Kidnapping Fears Keep Children Home

It has been over two weeks now since eight-year-old Victoria Stafford was taken from her school in the small town of Woodstock, Ontario. The story is slipping out of the news cycle and hopes are starting to wane.

These kinds of tragedies are heart-wrenching because what parent doesn’t know the feeling of looking up and finding your kid missing. Seeing him turn the bend and worrying that he’ll get lost or hurt or (please, no) abducted. Because we can imagine what that family is feeling. Because we know the agony — we’ve played it out in our heads a million times — that mother is feeling.

But also because we then hold our children ever closer. And we don’t let them walk to their friend’s house — not tonight. And we don’t want them going to the park by themselves. We want to be there, we want to protect them. But that isn’t good for them either. They need room to explore and space to discover their independence. How much space? And how soon? How do we find the right balance of protection and freedom, of guidance and experience?

Lenore Skenazy wrote a book called Free-Range Kids and has a blog by the same name in which she argues that it’s okay to give children the freedom to explore that we had as kids. In fact, it’s good for them. There was a lot of fuss about irresponsible parenting when she wrote about letting her nine-year-old take the New York subway a couple of stops in the New York Sun a couple years ago, and I can attest to the hovering and hand-holding I see many parents engaging in.

I am sympathetic to the Free-Range push, though, and think that we should be guiding our children toward independence from a young age. Clearly I stay close to my three-year-old at all times, but we talk about the names of the streets in our neighbourhood and the routes we take to get to the park and the library and Nanna’s house. In a few year, then, he should be very well equipped to navigate his way around and we’ll just have to judge his general sense of awareness and maturity. I love the idea of being able to send him out to the store for a loaf of bread or a stick of butter.

My guess is that it’s actually much easier to afford your kids some freedom and responsibility in an urban setting than a suburban or rural one. Running errands to the store, going to the park, popping over to a friend’s house don’t take them more than a couple of blocks away. The streets are full of mostly good people and helpful shopkeepers should any problem arise. I keep hearing again and again that people wouldn’t dream of raising their kids in the city. I wouldn’t dream of raising them anywhere else.