I Was a “Free-Range” Child

Jack Douglas sent me an article about “free-range parenting” being made legal in Utah. I didn’t know what the term meant, much less that it was illegal prior to the law being passed.

The new law allows “kids the freedom to walk to and from school, wait in parked cars (while their parents run errands in a store, for example), and visit playgrounds solo…” “…the following situations would not qualify as [parent] neglect: traveling to and from school or recreational facilities by walking, running, or biking, playing outside, or sitting in a car unattended, provided the child is at least 9 years old and in reasonably safe conditions.”

You might say that this is one way to build a libertarian from the ground up: Create an independent person immersed in other examples of the same within respectful relationships of family and friends, although not without stormy interludes and setbacks that affect most everyone.

I’ll vouch for the “method”, which I take not to be a method but the natural way of raising children. I didn’t go to kindergarten or daycare. Was there any in 1946? I started first grade when I was 5 years old in Lynn, Massachusetts. The elementary school was about 0.75 miles away. I walked to the E. J. Harrington school both ways, often alone. There was no school bus, and my father never played school chauffeur. On the other hand, he drove us to visit all the relatives and friends on Sundays; and he sometimes drove us to Boston to his place of work. He was a furrier who designed and made fur coats. He had two partners and later just one. Besides his family, He lived and breathed the fur business, which was located on the 8th floor of a building on 115 Chauncy Street. Dad used to go to New York City to buy fur pelts at auction. He worked mainly in the pre-mink era when mouton lamb, persian lamb, muskrat and beaver were popular and stylish.

Before I was 8, I’d walk unaccompanied about 1.5-2 miles to get to the Shute Branch library. I loved the stereoscopic view cards as much as the books. Central Square was in the opposite direction from home, maybe 0.75 miles. Home in Lynn, by the way, was a small rented apartment in a 3-decker. We had good neighbors, some of whom I know worked their way up to better dwellings.

Roaming around downtown Lynn alone was taken for granted. I was alerted to staying away from strangers. I used to take a shortcut through a department store, maybe Burrows and Sanborn. After awhile I’d walk to my cousin’s business. He was a glazier and I used to travel with him in his truck and assist, if you want to call it that, in putting in windows. He’d give me a glass cutter and scraps of glass to cut. Going to the playground, the beach and the movies was something I did with my two older brothers, who were also “free-rangers”. There was discipline enough at home, and especially after we broke the dining room table in our non-supervised play. My mother usually saw to the discipline. That table doubled as the operating table upon which one brother had his tonsils removed. I stayed the course, despite lots of tonsillitis.

When I was 8, we moved to the adjacent town of Swampscott, which meant learning new places to walk and roam, again without adult supervision. The house was bigger, but I still never had my own bedroom as a child. By then my older brothers had their own friends and so did I. I used to walk a long way down Lewis Street, which connected to Lynn, in order to reach a store that sold comic books. I was into MAD comics and Classics Illustrated. I got the money from doing errands for neighbors and later on from playing trumpet. An allowance? What’s that? It was more like “Here’s 25 cents for the three of you to go to the movies.”

Conscious parenting by method seems weird to me. Mom and dad eschewed all books, and there weren’t many at the time anyway. Their guide was common sense. Mom had no kind words to say for Dr. Spock when he came along. It’s hilarious and tragic to read a headline that says that “free-range parenting” is controversial, and that it might even be against many laws. Is this what the country has come to? Do people need laws to make them into good parents? Is it not ridiculous to think that legislators can micromanage behavior relating to nearly all parenting? What do they know? Why should they even have a say in one of the most highly personal realms that parents experience? If they are trying to “protect” children by safety measures and prevent bad parenting, the results will be awful and pile up in ways that they never could imagine or anticipate. An experienced mechanic of age 40-45 who works on garage doors told me (unsolicited) that his company has to let go (fire) one young person after another because they are “brainless” and can’t figure out how to resolve mechanical issues on their own.

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8:41 pm on March 23, 2018