It seems like almost every day we hear it on the news: an Amber Alert has been issued for a missing child, a child authorities believe has been kidnapped. From high profile cases like Adam Walsh to the ones whose names we never knew, the terrifying reality about our society is the frequency children are kidnapped, raped, and murdered in the United States. It’s enough to make many parents terrified of one of their children walking to and from school-lest the child never come home. Yet “free range parenting,” as Lenore Skenazy puts it (http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/), saved my life, one 1987 afternoon.
It was 9th grade. I was being severely bullied-yet again. Bullies not only assaulted me and tormented me, but were regularly vandalizing my bike. After years of this, my mother had enough. We spoke to a friend who lived about four blocks from my school and asked for help. Aware of my torments, she agreed to let us put my bike into her back yard on school days and safeguard it for me. This plan worked beautifully, but I never expected it to save my life.
On a spring day in 1987 I headed over to the friend’s house as usual, not particularly worried about anything-but I did notice a strange car driving up and down 48th street by the school. I paid attention more to it the third time I saw it; parking around campus was not exactly easy to find between 330 p.m. and 415 p.m. Halfway between school and my friend’s house, I noticed it a fourth time when it pulled down the street to me. A window rolled down. The man offered me a ride. I was a mere two blocks from my destination so I casually said “no thanks.” He asked again, insisting that I needed a ride to close the distance on a day with cool but not particularly stormy weather. Again I shrugged him off with a polite “nah! I’m fine, thank you!” and decided without knowing why that this would be a nice time to take a short cut through a grassy area no car could drive into; the only way would be to get out of the car and pursue me on foot.
I reached my friend’s house and knocked on the door. She was home and let me in. I sat with her and chatted for a bit, just to be social and because I did not feel like going home yet. Finally, a bit after 4 p.m. I left her place on my bike and enjoyed an uneventful ride home.
Not until I moved to New Jersey in 2000 would I realize what really happened-and how a bit of common sense and independence literally saved my life. My comfort level doing things on my own kept me out of danger. “Free range parenting” works!