How to Deal With Anti-Free-Rangers

Genuine concern can sometimes turn into an attack on one's parenting style.

A reader messaged me a few weeks ago, asking for advice on how to handle aggressive strangers who challenge one’s approach to parenting. She described an unfortunate incident that happened with her child.

Today, my 7-year-old was biking to the park (2 blocks away, mid-size Midwest city) to meet friends of ours, and a woman drove up beside her, told her to bike home, followed her and then waited for me to come outside to berate me. She said things like she hoped she didn’t see me on the news and that kids get “stolen” all the time.

I tried to respond with patience and tell her that my daughter knows her way and had permission, but she continued to scream at me. She scared my daughter, who has thus far enjoyed going to the park on her own.

How do you respond to critics in real time? There wasn’t time to explain our parenting philosophy in the moment. Do you just say thank you and brush it off? Try not to imagine being gossiped about on some neighborhood chat?

First of all, this is awful. I can only imagine how unpleasant and violating it must have felt for this mother to face such an aggressive verbal attack from a total stranger. I am fortunate not to have had such an encounter before, so I cannot speak from personal experience. But I’ve done plenty of reading about it and did my best to offer some advice.

Some of it comes Kim Brooks’ excellent 2018 book, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear. Brooks was arrested for leaving her 4-year-old alone in the car for a few minutes while she ran into a suburban Target to buy a pair of headphones. A two-year legal battle ensued, which led Brooks, a writer, to delve deep into the parental paranoia that has infected American culture.

In her book, Brooks tells the story of Jennifer Koehler, a mother from Evanston, Illinois, who left her three daughters in the minivan watching Dora the Explorer, while grabbing a coffee from Starbucks. A police officer approached the van and asked, “Where is your mother?” Julie came back, saw her upset children, and confronted the officer. She wasn’t fazed one bit; it helps when you’re a senior public defender with 20 years’ experience in Chicago’s criminal justice system.

Without giving him any of the deference he wanted, Julie said, “It’s not against the law in Illinois to leave your children unattended. You have to prove that I’m willfully endangering their life by going into Starbucks and getting a cup of coffee where I can see them. Good luck getting that case approved by a state’s attorney.” He left, but he called Child Protective Services, which proceeded to investigate Julie without him having pressed charges.

This Is Harassment

Until she spoke to Julie, Kim Brooks hadn’t thought of these sorts of interactions as harassment, but that is what they are.

“When a person intimidates, insults, verbally abuses, or demeans a woman on the street, in the bedroom, at the office, in the classroom, it’s harassment… But when a mother is intimidated, insulted, abused, or demeaned because of the way she is mothering, we call it concern or, at worst, nosiness. A mother, apparently, cannot be harassed. A mother can only be corrected.”

Framed in this way, such interventions are blatantly inappropriate. So, how should a harassed parent respond? Julie said:

“I would tell them to ask the officer what law she was breaking. I would tell them to ask why and how going into a store for a few minutes meant she was abandoning her child. I would tell her to ask if she was under arrest and if not, if she was free to go.

“And if it’s a person on the street, calling them names, yelling at them, scaring their kids, threatening to call the police and have their children taken away, then I’d tell them to be extremely calm and clear with that person. I’d tell them to take out their own phones and start recording the interaction.

“I’d tell them to say, calmly and assertively, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong; I haven’t broken any law. I don’t know you. So please step away from us. You are harassing me, and you’re harassing my children. If you don’t stop harassing us, then I’ll have to call the police and file a complaint.’”

Another Perspective

I then reached out to Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, founder of Let Grow, and a colleague of mine at The Anxious Generation, to ask what advice she has for handling the anti-free-rangers in real time. She said no one swayed by statistics, but that being kind is probably best. You can say, “Thank you for caring about my child! We do, too. We all have different ways of raising our kids, don’t we?” And then try to cut the conversation short.

Skenazy reminded me of the “Let Grow kid license,” a free printable that kids can carry with them. It indicates that the child’s parent knows exactly what’s going on and supports it. As she said, “It has a tone that I hope is startling enough to help kids deal with ‘Samaritans’ like this.”

via Let Grow

Recalibrate Fear With Statistics

For your own personal reinforcement, it may be helpful to revisit Skenazy’s delightful book, Free-Range Kids, which came out with a second edition in 2021. In it, Skenazy writes about receiving an email “that deserves the Nobel Prize for Clobbering Parental Hysteria.” It suggested offering comparisons that highlight just how absurd the fear of kidnapping is.

Whenever someone asks, “How could you possibly let your kid do that?” or “Wouldn’t you feel awful if something happened?”, respond with, “How could you possibly let your kids get in a car with you?” After all, a child is 40 times more likely to die as a passenger in a car crash than be kidnapped and murdered by a stranger.

She goes on in her trademark colourful style: “How could you possibly make your kids stay inside after school instead of letting them wander around on their own? Wouldn’t you feel awful if they were burned to a crisp?” After all, there are about 50 children killed by kidnappers each year, but 10 times that number are killed by fires at home.

Same goes for pools—20 times more likely to drown than be kidnapped and murdered. And never let a relative visit! Kids are 80-90 times more likely to be molested by a relative than a stranger!

The point is not to make parents even more nervous, but to “make them realize that a lot of our fears are off base.” You likely cannot spout these stats at an angry stranger who thinks they’re rescuing your kid from imminent danger, but these numbers might make you feel more confident in letting them go at all, especially when someone is screaming at you and making you feel like a terrible parent. You’re not. You are letting your kid do what kids have always done, up until just the past couple of decades, which is the tiniest blip in human history.

I hope that the mother who contacted me is not deterred from letting her child ride her bike to the park. We need to normalize child independence as much as possible, because it is what kids need and deserve. We can’t let these irrationally paranoid fearmongers get in the way.

You Might Also Like:

• I Don’t Play With My Kids

• Why I Don’t Homeschool

• What Is the Point of Having Kids?

---