The parenting book that beats valium

Parenting books, like ads for prescription drugs, should come with warnings: Danger. This book, if taken literally, could induce dizziness, shortness of breath, depression,  panic attacks and/or the sudden onset of a need to call your husband and tell him to stop by the doctor’s office on the way home from work and get a vasectomy. In the guise of being helpful, most parenting books make raising children seem less like a pleasant journey than an endless tip-toe through a minefield.

But Lenore Skenazy’s new book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, actually relaxed me.  Skenazy argues that today’s parents, by being hyper-controlling and irrationally fearful, are depriving their children of the freedom and independence they deserve. She’s not just ranting; she fills her book with statistics meant to free parents from living in fear.

Afraid of letting your kids eat Halloween candy? According to Skenazy’s research, there has never been a single substantiated instance of any child dying from a stranger’s poisoned Halloween candy.

Afraid to let your toddler eat food that isn’t cut into tiny bits? Dice away, but keep in mind that the odds that your over one-year-old will die from choking are about 1 in 350,000.

Afraid to let your 10-year-old go anywhere alone, even down the block to a friend’s house, for fear he’ll get abducted? Despite the truly awful high-profile cases we read about in People magazine, the number of U.S. children abducted and killed has held steady over the years — at about 1 in 1.5 million.  In fact, Skenazy writes, your child is 40 times more likely to die as a passenger in a car crash than to be kidnapped and murdered by a stranger — yet we don’t refuse to let our children get in a car.

On the contrary, we tend to drive them rather than let them walk to school alone as we probably did when we were kids. Forty years ago, 66 percent of U.S. children walked or biked to school; now it’s down to about 10 percent.

That trend itself is a problem, as it takes a brave and hardy parent to go against the norm.

When Skenazy wrote in her column in The New York Sun about allowing her eager 9-year-old son to ride the New York City subway by himself, she was excoriated as a bad, neglectful mother on The Today Show and throughout the blogosphere. It was that experience that led her to create a blog, freerangekids, and write her book. Both are filled with anecdotes of parents who live in fear — refusing to let their children play outside alone, talk to any stranger, climb a tree, ride their bike to the library, walk to school alone — and from those who have been rebuked by authorities, mostly other parents, for allowing their children to do those same things.

Skenazy’s book reminds us that we can’t — as  I was once counseled to tell my anxious child — live in a “what if” world. We can’t raise children in a “what if” world:

“Mostly, the world is safe. Mostly, people are good. To emphasize the opposite is to live in the world of tabloid TV. A world where the weirdest, worst, least likely events are given the most play. A world filled with worst-case scenarios, not the world we actually live in, which is factually, statistically, and, luckily for us, one of the safest periods for children in the history of the world.”

In my quiet, suburban neighborhood, few children walk to school alone before sixth grade. My oldest is one of a handful of fifth-graders who  walk or bike to school alone. My third-grader is still hesitant, no doubt because he doesn’t see any of his friends taking these steps toward independence. I recently suggested he walk home from school with his brother, but he said he didn’t want to do it unless one of them had a cellphone. When I responded, perhaps unhelpfully, by telling him I spent my whole childhood walking to and from school without a cellphone, his answer made me realize how our parental fears have trickled down. “Mom,” he said, “times are different now.”

How do I convince him that, no, times really aren’t different — parents are?