Cluck, cluck.

I say goodbye to the two of them at the roundabout.  They pedal away from me, pigtails poking from beneath helmets, little twenty-inch tires churning.  They don’t look back.

As I run up the hill to West Ridge, the road’s shoulder looks narrower than I remember, and the slope seems steeper and longer.  Will they have to walk their bikes, when it’s time for them to find me?  What about the two busy roads they need to cross, both coming and going? Will they correctly calculate what lunches they can purchase with the money I have provided? Do they remember the combination to the bike lock?  How about the location of my new office? What if…

No. Stop. I open the glass doors of the International Arctic Research Center.  I jog up two flights of stairs and around the corner to an office decorated with a medley of artwork from grades K-3.  I fire up my computer.  The kids will buy their sandwiches at the café in Gulliver’s Books, I tell myself.  They will peruse a few used paperbacks.  They might count up their change and buy a caramel or two from the alluring box by the cash register.  And then, in two hours’ time, they’ll bike up the hill.  My little free-rangers will be just fine.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a lot of articles about “free range kids”.  The term -- and the movement -- was initiated by Lenore Skenazy, the dastardly mother who triggered an uproar when she allowed her nine-year-old to ride the New York City subway alone, and then admitted to it, in print!  In truth, Skenazy is a self-proclaimed “safety geek” who nonetheless espouses the notion that kids are  capable young individuals who should be allowed and expected, when ready, to do stuff on their own.

Now, my own kids are nine.  There are no subways here in Fairbanks, Alaska, but there are other ways for young poultry to spread their wings.  Simply going to the outhouse alone when the thermometer reads forty degrees below zero is a small-scale adventure in self-reliance.  The school bus stop is half a mile from our cabin in the woods. At a campground in Denali National Park last week, I put the twins and a young friend in charge of lighting and tending the fire, then wandered off; when I came back 45 minutes later, they’d not only refrained from setting themselves alight, they’d also baked me a perfect potato.

But Fairbanks isn’t just a place for Last Frontier Style independence; we can also conjure opportunities for retro nineteen-fifties free-ranging, both figuratively and literally.  A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were interrupted in the middle of a carpentry project by a cheerful voice. “Hello! Can you let me know if you see a chicken?”

As a conversational opener, this had promise.  We paused in our industrious hammering of nails into a nascent shed. The speaker, casually friendly on the edge of the lawn, quickly introduced herself as my friend’s new neighbor.  She didn’t seem unduly worried about her missing bird.  “They go wherever they want.  They’re completely free-range.”

The phrase made me involuntarily glance over to where four girls, aged 8¹/₂, 9, 9, and almost 12, were busy constructing mysterious items out of scrap lumber.  One of my twins was really going to town with the cordless drill.  The eldest of the quartet was sweating away with a hand saw. 

The fact that the kids were all in view was unusual.  The pre-teen has been uncaged for some time.  The three younger ones, best buddies, are new to the mean streets – but over the course of the previous two weeks, they had been rampaging around the miniscule metropolis of downtown Fairbanks, undertaking such nefarious pursuits as riding their bikes to a local playground, touring historical buildings, and (horrifying as it may seem) checking out library books.

That’s right: my kids, left to their own devices, went and signed themselves up for the Summer Reading Program.   According to the Noel Wien Public Library Patron Conduct Policy: “…Conduct in the library building or on its premises which may lead to denial of library privileges includes… leaving a child under the age of 9 unattended in the library…" The twins were precisely nine years and five days old, and thus totally kosher, but their scofflaw friend was a mere eight years and seven months.  However, as the more diminutive of my kids noted with undisguised jealousy, “Everyone would totally think she’s nine.  Maybe even TEN!”  Right.  She’s practically ready for a fake I.D.  Or, like, a fake “Raven About Reading” children’s library card.  Don’t tell the authorities.

But, in truth, free-range parenting is not about making your kids into public nuisances, and it’s not about breaking rules; it’s about resisting the urge to make too many of them.  It’s the antithesis of helicopter parenting.   As such, it represents kick-back against what has become the new norm.  Skenazy was called, “The World’s Worst Mother” for letting a nine-year-old loose in New York for an hour – but there was no uproar whatsoever when my dad rode the NYC subway to school alone every day when he was just six.  There was no uproar when I myself was nine, and my mom hung a house key around my neck on a piece of yarn.

Up in my office, I wade through the slurry of emails swamping my inbox.  I battle a spreadsheet into submission.  I quickly rummage for my lunch in the break-room fridge, which is adorned with a discomfiting laminated note reminding everyone to refrain from storing scientific experiments therein.  What are the kids eating down at Gulliver’s? They love taking command of little wipe-off cards that allow them to micro-manage what kind of bread and fillings they prefer.  Toasted or not toasted?  Provolone or Cheddar?  With the shredded carrot?  The spinach?  Oh, the thrill of it!  They can take ten minutes to carefully plan a sandwich. 

Being in control turns the humdrum into an adventure. This piece of kid-psychology isn’t new-fangled.  Classic novels that I’ve passed on to my children over the past couple of years – books by Elizabeth Enright and Arthur Ransome – feature buccaneers as young as six joining older siblings in adult-free urban exploration, rural camping, and sailing.  It warms my heart to see my third-grader burying her nose in a 400-page moldy-looking volume that once belonged to my mother.  That the story in those pages involves bold and unapologetic free-range girls pretending to be Amazon pirates – well, that’s pure perfection.

But those were different times, the protest goes.  The world is so much more dangerous nowadays. Except that, in fact, it’s not.  I had to explain to my kids what “mumps” were, when that disease cropped up in one of the above stories.  I had to define “quarantine”, “coal gas”, “rationing”, and “illegal still”, and explain why the cars had no seat belts and why so many people seemed to be smoking. We’ve made the world a better, safer, kinder, and more equitable place in a lot of ways that matter.  Moreover, crime rates have actually decreased since I was the age my kids are now, when a buddy and I rampaged around our suburban neighborhood on bikes.  The odds have improved.  But, barraged with Bad News TV, Americans tend not to believe this.

Thinking about life choices as some kind of statistical gambling game might seem Machiavellian, especially when it comes to our sweet, darling children.  But if playing the probabilities like a savvy gambler is cold-hearted, it still beats the other option – playing the odds like a clueless sucker. Math matters.

Math.  Spreadsheets.  I glance at the clock.  What if someone sees the twins out there, and doesn’t share my views on parenting?  It doesn’t help that my nine-year-olds look younger than their years.  One of them is barely the size of the average first grader. What if someone thinks… No.  I glance resolutely at my emails again: Climate change scenarios planning…

Scenarios.  My job title and my research group both include the word, so it looms large in my life.  The concept doesn’t apply only to all the ways in which the ice caps might melt or the forests might burn.  The future – anyone’s future, everyone’s future – is a patchwork of possibilities.  Some are far more likely than others.  Some are desirable, some are benign, and some are so horrific that we want to believe that we can dial their risk down to absolute zero. 

Sometimes, we can come pretty darned close.  Don’t want your kid to end up polio-stricken in an iron lung?  Huzzah, there’s a handy-dandy vaccine for that!  But other choices carry heavier trade-offs.  For example, one of the most dangerous things that we Americans allow our kids to do is ride in cars.  We can greatly improve the odds by insisting on seat belts and those five-point harnesses that toddlers love so much.  But if we wanted to eradicate the risk, we’d have to keep the kids out of vehicles entirely, which… yeah.  Welcome to reality.

Oddly, what keeps a lot of kids under the whipping blades of helicopter parenting is not the non-negligible hazard of traffic, but the bogey-man of Stranger Danger. I’ve blogged before about kids talking to strangers. [http://latitude.nancyfresco.com/2012/09/stranger-than-fiction.html]  I’m in favor of it.   I know, I know: the over-hyped news of children-abducted-by-unknown-creeps-or-psychos is scary as hell.  It’s also, with an annual rate of approximately 1.25 per million in the US, mathematically insignificant. 

One thirty.  They’ll be leaving the book store now – if they remember what we agreed, and if they remember to look at their watches.  Two traffic lights.  One roundabout.  And those two awkward three-way intersections protected only by stop signs.  But they know enough to make the right choices.

The vast majority of the time, we are not helpless in the face of a cruel world, and neither are our kids.  It makes sense to talk to children about which potential adult behaviors (even among friends and family… no, given the statistics, ESPECIALLY among friends and family) are iffy, untrustworthy, or downright horrendous.  Wearing helmets and brightly colored clothing and assiduously following traffic rules reduces the risk associated with riding bikes.  It’s also important to teach kids to remain alert to the jack-holes* who are too busy texting to know how to drive. 

The tradeoffs for doing all of the above are… Being dorky?  Having helmet-hair?  I’m cool with that.  But some risk still exists.  The only way to reduce kids-on-bikes injuries to zero is to never let kids bike at all.  This is not a trade-off I’m willing to consider or negotiate. Nor am I willing to tell children to never speak to anyone they haven’t met before. 

The twins’ ninth birthday party occurred on a gloriously sunny day at a sprawling public park (which is named “Alaskaland” if you’ve been in Fairbanks since the previous millennium and “Pioneer Park” if you haven’t).  I interrupted the young revelers in their primary activity (spraying one another with muddy water from the drainage ditch that masquerades as a stream) to send them off on a somewhat quirky scavenger hunt.  Not only did this provide the lingering adults with the opportunity to covertly spike our lemonade, it also gave the kids a chance to accost totally unknown park-goers with odd requests.  “Can you please tell me who was President when you were nine?”  Go learn some history, children.  Also, please talk to strangers.

It’s only a mile or so from the book store to my office, but it’s all uphill.  It will take them a while on those six-geared bikes.  They will press the buttons and wait for the Walking Person.  They will look both ways for the drivers who think that “right turn on red” is one of the Ten Commandments.  Spreadsheets.  Back to my spreadsheets.  They will come back.

Ultimately, the woman with the missing poultry reported that all her free-rangers were accounted for.  Then she invited the human free-rangers to come and visit.  Apparently her birds like hugs.  “And at night, they just kind of pick a tree, and roost there.”  I couldn’t stop myself from picturing four young girls cozily roosting in some kind of homemade treehouse. How much would they love that?

Ping!  A message.  Quickly, I click.

“As I finished crossing the street on today's expedition to Pad Thai, I was accosted by… “

Yeah.  By my children.  

But, connotations of the word “accosted” notwithstanding, this is not a message from Social Services. Nor is it a message from the State Troopers, Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, or the FBI.  No, via the sweet serendipity of small-town life, the writer is not only my good friend, but also the husband of my shed-building-partner and father of the twins’ free-ranging, tool-using, library-rule-flouting co-conspirators. 

 “… What a pleasure it was to see those strong, independent, skillfully biking young women.”

Young women!  Ha.  On one hand, it seems like a stretch to describe my freckled, scabby-kneed pipsqueaks in such a manner.  On the other hand… growing up is incremental.  That’s the whole damned point, isn’t it? A grin spreads across my face. 

And then, impeccably timed, I hear an ebullient chirrup at my elbow. 

“Hi Mom! We’re here!”

Cluck.  Cluck.  Good little chicks.

 

*This term was coined by the eldest of the four children featured in this essay.  Her logic is that she cannot get in trouble for saying it, but it’s obvious that it’s a swearword.  I feel that it deserves to be popularized, particularly with connotations linked to use of technology, as in, “If that jack-hole doesn’t put down his phone, this is the last Panang curry I’m ever gonna buy him.”

Homunculus

Given that one of my twin daughters took her remote-control truck to school for Show and Tell, the other took in her Snap Circuits electrical kit, and this was the cake that they chose to make on the occasion of their ninth birthday,  there might be those who would assume that they are not very into dolls.

Given the additional fact that I was not only the only female member of the Dungeons and Dragons Club in my elementary school, but also the only female member of the Cabbage Patch Haters Club… well, ditto.

But those assumptions would be wrong.

What’s so great about dolls?  Well… I wrote a list.  Or maybe it’s a tutorial.  I’ll let you decide.

How to play with dolls

Do I even need to explain that you have to really play with them?  When I was little, a neighbor (who was an actual grown-up human being) had a doll collection – pristine and untouched, on a high shelf.  This, I recognized, was utterly asinine.  If your dolls are a status symbol, you’re doing it wrong.

The first important doll category is the Soft Snuggly group.  If you happen to have a Y chromosome, people will probably give you a pretend bear or lion or whatever instead of a pretend human to cuddle with, but it really doesn’t matter; it’s still comforting and awesome, and still basically a doll.  Besides, if you’re dressed for winter in Fairbanks, your gender may be a mystery.

You can play with it in weird and potentially adult-embarrassing toddler ways.  For example, name the doll “Bedtime” or the bear “Whitey”.  Insist on taking it to grocery stores.  Insist on taking it to weddings.  Cry if Daddy washes it -- even though it kind of needed it what with the vomit and all.

As you get older, you’ll discover the second important category of dolls – the Imaginary Friend.  (Again, if you’re a boy, you’ll probably have to make do with a plastic velociraptor or a Lego construction worker, because society hates you.)  These imaginary friends are marginally more socially acceptable than the invisible kind, and incredibly adaptable.  Share your snacks with them.  Their table manners are almost as good as yours.   

Horizons broadening? Cognitive skills improving?  Try playing checkers with your Imaginary Friend.  Find two dolls and a bear and set up a bridge foursome.  

Sew them outfits that are way less lame and useless than the ones they came in.  Equip them with flashlights and emergency supplies. 

Build them bunk beds.  Build them a treehouse.  Build crazy amounts of shit for them, using as much duct tape as possible, and as many hazardous power tools as you can get away with.  

Teach your dolls a little something about parachuting.  Turn this into a kindergarten science fair project.  (Note: “The bigger parachute was better” might be a useful phrase to remember, later in life.)

Make them mushing sleds.  Dolls love mushing sleds.

Mommy Practice is a traditional role expected of dolls.  Daddy Practice is, alas, only sanctioned if you are lucky enough to have hippie parents who listened to Free To Be You and Me throughout the seventies (see also, “William Wants a Doll”).  Sure, this nurturing meme is a bit passé, but you can mix things up by reflecting your own Mom and Dad’s incredibly nerdy parenting techniques on your cloth-and-plastic children.  Try lecturing your dolls about biology and evolution.  Make a child bike seat out of an old Arm and Hammer cat litter box, strap it to your handlebars, and take your doll for a fourteen-mile ride.  Make backpack carriers with attached snack bags and tell the dolls you are hiking the Chilkoot Trail into the Yukon.  Make car seats. Stuff your baby in your jacket, fasten your skis, and round up the huskies.

Now test their math skills.  Be sure to use a voice filled with exaggerated patience every time your mock-child screws up royally – because, let’s face it, that doll does not know what the hell eight times six is.

Dolls that look like grownups are still called dolls if you’re female, but they’re called “action figures” if you’re male.  The only proper purpose of this category is pretending to do awesome grownup things such as rescuing people from fires, floods, Daleks, or gelatinous cubes.  The key here is that there has to be some cool adventure or challenge to act out.  Veterinary care for a wounded zebra might count, or exploring alien planets. War is not a good adventure.  Hair care and shopping are also not good adventures. From the perspective of a seven-year-old, being President probably isn't an interesting adventure, either, although your mileage and your seven-year-olds may vary.

This time, society pisses on both the double-X chromosomes and the XYs, albeit in very different ways.  This is only amusing if ironically reversed, as accomplished in this fabulous 1993 heist:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/31/us/while-barbie-talks-tough-g-i-joe-goes-shopping.html 

However, the trap is easily avoided: if the purpose of the doll appears to be donning high heels, applying glittery eyeshadow, and growing impossible boobs, get rid of it immediately -- unless you are creative enough to repurpose it into Wonder Woman Ninja Han Solo President Barbie.

Don’t get me wrong -- remote-control trucks are awesome.

Legos rock, and cardboard and duct tape are absolutely the bomb.  But a world that contains all of these fine accoutrements of childhood also needs some make-believe inhabitants to make it colorful, personable, alive – and, at the end of the day, just that little bit snuggly.

Non-random sampling

The survey, Part I: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RL3HWW9

The survey, Part II:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RJ9GQL8

Thanks for playing, friends.  Results are in -- and I must say, we’re an intriguing bunch.  Do I need to add a disclaimer about how incredibly unscientific this is?  No?  Good -- because I know you can’t wait to find out this ONE AMAZING FACT, the secret that EVEN DOCTORS DON’T KNOW:

Pretty much everyone is picking their nose. 

Yeah.  Like, about 90%.  Also clocking in at about that level were picking off bits of dead skin and peeing in the shower. Next, at about 80%, came fingernail biting, eating food bitten by family or non-family, and the “ten second rule”.  I could provide exact percentages for everything, but it hardly matters; there was absolutely nothing on the list of ten icky habits that didn’t achieve compliance from well over 50% of respondents.  You are surrounded by pimple-squeezing, scab-picking, non-hand-washing not-as-evolved-as-we-think-we-are great apes – but that’s okay, because you totally fit in. 

Let’s see… proceeding through Survey I in no particular order…

Crying frequency was reported as (approximately) 18% rarely or never; 35% a few times a year; 18% monthly; and 30% weekly.  That last one surprised me – but, see, now I’m showing experimental bias.  I will shut up and move on.

The habits that people would like to give up include tobacco (a small number of people), pot (one person), procrastination (several), gluttony (lots), and completing surveys (two charming smart-asses).

You people don’t live in Lake Woebegone, do you?  Really, you’re quite modest about your above-averageness.  Granted, over 80% of you think you’re more intelligent than average, two-thirds of you think you are more fit, and a similar fraction say they are better read, but kindness came in at only 50%, “hard-working” at just over 40%, and efficiency at barely more than 30%.  Only a quarter of you estimate you are better-looking than average.  We’re either a homely bunch, or a modest bunch -- or we’re assuming that “above average” means something like, “at least one standard deviation above average”.  Knowing my friends… yeah, probably that last option.

Interestingly, we don’t particularly want to improve the traits in which we find ourselves most deficient.  Three quarters of responders want to be more physically fit, and two thirds want to be better-read.  Clearly, in these categories, above average is still Not Good Enough.  On the flip side, only 30% of survey-takers want to be better-looking, despite us all being so ugly and whatnot.

Moving on to the hypothetical impediments… Other than the self-knowledge gleaned from those who let me know that I’m weird for even asking in the first place, this question didn’t tell me much.  Being unable to bend one knee, people agree, would really suck.  But rankings for all those creepy choices of missing fingers, toes, ears, and eyes were all over the map, and thus kind of a wash.  Of course, as someone who is blind in one eye, this was personally interesting, but it was probably just vaguely disturbing for the rest of you.  Sorry, guys.  Keep your toes.

How many people do you hug or otherwise touch with friendship of affection at least once a week?  The answer is 2-4 for more than half of us.  The other answers were almost evenly distributed between none, one, 5-10, and more than 10.  Having spent my entire life in (at varying times) the zero, one, or 2-4 categories, I feel like I’ve missed a lot of hugs.  But, then again, actually getting all those hugs might seriously freak me out.

So many books!  Yeah, I was just being selfish, in asking this question, because I always want recommendations.  I’m not going to list them all.  But I will say that the thing that struck me about the books was that they were all different.  All of them.  Many of my own favorites showed up, and some great authors were on the list – Kurt Vonnegut, Barbara Kingsolver, Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, John Irving, and so many more.  But there were some obscure works I’d never even heard of, and others (Vikram Seth, Chaim Potok) that it’s nice to know someone else loves, too.  So delightful. 

So much music!  Again, good work with the variety, folks.  There were show tunes, classical, oldies, folk, even a bit of country.  As a group, we’re a bit heavy on the female singer/song-writers with a liberal social agenda, but that’s cool; I love Dar Williams, too. 

Finally (at least for Part 1): who wants chimp-steak for dinner?  Nobody.  But one person is okay with dolphin.  From there down, the percentage who think it is immoral to farm-raise each species for a tasty stir-fry were as follows: dog (69%), cat (56%), horse (44%), pig (31%), goat (25%) and cow (18%).  Why?  Well, the comments cited cultural tradition, intelligence, and similarity to humans.  Some people who eat pigs admitted that with regard to the intelligence argument they were probably on thin ice.  The best comment, though, was, “Are you using the Socratic method to make me into a vegetarian by forcing me to recognize the arbitrary nature of the social in- and out-groups that define carnivorism versus cannibalism?”  The wonderful thing about this comment, of course, was my realization that I had no idea who had written it, because I have so many friends who might easily say something as dorky as that.  Most likely, though, it was written by a dolphin.

And… the moment you have all been waiting for… the survey with questions about sex! 

But I’m not jumping straight there; that would be gauche.  First I’m going to report that – whatever I might say about our other moral choices – none of us has EVER illegally parked in a handicapped spot. 

In truth, the ranking of the “moral” questions fascinated me.  I quickly realized, especially given the fact that a couple of people may have done the whole thing backward, that it made more sense to look at the most commonly selected rankings (modal values) than at mean values.  For most of the “sins”, the preferred rank was surprisingly clear.  “Repeatedly telling a child that he or she is worthless or a bad person” was the clear bottom of the barrel, followed by abusing a pet and spilling a friend’s important personal secret.  Pilfering office paperclips was least-bad, followed by parking in a handicapped spot (which, I repeat NO ONE has done), not tipping a good waiter, and stealing public property.  Littering and intentionally keeping something belonging to a friend came next – decidedly mid-range.  The only choice that was weirdly bi-modal, with some respondents ranking it a mellow 3 and others damning it with an 8  or 9 was “cheating on a spouse or partner”.

This might – I’m only guessing here – have something to do with the 25/75 split between those who have cheated and those who have not.

In other news, there is one person amongst us who has NOT used offices supplies for personal reasons – and there is one person who had littered.  Littered!  I’m worried about the fiber of our society.

Right.  Now the sexy stuff.  Respondents to this survey were 76% straight, 18% gay, and 6% bisexual, and everyone is (definitely or probably) identified as such to everyone they know.  Also, they are all singing kumbaya -- or maybe something by the Indigo Girls.  One quarter of survey-takers have never had a sexual experience that does not match with their stated identity.  The rest – well, you do the math (although fully 25% are not really sure what counts, and are maybe trying to figure out some kind of baseball analogy).

How much is everyone having (and wanting) sex?  Well, two respondents do not wish to have sex at all, and an equal number report never getting any.  I’d LIKE to think that these are the same happy people, but… maybe not.   Ditto for the two responses at the other end of the spectrum, “daily or more” – and bonus points for the comment, “As often as my body would let me”. 

As for everyone else, well, it seems that about 70% of people want sex somewhere between one and six times per week, with a fairly even breakdown between 1-2, 3-4, or 5-6 times.  About ten percent each chose “monthly” or “2-3 times per month”.  Absolutely nobody selected, “A few times a year”. 

But… alas (and, truly, this bums me out), “A few times a year” was the single most common category (~30%) for how often people are actually having sex.  The percentages for monthly, a few times a month, 1-2 times per week, and 3-4 times per week were not far off from the desired percentages for those categories – but, alas, I doubt that the individuals match up so neatly.  Meanwhile, although about a quarter of those surveyed said they’d like to have sex 5-6 times per week, absolutely nobody selected that category as representing their reality.  Sigh.

Life goals!  Things you can attain!  Yes!  Everyone wants to write a book!  Okay, not everyone, but a few of you.  You also want more fulfilling and meaningful jobs.

Why did I even ask about things you WON’T attain?  Sheesh, that’s just depressing -- except for the person who said, “I'll probably never manage to develop a species of dwarf wooly mammoths for the household pets market.”  As for the individual who questioned my grammar: “likely” can obviously be used as an adverb, as in, “I’ll most likely kill you in the morning”. 

Okay, so way too many of you think you won’t ever attain a happy partnership, marriage, true love...  I… well, crap, I think you’re wrong, but I don’t know who you are, so how can I argue my point?  I’ll just have to revert to quoting the Princess Bride.

But, to close on a bright note: treasured things you already have.  Love, laughter, kids, family, partners, good friends.  Yeah, it’s the relationships, isn’t it? 

You’re all good sports, my friends.  Really, you are.  Thank you.