Kern-Rugile: Kids gradually need freedom

Jenna Kern-Rugile lives in East Northport.

It's a parent's worst nightmare. Your son, walking home from camp, is abducted and killed, as 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky was in Brooklyn this week. Or your daughter is kidnapped from a bus stop a few houses from your front door, as Jaycee Dugard was in California when she was 11.

Dugard's book about her 18 years in captivity, "A Stolen Life: A Memoir," was released this week. Her interview Sunday on ABC's "Primetime" was watched by nearly 15 million people, the largest audience for a newsmagazine program in seven years. By coincidence, it aired just a day before Kletzky disappeared.

As the mother of an 11-year-old, both the Dugard and Kletzky stories terrify me. The randomness of these abductions is enough to make any parent decide that the world is far too dangerous a place to allow children to venture out in alone.

Keep them off the bus; better yet, school them at home. Give them a cellphone; even better, walk within five feet of them at all times. Do something, anything, our parental instincts tell us, to keep them from falling prey to these horrific criminal acts.

The unfortunate reality is that no strategy is foolproof. Life entails risk, and keeping your offspring under constant supervision is no solution.

In this age of "helicopter parents" -- the ones who, whether out of safety concerns or an overinvestment in their children's every success and failure, hover over their kids' lives, monitoring their every move -- we've created another kind of danger to our kids: We may be raising a generation that doesn't know how to make its own decisions or handle disappointment.

A 2010 study of college freshmen by psychologist Neil Montgomery of Keene State College suggests that the children of helicopter parents are more likely not only to be narcissistic ("It's the teacher's fault I got a D!"), they're also more apt to feel insecure, anxious and risk-averse.

In today's world, many parents, schools and groups bend over backward to avoid the slightest wound to a child's esteem. Every kid gets a trophy, just for being in the game. Every work of art is deemed a masterpiece.

But it's not only the "my kid can do no wrong" parents who create problems for their children. I know parents who won't let their child ride the school bus, afraid that their child will be bullied or exposed to bad language. Others won't let their kids go on school trips unless they accompany them. What does this excessive fear teach our children about how to navigate the world?

A confession: Although I don't consider myself a helicopter parent (no one does), I certainly am overprotective. I realized this one day when my daughter's classmate stopped by our house on her bike, all alone. My daughter wasn't home, so the child headed off to another friend's house.

My first thought? I can't believe her mother lets her ride around the neighborhood not knowing where she's going. Then it occurred to me that, at that age, I did the same thing -- with no cellphone to track me. I wouldn't head home until my mother rang the dinner bell.

For the most part, children are about as safe today as they were when we, their parents, were growing up. As Lenore Skenazy -- who caused an uproar a few years ago when she wrote about allowing her 9-year-old son to ride the subway alone -- wrote this week on her blog, FreeRange Kids: "There are horrible people in the world. There always were, always will be." Our parents weren't naive, she adds, but they knew that keeping us "locked inside for fear of a tragic, rare worst-case scenario" would be a huge mistake.

Yes, awful things happen. We must make sure our kids know by heart the crucial safety precautions. But we do them more harm than good when we stifle their independence, fearing that ill-intentioned strangers lurk around every corner.