On Halloween, we collectively agree that children belong outside and making their own adventures, with an entire neighbourhood keeping watch.Rebecca Nelson/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Last Halloween, I lost my five-year-old daughter. The streets of my west Toronto neighbourhood were flooded with kids in costume as K-pop demon hunters, Disney princesses and a functioning Transformer zigzagged between houses. Adults congregated in the streets, too, in a scene straight out of a nineties movie.
I was chatting with a family of superheroes while I waited for my daughters to finish trick-or-treating at the house with the towering, jump-out-of-your-skin animatronics. But only my younger daughter came back. I was about to panic when my phone buzzed with two texts from a good friend who lives nearby.
She’s with us, having the best time.
Do you want a drink? Swing by our porch.
I breathed a sigh of relief and was reminded of something increasingly rare in modern childhood: the freedom to roam, and the community that makes it possible.
A little freedom might be the best treat we can give our kids, writes Amber McAteer.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Claudia Mokbel, a Toronto mother of two, knows how difficult – and important – it can be to give children that independence. Inspired by the free-range parenting movement popularized by author Lenore Skenazy, Mokbel has allowed her children, now 10 and eight, to explore their neighbourhood without an adult for roughly two years. They visit friends, play at the local park and ride their bikes, a parenting choice that has drawn raised eyebrows from other parents.
“I do feel judged, quite a lot. But I don’t want my kids thinking that outside is a threat, because it’s not. It’s a public space and they belong there, with a whole world to discover,” Mokbel said.
She added that she wants her children to experience the kind of childhood she remembers: neighbourhood adventures and not a helicopter parent in sight. Quieting her own anxiety about her kids’ safety, however, remains a challenge.
“It’s always top of mind, but I see how a little independence here and there has helped with their development, their critical thinking, their problem solving, their ability to self-monitor, self-regulate,” she said. “They have gained so much.”
Her daughter, Diem, agrees.
“We live near an ice-cream store and I’m allowed to walk there with my brother, just us,” she said proudly. “That makes me feel free, and capable, and really independent. I feel like I’m trusted, which is cool.”
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That independence is increasingly rare: A 2012 British study illustrated just how dramatically children’s freedom has shrunk. In 1971, 86 per cent of primary-school children aged seven to 11 were allowed to travel home from school without an adult. By 1990, that figure had fallen to 35 per cent, and by 2010 to just 25 per cent.
Meanwhile, a Canadian study published last year offered another troubling snapshot: Of more than 10,000 adolescents surveyed, 36 per cent reported no outdoor physical activity in their free time over the previous week.
Mariana Brussoni, a developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia and author of Embracing Risky Play at School: Getting Kids Outdoors to Explore, Learn, and Grow, said parents have become so focused on protecting children from danger that they sometimes overlook the benefits of letting them take manageable risks.
“It’s never been safer to be a kid,” she said, pointing to the decline in child injury mortality over the past decades.
Parents are so concerned with certain perceived threats, she explained, that they aren’t allowing kids to explore and learn outside. For instance, stranger abductions, a fear that looms large for many parents, are exceptionally rare, accounting for 0.04 per cent of missing-child reports in Canada last year.
Brussoni also noted that, over a 23-year period, no child has died from falling out of a tree in Canada, while hundreds died in motor-vehicle incidents. We routinely buckle our children into cars without a second thought yet fret over the comparatively small risks of climbing trees.
I told her about my own outdoor excursions with my kids: I routinely jog behind my daughter, always scanning for danger, while she takes off on her scooter, confidently and skillfully headed toward our neighbourhood park. I have to physically stifle the urge to shout, “Be careful!”
“You have to finish the sentence,” Brussoni told me. “Be careful of what, exactly?”
A vague warning could distract my daughter from what she’s doing, she explained, while also communicating that I don’t trust her judgment. She calls this “fear-based caregiving,” and says it’s increasingly common.
“We are trying to manage that fear in ourselves rather than thinking about what’s best for the child that’s in front of us,” she said, in a sentence I want to get tattooed inside my eyelids.
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Rather than prescribing a particular age when children should be allowed to play outdoors unsupervised, Brussoni emphasizes the importance of context: the child, their abilities and the environment around them. Not every environment is safe, nor is every child immediately equipped to navigate its risks – but those skills need to be learned somewhere.
“It’s really about slowly building those skills up through risky play, and allowing your kid to microdose uncertainty in a relatively safe context.”
Brussoni added that there’s a reason parents feel more comfortable allowing their kids to roam free on Halloween night: “You’ve got eyes on the street,” she explained, and a confidence in the surrounding community.
For one evening, we collectively agree that children belong outside, moving between houses, making their own adventures, with an entire neighbourhood keeping an eye out. But come Nov. 1, the empty streets and the invisible boundaries around our children’s worlds snap back into place.
The spookiest thing for many parents, myself included, is the thought of giving our kids some independence year-round. We’ve deemed the outside to be a big, bad bogeyman, but a little freedom – and a neighbourhood that makes room for it – might be the best treat we can give our kids.