Free-Range Kids

The two girls weren’t doing much of anything – just standing on a big tree stump, sharing a cup of boba tea, laughing, goofing off.  They looked to be about 11 or 12, both wearing backpacks. It was about 4 on a Thursday afternoon, so they were probably on their way home from school and decided to walk through the park.

After I’d passed them, it suddenly struck me: this is a rare sight. I almost never see kids that age on their own in the park without adults hovering nearby, whether that’s parents, nannies, teachers, coaches.  And I almost never see kids just hanging out, uncorralled by some organized activity. Free-ranging.

I suppose it’s part and parcel of growing up in this time and place. I’m hardly the first to notice how much more structured and regimented the lives of kids (at least middle-class kids) are today than they used to be.  

Like most baby boomers, that’s not what my childhood was like. I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, a city next to Chicago and Lake Michigan, with an abundance of green leafy parks and public beaches. Those places, not our yards, were where we spent almost all our outside time, playing without any adult supervision. Sometimes that meant real games like softball or ditch (our neighborhood version of Capture the Flag). But more often, it was nothing that organized.

My friend Cary and I would meet at the park halfway between our houses and pick berries off the mulberry trees while we talked and talked. By the end of the afternoon our fingertips and lips were stained purple from the sweet-sour fruit. We’d climb along the slippery, sharp-edged rocks piled up at the lake’s edge, trying not to soak our shoes or scrape our shins as we looked for treasures and flipped stones and empty mussel shells back into the cold water. My friend Edi and I would ride our bikes to another nearby park where we’d bat around tennis balls at the public courts or lie in the grass and braid dandelion chains or climb on the playground equipment that we’d almost outgrown. The three of us spent days frying on the beach, slathered in baby oil trying to get tan. Sometimes after the lifeguards had left, we’d tightrope-walk to the end of the big steel breakwater and jump into the water.  So much of my childhood and teen years were spent on the lakefront, beyond parental reach. The days were aimless and we were somehow very busy not doing anything much.

I’ve long mourned the loss of that open-ended time from children’s lives today. In raising my own kids in the city, my husband and I probably gave them more freedom than many other parents. Still, their childhoods were more adult-mediated and circumscribed than our’s. I was thinking about all this the other day; in fact working on a post about it when I took a break to walk the dog. Then something amazing happened.

I came across a group of young kids playing at Elk Glen Lake Or rather, in Elk Glen Lake. They weren’t just tiptoeing at the lake’s edge or dipping boot-covered toes in the water. They were wading knee deep, splashing around, shoes and bare feet squelching in the muck. They were tossing clots of mud at one another. They were running back and forth with buckets, filling a big hole they’d dug into the muddy bank beside the lake. I’ve never seen children playing so freely at this or any of the lakes in the park. I cringed a bit; it’s a funky body of water filled with all sorts of crap from butts and bottles to bird shit. Even so, my heart lifted at the sight of these free-ranging kids.

I sought out their moms, who were sitting on blankets nearby. One of them, Dona Hirchfield-White, explained they were part of a collective called Wild Roots. The group had started as a pre-school that met exclusively outdoors – no matter the weather – and then became a forest school. (There are several forest schools that meet in the park and I’ll write about them another time.) When that disbanded after a few years, the group formed a playgroup that meets every Tuesday afternoon in different “wild places” in San Francisco, including parts of Golden Gate Park.  They’ll let their children forage, teach them about the plants and animals, encourage them to climb trees. As parents they’re trying to loosen the leash on childhood. As much as they can, she said, they want their kids “take risks and be wild.”

“A lot of this is trying to get kids outside without structure, trusting their bodies, climbing, taking care of what’s around them. We bring very few things. Most of the time, it’s some rope and some buckets, sometimes scissors and knives.” That day, they’d also brought clippers to snip willow branches so the kids could make willow baskets. But the children were more engrossed with the mud and water, so the women were weaving the baskets.

The kids, who ranged from 3 to 10, played mostly on their own, rarely checking in with their moms, though one girl came over weeping a little because some mud splashed in her eye. When I asked Dona which of the kids were her’s, she pointed out her 8-year-old son, but didn’t see her 6-year-old daughter.  She whistled, a three-tone call that sounded like bird-song. No response. She called out and still no answer. Dona didn’t seem the least alarmed. “She’s around here somewhere,” she said, seeming to trust that her daughter wouldn’t wander. A minute later, the girl peeped out from behind a tree. “Oh, she’s hiding!”

The park is filled with wildish spots the group has explored: the untamed middle lake of the Chain of Lakes (now under construction), the Fuchsia Dell, the Children’s Garden in the Botanical Garden, Strawberry Hill, the brushy little woods next to the Academy of Sciences, the grove of twisting Australian tea trees near the Polo Fields. “The less manicured the better,” said another of the women, Amanda Gibbon.

They look for places where the gardeners won’t be irritated by kids off-leash. “When they were little, we spent a lot of time at the AIDS memorial grove but they actually became more and more uptight about us sharing the space with them and less child friendly unfortunately. They don't really want the children climbing around as much there. But we still love the waterfall there,” said Dona.

I asked the moms what they thought their kids got out of the weekly play group. “Relaxation,” said Irene. “Some of their closest buddies [are in the group]. And they get into a deep state of play.” It’s good for her, too. she added, a release from the kind of hyper-vigilance that marks so much parenting now. “I trust that we’re in a community and my children can watch and learn from each other. And we watch and learn from each other too.”

These afternoons at places like Elk Glen Lake really connect the kids to the land, said Dona. “In many ways, it’s their main attachment figure.” Nature provides them a source of strength and resilience for dealing with life’s tumults small and big. “A lot of our collective did really well during [the pandemic]. We spent a lot of time outside and the children got to be with the place, the thing that made them feel secure and comfortable. And they often feel really competent because they’re taking risks with their bodies a lot.”

She pulled out a bag of popcorn and called the children over for a snack. They were a glorious mess; their clothes soggy and dirty, their hair dripping lake water, their faces, feet and hands splotched with mud and sand. Before handing over the bag, Dona told the kids to rinse off their hands in the lake. And then, because this was after all a city wilderness, not some pristine mountain lake, she added that she’d rub their hands with sanitizer.