Free-Range Kids is the name of a weblog which invites contributions from parents: “Chances are, your childhood was not all about fear and huge ‘What if’s.’ Chances are you walked to school and rode your bike and stayed out till the lights came on, right? Maybe you even ate an unwashed grape. Tell us about your freedom, and especially: The moment you felt most grown up. And, if you’d like, tell us how you’re trying to give your kids that same kind of independence.”
If you do a search on the term ‘free range’ the first result in Google is from the Wikipedia:
Free range is a method of farming husbandry where the animals are allowed to roam freely instead of being contained in any manner. The term is used in two senses that do not overlap completely: as a farmer-centric description of husbandry methods, and as a consumer-centric description of them. Farmers practice free range to achieve free-range or humane certification (and thus capture high prices), to reduce feed costs, to improve the happiness and liveliness of their animals, to produce a higher-quality product, and as a method of raising multiple crops on the same land.
Note the phrase “… to improve the happiness and liveliness of their animals…”
When applied to children, the term ‘Free-Range’ describes, in effect, this same concept, a way to improve the happiness and liveliness of kids. The term has been popularized by Lenore Skenazy, who authored a book on the concept and whose weblog offers information, support, and ongoing news about Free-Range Kids. Lenore is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work appears in more than 100 papers, offering commentary on everything from politics to family life to popular culture. Formerly a columnist for The New York Sun, and The New York Daily News, she has also worked for National Public Radio and Mad Magazine.
At her website Lenore explains: “When I wrote a column for The New York Sun on ‘Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,’ I figured I’d get a few e-mails pro and con. Two days later I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, FoxNews and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: ‘America’s Worst Mom?’” The incident led to the creation of the Free-Range Kids blog and the book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry (John Wiley & Sons, April 2009).
Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids concept has long been familiar to many homeschooling families. Lenore writes “Somehow, a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing. They have lost confidence in everything: Their neighborhood. Their kids. And their own ability to teach their children how to get by in the world.”
Homeschooling parents haven’t forgotten, and they’re often very comfortable trusting their children to figure out how to get by in the world. Homeschooled children frequently do the kinds of things which raise eyebrows and cause concern according to Lenore’s blog: “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!”
For a few weeks after discovering Lenore’s blog I merely monitored it, thinking it was a bit sensationalistic and over the top: Could we really be so far gone as a society that letting a kid walk down the street alone might be perceived as child abuse? The idea was simply foreign to my thinking. But the more I read Lenore’s posts and the ongoing media articles about her work; the more I read the emails and letters she shares, the more I came to realize that she’s right, a large segment of this society fears deeply for the safety of children. She addresses that attitude in her original New York Sun article, and then notes:
We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.
The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.
Just so.
Tags: childhood freedom, Free Range Kids, freedom in childhood, homeschooling families, Lenore Skenazy, over-protectiveness, trusting children
Reading through the current issue of Education Revolution, I found an interesting article by Elana Davidson titled “Moving Beyond Age Discrimination,” with this highlighted quote:
“Children are the only classification of citizens in our society against whom discriminatory abuse is not only legal, but actually encouraged and carried out by laws themselves.”
What is age discrimination? The writer explains:
“We consider such practices as limiting people’s movement in the world, making decisions that affect them without their participation or consent, and invasion of privacy and personal and physical space without just cause, to name a few, as violations of personal freedom and rights and yet these are common experiences for children and young people.”
I also liked this quote from the text:
“When one takes a critical look at the justification for the subordination and disenfranchisement of youth and children, the arguments for exclusion such as children being irrational, amoral, inexperienced or incapable of deciding what is in their own best interests start to fall apart.”
The most visible example of age discrimination in our society is age-related curfews, a subject we’ve covered in great depth over the years. From a 1999 column by Larry and Susan Kaseman:
“Daytime curfews require that police stop and question young people who appear to be of school age but are not in a school building during conventional school hours. Those who cannot provide a convincing reason for not being in school are either fined or taken into custody.
It is often surprisingly and frighteningly easy to get curfews passed by town, city, or county governments. Proponents of curfews claim that curfews are needed to combat truancy and juvenile crime. Although serious juvenile crime rates are the lowest in 30 years, many people still fear and distrust young people, partly because the media gives so much attention to sensational crime.”
The Kasemans understand the complexities involved:
“It is often difficult to convince people to oppose curfews. Many people do not stop to think about how curfews threaten basic freedoms. Those who fear crime or are shocked by truancy may feel curfews are necessary. Parents whose children are not truants assume that curfews will not affect their family, so they don’t need to bother to oppose curfews.
It is especially important that we homeschoolers oppose curfews, perhaps assuming leadership roles. We understand more clearly than many people how government regulation can interfere with learning and family life, and we have experience working together to oppose harmful legislation.”
In a 1998 article, “Nighttime Curfews or ‘You Wanna Do WHAT to My Kid?’” Mary McCarthy explained what she did to fight a local curfew law, and the successful challenges and legal precedents she found in her research:
“The first is Hutchins v. District of Columbia. U. S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan issued a permanent injunction against D.C.’s curfew, ruling that minors “possess a fundamental right to free movement to participate in legitimate activities that do not adversely impact the rights of others.” He also noted that curfews violate the rights of parents to make responsible decisions about how to raise their own children, and in doing so do nothing to make the streets safer. Arthur Spitzer, Legal Director of the ACLU of the National Capital Area, further noted, “The proper response to juvenile crime is to arrest the criminals, not to put thousands of law-abiding young people under house arrest.”"
Janie Levine Hellyer addressed the subject in her 1997 article, “Truancy, Curfews, and Our Response”:
“Is this a “homeschool” problem? We are seeing how many homeschool families and groups have worked hand-in-hand with local officials to ensure that homeschoolers are not negatively affected by these regulations. Should we not, however, be concerned with freedom for all young people, regardless of where they are being educated? According to many, these new regulations are once again being enforced disproportionately against children and teens of color and those who look “different.”
Those who support civil liberties for young people are taking stands opposing these curfew regulations. As the mother of a homeschooled teenager, I oppose any ordinance or regulation that would keep my son or any other young person from accepting a daytime job, visiting the public library or simply going to the store to buy milk. Once again, we need to stand together and fight these regulations which will essentially put all children under “house arrest” until they reach the acceptable age.”
Returning to Elena’s article:
“While most cultures of the world today are perpetuating to some degree an oppressive relationship between adults and children, if we become aware of such dynamics, we can shift our thinking and our culture in ways that minimize their impact and build a more cooperative and supportive culture for all of us.”
Tags: AERO, age discrimination, civil liberties, Curfews, Education Revolution, Elana Davidson, Janie Levine Hellyer, Larry and Susan Kaseman, Mary McCarthy, truancy, truants, young people
As some of my readers know, I’ve been traveling in Washington state for the last three weeks, visiting family and friends and the old family home in the north central part of the state, which also houses the permanent office for Home Education Magazine. I left Alaska, where we live now, the first week of June with my dad and my sister, to attend the high school graduation of my youngest nephew, and to visit my mother’s only sister, who lives in Boise, Idaho. A week later Dad and my sister flew home and I turned toward our Washington home, where I’m presently working in the office, hanging out with our daughter Jody (who still lives in this area), and going through the 26+ year collection of stuff related to publishing the magazine. It’s been an eye-opening experience, and quite a trip down memory lane.
I found the original notebooks and edited manuscripts of several books we published, by Linda Dobson, Agnes Leistico, Cafi Cohen and others. I found photos of Mark and I speaking at conferences from New York to California, and marveled at how young we looked two decades ago. I found our complete collection of Homeschooler’s Weekly, a popular little publication we produced for a couple of years in the early 1990’s.
I found photos of our kids – some only babies! – playing amongst cases of magazines, helping out in the mailroom, assisting us at conferences, posing for cover photos. I found original copies of old flyers and brochures for HEM, booklets and catalogues we produced, mock-ups for old ads we ran in magazines and newsletters. It brought a smile to see that you can still subscribe to HEM for the same price we advertised over a quarter of a century ago! 
I came across a box which contained a few binders and notebooks, our complete archives of the National Homeschool Association, founded in 1988 and voluntarily disbanded around 1997. For almost ten years the organization, the first nationwide effort to unite homeschoolers, provided a national forum for broad-based discussion about issues of concern to homeschooling families. As founding members, editors of the NHA’s Circles of Correspondence newsletter, and having attended every meeting for the first few years, we collected quite an archive of homeschooling’s history. Probably a book in there somewhere, someday.
Before the NHA dissolved itself it produced a document, Homeschooling Families, Ready for the Next Decade, which still stands alone as just what the subtitle says: “A Foundation for Ongoing Conversations.” A brief excerpt:
“The knowledge and effective support homeschoolers offer one another are major strengths of the homeschooling movement. Homeschoolers who create and participate in support groups, share resources, and gather for activities and discussions are making an important contribution to the growth and stability of the homeschooling movement. Grassroots organizing and networking have been a source of the homeschooling community’s strength.”
That might seem like a real no-brainer in today’s homeschooling world of email, websites, blogs, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, but the NHA predated most of our current electronic inter-connectedness. The NHA functioned via phone and postal mail delivery, almost archaic by today’s standards. Most of the discussion about creating the NHA took place within the pages of Home Education Magazine – with many weeks between installments and updates.
I’m still digging around, and still finding old treasures. Photos of old friends, letters and documents which bring back memories, books, computer disks, recordings, notes and more. I could start a museum of homeschooling’s history with this stuff! Maybe some day, in some way, I will.
Tags: Agnes Leistico, Cafi Cohen, history of homeschooling, Home Education Magazine, homeschool history, Linda Dobson, National Homeschool Association, NHA
How does a person learn to think clearly and effectively and to make reasoned decisions? How do you learn – or teach someone else – to gather enough information about a situation to become familiar with the pros and cons, the advantages and disadvantages, and then, being informed, make a decision about the best course of action to take?
As we go through life we make decisions, and those decisions, in turn, make us. Large decisions, small decisions. Matters of great importance and the details of daily life. What to wear today, what to have for dinner, which friends to see, which road to take. Who to build relationships with, where to live, which job offer to accept, when to make a change in how things are going.
The decision to homeschool your children is on the more important end of the scale, and inevitably your decisions relating to homeschooling will affect your child’s decisions later in life. But there’s no way to tell how your decisions now might affect your child’s decisions later. If you decide to chart a course of serious and demanding study it might inspire your child to become a scholar and pursue an advanced degree, or it might sour his attitude toward structured learning environments and encourage him to seek other approaches to educating himself, which might be less expensive and more productive than the college education you originally thought would be best. By the same token your decision to provide a more relaxed unschooling atmosphere might spur your child to seek out a more formal learning environment and higher levels of education when she’s older, or it might result in a laid-back attitude and a preference for finding her own way through life.
As parents, part of our challenge is making decisions about the best living environment for our children. We might decide to raise our kids in the city, with multifacted cultural and social opportunities, or we might decide a rural or suburban environment would be more agreeable, and there are advantages – and disadvantages – to both. Sometimes the decisions have already been made for us, as when a home is passed down through the generations. Sometimes one decision takes precedence over others, as when a job offer dictates the place of residence.
Our decisions as parents, and later our childrens’ decisions for themselves, shape and form our lives in large and small ways, and the ability to make decisions effectively is a valuable skill, worth developing and sharpening. A letter submitted to our HEM Letters email discussion list brought the truth of this into focus for me recently:
I have been musing. My grandmother was born in 1897 and was 101 when she died. She was born in the Ukraine and came to the US when she was 14. Who would have, could have, imagined the changes in her lifetime? In our lifetimes?
I can only imagine what she would have said had she been told about being prepared for her future. For my grandmother: a new country, a new language, a new culture, electicity, cars, telephones, man on the moon, computers, Mars exploration–the list is endless.
For us, the list continues to grow. Who knows what the future will be for our children?
It seems to me that when we are asked about preparing our kids for their futures, we and they truly can only be prepared to be active participants in the present–and if we know how to find out what we need to know, we’ll do just fine. We don’t need to know all the answers, we need to be able to ask the questions, and to try to find out what we need to know.
The 21st century certainly doesn’t need standardized thinkers.
Just some thoughts
Debra Bures, buresfam@surfree.com
Who can imagine the future our children will face? Beyond the unfathomable changes in society, technology, medicine, and other variables, what personal changes will affect their decisions, shape their lives? How can we best help them prepare for whatever curve balls life might decide to pitch their way?
I’ve always thought one of the most valuable and underrated aspects of homeschooling was the opportunity to makes one’s own choices and decisions, to step away from the mainstream herdlike group-think. And yet this singular advantage is in grave danger of disappearing as more and more parents seek not something different from schools and schooling, but simply to teach school in a different location.
The message of homeschooling being advanced by many businesses (”Our curriculum guarantees success!”), and organizations (”Homeschoolers test above average!”) does nothing to dispel the notion of homeschooling as merely school in the home. Combined with the scare tactics of an educational bureaucracy struggling to justify its existence (”If you can read this, thank a teacher!”), there’s little room for parents to consider any decision that leads away from traditional models of education. Parents who were trained as children to use the schoolish model find reassurance in using the schoolish model with their own children, especially when the experts, professionals, and even some homeschooling recruiters tell them that’s what works best. But is it?
If the school model worked best there would be no such thing as homeschooling. When parents decide that school is not working for their children, or when they decide to forego schooling altogether and approach homeschooling as a continuum of living, they’re seeking something different than the mainstream educational offering. They’re deciding to change things for the better, and that decision will result in learning – not just about homeschooling, but about a whole new world of ideas, experiences, opportunities, challenges and more, for themselves and for their children.
Adapted from an editorial which appeared in Home Education Magazine’s November-December, 2002 issue. © 2009 Helen Hegener, all rights reserved.
Tags: Helen Hegener, Home Education Magazine, homeschool decision, homeschooling, reasons to homeschool
My five kids may dispute the notion, but I’m pretty certain I’ve learned much more from them than they ever learned from me. I’m so sure of it that I’ve put a lot of thought into the idea, and I’ve come to the conclusion that on some levels it has to do with learning the value of learning. Let me explain.
I don’t think kids really value learning per se. Why should they? They’ve been doing it nonstop since they were born, but still we constantly remind them to do it, advise them how important it is, tell them how useful it will be in their lives when they’re all grown up, and we’re constantly coming up with new and improved ways to get them to do it. We buy their toys with an eye toward how ’educational’ they’ll be. We take them places where they’ll learn things like science, history, or geography. When they ask us simply how to spell a word we seize the opportunity to turn the answer into a quest for knowledge: “How do you think it’s spelled. Sound it out slowly. Think about the root word.”
Yes, I was guilty of all that and more early on. It took me a few years to learn the error of my ways, and for that I believe I owe my oldest two sons an apology. They were the guinea pigs, so to speak, the ones I learned how to handle learning with. By the time our three younger kids came along I’d smartened up enough to relax and trust that learning was always happening, with or without my help, and the learning that happened without my assistance was much more likely to be useful and relevant to the learners.
I learned the value of learning, and I think it’s a lesson my kids will need to learn for themselves. Like so many things in life, it’s not something you can just tell someone else and expect to have any meaning , it really needs to be experienced, to have a context all its own.
Eventually we reached a point where learning was just accepted as something that happened, sort of like the fortune-cookie philosophy about life being what happens while you’re making other plans. Learning is certainly what happens while you’re living life. For better or worse, we learn every day, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, whoever we’re with. We learn good things, useful things, handy things; and we learn bad things, destructive things, things we might someday wish we hadn’t learned. Life’s like that.
On the whole, though, learning serves us quite well, and we’re constantly arranging and rearranging our learning so it’s more useful to us. Something draws our attention and we ask questions or find books to read or take classes until we’ve learned enough to satisfy ourselves. Something else seems interesting so we team up with others and share and hone our skills and put our knowledge to work, thereby learning more and more in ever-widening circles. We find ourselves with a need to learn something and we set about doing so just as we set about feeding ourselves when we’re hungry. It’s just what people do. My kids taught me that. But they also taught me so much more.
They taught me that life makes us all learners, but while some of us learn easily, others learn with more difficulty. They taught me it’s okay to skip knowing something. They taught me there will never, ever be enough time to learn everything I’d like to learn, to do everything I’d like to do, and that’s how it should be. They taught me to view them – and indeed, everyone I meet , as individuals, and not to fall into the trap of sticking people with convenient labels based on my personal experiences. They taught me to acknowledge that everyone has their own experiences which make them unique in the world, and try as I might I’ll never know all there is to know about anyone except myself. My kids taught me it’s a mistake to sacrifice your life to work or even to lofty ideals. Work and worthwhile causes come and go, but the people in our lives are what are most important.
My kids taught me to listen with an open heart, and to see without making judgments. They taught me patience, and perseverance, and persistence , but they also taught me to know when to quit. They taught me that love does not bring conditions with it, but just is, and they made me a much better person than I’d have ever been without them.
Thanks kids, for homeschooling me.
(© 2004/2009 by Helen Hegener. Adapted from an HEM editorial from 2004. Still learning after all these years…)
Tags: children, family, Helen Hegener, homeschooling, kids, Learning, Unschooling
