Free-Range Kids

One of the more remarkable takes on parenting in communications would be the successful Sunlight's campaign from 1999 - let kids be kids. Subtext: You're not a bad, neglectful mom even if your kids get dirty. In fact, you're being progressive in your child-rearing values.

Cut to April 2008.

Carl Honore, Canadian writer (and perplexed parent) publishes his latest book, Under Pressure: Rescuing Childhood from the Culture of Hyper-parenting. His thesis: Children around the world are being warped by the fears and pressures of their parents - it’s time to back off.

The same week of Honore's latest book launch, a mother in New York let her 9-year old son take the subway alone and wrote about it in her columnfor The New York Sun. A flurry of media coverage later, she starts a blog, Free Range kids, with a stirring call to action:

Do you ever... ..let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting. Share your stories, tell your tips and maybe one day I will try to collect them in a book. Meantime, let's try to help our kids embrace life! (And maybe even clear the table.)

Hyper-parenting has always been a rife territory for branding and communications. What kind of parent you are largely depends on what brand of laundry detergent*convenience food*vacation get-away*stationery... (pick your category) you choose, if you go by the depictions of parents in some campaigns.

So which side of the fence does your brand sit on? Do you tout safety and cautiousness (and play on fears and anxieties of parents today)? Or do  you celebrate kids' independence, exhuberance, self-reliance?

Going by the poll on the NY Sun column, 51% of parents thought that the mother-who-let-her 9-year-old-son-loose-in-the-NY-subway was nuts. 25% were ambivalent; a little more than a third were on her side. Those stats don't bode well for progressive, empowering parenting styles.

Fine, there is a world of difference between letting your kids run dirty in the playground and letting them run loose in New York. Woe to the brand (or columnist) who takes the laissez faire impulse too far.

Comments

[Andrew Crighton]

This is dedicated to those born between the years
1930 – 1979

… the children who lived through the
30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!
 
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.
 
Then, after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in cribs covered with bright colored, lead-based paints.
 
We had no child-proof lids on medicine bottles, doors and cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets… not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.
 
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. And riding in the back of a pickup on a warm day was always a special treat.
 
We drank from the garden hose, not from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends from one bottle, and no one actually died from this. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank KoolAid made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because…..
 
We were always outside playing.
 
We would leave home in the morning and play and play and play, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.
 
And we were okay.
 
We would spend hours building a go-cart out of scraps, and then ride down the hill only to find we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
 
We did not have PlayStations, Nintendos, X-boxes, video games, 150 channels on TV, video movies or DVD’s. There were no CD’s, iPods, cell phones or personal computers. No Internet, no instant messaging, no chat rooms.
 
We had friends, and we went outside and found them!
 
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given pellet guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes. We rode our bikes, or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door, or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those that didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.

Imagine that!!
 
The idea of our parents bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
 
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all!

And, you know what? These generations produced some of the most daring risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever. In fact, in the past 50 years the world has witnessed a dramatic explosion of innovation and new ideas. 
  
If you were a child during these five decades… Congratulations!
 
You might want to share this with others who had the good fortune to do their growing up before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.
 
And while you’re at it, forward it to your kids, so they will know how inappropriately behaved (and lucky) their parents were.

 
Kind of makes you want to run through the house holding a pair of scissors, doesn’t it?!