Framing Teenage Perspectives: A Glimpse into Free-Range Parenting
In 2008, much to the shock of most parents who read the article, Lenore Skenanzy published an article, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone". Gaining significant media traction since then, it has become a key media text in helping us understand a marked shift in parenting styles in the 21st century.
Skenanzy's style of parenting is a radical shift away from the extremely involved nature of helicopter parenting, in which parents constantly interfere in each and every aspect of their children's lives with the assumption that their interventions are automatically beneficial for the child. As opposed to helicopter parenting, Skenanzy's style of parenting is known as free-range parenting, which is defined as extending children the freedom to make choices for themselves, act on their own agency, and experience the consequences of their own actions.
Despite whatever it is believed to be in the popular imagination, free-range parenting is not automatically about neglecting your children's needs or being uninvolved in their lives. In the article too, Skenanzy writes that before letting her son ride the metro on his own, she made sure to train him adequately, taught him to read the map, and even gave him extra money should he need it for any reason.
Let's then discuss these parenting styles from a teenager's point of view. Given that teenagers, broadly speaking, are in the process of forming their identities and figuring out who they are and what they want to be, it is crucial to give them the relative space to explore different facets and decide what appeals to them. This is, of course, not to say that parents should let their children be like how birds abandon their young ones. Instead, the goal here is to offer limited parental supervision depending on the contextualized situation of the child, and how mature they are.
Therefore, for teenagers to realize the concepts of agency and accountability, parents need to nurture freedom of thought and action in them to help them ease off the monumental pressure they face. As a teenager myself, I am aware of the heterogeneous pressures faced by us in different areas of our lives that strive to crumble any potential of joy from our lives. Despite receiving fierce criticism about how this method is equivalent to neglect, I believe that such a parenting style is deeply liberating in nature, because it creates an organic sense of self-confidence by teaching teenagers to trust their instincts.
I believe that no teenager wants to fear their parents. Instead, they want to develop healthy relationships based on mutual trust and confidence. In this context, free-range parenting emerges as a viable parenting style that seeks to let children develop at their own pace and follow their own visions of who they want to be.
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