Fear and loving

Illustration: Brendan Leach

My friend’s 80-ish mom was over for coffee, her blue eye shadow crinkling as she laughed. “My sister and I giggle about it now,” she said. “We’d be out playing on Claremont Avenue. Sometimes a car would drive up and call us over, and the guy would be sitting there.”

Doing what?

“Playing with himself!” She laughed again. “We just went right back to our game.” That’s an attitude we haven’t seen in the city for a couple of generations. The fact that Martha Allman O’Leary went on to enjoy life, marry and have six kids seems to prove she was not permanently damaged by her early exposure to, well, exposure. But in the 70 years or so since her Upper West Side childhood, parents here and elsewhere around the country have become terrified that their kids are in physical, psychological and developmental danger all the time, everywhere they go. If they’re actually allowed to go anywhere, that is, without a nanny or mommy or bodyguard.

We think of New York parents as being hip and brave—they haven’t fled to the burbs, after all. But ever since I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone and got branded “America’s Worst Mom” (go ahead, Google it), I’ve heard about more fears than I ever nightmared of. That’s why I started my plea-for-sanity blog, Free Range Kids.

Parents are afraid of letting their little ones walk to school, drink from plastic baby bottles, play in the park, trick-or-treat, eat the candy if they do trick-or-treat, ride a skateboard (okay, that one’s mine—I’m terrified of skateboards) and, of course, take the subway solo before puberty. We all want to keep our children safe. I, too, believe in safety belts and sunblock. But are our kids really in such grave danger? Here’s what I found out.

Walking to school
This one’s true: Getting hit by a car is the top cause of preventable death for children ages five to 14 in the city, according to the Department of Transportation. So you really do have to be careful when you start letting your kids cross the street alone. However, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. In fact, the city gives pedestrian safety lessons to almost all youngsters in second or third grade—a reasonable age to start walking without an escort. A child who learns to look both ways and walk defensively is ready to take to the streets, says Wiley Norvell at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit that seeks to decrease private car use in NYC. The more kids there are who walk to school, he adds, the safer it becomes, with fewer cars dropping students off and bigger gaggles of pint-size pedestrians for drivers to notice.

Trick-or-treating
How many American children have been poisoned over the years by killers who waited for Halloween to get their kicks? Try zero. It’s an urban myth, says Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware who has studied Halloween crime records as far back as 1958. Once, one child in Texas was killed by his dad, who tried to make it look like someone else had poisoned his son’s Pixy Stix. In Michigan, another kid overdosed on his uncle’s heroin stash, and relatives sprinkled the drug on some candy as a diversion. But Best is so unconcerned about poisoned sweets, he never checked his own kids’ goody bags. (Except, perhaps, for extra Snickers.)

(Way too) young love
“Every parent’s worst nightmare,” blare the Gossip Girl billboards. Really? New York does have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, says NARAL Pro-Choice New York spokeswoman Samantha Levine, who notes that the ads are “normalizing” teen sex. Worse, she says, they show the sizzle without the gristle: possible pregnancies and STDs. But if you talk to your kids about birth control and AIDS, Levine says, they’ll probably act more responsibly than Serena et al. Levine cites 20 years of studies by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy that found children’s relationships with their parents make a real difference in determining the age at which they do the deed.

Stranger danger
Fact: In the U.S., about 115 children a year are abducted by strangers, according to the Crimes Against Children Research Center, and about 50 percent of them are killed. As horrible as that is, we are talking about a 1 in 1.5 million chance of this happening to your kid. Or, as Warwick Cairns put it in his book How to Live Dangerously, if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, you would have to leave the moppet outside, unattended, for 600,000 years before it would be statistically likely to happen. In the meantime, every NYC parent who says “Things are different today” should remember: Our murder rate is back to what it was in 1963.

We live in safe times, in a safe city—a city you probably chose because it allowed you to stretch your wings. Having kids doesn’t have to mean an end to the thrills (well, maybe a few of them), it just means new ones. Among the best is the thrill of standing back to watch as your babes start unfurling their wings. Giving them a little independence isn’t foolhardy, it’s smart. It teaches them resilience. And guess what? It’s fun. You’re living in a great city for kids. Enjoy it.

Lenore Skenazy is the founder of FreeRangeKids.com.