If you’re unfamiliar with the terms “helicopter parents” and “free-range” kids, Chasing Childhood will have you up to speed in no time on all the new and innovative ways that 21st-century parents ruin their children’s lives. As we learn from the film, unlike traditional ways of darkening a child’s future through parental indifference and neglect, it would now seem to be a surfeit of good intentions (and attention) that are stressing kids to the point of hopeless despair.
The documentary centers on two particular suburban Tri-State area communities, Patchogue, Long Island, and the more upscale Wilton, Connecticut, and how parents and schools in these two communities are dealing with children whose parents are micromanaging their lives to the point where kids are depressed and suicidal before they’ve even hit puberty because of the unprecedented pressure to succeed and get accepted to Ivy League schools.
The filmmakers clearly favor the “free-range” style of parenting and make no bones about the obvious bias. Chasing Childhood homes in on two polar opposite parents and what they’ve learned from their unique parenting experiences: on the one hand, Genevive Eason, of posh Wilton, CT, is a reformed micromanager whose grinding pressure on her daughter Savannah to make it to an Ivy League university was so great that Savannah loses interest in scholastic achievement, ending up spending her formative teen years recovering from deep depression brought on by unrelenting expectations of scholastic perfection.
On the opposite end of the parental spectrum, we have Lenore Skenazy, a fanatical “free-range” advocate and newspaper columnist who gained media infamy for writing an opinion column about allowing her nine-year-old son to take the NYC subway by himself. Although the film’s obvious zeal to try and push the “free-range” movement—which certainly has its obvious merits—there’s not much weighing of the very real costs of too much freedom for kids happening here.
Nevertheless, there are some undeniable “free-range” success stories here: Savannah’s journey from a lost youth to a culinary school star being one of them. And the mirror Chasing Childhood holds up to today’s trends that see unrealistic parental goal-setting for their kids can only be welcome in a society where children are increasingly missing out on their childhood.