A Different Kind of Back-to-School Sail

Maybe you've heard about Laura Dekker. She's the 13-year-old girl in the Netherlands who is already an accomplished sailor and now wants to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world. Her parents — or at least her seafaring dad, with whom she lives — are all for it. The Dutch equivalent of Child Protective Services is against it and currently seeking legal permission to step in, take temporary custody of the girl and stop her.

In other words: They want to ground her (literally) — and I am with them. Even though I am the founder of Free-Range Kids, the movement devoted to ending the era of helicopter parenting and excessive worry about our kids.

Simply because I am all for kids climbing trees and playing outside without a licensed "fun facilitator," or whatever new layer of protection we dream up, some people think that "Free-Range" means "throw the kids outside and see whether any of them come home." But actually, at Free-Range Kids, we believe in two things: Freedom. And safety.

We believe in helmets and car seats and teaching your child to look both ways before crossing the street. Safety is good. What we don't believe is that children are more endangered now than at any other time in history. That is why Free-Range is all in favor of letting kids do things that we did as kids that have been deemed "dangerous" only recently. Things such as touching a shopping cart, playing on a merry-go-round, selling Girl Scout Cookies and skipping to school. We believe 11-year-olds can be competent baby sitters. They also can deliver newspapers.

We do not believe in actively courting danger.

Traveling solo around the world when you aren't, say, fleeing the Nazis seems less like ranging free and more like unnecessarily putting a young life at risk for the sake of bragging rights.

(Or, God forbid, something cool to write on college applications.) If Ms. Dekker longs to sail far and wide, she can do it — with others. By doing that, she still would get to see the world and have adventures, just like young Herman Melville.

But even Melville went with a crew.

Dekker's dad is quoted as saying, "We would not let our child do something of which she was not in complete control." But no one is in complete control of the Seven Seas, unless named Poseidon.

Often when the authorities step in to override a parent's judgment, I find them way out of whack. When, for instance, they deem that a 9-year-old left at home for a few hours has been recklessly "endangered" by his parents. Or when they ticket a mom who let her sleeping 2-year-old stay in the (locked) car while she ran in to return a library book. Once again, those are cases that never would have been considered negligent a generation ago, which is generally my rule of thumb for determining whether something is truly risky or just some new terror minted by the media.

The smarmy "what if ...?" chorus can be counted on to dream up outlandish scenarios that make it sound as if any second kids are on their own, they are in dire peril. Scenarios such as, "What if burglars break into your house on the Saturday morning you decide to leave your fourth-grader by himself?"

But it is not a crazy "what if ...?" to ask: "What if Laura, in a year of sailing, gets hit by the boom one day? Or gets dehydrated? Or too tired to sail after a relentless storm?" I love the idea of kids finding their inner strength. I don't love the idea of their lives hanging in the balance if they don't.

As in cases of actual child abuse, there are times when the authorities really should step in to save a kid. A kid who then can grow up and take on the world.

Even by boat.

Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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