Free Range Parenting and Screens

Last updated on: August 29, 2016 at 8:45 am by Anne Kennedy

Free Range Parenting and Screens 2016-08-29T08:45:21-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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I should already have written something scintillating and delightful, for this bright cheery Monday morning, but Posie the dog wants to put his horrible wet nose on my hand, being jealous of this shiny screen. His life is miserably hard–or was I thinking of mine? Since waking up he has polished off the cat bowl, peed in the hall, pooped in the living room, and sat crying on my lap because I won’t pet him. Meanwhile, his true owner is nowhere within shouting distance, having retreated to the basement to play on the Xbox.

Just finished reading this very interesting article about the dicey business of parenting in this brave new world. It’s a bit long, but I commend the whole thing to you. A study has recently been carried out, trying to get at the root of why it is so completely unacceptable for children to be left without a parent within arm’s length, even for five minutes, even when it’s factually the safest thing in the world.

If you have a child you probably think about it some of the time. Certainly I do. I would, by instinct, be of the so called Free Range variety, which really just means you have some kind of sense about what kids are capable of and you don’t want to be tyrannically ruled by other people’s unreasonable expectations (to provide a technical definition of free range). But I am also desperately afraid of getting in trouble, with anyone, especially the state, and so I have never wittingly put myself in a situation where a stranger might make that life shattering phone call. I don’t take the children anywhere that I might have to take them all out of the car–like the gas station–because I am so afraid of the cell phone enabled crazy stranger. Nevertheless, in spite of my diligence, I have been threatened with child protective services more than once.

One of the authors of the study believes this trend towards never letting a child be alone outside of a house, and I would add, away from a screen, without an adult, is classist. A very prescient insight. I’ve often thought, as I’ve battled back the threats, that if my children weren’t white and sort of middle class looking, they might be able to go wherever they wanted. We have minority unattended children all over our church and no one thinks of calling cps on them, even though they are very small. They know what they are about, and they obviously can handle whatever comes their way. All the middle class white children (like mine) look at them with sick envy and then are bundled back in the car to be driven somewhere where they have to get out and get back in and get out and get back in.

We think it’s immoral for a mother to let her children wander to the park, but we don’t really think it’s that bad for children to be plugged in to every single available device. Freedom from the other has to be achieved somehow. The mother needs a break from the kid and the kid needs a break from the mother, but she Cannot let him go outside to play alone without watching him. Her only recourse is a screen. Screen Time. And so every modern mother is beating back technology, because she can’t send the child outside, but she has to make dinner.

I can’t tell you how much I hate this trend. The very idea that mothers would be judged most especially by other mothers (as the study found), and that this judgement would be moral in nature, just boils my onion. No wonder so many women are deciding it’s not worth the trouble, not worth the heart break. And no wonder technology is the poison pill solution. We keep them from the park and so they go online to be harried and bullied in cyber space. May God have mercy. Especially is I make them all turn everything off and go out into this beautiful day to play.

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