I found this particularly funny after having a week where I wondered if everything I’ve EVER done with regard to one of my kids was a mistake, only to be told by a professional that, in fact, she was pleasantly surprised at how well he’s turned out, given his history. 
Enjoy!
Haha. I just tried to employ the “Common Sense” approach to childrearing. Enough independence to allow them to grow and enough oversight to prevent serious harm.
My H and I have been chuckling about “free range parenting” …at least to the extreme that went on in his household. His SAHM never knew where any of her 8 kids were…and they were doing some pretty dangerous things…climbing onto moving trains…JUMPING from moving trains…practicing jumping from rooftops…playing with dangerous firecrackers. It’s amazing that the 8 kids survived. It’s amazing that H survived…hit by a car when he was 8, fell out of two moving cars (his mom never paid attention to see if doors were closed/locked), left behind in several stores (managers had to call his home to tell his mom that she had left him…lol)
^^^I got hit by a car while riding my bike when I was 9, and I think that’s part of the reason I’m such a safety nut today. I was a latchkey kid in the sixties and was always taught proper safety precautions, but I pretty much believed I was invincible until I nearly got myself killed.
I always tell people I was “raised by wolves,” but I think your H’s childhood sounds a lot closer to that! 
@ megp-
I agree. I think my dad had the right approach to things (not that he did in other things), and that is that kids have to learn as they grow up to fall down and skin their knee, and that a big lesson is learned in how you recover from the bumps and such. Hands off parenting, or parenting to have your kid be your best friend, is going to fail, because in the end, as you point out, we still are parents. I kind of took the approach to give the kid as much freedom at each stage of growth , as long as he wasn’t doing something like sticking a fork in an outlet, and instead of being the helicopter parent telling him what to do (the ultimate of that being the tiger parents), we guided him by suggesting things he should try, along with supporting what he wanted to try. I can remember after kids when my son was young , hearing music or seeing him play, would seem to get interested, and would ask their parents about trying music, and the general response you would hear is “no, because you’ll never be good enough”…what the heck?
At each phase, as the kid gets older, they need to be allowed to make more and more of their decisions, let them drive the process rather than the parents. Our role is as guides I think, and yes, we are going to be the ultimate safety at any phase, but it should be used to keep them from serious harm, not because of what we think necessarily is right for them, and there is a difference.
Put it this way, I saw kids when my son was in a major pre college music prep program, where kids 16, 17 had parents sitting in their lessons, taking notes, recording the session, arguing with the teacher over repertoire, and otherwise controlling their kids lives (probably in everything else, too), and I wondered what would happen to those kids when they got on their own, where for example there isn’t mom or dad yelling at them to practice and so forth…
I always loved my old therapist, who raised 4 kids of her own, all successful adults with families, if by the time they go to college they can tie their shoes and go to the bathroom by themselves, we have done our job lol
Back in the 70s, I would run all over our neighborhood with friends, sometimes a couple miles away (this was in NYC). I think the difference now is that fewer kids hang out with each other and go out and explore.
I think wolves are actually very protective parents. I mean, they even chew their children’s food for them…
Yes, but would they be as “protective” of a human kiddo???
H does joke that they were raised by wolves. lol We have been married for 30 years and he still tells me new stories that absolutely floor me…the numerous emergency room visits for ingesting the wrong things (no, white paint is not milk!), broken bones, concussions, etc. The weird thing is that him mom was a very friendly, “nice” lady. If necessary, I would have welcomed her into my home during her “older years”. She just was extremely clueless about taking care of children.
I was not particularly helicopterish about physical danger and what they did as young children; they climbed high trees and ate hot dogs and grapes that weren’t cut into 1 mm. pieces. I can’t tell you how many fellow mothers said, “OMG, you’re letting him eat popcorn? Aren’t you afraid he will choke?” No, actually I’m not. And when I allowed my son to walk 4 blocks home from the suburban middle school after club meetings twice a week, several concerned parents called me to inform me they had seen him walking “alone,” and wasn’t I worried about him crossing the street or getting abducted? No, actually, I wasn’t. I also wasn’t afraid to allow him to take the train into the big bad city with a friend to visit a university, despite the appalled looks of other moms. And this summer I will allow my high school sophomore D to take the train by herself in to the city for a daytime job (I will take her on several practice runs, of course), despite shocked warnings she will get molested.
However, I did put a good bit of effort into guiding the children into EC’s I felt made sense for their talents and our pocketbook, and I definitely held them to the highest academic standards I believed they were capable of. Because I attended all their sporting events and actually paid attention to their performances, I think some saw me as very involved, and maybe domineering in the sense that I did not tolerate foolishness or laziness in my kids. Other parents were more relaxed, and seemed to be always saying about their own children, “He’s just a kid,” or “She’s only 10 years old,” to excuse everything from bratty temper tantrums to refusing to practice their instruments. I’d be the parent telling them to stop crying and try harder next time. With my youngest, since she has some disabilities, I know people with their own special needs children thought I was mean to push her so hard to achieve. Well, the end result is she overcame so much and is the same child who just landed a prestigious internship that hundreds of normal children who applied did not.
Fast forward to today, when the older ones are in their twenties, both have profusely thanked me for instilling in them discipline, independence and self-confidence.
That was funny.
My parents were what people would call free range. I went to the park by myself, went on vacations with my boyfriend in high school, lived by myself for a few months when I was 16/17, and always allowed to lead the way on school, ECs, etc. I’m so grateful.
I grew up semi-feral in the NW 'burbs of Chicago, an area that was relatively rural in the sixties. We roved in packs, and there was apparently safety in numbers. A huge population of kids were produced during the peak boomer years. Back then, 4-6 kids per family was the norm, not the exception, so parents “outsourced” some supervision to older children. Or, figured that in a group of kids, the wild ones would be balanced by a larger number of semi-domesticated ones. Most of us survived to adulthood, so by that measure “it takes a horde” (aka peer pressure) was a valid approach to parenting.
Most of the families we associate now with have one or two kids, so each kid gets more parental involvement. Great, but when you combine this with the pressure associated with test scores, college placement, etc. bad things can happen.
the thing about “extreme free range parenting,” (which is what I’m referring to with H’s parents), is that you can have “good results” if the children aren’t all that adventuresome or impulsive or at least have a good head on their shoulders.
I had a good bit of freedom as a child, but my mom knew where we were. I walked to kindergarten which involved walking several blocks and crossing a major street. When I was in the 3rd grade, I got separated from my aunt at Disneyland, called my mom, she asked if I was ok, I said I was, she let me spend the rest of day at Disneyland by myself, and she picked me up at 9pm. lol I don’t think she would have done that for many places, but Disney (at least at that time) was widely-known to be a very safe place to be.
Yep, I was the parent who got “concerned” calls when I allowed my 1st grader to walk one block to play at a friend’s house and when I allowed two 3rd graders to play unsupervised at the neighbourhood playground. And we lived in a suburban neighbourhood! I just learned to ignore those people. Glad no one ever called the police on me.
I was overprotective with regard to personal safety of my girls. I worried so much my DH thought it was not a normal degree of concern. But I wasn’t helicopter with regard to school/schoolwork/teachers, etc.
I still worry about my Ds quite a bit. D2 seems resigned to it and has compassion, while D1 gets annoyed.
I was given pretty free range as a kid. I used to go riding alone in Somalia. Once I fell off the horse and he came home without me. There was a bit of worrying until I called home and told them where I was. I biked all over town from age nine on. I jumped of the roof of our one story house. And I once got a dreadful shock when there was a live wire on the metal roof. I couldn’t walk for a couple of hours. I certainly took the bus alone starting in junior high. (I took a public bus to school.) The only bad experience I had was hitchhiking with a friend in France. It put me off hitchhiking forever, but I still wanted my kids to be reasonably free range.
My kids walked home late in elementary school. And from middle school on they were free to go across town on their own. They started going into NYC by themselves early in high school.
I’m too forgetful to be a good helicopter. I never knew which day they needed their musical instruments at school and I never did more than a “what it’s like to be an architect” thing in the classroom. I knew teachers because I was involved with Reading is Fundamental and I got asked to teach Family Art events and various other things. And my oldest desperately needed acceleration so there was a fair amount of work getting his needs accommodated.
I was given pretty free range as a kid. I used to go riding alone in Somalia. Once I fell off the horse and he came home without me. There was a bit of worrying until I called home and told them where I was. I biked all over town from age nine on. I jumped of the roof of our one story house. And I once got a dreadful shock when there was a live wire on the metal roof. I couldn’t walk for a couple of hours. I certainly took the bus alone starting in junior high. (I took a public bus to school.) The only bad experience I had was hitchhiking with a friend in France. It put me off hitchhiking forever, but I still wanted my kids to be reasonably free range.
My kids walked home late in elementary school. And from middle school on they were free to go across town on their own. They started going into NYC by themselves early in high school.
I’m too forgetful to be a good helicopter. I never knew which day they needed their musical instruments at school and I never did more than a “what it’s like to be an architect” thing in the classroom. I knew teachers because I was involved with Reading is Fundamental and I got asked to teach Family Art events and various other things. And my oldest desperately needed acceleration so there was a fair amount of work getting his needs accommodated.
I would likely be arrested now if I had a child and let his/her do what I allowed my S to do (for example, he rode is bike by himself to school a mile away in the first grade on streets with no sidewalks.)
My parents usually had no idea where I was after school when I was growing up or at night once I was older, and that was the norm. The only thing that freaked them out was hitchhiking - so they got both my sister and I cars after our freshman years of college so we would have no reason to hitchhike. Neither of us complained.
Our school district has 6th grade camp - 4 nights away from home, in cabins, to try to blend middle schoolers who came from multiple grade schools. I dropped DD off and stayed a while talking to other parents while they loaded up the buses. The parents all compared notes on what they packed, how many pairs of socks and long and short sleeved shirts and…
I had given the DD the packing list from school and a suitcase, and assumed she had it covered.
I guess my parents were somewhere in the middle. I guess what I’ll call “reasonable.”
If I came home from school at 7 instead of 4 they wouldn’t notice or care. If I disappeared for 3 days they would both notice and care.