Wow, I still remember doing the exact same thing as a kid, walking up and down the block aways barefoot.

Still love going barefoot, though my podiatrist (who I suspect is borderline incompetent) tells me that's a terrible idea, even indoors.

If you went barefoot most of the time, you probably wouldn't need a podiatrist. So naturally, he thinks it's a terrible idea.

In a related story, bankers think it's a terrible idea for you to keep your money in your mattress.

Seriously?? The first thing I do when I get home from anywhere is take off my shoes! My kids, too; we have a no shoes rule in the house. As soon as you come in the door, the shoes come off your feet. And half the time, weather permitting, we're outside sans shoes as well. Obviously in the winter, that's not practical, but sping, summer, even into the fall months, I only wear shoes if I'm going to work or to the store. I even drive barefoot in the warmer weather, although I think that's against the law, for whatever reason. In the winter, I wear socks if my feet are cold. (When I'm having hot flashes, they're the first things that come off!) But now we've got footwear police?? WTF??

Because the one time the child wanders away and drowns in a ditch the police will be caught up in the blanket law suit along with they shovel factory that helped dig the ditch.

Google up some "child wanders away and dies", http://tiny.cc/1b5wd for the kind of parent that sets the mood. This explains why the cops may act that way. It doesn't mean that it's a good idea to treat every parent and child like autistic cattle just because a couple of people walked right into the DARWIN RULES bumper stick on the grill of my car.

That said, i believe the police acted stupidly.

The level of scrutiny, police attention, and CPS visits that Lenore Skenazy receives seems abnormally excessive. Granted I'm a college student, not a parent, so I may just be unaware, but I have never heard of any "normal" parent being subjected to this much attention. I would surmise that either:

1) Skenazy is taking things too far to prove a point, and the level of scrutiny she receives is appropriate and justified.

2) Skenazy has attracted a lot of attention as a spokesperson for this topic, and is thus a target for scrutiny, anonymous tips, and even false claims that a regular parent wouldn't receive.

I'm leaning towards theory 2, with maybe a little of 1 thrown in--not in this case per say, but I can remember others where her "free-ranging" seemed a little extreme. Either way, it seems as though her encounters are influenced by her position, and not representative of what another parent would experience in the same situation. Or is this typical and I'm just oblivious?

Shannon,

I have 7 kids and home school. I have been informed that my kids weren't allowed to do their schoolwork outside. By a cop. I have had to prove my case more than once. People are nosy. You are doing something different then they are and that's bad. Add in over aggressive police and children's services and you have a hell hole. I have daily fantasies of living so far back in the boon docks I can barely see the sun, never mind my neighbors chimney smoke.

But yeah. Some may think she is pushing them to report her. I have heard similar things before in the form of "you know I am not going to report you but others in the neighborhood are concerned about the way your children____". Fill than in with "stay out side all weekend", "ride their bikes in the road" and what ever else they can come up with... She is just different than them. She is counter cultural so instead of looking inward to see if they are doing something wrong they try to crush her. I bet you everything I own they tell them selves they love their kids more than she does hers and that's why they protect them more. In my own nieghborhood my kids talk to people walking thier dogs and they freak. All that stranger danger bullshit is big in this area. So yeah Choice #2 is more likely with no amount of#1 mixed in. Any deviation from what others demand and they ostracize you. be different.. Be alone..

This very same thing has happened to me. Some neighbor called the frigging police because my three children were running around in their own yard without shoes. In Arkansas. In August. It's damn hot in Arkansas during August.

What baffled me was that the police responded. We lived on a military base at the time and, admittedly, the military police generally don't have a lot to do.

They also responded to a call that my ten year old boy was climbing a tree. In his own yard. With me standing at the base of the tree supervising and suggesting good limbs to step on.

In both cases they couldn't tell me a regulation that was being violated and nothing came of it. That didn't stop my kids from being terrified of the police. They're adults now, but they still have an unhealthy fear of police.

Nosy neighbors that feel they have some ownership of how you raise your children really suck. I never lived on a military base again.

Oh yeah, then there's this story.

My youngest daughter must have been five or so and was riding her tricycle without a helmet. Okay, I'll admit that we were violating a base regulation (bicycle helmets). But, for Christ's sake, how fast can a five year old go on a tricycle?

A police car actually rode up behind her and put on the lights and siren as if they were pulling over a car. Scared the shit out of her. Then they told my wife, who was sitting on the front patio watching her, that she would be "apprehended" if it happened again.

Age is prolly quite a factor, but how can you tell from a police cruiser the exact age of a kid, if they are small? Contrast with:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/29712438/detail.html

It'd be a case of police over-reaction right up till they fail to act and the kid dies. They are in a no-win on this.

Society for some reason has, in the last 15 years, grown to sorely underestimate the resilience of children.
When my grandfather was 8, he got up at 5 am, took the cows out of the barn and drove them to the grazing pasutre. By himself. Unsupervised. With no shoes (in the summertime). He managed not only to survive his childhood, but WWII, college, and medical school. He worked hard without complaint because he'd had to since childhood.
Wanna know what kind of person the bullshit "wear your shoes and don't climb trees" school of thought creates? Go look at all those spoiled, simpering, entitled OWS brats!!

What underlies most of Skenazy's writing is to put a stop to "worst case thinking" with regards to raising children. We used to consider people that did this neurotic and over-protective, but now it's too often the norm with those who don't being called abusive or negligent.

I mean, after all, that boy could have stepped on some glass and bled to death. Or been kidnapped. Or hit by a careening car...

We must never ever take our eyes off our children, not for a second. Even when they sleep. Because something bad can happen.

However rare "bad things" may happen, you can be assured they will still be broadcast widely on the news. And considering how the norm is to blame someone else for "bad things", we get this kind of hypervigilance.

That being said, I live out in the puckerbrush and have no close neighbors. I love it. I did call the cops on one kid one time... my own. He was 10 or 11 and disappeared while on a walk. Our 10 acres is fenced and he KNEW not to go past the wire. Still, he did. Luckily, he had two of our dogs with him acting as nannies. He eventually found a road and flagged down a car. He was less than a mile from home but it still scared the crap outta me.

I went barefoot all the itme as a kid, took forever to get me to put on shoes. I know, Amy, shocker considering my adult fondness for shoes. :-) And I have very happy feet as an adult, nothing catastrophic happened.

WTF is wrong with you people? Cops are American Heroes. Do as you're told!

Everything changed on 9/11. Remember?!

I suppose in most suburban/rural parts of the U.S., you don't need to worry about this, but there ARE places where going barefoot is not that good an idea. (Google on "Can you get worms (parasites) from walking barefoot" for more details.)

And, about helmets, to repeat a question about Judy Blume's book "Tiger Eyes":

The book was written in 1981. When Davey removes her bike helmet (which her Aunt Bitsy had ordered her to wear), would most adult readers of that time, in your opinion, see her act as ominous and foolish, or would they follow the young reader's tendency to see Davey as starting to be aware of her relatives' paranoia and controlling behaviors? I myself can't help but wonder whether Blume herself was capable of seeing the act as reckless, given her general tendency towards navel-gazing. (After all, helmets, for bicyclists, were not considered that important back then, I believe, so the fact that Davey's parents had never told her to wear one hardly proves that they were foolish or particularly ignorant.) Of course, Davey's aunt Bitsy eventually catches her in the act of biking without it and reads her the riot act, but I had the impression that was mainly to show the reader that Bitsy is observant and responsible, not necessarily smart or a great role model.

The real illness here, the root of all assward thinking, is that all men are equal.

No, they're not.

And if you think so, until you put on the big-boy britches and figure out how to tell who is good and who is bad, you're the problem.

Because the thug and the angel are not equals, and your insistence that they are has put police in schools and led you to presume yourself guilty of some unspecified crime.

Well, that's it: stupidity is your crime. Your kids CAN be smarter than you let them be. You CAN exercise more freedoms than you do, but you hide instead, because risk is involved.

My sister just got her copy of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry as a gift from me. She apparently is enjoying it immensely.

As far as wearing shoes -- if I had a kid in west Texas, I would insist that they wear at least the Wal-mart aqua socks (Google it) just because because burrs suck. I want the kid to be able to look up and see where they're going, not looking down to see where they are.

The police may have over-reacted, but give them some credit for trying to be pro-active rather than waiting for an actual crime. As to why they did this, it is a reflection of the way society-at-large has gone overboard about certain potential problems, especially if children may be involved.

John A is right, lord forbid cops investigate the backlog of decades old murders, daily muggings and car thefts, far better to troll suburbia ad terrorse children til their pensions kick in

Jim I used to live in Texas as a kid, I was very free range, went all over the place, hopped my neighbors fence, and more than once landed on one of those burrs. Hurt like hell, but my parents couldn't keep shoes on me. Sure I had to pull those things out of the bottoms of my feet frequently...but now I've got foot callouses so thick I could walk on broken glass with barely a cut.

What can I say? I've always loved the feel of grass and dirt under my feet.