Recently I was pointed at this article: http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-alone and asked my opinion. The article is from the New York Sun and is an editorial from a woman who took her nine year old to downtown New York and deliberately left him there with money and subway maps so that he could find his own way home. The adventure was by the request of the son who wanted to see if he could do it.
What Lenore Skenazy did is not something I would do, but that is primarily because I am completely unfamiliar with New York. I have no idea what areas are safe and what are not. In my head “New York Subway” is fairly synonymous with “dangerous.” If I was dropped downtown and told to find my own way home, the experience would be highly stressful to me. Because the experience would be frightening for me, I don’t consider it appropriate for one of my kids. I might feel differently about it if I lived in New York and rode the subway regularly. I do agree with the points that Ms. Skenazy makes. My job as a parent is not to wrap my children in a cocoon of safety. My job is to guide their growth.
I find Tomato seedlings a good metaphor for this. Early in the spring I fill little cups with dirt and plant seeds in them. Soon the seeds begin to sprout and grow. In my sunny windowsill, they grow tall very quickly. The first time I grew seedlings I was very pleased by this. Then I planted the seedlings outside and they were all dead within a week. The seedlings had grown and adapted for indoor conditions. They were unprepared for real weather and so they died. Over the course of several years I tried many different plans for growing tomato seedlings. The best way I’ve found to grow tomato seedlings is to start setting them outside during the day as soon as they sprout. This way they can experience the weather and adapt to it. I bring the seedlings inside at night when the temperatures are cold enough to kill or when the weather is too fierce for baby plants to handle. This way I raise up little plants that are prepared to handle the outdoors.
The metaphor is far from perfect and I certainly hope that I do a much better job raising kids than I do raising tomato seedlings. It is my job as a parent to carefully expose my children to things that are hard for them, but which will help them to grow in ways that will be useful later in their lives. With this in mind, I made Kiki and Link mow the lawn today. As they struggled to push the heavy mower, I knew that the struggle will make them stronger and better able to handle other challenges in the future. And when they were done they could look around the yard with a sense of accomplishment. I saw how straight and tall they stood. They felt good knowing that they had really contributed to our household. Nothing builds self confidence better than completing a truly difficult task. Hopefully when they are faced with a difficult task in the future, Link and Kiki will say “well, if I can mow a lawn I can certainly do that.”
This goes along well with my recent thoughts on child-proofing. I’ve discovered that I only believe in child-proofing a house during a certain age of early mobility and lack of ability to discern. Other than that age, I don’t believe in child-proofing. Rather I believe in house-proofing my child. Teach the child what it safe and what is not and why, and they will be safe all over, not just in the confines of my house. Kind of a ‘teach a man to fish’ concept.
We do our children wondrous favors by preparing them gradually to thrive in any condition.
I’ve lived in New York City AND I have a 9-year-old son, and all I can think to say is that that lady was out of her mind. She might consider it a wonderful lesson for her son, but what if he hadn’t found his way home . . . ever. It’s not that we can’t trust our kids. It’s that there are some really bad people out there. Even here in Utah, I worry when my kids are walking home from school or to a friend’s house. Over the past year there have been three or four attempted abductions near the schools in my area, and I live in a pretty good community. Sure, the odds are low that something like that would ever happen to my kids, but should we be playing the odds with our kids’ lives. It’s one thing to teach our children to be independent and responsible. It’s another thing to put them at unnecessary risk.
How long ago?
I’ve heard that when giuliani was mayor, it became much safer. I’ve never been there to verify it myself though.
I think that she should have gone with him the first dozen or so times, letting him do all of the navigating.
I don’t know that I agree with this lady’s method, but the concept of allowing children to adapt to challenges is certainly a sound one. It’s good to be reminded of this, because I find it so easy to shelter kids in ways that are not helpful to them. Maybe I should allow my son to mow the lawn…
I lived there from 1995 to late 1997. Yep, Giuliani was mayor. He did a lot of good things for the city.
I’ve got a 9 year old and live in NYC and wouldn’t let her ride the trains by herself, but that’s because she’s not ready, not because they;re so dangerous. She already goes to the stiore to shop on her own and would be permitted to go further away than the store on our block if the streets were safer. I wasn’t appalled by the article.
I think what this lady did was a great thing, assuming she knows her kid (and it sounds like she does). I was very independent as a kid and my parents were happy to allow me to use my independence, so long as I used it wisely. I never had a baby sitter after age eight. I rode my bike all over town, and was pretty much in charge of myself for the majority of the day during summer vacations. The worst scrape I ever got into was when an older bully knew I was home along and threatened to come into my house and mess with me. I locked the door, and he got bored and left.
Kids are much safer now than when I was a kid, and yet because of news stories, we are convinced that there is someone waiting to molest or abduct our kids every time we turn around. This is a media fantasy. The numbers don’t support it. Try an experiment of going to the website for missing and exploited children and do a search on the last year for kids between four and fourteen missing from stranger abduction, and then factor in that this is from the entire country and with the largest number of kids in our country in its history.
Sadly, I can’t claim that I have such a hands off method with my own kids. Why? Because they are likely to do something unwise when out of parental supervision. I don’t worry about a stranger doing anything to them, I worry (with too much justification) for what they will choose to do on their own.
My wife and I have tried over and over to give them more freedom and responsibility, but generally have to end up taking it back because of the poor uses they have made of their opportunities. But we still keep trying. We feel the risk is worth it for leaving them without a babysitter when we go out on a date (our oldest is nearly 14), though we’ve already discovered they have done some unhappy things in our absence. We just keep hoping that in making less than optimal choices now, while the stakes are still relatively small, they will learn enough that they don’t do the kind of complete insanity of some kids when they go off to college and try every forbidden thing that they can think of.