Giving children space

Free-range chicken, we can all agree, is a good thing. Free-range parenting? Oy vey.

The movement was launched in 2008 by New York mom Lenore Skenazy, who let her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone and then wrote a column about it in The New York Sun. It took about 30 seconds for the parenting world to lose its collective mind, dubbing her "America's worst mom" and landing her on the "Today" show, NPR, MSNBC and Fox News.

Today, Skenazy has a book, "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry" (Jossey-Bass); a blog, freerangekids.wordpress.com; and a following. She recently called for making May 22 "Take Our Kids to the Park … and Leave Them There Day."

A number of books advocate a similar hands-off approach, including "The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids" (Tarcher/Penguin) by Tom Hodgkinson, which hits bookstores in mid-May.

It is against this backdrop that the new film "Babies" lands in theaters. The movie follows four babies from four parts of the world from birth to around age 1. The babies live in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo and San Francisco, and their life experiences are as disparate as their locales.

We watch Ponijao, the Namibian baby, being bathed, which consists of her mother sucking dust off her and spitting it aside and rubbing her head with a mix of red ochre mineral and oil. We watch Hattie, the American baby, attend yoga class. We watch Mari, the Japanese baby, blow out birthday candles with her grandparents. And we watch Bayar, the Mongolian baby, spend chunks of his days alone or in the care of his 2-year-old brother while his parents — the ultimate free-rangers — tend to farming duties.

French director Thomas Balmes didn't set out to send any particular message with his film. In fact, he says, he took pains to avoid telling viewers what to think, which is why the movie has no narrator or dialogue, outside of the parents' and babies' interactions.

"I wanted to allow you to make your own narration, to be as objective as I can," Balmes said in a recent phone interview. "Too many documentaries don't leave to the viewer that much freedom to think for himself."

It's impossible not to be struck, while watching the movie, by the life of Bayar and his copious amounts of free time — and to wonder where he and the other babies fit in the free-range parenting debate.

"I've been fascinated, especially by the Mongolian family and how much freedom and trust and confidence and space they give to the kids," Balmes says, "and how nicely these kids were using that freedom and time — not doing anything but watching the sky, feeling the wind, looking at flies on the ground."

As a father of three, Balmes, who lives in Paris, says the filmmaking experience gave him pause about his own parenting.

"As a parent filling up every single minute with dance lessons, piano lessons, reading books since the baby was born, you start questioning," he says. "Our daughter is 7, and she's virtually not had a minute to herself. It's very good in many ways, but I wonder if we're maybe a little too concerned about seeing the brain as a sponge that we should try to fill up as much as we can. Maybe kids being by themselves may not be so bad."

Even on the subway? What about the park? Skenazy's "Take Our Kids to the Park …" proposal was met with mixed reaction.

"I spent a lot of time playing outside unsupervised, in my own unfenced yard, on our quiet street, in our sleepy little town," read one comment from a parenting blog that addressed the topic. "I was also injured frequently, scared of strangers hovering, and in a lot of dangerous situations that could have been avoided if I had been properly supervised. I will not be repeating my childhood with my own child. No way, no how."

But it struck a chord with others: "I applaud her ideas and agree with her line of thought," read another comment on the same parenting blog. "Let them go be kids!"

Although "Babies" doesn't set out to settle the debate, it certainly offers new material for both sides to consider.

"The main purpose," Balmes says, "is to get the audience questioning themselves, thinking for themselves, confronting their ideas about what they see and maybe challenging their preconceived notions of what they are doing and what others are doing."

hstevens@tribune.com