Free Range Children
Do you know where your children are? Why?
I’m guilty of being a baby boomer. Back in 1948 my parents conspired to place baby boomers (more than one) on this earth in the twenty-first century. So really, it’s their fault that I’m a boomer, not mine. I feel that I have to say this, because, as a boomer, I’ve been blamed for a lot just by virtue of my existence. Not my fault! I didn’t personally create pesticides for crops. I had nothing to do with it; I wasn’t even there! I didn’t create saturated fats. I didn’t pump any hormones into anybody’s food. I promise!
But I did grow up with a somewhat different point of view than what is popular today. Back in the old days, we went to the grocery and bought food and took it home and ate. We didn’t think so much about how the food used to be a cow or a chicken. Today, we think about it. I’m not upset that we now consider such things more than we used to. There isn’t anything that I’m not willing to at least contemplate, and our food should be considered.
But I’ve always been a little confused by the idea of ‘free range chickens’. Do chickens care? If allowed to decide for themselves, what life would chickens choose? They might choose to be free range, but we won’t know until we ask. And I’m pretty sure no one has asked any chickens if they prefer to be free range.
I’m being only partially facetious. We can’t ask a chicken what they want, but it’s possible to discern some likelihoods with behavioral studies. Have these studies been done? Apparently not. Assumptions have been made, based on no research, as usual.
Does the chicken care? Or are we succumbing to basic transference? In other words, we wouldn’t want to be cooped up in coop, so chickens probably don’t want that either. Well, maybe they don’t care. Maybe they prefer the coop. No effort, near as I can tell, has been made in an effort to find out. Honestly, if it was only about chickens, I wouldn’t care one way or the other.
But here’s an irony: Even as we endeavor to make sure that chickens can experience the outside world, many parents do all they can to keep their children in the coop. Sure, many (most) parents make sure that their child is involved in multiple activities; sports, music/dance lessons and the like. OK, now how about if your kid decides to climb a tall tree with no safety harness? Are you willing to let your kid be THAT free range? If he is bullied in school, are you willing to coach him to handle it himself because if he doesn’t, it’s going to be a long, hard life? If he doesn’t like a kid of some other race, will you readily accept it? Or will you tell him that it’s not right to dislike people of another race?
Really, how free range is your kid? Free range chickens are only free range to the extent that they are allowed to run around in a predetermined space, for a predetermined time, protected from coyotes. Is your kid more free range than a chicken? Can your kid take off on his own, not telling you where he is going, where he has been, or what he’s been doing? Can he form his own ad hoc groups, or are the groups preselected? Can they make up their own games, their own rules for the games, and argue to their heart’s content, when they disagree on the rules?
Yes, I’m a boomer, and my perspective is different from some. But I’ve been in some fights, I’ve been bullied (and lived!), I’ve gone off nearly all day, even as a young kid, and come home and my mother had no concerns with what I’d been up to. The neighborhood kids created their own ad hoc teams to play their own ad hoc sports. We learned to fend for ourselves, rather than learn to be supervised. If we had a problem, it was our problem to solve. We didn’t necessarily feel compelled to seek counseling, intervention, or corroboration. Even as children, we were encouraged to see that our life is our responsibility. We can’t expect our life to be any better than what we make it. These are things we learned in childhood, that many adults can’t seem to handle today.
In reality, our physical existence today is far easier than what it was fifty years ago. And that’s true even of poor people. But how about our emotional and spiritual existence? Well, maybe that’s been in decline. Perhaps relying on a nanny state to arrange our lives and see to our needs is exactly what we DON’T need. Perhaps seeing to our child’s every need and want is exactly what THEY don’t need.
Talk about coincidences! Shortly after writing this, I came across this video on Odysee, concerning this subject. It’s well worth watching. I haven’t watched Odysee in a while. It’s really improved. Check it out.
https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1857572990097174873
I too am a Boomer and so glad to be one of the last generation of folks who got to really be free-range as a child. My mother’s mantra on Saturday morning at 8am was, “Go out and play and don’t come home unless you’re bleeding profusely or on fire”. LOL
She said the same thing every weekend and we always laughed at it as we laced up our
PF Flyers and raced out the door! We loved the freedom of no parents around. And yes, we got in fights and often got hurt but unless we were afraid of dying we never went home. And someone’s mother always fed us lunch. And we drank out of the hose and survived. And when the street lights came home we wandered home…dirty, tired and happy.
I feel bad for kids today who don’t have the creativity or imagination to invent their own street games. Heck, they don’t even know what street games are because they’re not allowed in the street!
As for chickens…I live on a ranch and keep lots of chickens. They love it in the morning when I open the coop and they get to be free all day. But at sunset they happily head back inside knowing it’s safe and comfortable until the next day. Much the same as we did as human children.