I have been quite aware of the pro-liberty work of free-range kids advocate mother Lenore Skenazy. Skenazy, an Ivy League-school NYC newspaper columnist/blogger and TV host, ignited a firestorm back in 2008 when she penned a column explaining how she allowed her 9-year-old son ride the infamous NYC subway home unescorted, gaining a progressive tag as the "world's worst Mom".
As a baby boomer, I and my 6 younger siblings often had done stuff on our own that would raise eyebrows in today's America; for example, my maternal grandfather used to give us nickels to spend on penny candy at the variety store across the street from his Fall River, MA grocery store, and we walked the several blocks on our own (never mind going to Notre Dame Elementary School, even further away; my grandfather never owned a car). We walked or rode our bikes to playgrounds, baseball games, the base swimming pool, etc., never a bad incident.
I even did some seriously risky stuff; I recently blogged how, during my high school days in south Texas, I didn't want to wait another 20+ minutes for buses to pick us up after school and occasionally cut across a direct one-mile path through ranch land between school and the base. (The government had tried to negotiate an easement with the rancher but failed; so buses had to do a 3-mile or so route around the property on busy city streets.) I think once or twice I learned the path going with others, and we largely ignored the hissing of rattlesnakes, although I never saw any; God knows what would have happened if I had gotten bitten.) Note that I didn't routinely do this, but I probably didn't mention it to the folks.
I sometimes blame the public hysteria on what I call the "Oprah Winfrey effect". We started seeing any adult approaching or working with kids as a likely pedophile or kidnapper; the clergy became bogeymen. Make no mistake; there are some evil people out there who do victimize children. It's one thing to be prudent, another thing to impose your own parental preferences on other people, to accuse them of criminal neglect. My personal belief is that we shouldn't underestimate our kids and we need to give them enough space to make mistakes, learn from them and earn our trust.
Skenazy's latest Reason post drew my attention because it draws from some family history. Now I've personally never owned a sled or to the best of my memory ever used one; for the most part as an Air Force brat, I've lived in states where it rarely snows (FL, SC, TX).
But my late maternal uncle did, and part of family mythology involves a childhood incident. To provide a context, my grandfather's house sat on an inflection point on Reney St. What's important about that is there is a steep decline down the hill to the end of the street several houses down, a natural setting for sledding, and among my uncle's few possessions was a sled.
Now I have to mention something which may seem irrelevant but is part of the story. My grandmother and godmother, who died from cancer complications before I turned 3, reportedly had the bloodstopping gift/powet. No doubt it was well-known in my Franco-American (French Canadian) heritage. The mythology is the gift is passed on through members of the other gender, and requires a special prayer (according to the Wikipedia source, a verse from Ezekiel); no word in the family if Grandmother passed on her gift. So the idea is that the gifted person can stop a gushing blood wound using his/her power and reciting the ancient prayer.
So the story is my grandmother was watching my preteen uncle sledding down the hill one day when the sled suddenly flipped and one of the blades came down on one of his legs, deeply cutting him, leaving him bleeding profusely. My grandmother rushed to his side and invoked her power; by all accounts, uncle's bleeding immediately stopped.
Now I have to say I am a skeptic of all this stuff about a power and the gimmick of how it's allegedly passed down to others of the opposite gender; my uncle was a conservative priest, extremely intelligent with a licentiate from a prestigious seminary. He had zero patience with astrology, magic, and assorted other superstitious rubbish. So one day I asked him incredulously about the sledding accident. Now my uncle did not believe in arguing for its own sake or in repeating himself. He simply told me it was a fact; he was there and saw what happened; the bleeding stopped after his mother's intervention.
Of course, Skenazy's column has nothing to do with bloodstopping. It has more to do with parents' scapegoating municipalities for their children's accidents and suing them--and the predictable Statist response has been to ban sledding. I don't think it ever crossed my grandparents' minds to sue Fall River over my uncle's accident. Accidents don't happen because of public policy; they can be tragic. And prohibitions never work anyway, can be counterproductive and are typically unenforceable. Sledding technology and knowhow exists. We need to stop lawsuit abuse and the Nanny State.
