Open Writing

New York journalist, Lenore Skenazy wrote an article about letting go in 2008. It brought home to me how impossible it is to know the rights and wrongs of good parenting; everybody goes about it differently. There are the core values, like gently guiding children through their various phases, teaching them right from wrong and instilling family values. But then your family values are not necessarily mine, so, it’s a bit of a muddle, one that I can generally accept but I really couldn’t relate to most of Ms Skenazy’s ideas on parenting.

‘One sunny Sunday’, she left her then 9 year old son at Bloomingdales armed with 20 dollars, a map, a subway ticket and her blessing. She scoffed at the idea that strangers would be lurking nearby just waiting to ‘abduct’ her ‘adorable child.’ It was a strategy calculated to make her detractors feel silly. Skenazy trusted her son to negotiate his way home safely, but paradoxically wouldn’t provide him with a cell phone in case he lost it. It was his first excursion alone but she didn’t think it appropriate to ‘trail her son like a ‘mommy private eye’, New York was hardly ‘downtown Baghdad’ so by implication NY must be safe. I wondered why she couldn’t have chosen a safer location for her boy’s first adventure.

I don’t believe that Skenazy is a bad mother. I just see her as somebody at the other end of the parenting spectrum. There are the hovering helicopter mums at one end and those like Skenazy at the other. The rest of us are in-betweeners muddling along and learning as we go.

On what seems to me a parallel experience (sort of), three decades ago my five year old son also wanted to make his own way home. He had it ‘figured out’. ‘No problem’, he said, or something like it, I’m paraphrasing as I wasn’t listening at the time. Most young mums tend to zone out occasionally if they value their sanity. We had been walking to and from school; it was only a 20 minute walk, but there was a busy highway to negotiate. In hindsight (and ain’t that a grand thing) I should have taken more notice because halfway through the school year, David did walk home by himself.

I was running late so I took the bus to catch up time and when I arrived, David had left. He had hiked his school bag higher on his shoulder and walked confidently out the front gate along with his peers and their parents.

I scoured the streets then made my way home. My neighbour came out of her house holding the hand of a safe but teary David. He’d been standing outside our front door crying so our neighbour had taken him in and plied him with milk and scones.

I was pretty teary myself and immensely relieved. I hugged David then shook him and asked what had possessed him. It had been a spur of the moment decision that could have taken a scary direction, one that doesn’t bear considering. The only good thing that had come out of that event was a lesson learned that thankfully hadn’t proved disastrous.

Given a couple of extra years and David would have come home with friends and his younger brother for company, there’s safety in numbers. And he would have a couple of years’ worth of life experience under his belt and the road rules down pat.

If you tell a five year old child not to talk to strangers, he will nod as if he understands, except that in his mind a stranger has fangs and claws. An older child might understand better about the traps involved but even older children are used to doing what they are told to by adults. A guardian angel must have helped David negotiate the road. But what hope would he have had if somebody had forced him into a car?

In January this year an abduction almost happened to a ten year old boy. He was waiting for his mother in the family car in a car park in Melbourne’s south east when he was approached by a man who offered him lollies. As it happened, the boy refused to come with him and the man tried to pull the boy from the car. The stranger was unsuccessful that time. But if he had pulled harder or persisted it could have had a tragic ending for that boy and his family.

Adults make hundreds of decisions every day based on life experience and even then they can’t count on getting it right every time. How can parents expect it of a five or even a nine year old? I believe that until a child is old enough to protect himself from the wider world it’s our duty to be vigilant on their behalf. I think that letting go is a series of small steps and at each junction of a child’s life it is a parent’s job to pre-prepare the child for each situation, recognise when the right time is and then let go.