Airport.

My Fair Lady wins best picture, beating out Dr. Strangelove.

The United States Supreme Court rules that under the First Amendment, speech criticizing political figures cannot be censored.

Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, 72 and mother of Massachusetts Governor Endicott Peabody, is released on $450 bond after spending 2 days in a St. Augustine Florida jail for participating in an anti-segregation demonstration.

Merv Griffin's game show Jeopardy! debuts on NBC.

The Ford Mustang car is officially unveiled.

The Rolling Stones release their debut album.

The first of several major student demonstrations against the Vietnam War are held.

Nelson Mandela and 7 others are sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa.

The Vatican condemns the female combined oral contraceptive pill on June 25th. That's my birthday. Oh the irony. :)

The United States Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson "broad war powers" to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. forces. Ie: bombing raids.

Walt Disney's Mary Poppins premieres in Los Angeles.

Bob Dylan turns The Beatles on to cannabis for the first time.

Bewitched airs on ABC.

Three thousand student activists at University of California, Berkeley surround and block a police car from taking a CORE volunteer who'd been arrested for not showing his ID when he violated a ban on outdoor activist card tables. The protest eventually exploded into the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

Twenty-three men and thirty-one women escape to West Berlin through a narrow tunnel under the Berlin Wall.

The Labour Party wins the parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, ending 13 years of Conservative Party rule.

Canada selects the "new" red & white maple leaf design for the Canadian flag.

The 1-hour stop-motion animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, premieres on NBC.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Jean-Paul Sartre receives one for Literature.

Comedian Lenny Bruce is sentenced to 4 months in prison, concluding a 6-month obscenity trial.

Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States, is born. So too, Sarah Palin and Stephen Colbert.

All that was happening and much more besides, the year I came into the world. It informed my understanding of it, encouraged me to think and ask questions, all the while enjoying a free-range childhood and adolescence - the latter including conversations with "Mary Jane". :)

I live near Vancouver. On the West Coast. British Columbia. The home of BC Bud. It's like living on a different planet. The mindset is very Zen and to each his own. It's not that we don't have our faults or failings as a country, we do, it's just that when it comes to people smoking pot, the problem isn't the user - it's prohibition and we all know it.

NOTE: pot isn't crystal meth, crack cocaine or heroin. If you smoke too much, you'll fall asleep. Or get the munchies and eat too much and get a tummy ache. Or burn out, sleep in and be late for work. You do not, I repeat, you do not go berserk and run around your son's college campus alla Transformers 2.

The reality of Pot Smoking in Vancouver Canada...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHxONALZRyw&NR=1

I've been inside the New Amsterdam Cafe on Hastings Street; they have some really nice hand-blown glass pipes and bongs. Point is, that's a very typical reaction to pot smoking. Most people are very blaze about it. How you conduct yourself as a person, whether or not you're polite and respectful, is far more important to people up here than if you smoke weed.

As you can be as straight as they come and still be a selfish A-HOLE, eh? The only reason it's still illegal up here is thanks to the United States - that's where the pressure is coming from. They made a documentary about it...

"The Union: The Business of Getting High"

http://theunionmovie.com/TheUnionWeb.html

Today is July 1st, Canada Day! And I'm proud to be Canadian because it means I live in a country where even though some stuff is illegal, we still find a way to be nice to one another and get along. :)

Oh, Canada...

My country does not suck...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFBu8PnC4dI&feature=related

Ebert: O Canada! where pines and maples grow,
Great prairies spread, and lordly rivers flow.
How dear to us thy broad domain,
From East to Western sea.
The land of hope for all who toil,
The True North strong and free!

Right now, anxiety-ridden parents keep constant tabs on their over-stressed kids via cell phone. (Something unimaginable in the low-tech 40's and 50's.) In a few years, the kids will have gps chips implanted under their skin at birth and mom will follow them throughout their day on her computer monitor, the way big corporations do with company vehicles already. Eventually everyone will be tracked 24/7, probably by private concerns long before government. They already put chips in many of the products you buy without your knowledge. Eventually, the chips will carry not just your legal identity, but a whole pacel of educational background, court records, genetic makeup and health history. The world of GATTACCA is coming soon. Count on it. The technology already exists and just needs to be implemented. There will be no more free range kids than free range farm animals. Good day and have a pleasant tomorrow.

I have heard about accidents, murders, rapes, and so many other bad things from TV. The world is indeed dangerous, and sh*t happens. Sometimes the world seems more dangerous and chaotic nowadays. However, as some character in "No Country for Old Men" points out to Ed Tom Bell, things have always been like that. Human nature is slower than technology advancement, so we just see the dark corner of it more clearly and sensationally.

Sh*t does happen to you and your family at the same frequency as before, and it can not be stopped. Children must be safe, but I think people are overreacting to dangers. I have heard about many car accidents on highways, but I have never had any accident. It will happen someday, maybe, but what can I do about it? I will try to some degree, but I will not be never free from it. Same for my children in the future. They will get hurt anyway, so give them some freedom for lessons in real world. Innocence of children is precious, but never growing up can be as problematic as immortality.

I and my little brother were free range kids during childhood in 90's. Even though I was sort of a bookworm, I sometimes hanged around neighborhood(it was usually "The Land of Apartment buildings") a lot even in late evening. Of course, sometime we paid the price. My mother beat us for coming late, but we sensed she was terribly worried about us. This punishment did not hurt our feeling only. There are cruel, heartless things far worse than this.

And there were some accidents. I still have visible scar in the left leg because of broken beer bottle. That happened when we carry lots of empty bottles to the store for selling them. One of them was broken and its sharp edge cut my skin. I bled a lot that time, but as you see, I am okay now. Some of canned products do not require an opener, but you should be careful with opening them. Whenever I try to open them, I am very careful. Razor-like edge still makes me wince due to childhood experience. It hurted, but one lesson was learned, wasn't it?

I also had two head injuries during kindergarten years. I have faint scar between my left eye and left cheek, and that resulted from falling from the top of slide at the playground. Funny thing is, getting treatment at hospital is more painful in my memory. The other one was caused by falling from concrete stairs with metal ends, and it was skull injury at that time. Sometimes I wonder whether this injury affected my character. But I feel I am all right.

I think I grew up well and learned many things during teenager period. I was crazy in my way during teenager time. Maybe it runs in my mother's family, some of whose members allowed me to drink a little even when I was 2(and I danced). I did bad thing to some online shopping website owner in 1999. I kept changing my demand about certain order many times, and I still do not know why I did that. He eventually became mad and demanded to see the principle of my school. I suddenly realized what I had done. I apologized to him and he accepted. The website is gone now. I do not remember the address of that British website, but I am still apologizing to him in my head. Another lesson was learned; I have been very polite on Internet.

During grade school years, my mother resumed her career, but she did not worry about us. Although she cooked rice and some dishes, the rest was our job. We prepared and ate dinner, and went out again for play or study. No need for babysitter. During winter in 1996 and 1997, teachers took me to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam. Sometimes I was on my own. I was not very good at English, but I bought presents for my parents at duty-free shop by myself. I was happy for accomplished mission.

Now, parents in my country usually put their kids immediately in competition for going to first-rate Universities even from kindergarten stage, even if it costs vast sum of money. They have to study(or be brainwashed, as someone says) at home and school and other private lessons first, and then they can play... maybe not now. This is another kind of over-protection. Of course, children have to be protected, However, from my experience, lessons from the world outside are quite good for children. I realized what I wanted to be while having free childhood, and I am still trying hard. I wonder how my opinion will be changed if I become father, but I believe in free-range at this moment. I finally learned to tie shoestrings when I was 15. When I got it, it was great and many embarrassing moments in the past were vanished immediately.

P.S.

1. I agree with your view on drug problem. You have to shake the bottom of pyramid, not the top of it.

2. Although we do not have gun problem in schools, there are disturbing news from time to time. Killing without clear reason, minor prostitution, teenager pregnancy..... Even I am worried sometimes.

Ebert: You know, I'm just going to come right out and say this: Learning to tie shoestrings can be tricky.

Ebert,

Having been raised free range, I am left with many memories of explorations and adventures spent alone – in transit, on my bike… looking for iron pyrite along the railroad tracks… taking long trips to distant corner stores for new flavors of soda pop…

Silence is the negative space on the painting of our lives. It’s presence adds definition to every other encounter. Without silence, a human being loses the ability to think critically. This is the crucial deficit of our contemporary way of life.

Most of this is due to our addiction for passive entertainment. That’s a fancy way of saying “time staring at screens”. TV, text messaging, videogaming, web surfing – all involve a steady stream of information inputting its way into your brain. If you’re watching, you’re not free range any longer.

“Free range”, by definition, is the art of roaming. You need to stop watching to do that. To ask yourself questions. To listen to the wind.

The occasional film is fine, even healthy -- but eventually, you've got to leave the theatre and live your own movie.

Roger,

Every generation has its challenges. When you were a kid, the Cold War threatened the world with nuclear armageddon, drugs were everywhere (tell me honestly that Pot, LSD, etc. weren't key to the 60's), and life really wasn't great for minorities, gays, etc. Now, we still have drugs (but more awareness), we have terrorists, computers let instant communication happen (to include both good and bad communication), and the economy goes up and down (just like always). The only thing that's different is the amount of media coverage out there. Kids in my neighborhood just outside Baltimore (which includes middle-class and poor, public housing kids) run around and play just fine, generally don't cause problems, and get on with the business of growing up. If they've got involved parents, then 99% of them survive childhood just fine and become responsible adults. My point is that this current generation (addicted to Facebook, Playstation, and the Hip-Hop lifestyle) will grow up, be just fine, and lament the fact that things "were so much better and safer" when they were kids. (And so will their grandkids).

Roger,
We collected coke bottles, babysat and mowed lawns for our child economy. We rode bikes to the mall. We had our own clubs up in the magnolia tree, we elected presidents (from the 4 members). We created our own secret language, we explored the woods, made bike jumping ramps. In florida, the roads were made from dredged up sea shells, so our roads were filled with treasures that we would spend all summer looking for, I still have my box of tar covered sharks teeth. We were like the Charlie Brown kids in that we traveled in packs and never saw our parents until it was dark and dinner time. We learned how to socialize and deal with bullies (fight back, or drop to the ground in defeat). We earned our own money. We provided our own entertainment (it did not plug into anything). My friend's kids today are duct taped to the house and bubble wrapped. I feel sad for them.

I see so many comments referring to this rising sentiment as the "Baby Boomers' Lamentations." Well it isn't, and shouldn't be perceived as such. I was born in the early 80s, and can remember what it was like to walk across the street to the neighborhood swimming pool, and remain there for hours with supervision consisting of bored, apathetic teenage lifeguards and my siblings (of which the oldest was 4 years older than I).
I also had the luxury of traipsing around in our backyard creek without shoes, biking around the streets of our small town, etc. The bicycles brought broken bones, broken glass in the creek claimed a small chunk of my sister's foot, and our once independent toys of treehouse and trampoline melded into a breathtakingly fun death trap.
Then some scandal or other hit my town, and while I was still young enough to be extremely confused by the question, I remember being asked if anyone had ever touched me on the schoolbus. You know...in that "special" place.
After that, life changed. When I was 14/15 with 16-17 year old friends, I wasn't allowed to be in a car with them. I couldn't go anywhere without my mother ensuring another parent would be present by speaking with them personally. I went from free-range to fenced-in.

These days, I can't really blame my mother for her reaction. I'd love to say "if I had kids, I'd raise them free-range, to hell with the world!" But who can? Even if people tried to raise their children as most of us can recall being raised, there would be child endangerment complaints everywhere. See a 10-year-old roaming around alone? Where's his leash? Is he a hoodlum or abandoned? Our sensationalist minds reach for the nearest negative (read: exciting) explanation. So not only is our world frought with danger, but the social judgementalism is shaping and reinforcing the child-rearing fads we see today. No woman wants to be a bad mother; if her entire group of friends are helicopter mothers, pack mentality dictates that the "black sheep" will likely endure some comparison between her parenting style and the others'. Those attempting to come back from the brink of bubble-suiting our children at birth are part of a sociopolitical "movement," rather than just people who want to raise their kids differently than everyone else in this country. Why is there so much attention on that? Who in heaven's name could make the conjecture that the changes in parenting styles have been for the better? If the adolescents I see these days are a product of the helicopter parenting style, this "free-range children" idea shouldn't be an oddball trend. It should be the norm.

Good luck to all those who are (or have chosen someday to be) parents. I don't envy your job, and hope never to have it.

By thelordofcheese on July 1, 2009 12:09 AM: "You are an idiot. An idiot for believing all that "remember when" BS. ... Let's all make fun of you on Fark."

So I go to fark.com, and holy smokes, parents, kick your kids out of the house and lock your computers. It's ugly in there.

To the fellow with the son that had his bike stolen:

Childhood, and life, are not always about the good things - they're about the knocks and bumps and bruises, too. That includes (horribly enough) a stolen bike.

When I was .. oh, I must have been nine or ten - I got my first BMX. Black bike, bright yellow tires, yellow pads (which were promptly removed at the first opportunity) - to this day I have a 'thing' for kelly yellow cars, and I blame that bike.

That said, a week after I got the darned thing, I had it stolen from me by the neighborhood bully, who shoved me down in a ditch, got on my bike while I was getting up, and rode off laughing.

Awful memory? No, not at all.

I came home, and (embarrassed) said nothing to my father - who came and asked me where my bike was. We talked, we discussed bullies, how to handle them, what to do. The next day, I went over to that fellow's house, simply picked up my bike, and went to ride off - he, of course, came out to do something about it.

Yes, we had a fight.

Yes, my lip got busted, and the bike? The gorgeous bike got scratched and a bit abused.

But me? Me, I learned to stand up for myself, and that words are not always enough to solve a problem. And I learned how to handle a bully, and how not to be a victim - and I learned what justifiable risk meant, and how I would handle myself in a crisis.

Life lessons are made, not of happy times and good memories, but in those times when things go wrong, and we learn to address them. And.. next time? Your son will use a bike lock (if he wasn't before) and hopefully be more cognizant of the intrinsic lack of value in 'stuff'. And - he'll remember how it felt to have something bad happen, and it will shape him.

It always does - and in a good way. I'm sure you've your own stories on that.

The point is - falling down and scraping your knee and your ego - well, they're important. And free-range kids definitely do that, and I think they're ultimately better for it.

This world does exist and if you want, maybe you can look past your fence.
Or your borders.
I found it here, in Japan.
If there's a crime on TV, it's not for shock value, but simply because it is shocking.
There's no price I can put on the safety I feel for the young, old, and the foreigner.
Good times. Play Ball!

It used to be that people didn't really think a whole lot about having kids. Parenthood was just the natural consequence of marital relations - which was why you got married, after all. When the baby came, mom stayed home, dad went to work, both provided guidance when necessary, and all they hoped for was that their kids would turn out alright. If not, well, s**t happens to parents too. You dealt with it when it happened, but you didn't anticipate or fear it.

Today's parents, on the other hand, consider raising their children as their vocation. They submerge their own goals and dreams and live vicariously through the children until the empty nest years. They never heard that Sting song someone above me mentioned, or if they did, they didn't listen. Parents know this is happening. They might not know it explicitly. But they realize that they are missing out on following their own purpose. So they dwell in unhappiness, which they mitigate by making damn sure their kids provide a proper return on their investment. Our culture's obsession with quantification and competition demands no less.

I'm in my early 30s and as my friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances have become parents, I have observed them all to give up their hobbies and personal dreams (or their work if they were fortunate enough to enjoy it) and invest their whole being in their families. They have become hollow shells with no identity, goals, dreams, emotions, or ideas of their own. It's no wonder that children are so protected and unhappy today. They're bearing the weight of two peoples' lives.

Remember how on TV not all that long ago Dan and Roseanne would go out after work and blow off steam at the bowling alley with their friends, some of whom were single and childless? That was real at one time. Parents today don't have such friends or opportunities to not be parents. If they do, they don't take them. Their entire life is child-centric and there's no time for anything else. And in some communities, it would be unseemly to even think about not obsessing over the kids. You wouldn't want to be "neglectful," right?

I don't mean to diminish the pure effort that it takes to raise children. It's never been easy. But parents are making it much harder on themselves than it has to be. They need to realize that, contrary to Bill Murray's monologue in "Lost in Translation", having children is not an obliteration of their personality and prior life - nor should it be. Parenting is serious business, but not the only business.

Roger,

I know it's not like this everywhere, but for now, I feel like we live in a fairly "free range" neighborhood here in Omaha, NE. We don't let our son out alone, but mainly because he's 3 & that would just be bad parenting. We have a park just down the corner from our home in a peaceful suburban neighborhood & I imagine I'll let him free-range it down to the park if we're still living here when he's old enough to do so.

Personally, I bought the book THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS a couple years ago & am excited for him to be old enough for me to do some of that stuff with him...stuff my dad didn't really do with me, so we'll be both be doing some free-range learning together...if that's possible.

It used to be that people didn't really think a whole lot about having kids. Parenthood was just the natural consequence of marital relations - which was why you got married, after all. When the baby
came, mom stayed home, dad went to work, both provided guidance when necessary, and all they hoped for was that their kids would turn out alright. If not, well, s**t happens to parents too. You dealt with it when it happened, but you didn't anticipate or fear it.

Today's parents, on the other hand, consider raising their children as their vocation. They submerge their own goals and dreams and live vicariously through the children until the empty nest years. They
never heard that Sting song someone above me mentioned, or if they did, they didn't listen.

Parents know this is happening. They might not know it explicitly. But they realize that they are missing out on following their own purpose. So they dwell in unhappiness, which they
mitigate by making damn sure their kids provide a proper return on their investment. Our culture's obsession with quantification and competition demands no less.

I'm in my early 30s and as my friends, co-workers, and other acquaintances have become parents, I have observed them all to give up their hobbies and personal dreams to invest their whole being in their families. They have become hollow shells with no identity, goals, dreams, emotions, or ideas of their own. It's no wonder that children are so unhappy today. They're bearing the weight of two peoples' lives.

Remember how on TV not all that long ago Dan and Roseanne would go out after work and blow off steam at the bowling alley with their friends, some of whom were single and childless? That was real at one time. Parents today don't have such friends or opportunities to not play the role of parent - to be themselves. If they do, they don't take them. Their entire life is child-centric and there's no time for anything else. And in some communities, it would be unseemly to even think about not obsessing over the kids. You wouldn't want to be "neglectful," right?

I don't mean to diminish the pure effort that it takes to raise children. It's never been easy. But parents are making it much harder on themselves than it has to be. They need to realize that, contrary to Bill Murray's monologue in "Lost in Translation", having children is not an obliteration of their personality and prior life - nor should it be. Parenting is serious business, but not the only
business.

My experience was similar to yours, Mr. Ebert, except just a little later (60s), and much more urban (South Side.)

Yes, we had to fight off child molesters, and we couldn't resist drugs, and we spent time in jail, broke our bones, got expelled from schools, etc.

But we survived (mostly.)

Kid raised since then have it so hard. They have no freedom. They are totally controlled, by their parents, and their schools, and so many of them wear chemical straight-jackets. My God, the drugs the parents give kids now are so much worse than anything we bought on the street. We were pretty reckless, but we weren't stupid enough to take drugs like that. And these things are prescribed by doctors?

Childhood is now considered a disorder.

We shelter the hell out of them, drug them senseless, and do nothing to prepare them for the real world. They get the false impression that the world is a Disney film (we considered anything Disney "baby stuff", beginning at about age 4.) And then they suddenly find themselves thrust into a world that is like some combination of Peckinpah and Lynch.

It's a terrible bait and switch. It's not fair. Our parents were much more fair, more truthful, to us. It traumatizes these kids, and many of them never get over it.

Ebert: Your closing paragraph says it all.

I am now Lenore Skenazy's biggest fan :D

I haven't heard of her prior to reading this article not being a real big fan of "touchy-fealy" news stories or stories that seem more gossip then news.

But I completely agree with her. I live / work near DC and noticed the absense of children playing "in the streets" and also during Holloween. I remember after moving here getting ready for my 1st Holloween here, buying candy, asking my then girl-friend (now wife) how many kids she expects to come by the house. She looked at me and said probably none. This answer suprised me and she explained that the kids all goto the MALL for trick-or-treating???? She explained that local parents felt it was 'safer'. I figured she was exagerating so I stayed at home waiting for the door bell to ring with an Adult with some kids in tow in costume looking for candy and this NEVER happened, no children showed up at all. This cycle was repeated every year since I moved (only recently have I stopped bothering with Holloween [I have no kids of my own yet to take out].

Now the stupid thing is (at least to me anyway), my neighborhood (more accurately a Northern VA neighborhood) is completely 'stayed' and safe.. Nothing EVER happens here. So for parents to want to avoid (think this is a more accurate reason, lazy parents) giving their children a real Holloween for safety reasons here make zero sense.

Like I said... I am now Lenore Skenazy's biggest fan :D

Ebert: I guess it would be asking too much to expect parents to actually walk around with their children on trick-or-treating.

BTW, do you know the legend of the mean old man who hid razor blades in apples is an Urban Legend?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_scare

Life is different now due to "compassion". We want to empower parents, so we have the very ideological educational establishment define what is right for boys and girls. We are very legalistic, so empowerment and equality is backed up by lawsuits.

At the same time we are creating over-empowered political proletarians with legal protections, we are showing incredible compassion to the worst elements of society.

I live in Las Vegas where my children go to play dates and I'm careful. Why? Because even on my block there have been home invasions and rapes. Children are picked up by child molesters who are always vehemently defended by the ACLU and state social workers.

Ebert makes some good points, but his politics are responsible for a less free, more paranoid society. If you want so much crime in the streets that your children aren't safe, then vote liberal Democrat. Democrats are soft on crime and want compassion for criminals. If you want to have to guard your kids because society and police won't - then vote liberal Democrat.

The social agenda of serious Democrats like Roger Ebert have created our divided, safety-obsessed and "compassionate" society. Freedom and common sense have been thrown out as a result. Sadly, about 60% of Americans think the ideas and policies that led us here are the only paths to follow.

Ebert: I am not aware of the ACLU defending child molestation.

I believe ideas about free-range and bubble-wrapped children cut across party lines. So does "compassion." I have heard tell of compassionate conservatives.

I grew up in the 70s, and I was as free-range as you get. I was a "latch-key" kid just a few years before they invented the term. My mother used to go out on dates on Saturday night when I was 10 and leave my brother and I alone with the t.v. -- which is just how we liked it.

I used to walk half a mile to KINDERGARTEN. I know the distance, because in disbelief as an adult, I went back to my old neightborhood and measured the distance on my car's odometer (the neighborhood is too scary to actually walk through).

My 7-year old daughter is acutely jealous of the freedom I grew up with, even though I probably give her far more rein then most modern parents. But if anything ever happens to her, not only will I be crushed, I'll likely be viewed as a neglectful parent.

It's a tragedy that idiots have an audience. Ebert writes:

So much is simply chance. You can't plan for bad luck. You can't pass
laws against it. You can't be innoculated for it. You can't wear
protective clothing. Forrest Gump inspired the bumper sticker, Shit
happens.

So much is simply chance. (true but people change risk profiles by
adaptating protective measures - helmets, safety belts, etc)

You can't plan for bad luck. (luck favors the prepared, falling off a
clifff = bad luck. falling off a cliff with a parchute = adrenaline
high)

You can't pass laws against it. (speeding, drinking, seat belt laws,
etc prevent bad luck)

You can't be innoculated for it. (vaccines prevent a host of 'good
old days' childhood diseases and they prevent elves gnomes and fairies
etc from inhabitting the unknown innards and possesing our souls)

You can't wear protective clothing. ( oh really talk to a
dermatologist, skateboarder, or anyway that raced in the KC cyclocross
nationals a few years ago. )

Forrest Gump inspired the bumper sticker, Shit happens (dumbass, the
sticker was out 6-8 years before the movie)

Ebert: Not the movie "Forrest Gump." The character Forrest Gump in the movie. Because the saying was already famous, that's why the scene was funny in the movie.

If any readers raced in the KC cyclocross nationals a few years ago, please let us know.

Hell, I'm only 30 and I was out running around and biking and whatnot in the woods miles from home when I was less than 10 years old. The only restriction was that I had to stay within range of my fathers whistle so I knew when it was dinner time. My father could(and still can) whistle very loudly, so I was pretty much free to go wherever I wanted. I feel sorry for kids who don't have that kind of experience these days, especially considering the world is actually a much safer place now. 'Didn't have serial rapists in those days' my ass, it was just that it wasn't plastered across 24/7 news networks back then.

Three months ago, I was driving through our neighborhood, and decided to let my 6 year old son sit on my lap and "steer" by holding the steering wheel.

I picked a low trafficked area, and had full control of the situation, but felt like a criminal for the whole 2 minutes.

It was one of the best experiences we have shared so far, but I still feel almost embarrassed and shameful to admit doing so.

When my daughter was just learning to walk, my wife's mother scurried around behind her, ready to catch her if/when she fell. I bought a floor rug with a nice thick soft pad underneath (we still have that rug, 18 years later....). That experience among others led to a saying in our household...

"Mothers don't want their kids to fall, fathers don't want their kids to be hurt too badly when they fall."

(we had many playground adventures that can't be duplicated now...all the good, tall, slick metal slides are gone, replaced by stumpy plastic dreck; all the merry-go-rounds have been removed, thanks to the trial lawyers).

I sense that you touch upon an angst that some have called the emasculation of the US. I don't at all "blame" it on "feminism,"...I guess I won't speculate on the driving forces, but there is something really immature about politics today, and the buying of votes, and the infantilism of voters who agree to be pandered to...

Just wanted to add that my son and I still drink from a garden hose. Gardening is hot work!! Or just digging holes if you're 4...

I'm looking forward to reading all these comments, but don't have time right now. We're off to my hometown for a nostalgia-filled visit, an all-school reunion in a small town.

My cousin and I grew up close to Chicago, Hammond, Indiana. This is exactly our childhood. We are 44 and 39 respectively and we used to drink water from the garden hose, it is an acquired taste. I remember walking blocks to George Washington Elementary when I was 5 years old! I have a daughter and I can't imagine her walking to the car from our front door by herself!

It's funny the things you forget and remember at the same time. Hand Sanitizer. How did we live in a world without Hand Sanitizer? Bottled water. HA! That's when TAB came in a can and it was a luxury to have some in your pantry!

Those muggy hot summers, the street ball, the alleys, the trips to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and yes, drinking out of the garden hose on a hot day, before seatbelts, speed limits and when I could walk to DeLocks and buy a pack of cigarettes for a neighbor with his bottle returns.

Roger, just the other day my wife and I were discussing this very issue, and coming to the same delights, laments, and conclusions as you. I fear that, like bicycle helmet laws and lawsuits over slips on wet poolside concrete, the right to grant our children a true childhood is slowly being legislated away. And that is outside my own failings— I too have succumbed to over-protective parenting and don't afford my own children many of the free-range experiences they deserve. Though I've always believed that crimes against children are statistically no more common than in my childhood, I've let the media and the behavior of other parents rob my children of their much deserved independence.

I just posted a permalink to this article on my profile page on the social networking site I use. I recommend that all parents do the same. Issues like this are only addressed at the grassroots level. Maybe this article can help start that movement.

Reading more and more of these posts, especially the ones from entombed teenagers who aren't allowed in their own backyards without a parent, has stirred a lot of conflicting emotions in me. I think the truest thing spoken here was the psychologist saying that children accomplishing things for themselves is what builds healthy adults, not just "you are wonderful, now get in this tower and let me lock the bad things out" being repeated over and over.

I also have been thinking about the film "Welcome To The Dollhouse", with Dawn Weiner's endless and futile scrappy rebellion against her world, which wants nothing more than to crush her. The constant torment she endured at the hands of her peers rang very true for me when I saw the movie, and just about everyone I talked to said the same. (I wonder who the bullies in school could have been, since I have only ever met victims of bullying.)

I really flashed on the boy who kept threatening to rape her: at school, on the phone, out in the neighborhood. He sets a time and place for her to be raped, and she shows up! When she does it's clear that A) she has more of an idea about what a rape entails than he does and B) she will put up with anything for some one on one attention. That scene really outlined for me the whole Lord of the Flies aspect of childhood, where children are using the scraps and patches of the "Dark Side" of adulthood to navigate their world, with no help from adults.

Where are the adults in Dawn's world? Her parents clearly hate her and adore her little sister. Her teachers either hate her or are indifferent. There doesn't seem to be anyone else in authority around. The stories of happy "free range" childhoods all have a very strong thread running through them--adults who cared.

I'm only 22, raised in the 90's as one of your 'free-range' kids. My little brothers and I played in drainage pipes and built forts in the woods until we'd eventually get kicked out and had to find a new spot (one property owner shot a BB gun at us a couple times) and rode our bikes as far as we could before having to turn back to get home before dark. We spent our allowances on whatchamacallit candy bars and Coca-Cola. The only thing I wasn't allowed to do was have sleepovers, because my mother got yelled at one too many times by overprotective parents for letting their kid do something that kids do. I didn't grow up in some backwoods town, just a normal suburb.

Maybe the media's fear-mongering has a lot to do with it, but sometimes parents just need to remember their own childhoods, probably a lot like yours in southern Illinois. No matter what my brothers and I did, my mom, more often than not, would recall a time when what she did growing up in the 70's was actually much worse. At 12, I was still diving for beer bottles at the bottom of the lake - my mom was smoking pot laced with acid. While when I was 16, I was at after-prom bonfires down the street, my mom was at Navy Pier before it was McDonald's Pier getting drunk around the sailors...a fair cry from her home in Edison Park.

It makes me sad that, as young as I am, my childhood was still more like yours 50 years ago than my niece's will be 5 from now.

*Also, as a side note to Anton Berlin: I think perhaps you may have missed the point of the entry, and foul language is rarely a good way to make your point.

We have 300,000,000 Americans in this country. One child is bound to die of a jump rope accident. We had a freak accident here in MN where a child's intestines got sucked out of her body by a rather strong drain in a kiddie pool. A freak accident but what do you do? The only thing you can do, pass legislation and regulation. Don't let your kids go into kiddie pools anymore.

On the other hand, maybe things weren't reported as much back then and it's an information issue. Do you think kids have been molested in the church since 2002? Or has it been happening for centuries?

I recall driving with my dad through his old neighborhood. He pointed out a tree that his buddy hanged himself in when he was about 10. He was playing cowboys and indians by himself. What if he had helicoptor hovering parents who never left him alone, tought him that rope is a dangerous object and should only be used by an adult. He may still be alive. Then again, can you imagine growing up not playing cowboys and indians?

Mr Ebert,

Do your research. NAMBLA and other groups are routinely championed by the ACLU - despite clear instructions on child abduction and child rape prominently displayed on their websites. The ACLU has a history of championing the rights of convicted child predators to retain custody of their children or live in areas where they can be a risk.

Regarding politics, nobody can say a conservative/traditional approach creates unsafe neighborhoods, paranoid parents, or hyper-politicized schools. Look to the UK for the results of a progressive and open-minded liberal society; drunk population, feral children, social collapse, and enlightened liberal leaders cheering the importation of radical Islam and third world poverty.

Conservative values produced social norms which allowed for those "good old days". When boys were allowed to be masculine, and schools taught the basics instead of political nonsense, thing made more sense. It is leftist compassion with an agenda that has created the problems you seem to lament. Neither political perspective has all the answers, but the left is responsible for the majority of social ills we see today. Only an irrational emotional investment in liberalism would blind an objective observer to this reality.

Ebert: The ACLU doesn't champion groups or ideas. It defends individuals--on the right, left or anywhere--whose constitutional rights seem to have been violated. Sounds to me like a strict constructionist approach.

I grew up in Lisle, the most depressing thing about going back is to hear about all the kids i went to school with who have died from a heroin overdose. Not alot of ChoMos roaming the streets but certainly there are predators.

Sounds like a comparison of small town life vs urban life. If you want to let your children run free, i say go for it. Statistically speaking, more of them will get killed or seriously injured which helps insure the success of my children. Those who claim that the incidence of abduction and injury to children has not gone up are looking at the wrong stats. Its a free country, be as stupid as you want.

Roger...you espouse all this yearning for personal responsibility, and yet you voted for the likes of Obama, who presents himself and his government as the answer to any and all problems. Politically, you just seem hopelessly confused. You want to know where this overweening sense of entitlement to cradle-to-the-grave protection comes from? The stupid Democratic Party, that's where.

Ebert: Medical care cradle-to-grave is currently controlled by HMOs and insurance companys, and is by far the most expensive in the world. You cool with that?

Really the biggest problem is that people don't spend time with their families like they used to back then, and kids now are not only undisciplined but a lot of them have also never had anyone to truly guide them and thus they learn their behaviors from their peers.

I like that you admit that you don't know what the solution is, you just know that there is a problem. I feel that way about a lot of things and I believe it's a healthy attitude to have. However, I do not believe that kids today are really in any more danger than they would have been back in the day (granted I'm only 26).

I just see it as fear. Fear that may have some valid foundation but is only exacerbated the evening news, which I find to be a rather morbid viewing habit by the way. The degree to which the average parent is paranoid is pretty astounding.

Oh and I love the video about the boy who rides the NYC subway. Good for his mother, that kid will go places both literally and figuratively.

You know, sorry to go against the flow, but I’m thinking these comments are not so well said. Somehow it seems the last couple of days things around here have gotten very un-Roger Ebert like. There is a real "us" and "them" thing going here that is not healthy. If I get it right the gist of what most everyone is saying is that we had a certain type of childhood, and because we enjoy imagining ourselves as the best humanity ever had to offer, we look at children being raised in a different way today and want to judge that as being inferior to what we had.
The free-range childhood was actually a pretty short period in the history of America as we struggled to figure out how to have two parents in the work force and still do a good job raising our children. And much like the period after WWI in Germany, the results were at best mixed. A childhood that in our rearview mirror might look like a Country Time Lemonade commercial, based on the voting record of those who experienced it, probably was far closer to the Lord of the Flies.
All the science shows that kids being raised with an active involvement from parents are far better off than those without. The free-rangers gave huge sums of money to give Dick Cheney a second term as vice-president; the post free-rangers went door to door in “dangerous” neighborhoods to get Obama elected. Roger, to say that you don’t know which approach is better is to say that for the moment you are living in a dream world where comfortable imagination outweighs the reality we need to make the real world a better place.
Maybe you saw Monday's study from the Pew Research Center about the growing generational gap. I look at it and see the young people are on the right side of every single issue. How can that be if their childhoods are failing them? How can we be on the wrong side of every issue when we are “perfect in every way?” Where your post, and its comments, seem to be looking at parenting today and seeing fear, I look at parenting today and see love, lots of it. By any measurable result it sure looks like love works, a story you usually tell better than anyone alive on the planet, but not this time.
The irony is that this is your post the same week as My Dinner with Andre is finally released on DVD. Did Louis Malle put the mirrors behind Wally and Andre to make the room look larger, or to remind us that we have no natural ability to see ourselves? You did so much to promote this film. I might never have seen it if it was not for you. Please, oh please, shut off the autopilot and bring your full Roger Ebert presence to bear on why every single person on this planet needs to see My Dinner with Andre. Its message is even more spot on today than it was back in 1981.
As Andre said “You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a language of the heart, languages in the Polish forest where language wasn't needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that's the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language, you're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything.”
You speak that language of the heart so well, and it is what we need now. Sorry if my post is a little negative. I had one of those free-range childhoods, and even though I am doing better most days, every once and a while little bits of anger seem to pop out of nowhere.

While reading this article, the followig passage struck a chord with me:

My friend McHugh was sitting in O'Rourke's one night when a guy flashed a gun stuck in his belt. "What are you carrying that for?" he asked the guy. "I live in a dangerous neighborhood," the guy said. McHugh told him, "It would be a lot safer if you moved."

Roger, did you ever consider that people who live in dangerous neighborhoods do so not because they want to carry around a loaded gun, but because they cannot afford to live anywhere else? I am sure that the many Americans who live in impoverished ghettos whould love to move next door to you if they had the means to do so. But since they do not, and the police in those areas are not up to the task, they have to resort to defending themselves. They are not trying to me macho or bad ass, they are just trying to protect themselves, their families, and their property. Do accidents in the home occur? Unfortunately yes. But an overwhelming majority of in home shootings are suicides that, while still tragic, are hardley accidental. At the end of the day, one's opinion of firearms boils down to what side of the barrel they are on.

1982: I was seven years old. The neighborhood bully roughed up my brother. I threw a rock and hit the bully in the head, bloodying him. The bully's mother came to my house, pissed off, and showed my mom the rock. My mom took the rock, told the woman that her son was a bully who got what he deserved, and told her to get off our property.

2009: The same incident would result in a lawsuit, court-ordered counseling for myself and counseling for the "traumatized" bully, neighborhood blog reports and, eventually, a college application essay written by the bully entitled, "How A Rock Changed My Life: Living With Attention Deficit Disorder."

I don't have children, but I interact with a lot of them who just happen to be of adult age. Their hovering parents nurtured them into passive-aggressive twits with a sense of entitlement that is so crippling that they can't handle the most common personal or professional setback. They have a difficult time understanding the difference between action and words and a more difficult time understanding that accommodating their wants and needs is not a top priority for others. As a result, they suffer arrested development and their ability to contribute meaningfully to society is retarded or compromised.

My girlfriend (future wife) and I have been talking excitedly about having children and about how we plan to raise them. I'm grateful for the fact that we have similar ideas about parenting and the type of environment we want to raise our children in. We want our children to feel loved, but not at the cost of denying them reality. We want them to feel pride in an actual achievement, not merely because they participated. And we went them to feel what it's like to lose, screw up and bump their heads. How would they become individuals and fully-formed adults otherwise?

Roger,

The only reason we have so much to worry about is because adults are not nearly as good at being adults as kids are at being kids. And then the adults get to make new adults. It's a viscious circle.

I grew up as free range as most kids born in the early 60's, and by the time I was in kindergarten, was already the child with the responsibility of picking up the gallon of milk three times a week from the corner store, about a third of a mile away.

But what I wanted to write about was bumping into a free range child a few weeks ago, here in Chicago, where I live just north of Fullerton, over by Central Park.

I was gardening in the front yard, and noticed, across the street, a boy of about eight, on a zipper-scooter, with two dogs following along; a medium sized dog, and a small poodle like creature. The larger dog came trotting over to inspect my gardening work, and as I gave it some water from the hose, the little one trotted over, followed by boy on scooter. He politely introduced his dogs, got them out of the flower bed, informed me that they were on their way to the small water park - which was about five blocks away. We chatted some more about what I was planting, then he scooped up the little dog, slung the creature onto his back (where it wrapped its forelegs around his neck and hung on for dear life) called to the larger mutt, and scooted off, telling me to have a nice day.

I was charmed out of my mind. Not once did I even think to say, "Where do you live? Shouldn't your mom be with you?"

All I could think was, "This is how it should be."

Roger -

Currently, I am 21 years old and I like to consider myself a child of the 90s. I grew up in a medum-sized city and its suburbs. Here's a brief documentation of my childhood as I'd like to think it's quite normal.

During the days, my parents would want me to be outside as long as possible, as often as possible. Every year, I'd get a new bicycle for my birthday. This is because every year, I'd destroy last year's bike with crazy stunts and falling. I can remember fountains of blood dripping from elbows. It was amazing! Part of growing up was being able to show off scars to your friends and parents to prove your toughness. I sort of miss falling off the monkey-bars.
Fun fact: Throughout my childhood on separate occasions, I fractured both arms. Twice.

My friends and I would bike all over town- bike across busy roads and intersections and never lock our bikes up upon location. We never feared getting anything stolen. We never wore elbow pads and knee-pads. Rarely helmets. We never feared getting hurt, especially by adults. This was unheard of to us.

Every summer, my dad would take my friends and I camping. We'd canoe 3 hours to our desolate location. We weren't afraid of bears because every single one of us carried a knife. Imagine, a 10 year old with his own pocket knife!

I'd also spend many weeks away at a summer camp. We learned to Kayak, Canoe, Sail, even Waterski and Kneeboard.

When I was 13 years old, my dad and I both chopped wood every fall for our fireplace. It was great feeling to wing a giant axe. After the first few swings under his supervision, he'd leave me alone to do the work. Perhaps that's a bit harsh, but I felt quite independent.

But I suppose my childhood would be different than other peoples. My parents grew up in the Soviet Union. It's a different world where the media was strictly controlled and always political. I was born there myself - as are many of my closest friends. We moved to the states when I was only 4 years old.

When I was 16 years old, I decided to work my summers as a camp counselor. That's when I started to see things the way you do, Roger. Parents wanting their kids to call them midday to keep tabs. Parents suing the camp because there was a bee's nest and their precious snowflake got stung. Kids that never learned to swim because their parents never took them to a lake - not even to fish. There was one particular parent that tried to get peanut butter BANNED because their kid was allergic. They make the kids feel like the world is out to get them.

But you gotta understand, this overprotective behavior doesn't apply to all parents. The kids that were the best behaved and most independent were the same chidlren whose parents allowed them more 'free-range' freedom, like biking home each day. And there were plenty of them. These parents didn't want to deny their children the 'Great American Childhood'.

Hopefully, if more parents start reading articles like yours - they'll get it through their heads that treating kids like caged-animals is DAMAGING. Not just to the kids, but to society.

I hope when I have a child one day, I won't succumb to the paranoia.

That's all I really wanted to say.
And please forgive my poor writing skills.

Protestants for the Common Good is a religious organization in the State of Illinois that believes the current drug laws make life worse for kids. The Board (on which I sit) recently voted for a resolution to decriminalize, but regulate, drugs. Making currently illegal drugs available only by prescription from a medical doctor, would, I believe, go a long way toward removing the criminal (and most violent) folks from the drug business. Then our grandchildren could more freely gather to build treehouses and ride bikes through the streets and down the country roads...

Ebert: They say it works in Portugal.

Dear Roger,

Forgot to add: I don't know that the "free-range" childhood is totally over--and its not all wonderful news :)

For awhile I worked in a department store in an "upscale" mixed-used community. Along with the stores, there was a movie theater, and parents would drop off their young teens (13/14-ish) on weekends and let them roam around at will before/after films.

What that meant was that I was constantly yelling at groups of teens, "Hey, quit running on the escalator!" Occasionally, police officers would stop by to see our in-store security about thefts, intoxicated teens, etc.

Thank goodness, we had in-store security, or the floor employees (primarily female college students or older married ladies, 45-60s) would have had to deal with rowdy, drunk 14-year olds, in addition to all the other nutty stuff we had to deal with: irate customers, crazy customers, people trying to return discounted merchandise at full price, watching high-value merchandise. After several thefts at other store locations, my manager told me to "guard the Dooney and Bourke handbags with your life!" We had to chain them up and unchain them for customers with minilocks and tag them with alarms that had a huge needle mechanism. I had stabbed thumbs and a bad attitude. :)

I once had a much-needed cup of coffee stolen on one of my breaks---some kid swiped it off of the bar before I could get through the crowd of other kids to pick it up. Made me want to growl "Get off my lawn, you brats!"

Then there was the four or five-year old, we found wandering near the escalator one day--he just "slipped out" of the dressing room, his mother said, but it took her at least 10 mins to come and get him.....

I'm fine with "free-range" in theory, but I don't particularly care to be a $7.50/hr. store employee AND an unpaid babysitter :)

Hi Roger,

I enjoyed this article, as I enjoy most articles you write. I'm a 29 year old male who was raised by a widowed mother on the North Shore. While I find your story pleasant and reminiscent, I think you are looking back at things with the tinge of romance. I certainly can't refute the "good ol days" or that your childhood was indeed better than mine. I have no such stories of community, or staying out late and playing on the streets. I was, perhaps, given more freedom than most, as my mother simply couldn't control me while she was at work. I have always admired childhood stories from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, blessed with their naivety and simplicity of life. While I certainly cannot doubt the richness of that period in time, I'm sure there were old timers in your childhood who shared the exact sentiment you have today. Perhaps it's age and the longing for that which has been lost. Old folks who had lived through the 30s and the 40s knew that the cars from the 50s were a step down, as manufacturers started figuring out obsolescence and dollar-cost averaging. So in a certain sense, I am trying to express that all of this is relative, in a repeating generational cycle.

"Things aren't like they used to be". They sure aren't. Granted, I am not a father, but would I trade my era for yours? Not in a heart beat. To look back at all of the malicious and dangerous products that were in use, to think of all of the illegal dumping and environmentally unconscious actions of the 50s and 60s; heck, we've barely recovered from the "Golden Age". The Chicago river is only just now beginning to recover from all of the abuse and pollution passed down by ignorance and a simple lack of education. Of course, none of these actions were malicious; most people were simply unaware that dumping thousands of tons of mercury down the river was bad for the environment. It was, perhaps, this ignorance which made life so pleasant to live back then.

With irresponsibility comes and increased sense of responsibility, and while baby boomers sit back and experience the other side of the generation gap, wishing for times past when you could, indeed, drink from the garden house, it is my generation, and those next me, who share the burden of cleaning up your mess.

Ebert: Final warning:

Readers, this is your three-day warning to get those recipes in for the cookbook inspired by my entry "The Pot and How to Use It."

Here is your chance at gourmet immortality. Include your name and where you are. Just a first name or handle if you insist.

They can be amateur, seat-of-the-pants recipes. We will polish them up. You can just list the stuff that goes in and let me figure out how gto concert for the Pot.

I especially would like to hear from the many readers in India, South Korea, China, Japan, Chile, Argentina, Turkey, Germany, the UK, Ireland and Sweden. Also from Marie Haws.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_use_it.html

Roger

I read a lot of the comments and see it is from people born in the 70s, the 60s, etc. I was born in 1981 and still consider myself to be young. I have a 6 year old daughter and I only hope that she gets to live a child hood like I had. I consider myself a country boy, and adventurer. My mom let me stay out until 10-11 at night as long as I got good grades in school. I owned a trampoline (that I often got hurt on) and explored the neighborhood and life as much as I can.

I know I made mistakes but I learned from them. I touch a fire and burn my hand, I then know not to do that again.

I see so much of the over protectiveness and sheltering of kids that it just blows my mind. Instead of taking the problems that come and learn from them people are now imagining every problem that could happen and trying to shield their kids from it.

Bad things happen. Most of the time it all comes down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter how much you shield your kids it only takes a second for something bad to happen to you or them. No matter how much you shelter them things will still happen. Let them live a life that is happy and free so if something does happen (knock on wood) you will at least know they lived a happy life.

I was born in 1981 and even I had a "free-range" childhood. I am certainly not an old fogey (sitting here at the ripe old age of 27). I too am disgusted at the way children are mishandled today and I long for a return to the good old days (15 years ago for crying out loud!), where children ran home only to drop off their books after school and weren't seen again by their parents until dinner time (at least). If parents don't wise up, the children of today are going to grow up and do grave damage to this nation, through no fault of their own.

Reply to: Mark: No country on the planet has legalized drugs. However, one country has decriminalized all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. In 2001, Portugal ignored the naysayers, and ended all criminal arrests and prosecution for possession of any drug for personal use.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

Ebert: Perhaps the solution is not legalization but decriminalization.

I'm not impressed by a 6 year experiment.

A small part of the problem is that the human body builds up a tolerance over decades of drug use.

SITE: Cherilyn Lee, a registered nurse, said Tuesday that she repeatedly rejected Michael Jackson's demands for the drug, Diprivan, which is given intravenously. "He wasn't looking to get high or feel good and sedated from drugs," she said. "This was a person who was not on drugs. This was a person who was seeking help, desperately, to get some sleep, to get some rest."

SITE: the drug Propofol, also known as Diprivan, is administered intravenously as a general anesthetic used to sedate patients for surgery and is only available to medical personnel.

"This is only meant for use in anesthesia and (using it for a sleep aid) it's like giving someone chemotherapy so they don't have to shave their head," said veteran anesthesiologist Dr. John F. Dombrowski, who has not treated Jackson and has no information about the case, but has used Propofol often in his practice.

Dr. Dombrowski said the drug is so powerful that it is critical to have someone in attendance who has the ability to rescue you should your breathing cease or some other critical failure occur, which is why the drug is only used in operating rooms and in doctor's offices where providers are on hand to support patients and intervene should something go wrong. "It is never used outside a medical setting during a procedure," he said. "And it is never used as a sleeping aid. I've never heard of that in my 16 years of practice."

Dombrowski said that Jackson, who was alleged to have struggled with an addiction to prescription medication, likely built up a tolerance to those drugs over the years. "You not only build up a tolerance, but these drugs can also mess with your sleep cycle and so you want to be sedated, you want that feeling of being out that patients who abuse these medications like," he explained. (end, most sites attribute the original story to TMZ.com)

I've been reading about the death of Marilyn Monroe. There's a coroner's report, which says she had the equivalent of 47 Demerol capsules in her bloodstream (But some of the internal organs were not tested, a serious error.) According to one of her friends, Monroe called her that night and asked if she could bring over some sleeping pills because Marilyn didn't have any. Was this an example of "drug-seeking behavior" as a result of building up a tolerance, that resulted in an accidental death?

There are numerous studies about the long-term effects of currently illegal drugs, and none of them make a case for wider use. Even a sensible person like Michael Jackson reaches a point where all the sensible options fail to give the desired result, and they move on to options that are not sensible.

Good read. I hate making generalities, but there really are so many folk devils. Child abduction wasn't invented 20 years ago, and neither was molestation. If it were, then how did we get the tale of Solomon and the baby? Just what were those Greeks doing with those boys then anyway?

I won't say it's a new trend (I'm only 21 myself), but what happened to personal responsibility? When a parent is called in by the principal: "My precious little snowflake wouldn't do that!" When a student goes on a rampage at school: "It must have been those video games!" While hitting is not necessarily the answer, we need to be willing to do something. Giving a kid detention is like punishing a child by taking away his chores.

The media is just trying to make a buck, and there are no better ways to get peoples' attention than outrage and controversy. Per capita, school shootings actually went down in recent generations. Swine Flu hasn't caused that many deaths. Mainstream media's idea of journalism is all about telling people what they want to hear, or generating some other predetermined response that suits their interests. Is it any wonder the most trusted sources of news today happen to be comedy shows?

There's nothing wrong with being safe, but everything can be bad when done in excess. So parents, let the kids run and just set them on the right path. They have their whole lives ahead of them to be worried about anything and everything.

As an aside, I think the thing about drugs is not necessarily the usage itself, it's the industry. Just as punishing prostitution is partly about the pimps rather than the actions of consenting adults, drugs are about the distributors. Let's face it, some of those people selling them aren't the nicest people. What happens to the drug lords and smugglers when you legalize it? I doubt they're going to just go away. Do they become something of a legitimate business, or do they move on to other high-profit crimes, such as human trafficking?

Thanks for the article Roger,

I notice you often talk of the idea/theme of 'self-fulfillment' (be it negative or positive). I was watching CNN the other day and they were reporting how Michael Jackson's physical transformation was largely encouraged by the negative expectation of the public; and thus became self-fulfilled in a way through Michael's own expectation of himself. It's interesting how others' expectations affect who we believe we are. Children, who are especially impressionable, must be this way ten fold. Could it be that a kid whose mother trusts her kid not to smoke pot will turn out better than a kid whose mother forbids it and monitors it?

On a separate note, I think allowing "children to be children" is important for maturation. Evolutionarily, our species would have weeded out these bad behaviors in children if they were truly a detriment. But testing boundaries is a natural process of our brain development. Maybe it's important for us to try that cigarette in the fifth grade so that we feel the immense guilt that we broke the trust of our parents. I'll tell you what, that guilt won't be there ten years down the road when we're twenty.

Ebert: Waitaminit. Unless I'm reading this wrong, you're 10 years old. If this is how you write, I want to be your publisher when you're 12.

I grew up in a small city in upstate New York. My dad wasn't around, and my mom worked, so from the time I was ten or eleven, I had a lot of time to myself in the summer.

There were lots of us - this was the mid '60s and there were kids everywhere all the time. Thinking back, I believe the girls stuck together and stayed close to home, but we boys were all over the place. All the moms and grandmoms in the neighborhood knew all the kids, and moms could count on getting calls if you did something funky.

The apartment complex in which I lived was backed by an enormous undeveloped patch of fields, hills, pond and swamp that is now a "Nature Reserve." At the time, the water was part of the city's sewage system and periodically the smell from a massive fish kill would make the path around one end of the pond impassible. But we ran wild in the fields all summer. By the end of June, only the ginger kids could be distinguished by skin color from the African-American kids who lived down the hill.

One kid I didn't know actually drowned in that pond one summer, and our parents got loud about staying away from it. Your story mentions that "shit happens," and when I think of some of the things we did (and survived), I wonder if Somebody Bigger than Phil was in fact watching us and taking care.

I live in San Francisco now, and a friend from a rural part of Michigan with five children recently talked to me about possibly moving here. I had to be honest with him about the lack of free-range childlife here. I don't know whether there is more danger or whether it's better reported, but I know that (outside of a very few neighborhoods in my city) the free-range child is a rare specie indeed.

50 years on earth! That milestone is but 6 weeks away for me on August 25th.

I feel blessed to have grown up in a time when we would ride our bikes/skateboards ALL OVER Santa Barbara, Goleta, Montecito, Hope Ranch and various other locations without a worry in the world. We did have to be close enough to the house at dinner time to hear my mom ring the dinner bell. Yes, we had a brass dinner bell hanging outside the front door. If she rang it and you didn't come there was hell to pay!

Remember when my brother and I got caught shoplifting candy from a local liquor store? My brother gave the owner a phony name. I, of course, being three years younger and not as savvy gave my real name AND home phone number. I'll never forget the look on my brother's face. It was priceless. We spent the next month sweeping the man's back room and entries/exits after school as punishment. Bad kids? Hardly!

Remember when we pushed our sting-ray bikes while sweating, huffing and puffing our way up Old San Marcos Road (having been replaced by San Marcos Pass) for 2 hours just for the THRILL of the 15 minute ride down?! The switchbacks, curves and esses that only a mountain road can provide were exhilarating. The occassional car that might come around a blind corner was rarely given any notice. And, there were some. The thrill of the ride was the only thing on our minds and superceded any real safety precautions.

Remember when my parents bought me a used 10 speed when I was entering 7th grade so that I could ride it to the private Christian school I attended at the time? It was about 11 miles each way ON CITY STREETS THAT CROSSED HIGHWAY 101!!

Kids today don't know how much fun they are missing out on.

Remember when our usual gang of idiots would find a eucalyptus tree of appropriate proportions and one of us would climb up and out onto one of the very limber branches and drop a line of rope to the ground. The rest of us would then pull on that branch until it was near enough to the ground that one (or more) could get a grip while the rest of us let go. Being flung forty feet into the air without anything but your grip on that branch was a pure adrenaline rush!

I could go on and on, but suffice to say "Those were the good ol' days!"

I remember riding my bike all over town with my buddy when we were maybe 10-14 years old. I also remember coming home bleeding, usually from the knees, noses, or elbows, and trying to explain why my face was hamburger but miracuously my helmet was untouched. I remember my mother fretting and almost crying, and carrying on the way mothers do about their sons faces and the desire to not have them shredded on the pavement. Above all I rememeber my father taking me into the bathroom to clean me up, an established ritual by this point in our lives, with a look of real concern on his face and calming words for my mother and myself. He gently cleaned my wounds and about the time he realized no permanant damage was going to result, and bonus for me, I would not have to dress up for halloween that year, a sudden change came about in his expression. I knew that expression, it meant he knew I was up to no good and it was too late to find a way out of it. I briefly considered tears, but had recently deemed that unmanly, worthy only of my sister and her friends. I tried the silver toungue bit but only got about half a sentence out before my face lit up like a fireworks show. I was so shocked that I had no natural response except to stare at my dad, who was grinning like a kid on christmas and holding a can of bactine. He chuckled and said "next time wear your damn helmet, it looked stupid strapped to your bike when I saw you earlier by the park." After that I had a moment of pure clarity, I was obviously getting to the age where "just don't tell your mother" was almost a daily recital from my dad, and he just upped the ante in our game of how far can I take this? I never told my mother, I never wore my helmet either, but it was understood that from on unless something was broken I was going to clean my own wounds, they would always have band-aids, bactine, and ice cream on hand, but it was big boy rules from then on. I will juxtapose this with my neighbor I saw yesterday. She had her kid on a fake, goodhouskeeping-approved, plastic tire swing in her yard. Maybe 18 inches of air between the seat and the sod, with the addition of outdoor rubber mats purpose built for this and only this function. Normally I pay no mind, but the shrill "not so high!" coming from the yard made me look. The boy of about 7 was making less speed then a clock pendulum, and he was in a harness complete with safety line anchored to the tree limb. My first thought was this boy will move out of the house eventually and die the first night because he has no idea what reality is. I guess the point is everyone deserves to be able to make mistakes, because that is how we learn.

Ebert: I'm picturing the bike route you must have taken. Wow. That's free-ranging.

I told a friend who graduated from Carver High School about my rides a year or so ago. I didn't know until I was in college that the Gardens was the projects. There were always bad stories about the Gardens. I never had any trouble. My friend thought the neighborhood people knew I was related to someone there, and I had visited my entire life with my parnets, so they didn't mess with me. I also told her I can remember the route except how to actually get the the apartment.

The bike route

From my parents I crossed the school yard to Morgan St. Went south to 119th St, then east to Halsted. I rode on the sidewalk to 127th St, then east to Indiana. (127th St and Indiana do not go through at that point. Is there a such thing as an L intersection?) I went south on Indiana next to the train tracks then east on 130th St (under the train tracks). Now I draw a blank on how I got the my cousins apartment which was at 133rd and Corliss. I don't know if I rode through the complex or around it. My aunt bought a house when I was a freshman or sophomore in college so I haven't been to the Gardens since then.

Ebert: Incredible. Way, way too free-range. Think of youself as a survivor. That route could make a reality show.

Ebert wrote: Final warning:

Readers, this is your three-day warning to get those recipes in for the cookbook inspired by my entry "The Pot and How to Use It."

OMG!

You're doing a cookbook?! I had no idea! Awesome! I'll have to find a recipe worthy of it. :)

Reading your blog entries about your childhood is like hearing those stories of the good old days that only seemed to exist in the minds of old, white Republicans who decry the dangers of (insert Puritanical concern here). Did that world actually exist? I think if you wrote a memoir, Roger, people might dismiss it as too idyllic to be believed.

But I'm happy to know that such a time existed, even if I've never lived there. I'm 25 and grew up in urban New York City. I was never a Free Range Child. Part of that was self-imposed; I was always timid and liked the security of staying close to home, and now as a young adult I'm not very good at setting out into the world.

My mother thinks the antibacterial, hand-sanitizing culture is foolish, and I agree. If children never get sick, they can't develop immunities. It is true of all things; if you lock your kids in a protective bubble, you'll create adults who can't function outside of it.

After 9/11, swine flu, and the fear-driven news cycle, I expect the rates of anxiety disorders to skyrocket for the coming generation.

One of my favorite memories of my 1950's childhood was playing hide and seek after dark. Ten or twelve of us would hide all over the neighborhood, requiring us to climb backyard fences, plow through hedges, leap streams, etc., all of which made us feel like resistance fighters in a WWII movie. It was beyond thrilling. I also remember floating concrete mixing bins down the local stream and pretending we were in African Queen. Wading in the town's river looking for "booty" and scouring caves for treasure maps both made us the heroes and heroines of our own Saturday afternoon serials. So you can see, my "free range" childhood had a lot of movie- and TV-related overtones. When you're a kid out on your own with your peers, you can BE d'Artagnan, Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, or Harriet Tubman. When you're sitting behind a screen playing an interactive game, you are a pale shadow of that kid who is running through the yard with the sheet on his back screaming, "Faster than a speeding bullet!"

At the age of 12 a good friend's daughter, who grew up in the cotton-batted 90s, was told to walk to her aunt's house two blocks away. "What about the men in the van?" she asked her mother. Her mom asked her what on earth she meant. "You know," Linsay said, "those men you told me would try to kidnap me. Aren't they waiting out there?" The poor kid has spent years believing that the evil ones were just outside the door. Is that any way to raise kids, with so much fear and apprehension? It comes soon enough, when adult reality sets in. There's no need to saddle our children with amorphous threats that are unlikely to be realized. So let the little darlings go. They need the exercise, the stimulation, the maturing process, and the socialization.

I used to grumble about the sound of kids playing outside when I was writing at home. Now the lawns have fallen silent and the streets are deserted. Kids at play have become a vanishing species.

I am 38 and remember childhood summers spent riding bikes through our neighborhood, playing in our nearby ballpark, gathering neighborhood kids for kick ball games, walking to the corner store.... When I think of those summers I most remember the feeling of freedom and endless possibilities.

My mother and I were recently discussing the differences in the way she watched my 15-year-younger brother. I told her that I felt a little sad that he didn't get to experience the same childhood as I since she spent so much more time watching over him. She informed me that she watched me every bit as much as she did my brother. The difference was my perspective - as a child I was outside and too busy exploring to notice her as she watched from the window or the edge of the yard but as a young adult I was in the house seeing her peek through the window or walk to the point where she could check on my brother as he ran around outside with friends.

My mother isn't subtle with much else but she did a great job of allowing her children to experience the joys of free-range summers while keeping a watchful eye over us. My memories of childhood freedom are now all the more special for the knowledge of the extra pains my mother went through to allow me them.

I grew up pretty free-range (born 1975) but I have two special needs kids (almost 3 and almost 6) who can't be left unsupervised because they'll hurt each other or themselves or do something like try to paint Daddy's 1972 Super Beetle with furniture paint again (it came off, thank God!). My almost 6 year old son is autistic and does really have ADHD (without Ritalin, he does not stop moving for 12 hours--seriously; Ritalin allows him to sit for small periods of time to like, eat). Without additional medication, he would hurt himself or his sister. It would be wonderful if I had neurotypical children that I could let wander around the neighborhood (which I like; it is relatively safe) but he understands no danger to himself: not a stranger who might hurt him (he loves everyone, instantly), not a car driving down the street, not anything that will fit in his mouth, nothing. Call me a helicopter parent if you must, but it will be years before my children can be left alone anywhere. I'm already dreading the plane ride we have to take for Thanksgiving to see family in California. What I hate about today is other people's intolerance of my childrens' un-normalness. That was better even 5 years ago when I flew all over with my son. Now I'm actually expecting to get thrown off of a plane because I can't keep my children quiet. We skipped Christmas last year because I couldn't bear the thought of being on a plane with my children and other people who seem to hate them. I do keep my children home a lot instead of going to parks or, heavens, the grocery store, because I cannot keep them in total control for every minute, which is what seems to be expected of me. And I long for the day when they have sufficient cognitive abilities for me to be able to explain to them where we are going and why they need to sit still, but that won't be soon. So we stay home, a lot.

I'm a grandmother who was a free-range child, too. But there were dangers then, as I wrote about in my Open Salon blog, Pedofilia - from Michael Jackson to Etan Patz.

The comments people posted at my blog indicate that predators on children are, alas, nothing new. Neither are other dangers parents guard against today. A car seat would, for example, have saved the life of the son of a friend of my mother; he was in the front seat beside his mother when he opened the door and fell out and she drove over and killed him before the brakes stopped the car.

Still, as you say, today's parents are more able to foresee and guard against dangers and this endangers their children's sense of adventure. Never was easy being a parent! Children are hostages to fortune, Francis Bacon observed.

I grew up in suburban Detroit. I was 10 years old in 1974. Everyone in my neighborhood had Schwinn bikes with banana seats and "sissy bars". Evel Knievel was at the height of his popularity and we spent hours setting up jumps on the sidewalk in front of our house and jumping over garbage cans and other items. All the time, my mom watched from the window. Helmets? there was no such thing, unless you wanted to wear a motorcycle helmet.

Could you imagine a mother allowing a son to do that today? Child services would be called!!!!

Like others who had posted, we would be on our own for hours. We weren't tethered to our parents because the technology of instant communications had not yet been developed. We developed self-reliance skills.

At the same time, I think that distance lends enchantment to the view, meaning we tend to remember the good things about the past while forgetting the unpleasant parts. When I was about 12 years old, the Oakland County Child Killer (see Wikipedia) killed 4 children about my age in suburban Detroit, abducting them when they were out-and-about without their parents and disposing of their bodies around town. He has never been caught.

Hi Everyone! Hello Roger!

I have to say I loved this article! The only thing is I grew up in the shift from "Free Range" to "Eggshell" as some have described it. I do remember riding my bike around the block and meeting with friends. But then it slowly crept up on me. I could only ride to certain blocks. Then I could only go out when my mom was out, watching. Then, there were cell phones, possibly the worst and best invention ever.

When I was learning to drive, my mom would call me even if I were a few minutes late (even if I were in the driveway) as I hadn't arrived at home yet and she was worried something had happened. This persisted all the way through high school and college and even happened a few weeks ago (btw I've moved to London and am now 23). It seems this persistent and constant communication with the news and the internet has become this awful necessity. Sure we "need" it to stay in touch but at the same time when we just want to "be". It's impossible.

I wish there was a solution, really!

ps I'm an avid supporter of the clause: LEGALIZE, EDUCATE, REGULATE!

Bill Hays,

The only thing that has occurred in the last 50 years is population growth? The problem with people is that there are too dern many?

1. Apparently, the Green Revolution essentially solved the food problem. As always, and will always be the case in capitalist societies, the problem is not supply, it`s demand - as in, the demand cannot pay the prices necessary to insure differential profits, so rather than provide food at affordable prices, food production and distribution is censored to buoy up prices.

2. Speaking of production, entire continents (Africa) face the limitation of being forced into the role of a consumer society, rather than a producing society. Trade treaties protect Western producers from competition from developing nations who, due to the tremendous head-start enjoyed by the West, not to mention the dilapidating tragedies of colonialism, are hard-pressed to gain any ground; South America (think Brazil, whose economy, IIRC, was once poised to be ranked 8th or 5th 30 years ago) raped by Western central banks during the fledgling years of globalization.

3. The Bush 2 administration`s Security Strategy of 2002 drew heavily upon the left-over rhetoric of the late 19th century`s *Guilded Age* in the US by asserting that the reason terrorism occurs is because nations are not wealthy enough (see the connection? Wealth is godliness, therefore lack of wealth breeds evil). Well, what can one expect from a ideological sound bite such as that document is.

**************************

Concerning an apparent `debate` over whether the United States is an isolationist or expansionist state, the answer is, obviously, both. Yes, the US founding generations certainly spread ever westward, destroying civilizations as they went. Yes, the Monroe Doctrine certainly makes it clear what territory is considered US-prime. Expansion into Central America and even the Philippines did occur. I would even agree that the White Man`s Burden of the Europeans could be read into the City on a Hill, the Light of the World rhetoric adopted and employed by Americans to justify their `adventures`. However, compared to European (and later, Japanese) imperialism around the same time (early 20th century), the American example noticeably pales. The US was hardly active in Africa, had some activity limited to supporting corporate interests in the Middle East and South America and was virtually absent from the Far East. In fact, when the US was originally recognized as the likely world leader after the prior examples smashed each other in WW1, this role was quite short-lived, as Wilson could not get the support from Congress necessary for the US to take an active role. While other modern nations sought, achieved, and maintained colonial territories and aspirations, the US limited itself to its own corporate affairs. Even after WW2, when the US (and USSR) was the only major power capable of asserting hegemony, the results are hardly the result of an expansionist state. The creation of post-colonialist territories and peoples, left in the wake of the retracting and recoiling colonialists, provided for a true expansionist state unfettered and uncontested opportunities for acquisition of new lands and the inherent wealth and `prestige`. Why didnt it happen?

If the US is an empire it certainly is a meager one. And notably an uncurious one also. The American mindset is well presented by its former president, whose curiousity about the world beyond his borders seemed to be on a strictly need to know basis. Case in point, is that the notion that the problem with US society is that there are too many people on the planet, period.

From Lauren Christiane: Children are picked up by child molesters who are always vehemently defended by the ACLU and state social workers.

And so another urban legend gets passed around. So much of this trend of paranoia is due to ignorance about what is real and what is projected and overblown and sensationalized by the media - a perversely proud ignorance that is, sadly, encouraged by those who whip up the uneducated not to better themselves and learn about the REAL world, but to rally against those who have with envious cries of "elitism!"

As I thought about this topic of why today's kids aren't so free, 9/11/01 came to mind. I'd been on a plane from Newark the day before, on my way to a trip in New Mexico. From where I worked, one could see the towers. I had a boyfriend who was in Building 7 that day (because his company had relocated from the second tower after the bombings in 1993), who was never the same after. So I have my reasons to have been traumatized by it.

But I was far more traumatized by the news coverage. Relentless and breathless voice-overs beating us senseless with every last bit of minutia, showing the same crash angles over and over until wow! someone brought some new piece in and we could watch it all from the other side - then see the original footage again. Conspiracy theories and who was to blame. How did everyone involved feeeeel? Pull the camera in tight when they start crying and hold it there. Days and days of it. I flipped around the channels but could get no escape from it. There were no shows, no entertainers. When Letterman was the first to come back on, with Regis Philbin as his guest, I was so relieved I have felt like I owed him something to this day.

Ignorance and fear in our country is promulgated by a media bought and paid for by companies and multi-millionaires with their own agenda, that has nothing to do with morals or doing the right thing. That is what has happened. The Internet MAY be a solution to that, if we do not manage to muck it up. I have donated to the ACLU in the past, and will again in the future. To put in print, as this person did, that its mission is to allow heinous lawbreakers to go right on doing as they please is more perverted than what is claimed of the ACLU.

The ACLU does a dirty job that too few want to do these days - it protects the constitutional rights of ALL of us, regardless of how unpopular our beliefs are. It was the ACLU filing briefs and speaking out when the rest of us quietly watched the government trump up charges and sling innocent people - including Americans - into Gitmo so they could look like they were doing something aftter 9/11, when the hysterical media was demanding to see results, any results, even though it quickly became clear that our enemies were like shadows and not an army as we know it; when frightened people were saying the Japanese internment camps weren't such a bad idea after all and perhaps we should round up any and all Muslims in the same way. When those of us uneasy about it said nothing because we didn't want to be painted with the same brush. THAT is the definition of heroic - sticking your neck out when it's so dangerous no one else will.

The ACLU protects beliefs, not lawbreaking. It is misunderstood because of propaganda from powerful people who would like very much to curtail those rights, who go about smearing this organization in as unsavory a way as they can imagine. Everyone who would like prayer in school, or anything else belief-based, is much too certain it is THEIR belief that would become the rule. But what if it wasn't? What if you were suddenly forced by law to pray as a Muslim, or to be your husband's property - or someone else's property?

People never think of the possiblity that by protecting even the rights of the fringe to believe as they do, they protect us all. They even protect your right to speak out against them. Believe me, Lauren, if the powerful ever come after you because your belief in the constitution pisses them off a little too much, you will hope the ACLU is still around.

Sorry this is such a long post after I already put up another long post earlier. But I feel kinda passionate about the ACLU, because I feel kinda passionate about the constitution that makes this such a great and unique country. And I'm tired of this modern celebration of studied ignorance that makes the citizenry forget that.

Ebert: Prohibition didn't work out so well here. It's my impression that Indians in general do not drink nearly as much as those of many other nations.

Its true that we have some catching up to do with the west, but by God, we are trying hard to get there and our government is doing everything it can. You can be sure that you might not get safe drinking water but a liquor store is never more than a few steps. But the point is social acceptance, I am sure you know about the arranged marriages concept in India, boy's parents used to proclaim loud " our boy never drinks or smokes " ( they still do infact, some of them ), but its not a factor any more. Its fine as long as he is not a chainsmoker or a alcoholic.

one more thing Roger, I was reading through the comments and I couldnt understand this which you mentioned about drugs, "Perhaps the solution is not legalization but decriminalization". whats the difference ?

Ebert: Drug use is illegal but not a criminal offense. Here is how it works it Portugal:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

Ebert: Waitaminit. Unless I'm reading this wrong, you're 10 years old. If this is how you write, I want to be your publisher when you're 12.
---

Alas, only at heart, you big bully.

Free range childhoods still exist. They're in the inner city.

South LA, south DC, south Boston (that's the toughest one, by the way), take your pick--when that school bell rings the streets flood with kids. They're just kids. They take pictures of themselves with the cell phones, they go to the corner cheap Chinese and get dinner, they sit on porches and leer at girls and throw balls and basically are ignored by adults unless the run into the street and block traffic or start a fire.

Yeah, it ain't like it used to be, but it's a damn site closer to it in really poor neighborhoods like these than it is in heartless Larry Clark suburbia. The city's a tough life, but the kids are motivated by it. They're not running home to their morgue drawer lives of on-line gaming and early sex. They're running from the tough kids and doing homework and ditching school and growing up, not just growing older. They're social.

Sure there's real problems. What used to get you a couple of loose teeth might today get you a cap in your ass (not a figure of speech, as any weekend ER worker will tell you--why do they shoot and stab each other in the ass, I wonder?) but it's hard to imagine kids with more on the ball than these kids. They're quick. They know right from wrong. They respond well to praise. They know when you're lying to them.

In short, they're nice kids. They're fun to watch. Most kids will navigate these waters pretty well, and always have. Hey, Huck Finn didn't have a safe life, but he was a lot more interesting than housebound good boy Sid ever dreamed of being.

Good temperment comes from good tempering.

Boo-hoo. Whatever. I live in an apartment complex that has been turned into a trailer park from all the rug-rat brats running around screaming and their alcoholic, pot-smoking, unmarried mothers screaming at them from one side of the building to the other. The yard between my building and the one adjacent has been turned into a mud puddle. God excuse me, but I wish these dirty little creeps were afraid of anything. Kids having "fun" at an ever-increasing volume: My idea of Hell on Earth.

I guess a point could be made that if these kids were allowed to actually roam free, they might venture beyond their mamma's eyesight and become someone else's nuisance.

I have one pleasant story to share. There is an old oak tree outside my window with branches beaten nearly to the ground from the spring storms. A trio of boys, Malaysian immigrants, took to climbing into the tree, pulling the branches further down in order to hoist themselves up. Now, I climbed trees when I was a youngster, but they were the trees in the yard my parents' owned and they were sturdy. This poor tree outside my window will no longer support the weight of a bird's nest. So, Grumpy Old Upstairs Man had to yell at these Malaysian youngsters to get down. And assuming they were ignoring him, as opposed to, for instance, misunderstanding his language, when they did not climb down, Grumpy Old Upstairs Man marched right out to sternly bark until they did. Grumpy Old Upstairs Man threatend to tell their parents and insisted, only half-truthfully, that his concern was their safety and nothing else. (Other-halfly, safety shared some space with annoyance, since nearer the upper branches meant nearer my open window.)

Five minutes after returning to his office room with the window allowing a child-free oak tree view, Grumps hears a gentle knock on his door. Answering, he finds a trio of young foreign men, holding back tears by speaking through bitten lips, apologizing. Now, Grumps wasn't born yesterday, and he assumes they are just trying to dissuade his reporting to their parents. He assumes this because last time he yelled at little American blonde-haired princess, she told him to f off. Nonetheless, Grumps assures the boys they're in no trouble, provided they no longer climb the unsafe oak tree, and he thanks them for coming up the stairs to apologize.

Returning to his office, Grumpy Old heard the boys racing across the yard hooting and hollering in a foreign language that could've translated into "ha-ha, we pulled one over on that old creep" for all it matters.

I smile every time I meet one of those boys on the sidewalk, now, and he'll smile back.

Princess and her Texas-twanging mother, though, still annoy me to baldness.

A couple of things...

Ah.... The Boneyard..... I was a graduate student at U of I in the middle sixties. One of my friends was a graduate student in metallurgy. We were neighbors in the grad dorm on 1010 W. Green Street. The Boneyard ran in back of it. He worked with horribly ferocious chemicals. (I, a mathematics student, lived in deathly fear of paper cuts.) He once told me that he sometimes made insanely vicious concoctions that were too hot to dump down the pipes because those pipes might dissolve. In that case, he would sneak them out the back door and dump them in the Boneyard. I hope you didn't eat those crawdads.

I now live in Madison, Wisconsin. Several months ago, I was speaking with an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin. He grew up in Door County, Wisconsin just after World War II. He told me that, in that era, he and his friends would go duck hunting before school began. They would than walk into school in their hunting clothes and change them. They would then store their clothes AND THEIR SHOTGUNS in their school lockers. No one objected.

I think it really was a different time back then.

Ebert: Sounds like that.

Joe VanPelt does not realize this, but I was one of the anonymous respondents to the very question he mentions on Yahoo Answers. I told the lady that I was a free ranger too, and she should let the kid ride the bike. It was funny to see Joe's comments here, and shocking to see the horror with which people viewed the lady's idea to let her child be free.

I want to say this and leave people with a puzzle.
First of all, my kids are free range and I have not a care in the world. The reason is that they are growing up in Japan. Really, that pretty much says it all. No litigation, no blaming people, no scary people tormenting neighborhoods. Few hazards and a lot of interesting things to do. Good public transportation and public facilities. The kids walk tall, drop their school books and head off to their friends house or the park. Their schools give them explicit rules designed to keep them from haunting convenience stores and malls. Yes, there are more stay-at-home parents too, which explains some, but not all of it.

But here is the puzzle. How does that all end? Here is how my free range days ended. I was in a mall in the 80s, just barely pre-puberty, and I had been hanging around some shops looking at things I was thinking of buying, and eventually had to use a public restroom. Shall I go on a little bit? OK. After I had finished, I left, and I noticed an older guy (30s) following me. He continued to follow me as I moved away from him, around a maze of shops to an escalator taking me to the security booth. He got me cornered in a pretty secluded area and asked me really nicely, smiling, if I wanted to go to his place and watch some movies. I saw him look to his left at ANOTHER guy (50s) about 40 meters away watching him. I bolted to the escalators and ran down them and the two men were both GONE not two minutes later.

I was a cute kid. A great kid. I tell my kids not to be frightened of people. I believe that they should not be, but the puzzle for me is how to keep them curious and normal without making them vulnerable to some terrible things that I know exist.

I was born in 1970. In the summer of 1980 my friend David and I were aimlessly exploring a school yard (school yards are a lot more interesting when they're empty, especially the rooftops) when we discovered a flagpole with a dangling rope. Usually the ropes were pulled taut in the summer and there was a lock mechanism that prevented you from fiddling with it. Anyway, the remainder of that summer was spent swinging from that rope in wild, gleeful arcs. One morning near the end of summer we approached our favorite flagpole and the rope was locked up tighter than Alcatraz. It was as if someone had shot our dogs or something. The unbridled despair! I don't think that had crossed my mind once in the last ten years or so. Thanks for the article.

three things
1. the number one way to make kids want to do something is to tell them they can't. in Europe, children are often allowed to drink watered down or sips of wine at events, with parents supervision. it's not seen as something dirty. many of those kids don't become alkies as grown ups.

2. my parents never told me I couldn't do drugs, drink or have sex. they taught me what could happen if I did and let me make the decision. and guess what, I graduated college having only smoked pot once, never drink so much I passed out cold or had a hangover and surprise, a virgin.

3. on the issue of parents parenting. I used to work at a public library. when parents complained that their kids could look at this or that evil book I had no issue telling them that other parents had a right to pick what their kids could see and thus we made all books available. and if they had an issue they needed to not let their kids come to the library alone because by law we could not act 'in loco parentis' and by the by if they failed to pick up their kids by closing again, we were calling the cops and reporting them as abandoned cause we are paid to sit and wait for Mom and Dad to come get them on their schedule.