Customer Reviews

Free-Range Kids, Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry

5 star:		(82)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been reading Lenore's blog for a few months now, and I enjoy it, so I mean it as a compliment when I say that her book is WAY better than her blog.

I really enjoyed the combination of light-hearted quips and anecdotes together with serious, thought-provoking information and opinions. Opinions that are backed up by real data, not the urban legends everyone likes to cite. Did you know that there are no documented cases of kids being given poisoned candy by a stranger on Halloween? I didn't. Lenore debunks lots of "known dangers," and she does it in a readable, entertaining fashion.

This is a parenting book I'm going to recommend to my friends, and one of the very few that I won't be selling to the used book store. This one will be proudly displayed on my bookshelf to be loaned out to people who need it, and re-read by me when I need a reminder not to be sucked in by the paranoid parenting that's taken over our society. Thanks, Lenore!

Personally, I thought the author was cool when she let her kid ride the subway alone. It's hard for parents to let go, but we have to or we'll stunt our kids. I was a crime reporter for many years. I covered Polly Klaas -- I know first-hand out unsafe the world can be. So lock your doors, put your kids in car seats, be sensible and then move on. To try to control every aspect of your kids' world probably does steal a little of their childhood away from them.

But blogs turned into books often annoy me, because that witty-breezy-edgy voice begins to grate.

I think this is an OK book, probably one that a lot of parents need to read or will want to read. But for me, once the point was made, it was made. I'd have been happy reading this in a magazine article without dragging it out. It felt like a make-a-buck effort more than a necessary parenting tool.

This is seriously one of the best parenting books I have read. Not only do I love Lenore Skenazy's writing style - so very down to earth - her advice is right on the mark. She doesn't dictate what you have to do, but offers some very practical wisdom on what dangers are real and which are overblown.

Her ideas are well-researched (documentation in the back of the book), her examples are on-the-mark - sometimes sad and many times hilarious, and she demonstrates a real empathy for parents. We can all get overwhelmed by the abundance of advice for parents. Lenore urges us to take a step back, use our common sense, and do what's best for our own children.

Before you install a Lo Jack system in your child's backpack- read this book! The world is not the scary place that the evening news would like us to believe. This book will debunk the myths that have been widely accepted as truths. For example, strangers passing out poisoned Halloween candy- how many documented cases have there been? zero. Check it out on snopes.

Do you wish your kids could play capture the flag on summer nights with the neighborhood kids like we did? They can! Trust your instincts. You know your children better than anyone. They don't need 24/7 supervision. They need you to teach them how to be safe and then trust them to do it.

Lenore Skenazy should be hailed as the liberator of children from the oppression of paranoia.

From the beginning, I was sucked in by her light, funny writing style. She uses a lot of sarcasm, which is always fun for me. The book came about because she wrote a column about letting her 9 year old ride the subway in New York City home by himself. She was contacted by various news shows to come on television and share her story, where she was usually made to look negligent by various parenting "experts." From there, a whole parenting movement took off, which she dubbed the Free Range movement. The premise is that kids have common sense, and that the world is safe and they should be allowed to explore it.

She uses statistics to back up her reasoning, some of which are surprising and reassuring. For instance, the likelihood of your child being abducted by a stranger are 1 in 1,500,000. That amounts to 0.000067%. She states that violent crime rates peaked in the early '90s, have been on a steady decline since, and are now at the same levels as they were in the early '60s. There are hypotheses about why this may be. Perhaps it's better prosecution of sex offenders, a greater police presence, better psychiatric treatments available, something else, or all of the above. She discusses Halloween as well. One expert found that there has never been a single case of a child dying from Halloween candy poisoned by a stranger. Not one single case.

This book takes you through 14 "commandments" for free range parents, and information about why you'd want to live this way. At the end of each chapter, she gives you ideas for how you can work toward allowing your kids more freedom. She does a great deal to try to soothe our natural parenting worries, which often are fueled by things like the evening news and Law & Order. She also spends a chapter addressing specific safety concerns parents have, such as choking, drowning, abduction, and "stranger danger" in general.

My main complaint about the book is that she sometimes lets her personal feelings influence her writing. One example is her view on breastfeeding, which of course I must address considering my career choice (childbirth & lactation educator). I agree with her that babies who are formula fed are going to mostly turn out just fine. I don't agree with labeling the benefits of breastfeeding as "supposed" and downplaying the importance of nutrition in general. It sounds like she had a run-in over formula feeding when one of her kids was a baby, and it has created a 12-year grudge (her words). I hope she can one day work through those feelings. She ignores studies on breastfeeding and formula, and states that the only real benefit is that breastfed babies might have fewer ear infections. Of course, that's just one of many, many benefits to both mothers and babies. I'm sorry that she felt harassed by a lactivist at some point in her life; I don't believe at all that formula is poison or that mothers who bottle feed should be made to feel guilty. How we choose to feed our babies (and our older kids - she addresses nutrition in general in a similar way as well) is up to us. However, this was one area where she chose to ignore evidence in favor of a personal bias.

Overall, this book is worth reading. It has some good information for parents, a fun writing style, and reassurance that no matter what we do, if we love our kids we probably won't screw them up too badly.

In this day and age of hyper scheduled, over stressed kids, this book offers the recipe for raising happy and productive kids!

Chock full of advice and stories of kids who made their parents crazy and ended up successful adults, you'll find reassurance on every page.

This couldn't have come at a better time. I have a (nearly) 6 year old and it makes me remember that even though times have changed, I can still give him the freedom to be a happy, healthy, creative and crazy/wonderful kid!

I really enjoyed the sense of humor in this book--it makes it a quick, fun read. But the real point of reading it is to get hit with a big dose of common sense about child safety. Some things that we worry about as parents--such as making sure our kids are wearing seat belts--really ARE worth worrying about. And others--such as evil child-poisoning neighbors on Halloween--are just myths, and when we buy into those myths, we deprive our children of a lot of the value of childhood. With the training of a reporter and the sensibility of a Mom, Lenore Skenazy helps us ferret out the difference, instead of reacting to every possible threat with a knee-jerk protective response that does more harm than good. I'm giving away so many copies of this book to Moms I know!

This book was an easy read, like reading a blog. The author's humor (which she injects quite, quite frequently) at times made me laugh out loud, and other times made me just groan/roll my eyes.
The subject, Free-Range kids, was one I had not heard of or read of before. How refreshing!! I can't believe that it's not talked about more these days. I think I'm pretty good about not being a 'helicopter' over-protective parent (no knee pads or kid leashes) but she brought up some areas I hadn't consdiered...for instance, why it was okay for me at the age of 12 to babysit, but how I'd gasp at the thought of leaving my babies with a 12 year old.
I disagreed with some of her stances on parenting. One whole chapter is based on her idea that our culture is obsessed with parenting and that she feels our choices don't impact our kids all that much. She also dismisses the idea that breastfeeding is the better choice.. she even comments that breastfed babies are often lower in Vitamin D.. I just find it hard to argue that overall breastfeeding isn't the best choice(even formula cans state breast IS best).
Personally, I wish she would've taken this chapter a different direction and tackled controversial topics like co-sleeping, which is practiced in many, many cultures (she compares our hands on parenting to other culture's hands off) in a safe and healthy way.
Anyway, other than some of the child rearing opinions and overkill blog style humore, I really enjoyed this book and the subject as a whole.

While common sense seems to be suffering from an inferiority complex these days, it shows up in buckets-full in this book. In my own humble opinions, if we just take the time to A) listen to the weird things coming out of our own mouths and B) pick apart the even crazier things the media repeats ad nauseum on a daily basis, then the world would be a much better place. And Lenore does just that on the subject of child rearing in today's world.

I don't have kids (yet) and even I feel the societal pressure of raising a healthy, well-adjusted kid. So I gobbled up this book, looking for one of those voices of sanity that helps me keep my head on reasonably straight. This book is chock-full of real life examples, well-researched references and a great sense of humor about it all. An easy read and one that will be well worth your time whether you have kids or plan to eventually. (Or give this book to your baby-knee-pad-buying, horrific-statistic-spouting, safety-obsessed friends!)

I am what you might call overprotective. I have inflicted many scars from infant-toddler-childhood years. My kid is very precious to me. I want my kid to be safe. But at the same time, my wife and I have spent most of our childhoods in another country, where kids as young as 5 years of age play outside without any adult supervision and where kids stay home alone without a babysitter. We want our kid to grow up happy, independent, and strong.

So I started reading Free-Range Kids with much interest. First few chapters were too anecdotal and full of generalization for my taste. Cute but not always relevant stories, lots of criticisms (much of it deserved) against the experts, lawyers, and media. Many comparisons to countries of different culture and lifestyle. And so on.

Ironically, in order to reassure skeptical readers that our community is safe for kids to roam around freely, it has to become one of the experts, very set of people it criticizes early on. It needs to back up its argument with hard facts, results from studies, and so on. The book does that without trying to appear as one, presenting data with comedic delivery, summarizing studies while deemphasizing the source.

What kept me going was the stories of happy free-range children. Although I would much have rather prefer reference-style arguments and guidelines for raising free-range kids, the book in this anecdotal form is perhaps easier, more fun to read as a result. If there's a common theme in every chapters, it's that we want our kids to trust and love the community, without paranoia the media is trying to inject us with. We became parents because we felt the world offers enough positives to outweigh the negatives. While the book is weak in convincing its arguments with hard cold facts, it offers enough stories and agreeable pleas that your kids will grow up happier if you make them trust the community more. At the end of each chapter, it presents some of the free-range "missions" my kid can tackle. I may not let my child tackle all of those missions, but certainly some.