Let them outside - #175

An argument for more feral parenting.

When I was growing up in rural Ohio, we would drive to Tower City in downtown Cleveland once every holiday season to go Christmas shopping. We would park at one of the end-of-the-line stops in the suburbs, and take the train into the city. As I got older, my parents would let me sit further and further from them in the train car, allowing me the most mundane fantasies of “going to work.”

Once in Tower City, we would head to the Higbee’s Elf Workshop—no parents allowed. Children were sent in, guided by various elves and a merchandise route you could not veer off of, to do the Christmas shopping for siblings, parents, teachers, whoever was on their list. It was magical. Not only because everything was kid height and kid size and covered in fake snow at an age when you could still believe in Big Magic, but because you were trusted to do it on your own.

For years, my parents tried to instill independence where they could: go ask the neighbors, go muck the stalls, go wrangle the horses, go fetch this grocery item. Still, we lived on a paved road with a 45mph speed limit—I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike to a friend’s house. But at 15 I got my first job making Blizzards, and by 18 when I graduated I would never live at home again. My first job out of college was out of the country. The lesson of independence stuck.

Now, more than a quarter of 8-9 year olds aren’t allowed to play unsupervised in their own front yard. You could blame the increase in crime, except crime hasn’t increased. You could blame the rewilding of front yards, except that’s not really happening and you can almost guarantee any parent rewilding their lawn is also keen on rewilding their children. You could blame the likelihood of being kidnapped, but a child’s odds of being kidnapped by a stranger are about 1 in 720,000. A child is “five times more likely to have a co-joined twin” than to be kidnapped by someone they don’t know.

Earlier this summer, a North Carolina district attorney charged two parents with involuntary manslaughter and felony child abuse after their 7-year-old was struck and killed by a car on the two-block walk home with his 10-year-old brother. The parents’ bail was set at over a million dollars, and their remaining children are left without parents. There is no law in North Carolina that addresses when a child can walk unaccompanied by an adult. The district attorney wanted to set an example that would allow other parents to keep their children safer.

But safety comes at a cost.

Right now, our child is just starting to walk. He’s a couple years away from asking the neighbors for sugar. But he does get left alone: when I went into the butcher to grab some meat, when I pulled over to drop some donations at the local free bin, when I ran into the vet to grab more of Link’s medication. W3 was asleep in his car seat—it’s the only way he’ll take his two-hour nap.

W3 is 14 months old, and we stopped using our audio-only baby monitor when he was about 3 months old. Giving up the baby monitor can sound like a brag, but I gave up the monitor for the same reason I gave up caffeine: it was supposed to make things easier when all it did was make things worse. I found myself leaning over it, trying to discern one rustle from the next, constantly running to the next room to find the thump I heard was just one of the cats jumping from dresser to chair while W3 entertained himself on the floor.

At this age, W3 is walking. He’s cautious. He asks for help when he’s not sure. Right now, he’s confined to the main floor and there isn’t a place I can’t hear him. Like most parents, I’ve learned that the siren call isn’t noise but silence. If I don’t hear anything, I check on him. He’s usually unraveling the toilet paper. I am more relaxed without the monitor, and because I am more relaxed, so is he. My nervous system has a direct impact on his childhood, so I am thoughtful in my tending to it. My mask on first, etc.

A week from Monday, W3 will start daycare. He’ll go Mondays and Wednesday, and I’ll work nearby so that if he struggles to adjust, I can be there. That’s the request of the daycare, and I’m happy for it. But I also trust them. We interviewed the caretakers, toured the facility, and asked other local parents for their opinion. Which is why I found it sad when their director shared their monitoring app.

“So you can log in and see when he peed, how long his nap was, what he ate for lunch, whatever.”

“Do I have to?”

“I mean, no, but some parents love it.”

I had felt that, because I was going to be paying the monthly equivalent of a luxury car payment, that the joy would be not knowing when he peed. Someone else would handle that, and I, finally, for a few hours at a time, would just be handling myself. But people are used to knowing. You can see Reels of dolled up moms out to cocktails, passing around their video monitors showing their babies peacefully at home sleeping. These babies aren’t at home alone. Another parent or a grandparent or the babysitter are always there. But there’s mom, at the bar with her surveillance camera, tamping her anxiety with live footage and white wine.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic released an article about how to get kids off their phones, according to the kids themselves. What the kids suggested most was just unsupervised, independent play time with each other, something I had all the time as a kid. A parent was always available, but they weren’t watching. That’s exactly what kids get out of phones: it’s a place where they can play unsupervised.

For a lot of America, that very idea summons a knee-jerk reaction of access to porn, violence, and talking to adults cosplaying as other children, and yet, the kids have phones. They have ipads at dinner. Their reliance on screens for dopamine release and escape begins earlier and earlier. Gen Z, the first generation raised with the internet, has less sex, does fewer drugs, and drinks less. Why? Well it might be because they’re getting all those highs elsewhere, all day long. Who needs the hunt when you can scroll TikTok all night long?

This month Instagram released a new mapping feature so you could see who/what was nearby. If your Location Services were on to begin with, the new feature shared your location immediately. Similar to my phone’s ringer, I haven’t had Location Services on for years. If you head to Find My Friends, you will not find me. If you want to locate me, you’re better off sinking your fingers into the soil and thinking really, really hard about who I am as a person and what that means my afternoon might look like.

But that’s why my moves over the years have gone further and further into the woods, where radios are more useful than phones. We are, on the whole, heavily influenced by the culture in which we live. I moved somewhere that matched my values: there to help, not to hinder. But what values are being instilled if kids can’t walk a few blocks? If moms can’t run in the store?

If you live in a suburb with busy roads where kids don’t walk by themselves and every child has their own playground in the back yard, those kids will grow up with a yearning, and they will either come to understand it as a need for connection with others, or they will come to understand it as, “I need my own playground forever.” They’ll get on their device and buy and buy, recoiling more and more when someone at the bus stop says “how’s it going?”

Oh wait, ha ha, these kids don’t ride the bus.

But it’s not on the kids to shape that outcome. It’s on the adults. Not the parents, mind you, but every adult who can make an impact in their community. Every person who can advocate (and practice!) slower speed limits, fund community resources, petition for sidewalks and bike lanes, lead the building of local playgrounds, care for the homeless, or even strike up casual conversations with neighbors via stoop hangs.

Of course summer camps and mentoring programs and after-school activities are great, but the kids are scheduled into oblivion. It’s like when you go to schedule a meeting with a coworker and they have “Lunch :)” blocked off, but there’s also a 15-minute meeting scheduled over half of it. Olivia is stretched so thing at her corporate marketing job selling suitcases you can’t take on planes that she thought a smiley face might soften the blow of her taking 30 minutes to complete basic human needs, but sorry babe, no eating. Drink your soylent and keep that mouse moving or we’ll start checking your LinkedIn history.

That’s part of the problem. When Olivia decides to have a kid, she’s strung higher than an aerial marker ball, trying to prove she’s working while also trying to remember to live, and fitting a kid into the nightmare that’s turned into getting by means she’s going to have to rely on whatever methods can soothe her already stress-addled brain, like a bracelet that assures her that her healthy-by-all-accounts baby is still breathing, when what she really needs is a very, very, very long walk in the woods.

That’s what I did at least.

But not every person can live in a strange bucolic town at 10,000 feet with truck-pulled rope toes and hidden forts in the woods and an absolute rampage of feral children that rely on the intertwined network of guardians and parents to keep them safe and accounted for.

Though it’s worth noting: spaces where children can be themselves do not require rugged, alpine environments or rugged, alpine residents.

Children’s freedom and development requires communities that advocate for them to not live in a perpetual surveillance state, trapped in their finished basements with the vacuous stare of too much Roblox, Minecraft, and Shein hauls. It requires a system that loosen the threads on parents and caregivers, to let things relax a little, to breathe, so those parents can breathe too. It requires a national news system that doesn’t need to run 24/7 on every nightmare moment to keep the lights on. It requires people welcoming kids in and remembering that they too once had a completely dysregulated brain that required a little screaming. It requires everyone to remember that maybe if we all had an opportunity every once in a while to break down in the bread aisle and not be deemed incompetent by the Airpod army of judgment, that we’d all be a little better off too.

It requires action, grace, and I hate to use this word, but it requires faith: that people are not terrible. That a conversation with one won’t kill you. That kids are not absolute morons. That most people, kids included, just want the opportunity to live their lives. That occasionally there will be loss and sadness and grief, but that if we don’t allow for that, we will be losing and grieving something else entirely.