My parents were free rangers. Their active non-involvement in much of my childhood and that of my younger siblings would earn them scorn and visits from the CPS today. Just how little my folks were aware of my activities is most evident today when I choose to freely reminisce about my escapades within their hearing. Dad just raises an eyebrow. Not because he is surprised but to let me know that although he never had proof at the time, he suspected I wasn’t any less adventuresome or reckless than the younger ones. I was just smarter. My mother professes shock and sometimes horror, but it is quickly forgotten. After all I didn’t die, wasn’t even maimed, and the police didn’t show up at the door.

Okay, the last part isn’t entirely true. The police actually showed up at my high school and requested that the girls’ dean get me from class so they could “ask a few questions”. Fortunately the dean was a woman not easily intimidated by a uniform. School policy required that she inform my parents first and my mother kept her cool enough to refuse permission. They could come to our house and question me there if they liked. That never happened however because as luck would have it I was still underage – by two whole months – and did not possess a fake ID (my two friends who did get hauled into the dean’s office both swore to that) and so I escaped being charged with underage alcohol possession and the older brother of the our friend who sold me the beer lost his job. Oh, and the little matter of transporting alcohol across state lines was dealt with by issuing a stern warning – to my two friends. I never did see a policemen over this matter nor did I receive a school punishment as was the practice of the day at my uber-conservative Catholic high school. My father told the dean that he would be handling the discipline of his daughter thank you very much and because he is a Virgo, they nodded and let the matter drop.

I was grounded for two weeks, could only go to work and school and spent the rest of my time doing what I always did – read, write and listen to music. It’s very hard to punish a Sagittarian. Even without TV (which I wasn’t banned from) I could retreat for hours into a book or my writing. How do you ground a child from her mind?

Free ranging is the new rage in parenting. A backlash against hyper-parenting and helicopter parents, free rangers let their children play unsupervised in their own yards and neighborhoods, walk to school and stay home alone once they reach a reasonable age. Free rangers are probably products of the same type of childhood that most of my peers had. The ones where we got ourselves to ball practice after school and babysat our younger siblings when our parents went out with friends on a Friday night.

I knew I was an overprotective parent but when my five year old informed me that she didn’t need me waiting for her at the bus stop after school because it was right in front of the next door neighbor’s house, I knew that it was time to let go and step away from the kid. I was only slightly older than she is when I trooped up the hill behind our house and disappeared into the next neighborhood over every morning to catch the bus to school for first and second grade. As a second grader, I was even in charge of my younger grade one sister. As a ten year old, I babysat my siblings ages 8, 7 and 5 when my folks went out for dinner. Nothing terrible ever happened and no, it wasn’t just luck.

Parents today have been indoctrinated into the hall of horrors where parenting is concerned. Death or dismemberment lurks with every unattended moment. Trailer parks and service industry jobs are all that can result from not overseeing homework diligently. All that has been really accomplished with this nonsense has been a few generations worth of kids who haven’t the coping skills or the social skills to move out and live on their own (the average age at which a child leaves home in Canada now is 32).

Children need freedom, within acceptable limits for their ages, in which to learn to think and do for themselves. Free range parenting? It’s about time we got back to it.