Free Range Bookworm

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this blog, Free Range Kids, and have been reading it ever since with the kind of horrified fascination one stares at a car crash with (oh, all right, so I’ve never actually seen a car crash, but I imagine this is how you’d stare.)

If you don’t want to read the blog yourself, it’s about the overprotectiveness of (American) parents that seems ridiculous to me, but seems to be quite normal in the US, and about what the author, Lenore Skenazy, calls ‘free ranging’ – what to me is the normal way of raising kids, letting them walk or bike to school, visit friends on their own, playing outside without supervision. Normal to me, the most overprotective parent I know being a younger friend’s mother, who forbade her daughter to go to the flea market with me again because ‘there are funny people there!’¹ But in the US, apparently, that’s not so normal, judging from the difficulties of ‘Free Range’ parents Skenazy writes about, from meddling strangers to police and child protection services getting called because there’s *gasp* an unaccompanied kid walking down the street!

I have no actual reason to read parenting blogs, since I neither have kids nor even a potential father for them, but some of the stories there horrify me, and as I said – it’s like a car accident. Can’t look away.

I wasn’t a very independent kid, but I did go to buy my own candy and comics and cooked unsupervised at eight or nine years, and I spent whole days roving the forest, with a water bottle, knife, string, matches, but not necessarily with shoes, and definitely without a phone…

Famous and fondly-remembered barefooted tour through a recently flooded forest, knee-deep in mud.

But that’s beside the point. I may have been a Free Range kid by that definition, and I never even considered the possibility that there could be another way to raise my own children, if I ever have them, but I don’t want to write a post glorifying barefooted forest wanderings (not today, anyway).

No, today I want to write about reading.

The same week as I discovered Free Range Kids, I was discussing a book with some online friends. At that forum, we’re famous for and proud of our ability to take any thread far, far off topic, so it’s not surprising that we got from a science fiction book to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, a series of children’s detective novels. (Which was comparatively tame – I’m surprised we didn’t end up discussing polar bears. Or tea cups.) It led to two interesting discoveries for me.

The first was that the American participants hadn’t ever heard of Enid Blyton, while the Europeans (Dutch, German, and Austrian) had all grown up with the Famous Five, even though the books (the first published in 1942) are quite a bit older than any of us, and one of us (not me, obviously) has a daughter who is reading them as well, and they’re still easily found in the bookshops.

The other was the reaction of one of the Americans, who seemed shocked that parents would give their kids such books to read, with their old-fashioned gender stereotypes, and who wouldn’t give them to his (also hypothetical) daughter to read. (I’m paraphrasing here – I’d quote, but I prefer to keep that forum and the name I use there, separate from this one.)

The boys get to have adventures... ('5 Freunde auf geheimnisvollen Spuren'/'Five Run Away Together by Enid Blyton', illustration by Wolfgang Hennecke)

In any case, this post stuck in my mind for the next couple of days, until I figured out why it bothered me.

I’d always found it odd to hear about books getting banned from US school libraries – I’d never heard of that happening over here. Even odder because another American from that same forum had found it very strange that here in Austria, it is forbidden to sell Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’² – censorship, she said, and unacceptable. But if that was so, if free speech was so important to those Americans, I wondered, why did they allow books being banned from libraries? (Though to be fair, I can’t imagine the people from that forum approving of banning books, and those thoughts were an unfair generalisation.)

But now I think, maybe banning books at schools isn’t actually about censorship. Maybe it’s not about suppressing views you do not agree with, but rather about protecting those poor, innocent and easily influenced children from those views. Basically the same attitude as the one behind ‘helicopter parenting’. The idea that children need to be protected from any real or imagined danger or difficulty. Whether it be kidnappers and pedophiles, or the idea that girls should stay at home and make hot chocolate while the boys go out having adventures (or something along those lines). Or from swearwords, racism, sexual situations… From anything that might potentially, by however long a stretch of imagination, be offensive or harmful.

Just as this is an odd concept to me in ‘real life’, where I was often out of the house until sunset with just my ‘survival kit’ and nobody knowing where I even was, it is an odd concept to me in regards to books. Just as I went where I pleased, I also read what I pleased. My parents, my mother in particular, even encouraged me, lending me some of their ‘grown-up’ books, and I grabbed whatever struck my fancy from their bookcases.

I don’t think it’s harmed me.

Swearwords? Hey, I went to school. Schools are breeding grounds for insults. (By the way, I find that whole (self-)censorship on the internet massively amusing – does anyone really think somebody doesn’t know what ‘f***’ means?)

Racism? Yeah, OK, people were stupid once, and thought stupid things about people who looked differently, and now we know better, that was all there was to it as far as I was concerned. Admittedly, I don’t know what it’s like to belong to the group that’s on the receiving end of said racism. But I always knew that some opinions and expressions that were OK in old books were not OK in real life.

Sexual situations? Alright, so I found them rather interesting for a while, but they didn’t shock me and didn’t harm me, and I think reading about it at a young age contributed to the fact that I was never inclined to silly giggling or ‘experimenting’ later.

Stupid gender stereotypes? Well, again, people were stupid once and thought stupid things. I rolled my eyes at them.

If books influenced my personality at all, it certainly wasn’t in a bad way. They taught me tolerance, fairness and courage, even if people did occasionally get called ‘gipsy’ or ‘nigger’ or the girls get left at home to fold pyjamas while the boys go off adventuring.

... while the girls wash the dishes. ('5 Freunde auf geheimnisvollen Spuren'/'Five Run Away Together' by Enid Blyton, illustration by Wolfgang Hennecke)

So what I’m saying is, kids don’t need to be protected from books. All right, maybe from some of them (I’m sure there are books I wouldn’t want my children to read, but I haven’t read any of them myself yet), but on the whole… sheesh. Talk to your kids if you’re worried about them. Put things in perspective. Give them the knowledge they need to understand the book. Teach them the values you want them to have, rather than trying to prevent books from teaching them things you don’t want them to learn. And trust your kids to be able to handle some difficulties.

Who knows, they might not even notice the things we adults see as difficulties. Like one of the Enid Blyton readers I mentioned above said, she didn’t even notice the gender stereotypes as a kid, and still grew up to be a self-aware feminist. Thinking back to the things I read as a kid, I wasn’t too sure I’d be comfortable with my child reading ‘The Shelters of Stone’³. But actually, I didn’t even notice the sex scenes as a kid. They didn’t register until I read the series again at the age of 18. And the only thing that ever scared me was an ‘age-appropriate’ article on UFOs in a kiddie magazine.

Come to think of it, the Famous Five are a perfect example of free-range kids – always out and about, having adventures, biking, swimming, hiking, rowing, climbing rocks, sleeping out of doors… makes me wish I were a child again, and could do all those things (OK, not right now with all that snow…)

So, hypothetical future children, go right ahead, read whatever you please. Don’t lose my books, don’t drop them in the bath and don’t smear them with jam, but don’t ever worry you’re not allowed.

A picture I've posted before... now Astrid Lindgren's Ronia the Robber's Daughter was a free-range kid if I ever saw one! Illustration by Ilon Wikland, coloured by yours truly.

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¹ Granted, there are. People dressed like Jack Sparrow, for example, or accordion players with sombreros. Not the dangerous kind of ‘funny’, though – and even if there were, what would they do – kidnap us in the middle of crowded Main Square?

² Which is not to say it doesn’t happen. I saw one for sale at a flea market last summer, and I know someone who owns a copy, found among donations for a church bazaar. She wanted to read it out of pure curiosity, and I kind of feel the same. I suppose it’s that ‘car accident’ thing all over again.

³ Thinking about Jean M. Auel’s ‘Earth’s Children’ series always brings memories of a meeting with some online friends. ‘Has anyone ever read Auel’s books?’ – ‘Who?’ – ‘You know, the ones with the gratuitous sex scenes.’ – ‘Oh, those!’

The fact that this statement was enough to recognize the books amuses me.