a free-range childhood

While pregnant with Isaiah, I read Last Child in the Woods and immediately longed for the sort of old-fashioned fearlessness that let kids take off in the morning and come home by dark. I have no experience of this myself. I grew up as an only child where it was usually too dangerously hot to play outside -- not that there was anywhere to play outside -- with very strict parents who rarely allowed me to spend time with friends or explore our neighborhood. The sum total of this environment is that I grew up in front of the television screen. I have amusing memories of my parents yelling at me for reading a book in my room. “Get out here and watch TV! Stop avoiding the family!” 

So, perhaps inevitably, I wanted something different for Isaiah and Willow: a free-range childhood. 

Even if it's a whole lot messier. And it is.

While I could accept that predation or abduction of children by strangers (as opposed to family members) are over-publicized and not statistically increasing as the media leads us to believe, I still hesitated to let my children wander about unattended. While living in town I made the train-wreck decision to check into the sex offender registry in our neighborhood. Coupled with cars speeding past over the speed limit and my children's resistance to following all the rules of walking or cycling our neighborhood (which were, admittedly, contrary to the general spirit of walking or cycling), I became, disappointingly, a helicopter parent.

At one point in the book Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, Sandra Steingraber discusses the limitations of free-range childhoods in the modern age. She says,

“...there are no roaming packs of kids anymore. They're all engaged in organized activities refereed by grown-ups. Or they are inside downloading something. In fact, it's hard to overstate the radical transformation of childhood that has taken place over the course of a single generation. Since the 1970s, the amount of time that children spend in unstructured, outside play has, according to surveys, declined by half and is now exceeded by the time spent inside vehicles. And when they are not being transported – or while they are – children are interacting with screens. In 2010, U.S. youths ages eight to eighteen spent an average of 7.5 hours each day involved with some form of electronic media....

“And no, my kids do not enjoy the kind of freedom to roam that I once had.... The fact is that years ago the outdoor world was full of children, and there was safety in those numbers. You can't just tell a kid to go outside and play when no one else is out there. If nothing else, it's lonely.

“In my attempt to counteract the allure of online role-playing games where many children gather, the childlessness of nature is the big problem.”

This is something I've observed as well. Several children lived in our neighborhood in Ukiah, but I only noticed them as they were being schlepped from school to... well, I don't know where else they were going. It wasn't a very neighborly neighborhood. When I told my children to go outside and play, they had each other, at least, but that was it. Rarely could they find another child playing outside. Never did they band together with several children. On the rare occasion when the kids found a friend, the parents were too busy, assuming they were present at all, to connect with us so we could share incidental childcare duties.

Renting this cabin has offered a respite in several regards. Living on a private road on an endless undeveloped acreage, concerns about traffic have vanished. We have no neighbors so I have no thought for predators -- at least of the human kind. Unfortunately this also means there are no other children in our immediate environment, but we still visit friends or the school almost daily, so the kids aren't lonely. In any case, it seems that the primary motivator for a continuing relationship with the natural world is solitary time spent within it. But I still hesitate, more than I'd like, to let Isaiah and Willow free-range, despite this amazing location and the infinite opportunities for exploration and discovery. The reason can be summed up in one word: rattlesnakes.

A child's freedom to form a substantial, authentic, enduring, and reciprocal connection to the natural world is of critical importance for the future of this planet. As much care as I've devoted to my children's health, education, and community, I consider it an essential aspect of parenting to facilitate this relationship. Since my fear of rattlesnakes is the primary obstacle, I've researched this creature in depth. How many bites a year come from a rattlesnake? How many of those bites are fatal, or resulting in amputation, and why? What should I do if I come across a rattlesnake, or if someone is bitten? How much time would I have to get medical attention before tissue death sets in? 

And I must say, at the risk of tremendous hubris, that I feel more comfortable living in -- and allowing my children to explore -- rattler habitat now that I'm armed with this knowledge.

You might say that I approach electronic media in childhood the same way. Television and video games are worthy of less respect than a rattlesnake, but I still need to navigate them to keep my children healthy and whole and connected to the land. Certainly, I feel more comfortable as a conscientious parent without various forms of media undermining my efforts.

We did go through a period of allowing the kids to watch movies almost every day -- while we were living at the farm, actually, because they couldn't spend any time outside. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the effects if exposure to media had been an enduring facet of their childhood, but it wasn't. We'd always been a “media-lite” family, not completely abstinent but definitely restrictive. So the effects of total immersion were very obvious and universally negative, the most serious being that they lost creative fire. All free play became an emulation of their favorite characters and story lines. All artwork reflected what they'd seen in those movies. They fought with each other constantly and bitterly, and fought us, too, if we tried to place limitations. They didn't sleep as well and they became more demanding and impatient overall. For the first time they claimed to be “bored,” even as they were obviously hyperstimulated.

In other words, they were nicely laid on the path of the obligate consumer.

Where's my latte?

After we moved, movies weren't even an option. At first, they asked every day, then less often and now, two months in, they never ask, and the repetitious mimicking that saturated their creativity, as well as the constant whining and fighting, have mostly disappeared (much to my great relief). 

I can't pass judgment on the convenience of a movie for an exhausted parent needing a nap, but as for daily entertainment, I don't want my children looking to others to provide it for them -- unless those others are caterpillars, ravens, turkey vultures, wolf spiders, chickens, madrones, mossy bay trees, banana slugs -- their neighbors, in other words.

Sometimes I do receive objections to our mostly media-free environment. My grandfather, for example, was shocked that no computers were present in Jeremy's classroom. (Waldorf school, 'nuff said.) Many people have expressed vocally that a child is crippled somehow by a lack of education in the ways of a computer or video game console.

I have ready responses to these objections -- technology changes so fast that anything they learn today will be obsolete in a few years; average computer skills can be learned within six months; media's negative impact on brain development is unequivocal; enduring skills are lost to dependency on corporate provisions...

Like chicken tending!

Beyond this, though, I have struggled to articulate why I not only wish to restrict media in the early years but to extend this as long as possible into the later years as well. This is about values more than brain function. Simply put, I want my children to be better than I am, to learn better than I have about what's important in the world and what is worthy of our attention -- but this is a hard thing to put into words. 

So I was delighted to find this explanation in the aforementioned book, Raising Elijah. Steingraber says,

“...someone is sure to warn me that, by disallowing my kids broadband access, I'm denying them the skills they need for the twenty-first century. In fact, I'm trying for the opposite. It was a hiker with keen observational skills who discovered the first signs of white-nose syndrome in bats and so alerted the world to an unfolding wildlife catastrophe. It was the humble Secchi disk thrown from the sides of boats by researchers who knew how to pilot them that revealed that 40 percent of our oceanic plankton has vanished; satellite monitoring had missed it. It is people with farming, cooking, and canning skills who are reinvigorating rural economies through the creation of local, organic agricultural systems....

“From all this, I infer that ecological literacy requires tuning children's synapses to the rhythms of the natural world rather than to virtual ones. Nature is a subtle place, with less dead-ahead action than a digital game. Observing it requires an eye trained to notice the almost undetectable – the half footprint in the mug, an absence of bees – and a willingness to wait and see what happens. Some facility with knots and fire is also useful. Habituation to electronic media – for comfort, amusement, escape from boredom, or because parents want it quiet in the backseat – seems unaligned with those goals.”

 

I appreciate the small ways that technology can improve one's life. I love being able to type because I can get my thoughts down almost as fast as they arrive, and hey, I'm no purist: I'm waiting for the new season of Parks & Recreation as anxiously as the next person. But I appreciate very much what Steingraber is saying here. A life saturated with electronic technology -- an artifact from the declining age of globalization and extractive, exploitative economies -- is simply not aligned with the needs of the twenty-first century, in which ecological collapse is arriving at every shoreline for perhaps the most mundane reason of all: we don't know the natural world any longer. 

One feels no drive to protect something one does not love. And one cannot love something one does not know.

The most important tool we can offer our children in this century is ecological literacy. Unfortunately, this may well be the most difficult tool to provide. Most children grow up in cities or suburbia where nature -- free nature, wild nature, not manicured lawns, ornamental parks, or even backyard gardens filled with neat rows of non-native, hybridized plants -- has been decimated. The cost of keeping nature at a distance are insurmountable under these conditions. Children in these environments will never learn to see themselves as an inextricable part of the Earth -- indeed, as an aspect of nature themselves. Instead they grow up to fall in line with the conventions of this culture, fatally considering humanity above and beyond nature: quick to extract from it what they wish, without sincere comprehension for the cords they have cut.

I tell my children, like all good equitable parents, that they can do anything they want to do with their lives. They can go to college, or not; they can get married, or not; they can be parents, or not. They can live in Mexico or Thailand or Florida, or right down the street. They can be teachers or nurses or helicopter pilots. But increasingly I feel compelled to amend that statement, to funnel them away from planet-killing, soul-sucking professions and locations and habits and into service to life itself.

I think what I'm really trying to ask them is, "How can you stay free-range, instead of being caged in a CAFO (Confined Adult Feeding Operation)?"

For now, Isaiah wants to be a farmer, a firefighter, and a father: all three worthy goals.