I live on an island in Maine where kids still get to be kids. They play unsupervised, and the community looks after them.
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- I moved to North Haven to teach at the public school 20 years ago.
- I learned the kids' parents felt comfortable letting them all outside alone.
- I've been a parent for 10 years and offer my child independence as well.
When I moved to North Haven Island 20 years ago to work as the music teacher at Maine's smallest K-12 public school, I couldn't quite imagine the students I would find there.
What would island kids be like? Rugged outdoors people? Miniature lobstermen with calloused hands and weathered faces? Plein air painters of rocky landscapes? Would-be urbanites desperate to escape their geographic isolation?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found a little bit of everything represented in the student body. But they were unified by one characteristic that I now realize made them even more unique than I initially thought: their parents felt comfortable sending them outside alone.
Not just because they believed — and continue to believe — that their kids could and should play in their yards and the woods, ride their bikes to school or the store, or take their quarters to the community center for snacks and penny candy, but because when they did so, they weren't at risk of arrest for child endangerment.
I'm a parent myself
For the last 10 years, coincidentally, the amount of time that I myself have been a parent, the news cycle has reflected the nation's ambivalence about kids navigating the world on their own. From Lenore Skenazy, whose kid's solo subway ride sparked an industry, to Jonathan Haidt's attribution of a lack of independence to the crisis of pediatric anxiety to the most recent story of Brittany Patterson's arrest, it's clear that the danger in letting your child out of the house isn't kidnapping or injury, it's the subsequent legal consequences.
On North Haven, our shared beliefs that outdoor time is excellent, that kids can be responsible if given responsibilities, and that parents deserve a break means that when we see a child riding their bike to school, we make sure our driving supports their safety.
When a gaggle of 9-year-olds juggling life jackets and tennis rackets has french fries together between summer classes with no adults in sight, nobody bats an eye or calls the police. When kids congregate on the playground for baseball or just to sit on the swings and talk, nobody is tallying the number of miles they walked to get there or asking whether they walked, biked, or were dropped off.
My child has independence
Ten years ago, when my own child was an infant and "free-range kids" had just entered the national lexicon, I wondered if I would still share these beliefs when she was older.
The answer, of course, is a resounding yes.
She has become one of the kids eating lunch with her friends between tennis and sailing, preventing me from having to drive into town four times instead of twice. For two years now, she's been allowed to ride her bike (with a helmet, always with a helmet) across the street and down the dirt road to her friend's house. A few times, when neither her father nor I were available to drive her, she's taken it farther afield, to school, to a friend's house further down the road, or all the way to town and back.
At age 9, she started working as a mother's helper, entertaining 5 and 6-year-old kids with a family member home but not directly involved. She's just now starting to babysit. She's often home alone for a little while after school, practicing her instruments and feeding her pet lizard while she waits for one of us to arrive.
Our community may be exceptionally safe, given its low population and inaccessibility other than by boat or airplane. But the deciding factor for me in offering my child independence is my confidence that should an adult come across my kid on the road between her house and her friend's, or the school and the store, or the tennis courts and the sailing club, they might check in and make sure she's OK, but that their first call would be to me, and not to the police.
If more adults in more communities tried that first, we might find that more kids can benefit from the feeling of accomplishment and confidence they gain from exercising a little independence.