"‘Free-range parenting’ case unleashes national debate" by Donna St. George and Brigid Schulte, Washington Post January 25, 2015
WASHINGTON — Two days after the story of their children’s unsupervised walk home from a park became the latest flash point in an ongoing cultural debate about what constitutes responsible parenting, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were still explaining their ‘‘old-fashioned’’ methods of child-rearing.
They eat dinner with their children. They enforce bedtimes, restrict screen times, and assign chores. They go to synagogue.
OMG!
There is no denying it!
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The idea of free-range children has been around since 2008, when New York journalist Lenore Skenazy set off a firestorm with a piece titled ‘‘Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone’’ and developed a following for pushing back against what many saw as an overinvolved ‘‘helicopter parent’’ culture.
Related: Snowplow Parents
Tis the season!
More than six years later, Skenazy is still pushing the conversation about giving children more freedom to experience the world.
She says many parents are terrified by an outsized perception of danger, driven partly by a constant beat of repetitive crime news that makes horrific events seem much more common than they are.
What?
Related: The Other Hernandez Trial
That started the hysteria.
Federal statistics show that the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically from its peak in 1991 and is about what it was in the late 1960s but lower than in the early 1970s, when many more mothers were at home and children roamed freer.
In the past, children stayed out for hours, slept in backyard tents, and wandered their neighborhoods.
Mine (nostalgic sigh).
‘‘These are things we all did on our own, and now we don’t let our children do, and there is no real or rational reason except we’re fearful,’’ she said.
Blame the me$$anger!
The Meitiv family’s difficulties have stirred passionate and conflicted responses from parents, and sparked some intense digital debates.
At the center of the whirl are the Meitivs, believers in ‘‘free-range’’ parenting, with its ideas that children learn to be self-reliant by progressively testing limits, making choices, and roaming the world without hovering adults. Danielle Meitiv works as a climate-science consultant and Alexander Meitiv is a physicist at the National Institutes of Health....
OMG!
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