Free range parenting isn’t new, it’s actually a return to the way our grandparents did it. But we can’t exactly rewind the clock. While I’d like to be challenged as a parent that the helicopter approach is harmful, and that every minute and crumb in my child’s day does not need to be planned and accounted for, our changing technology presents both benefits and challenges our ancestors didn’t face. Perhaps if we don’t ruin them too much, the next generation can contribute to the future of sustainable parenting.

Irony of ironies, as we’ve become vigilant advocates for providing our future dinner foul with proper elbow room to roam freely, our children may be the ones living in caged conditions. Actually, there is a bit of a media storm erupting over a “new” style of parenting that has been labeled—wait for it—free range parenting.

Yes. Some parents are under scrutiny in a town close to mine for allowing their ten-year-old son and six-year-old daughter to walk a mile to the park by themselves and play unsupervised. An outraged onlooker has turned them in and now Montgomery County Child Protective Services is investigating this family. Subsequently, this free range philosophy of parenting is being debated all over social media.

I will be upfront and say that when my children were that age, I was too overprotective to risk allowing them to walk that far independently. I can think of too many things that could go wrong with that scenario. But I do think this is a healthy debate. On one hand, I am quick to criticize the helicopter parenting that is rampant in our society. On the other, I am a total hypocrite. Sure, I would let my 15, 12, and 9 year olds walk a mile together to the park without me or their dad—but probably not without their cell phones. And they have been so pampered in their upbringing that they would expect a ride.

Even then I would worry over whether I have coached them enough on safety precautions. The truth is, I may have coached them too much. They may actually prefer singing in cages rather than free roaming to a park with all its dangerous variables.

I don’t want to pay the consequences of potentially neglectful parenting. And I certainly don’t want my kids to pay those consequences. But I also don’t want to base my parenting on fear. My job is to raise my kids to need me less. My husband and I are supposed to raise adults.

I struggled with this topic two years ago on my blog, and I’m still asking some of thesame questions:

I find myself now wondering which apron strings to loosen as my kids are growing. Do I still need to regulate every calorie that goes into their mouths? Do I let them go to school not listening to my advice that their outfit just isn’t working out, or do I make them change? At what point should I stop editing their papers and let them find out for themselves through the red pen?

An article in Psychology Today, A Nation of Wimps, has provoked a lot of thought about my own parenting. Instead of healthy, functioning adults, are we raising a bunch of co-dependent, anxious, namby-pambies? The article suggests that the cell phone is functioning as an eternal umbilicus that we are all too happy to continue coddling our children through. Here’s an excerpt of my favorite part that makes the point oh too well:

It’s bad enough that today’s children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are overmonitored and oversheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college—or perhaps especially at college—students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: “Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?”

“Kids are constantly talking to parents,” laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they’re not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. “They’re not calling their parents to say, ‘I really went wild last Friday at the frat house and now I might have chlamydia. Should I go to the student health center?'”

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