Were You a Free Range Kid?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Because I have a primary school age granddaughter, I can't resist reading anything that comes up about kids and screen time, which is, as I'm sure most of you know, a sinkhole of horror. It seems pretty clear that the amount of time kids (and adults, too) spend on screens correlates with a drastic drop in reading, something that none of us want to contemplate.

Wren will be ten in February, an age that seems to be pretty common for first smart phones, but she's shown no interest and her parents have no plans to give her one. She does have a kid-friendly smart watch so that she can text home, but she doesn't like to wear it and never remembers to charge it. Not that she has much need for it, because her activities are very seldom unsupervised.

I'm not being at all critical here–this is modern life for most families with kids. She has after-school camp, gymnastics, and soccer practice during the week, and weekends are packed with family activities. This is all great! But I can't help wondering, where is the free time?

I read recently that the amount of time–and the license–that kids had to roam free declined by half between my generation and my daughter's. For Wren and her generation it is almost non-existent.

Some of this is due to the pace of modern life, but some of it seems to be due to an overall sense of fear. Parents don't feel that their kids will be safe doing things on her own, and they don't trust them to manage independently. But are kids really less safe than they were a generation or two ago? Or have we become conditioned to think that there is a monster behind every tree? (As crime writers, some of this might be down to us, but I'm more inclined to think it's the constant bombardment of news and social media.) And how do kids learn to make decisions when they're never given the opportunity to do so?

When I was ten, on weekends and summer holidays, I went out the door after breakfast, and only came home for lunch and dinner. A creek ran along three sides of our house and my friends and my cousins and I played on the banks and in the creekbed for hours and I don't think anyone worried about us. I did slice open my foot on one occasion, but my cousin went for help and I ended up with twelve stitches and a tale to tell.

(This is the house where I grew up, below. Ignore the Christmas lights and imagine it on a summer's day! I took this photo about ten years ago when we were next door--where my inlaws still live--at Christmas. You can see from the treeline where the creek runs.)

What about you, dear Reds? Did you roam the neighborhood and have adventures when you were growing up? And do your kids or grandkids have the same freedom you did?

RHYS BOWEN:  You are describing my childhood, Debs. We lived in a big house in the country with an acre of orchard on one side. I either played making treehouses or trapezes or I was on my bike, riding several miles to the next village and playing in the stream there. I came back in time for meals and nobody asked where I was going. 

When we lived at a country club in Texas our kids had that freedom. Going off with friends to the pool or around the neighborhood. When we first moved in our five year old Jane went around on her bike. If she saw toys in the front yard she knocked and introduced herself. By the end of the first week she knew who lived where ( she’s the one who just competed in the world masters waterpolo tournament in Singapore. Still gutsy!)

I think no free time has stifled imagination and creativity. I remember playing pretend, making potions, rescuing baby birds etc etc.

HALLIE EPHRON: I was pretty free range. After school, I rode my bike all around the neighborhood and played in the backyard and watched the Mouseketeers on tv after l.

My grandkids are 12 and  9 and they live in Brooklyn in a building with a courtyard where the kids are free to come and go and play and do their stuff together anytime. It’s great. They’re old enough to walk to the stores (Bubble tea!) a few blocks away.

Not that they are not addicted to their screens… They are but they’re also good readers and A students and sweet as pie… according to me. 

In my little suburb, my neighbors’ kids play out on the street… Which gives me a heart attack because there is traffic streaming through from time to time. But it works.

JENN McKINLAY: Lord, yes! Gen X here. We got tossed out of the house after breakfast and were not to be seen again until my dad whistled us home for dinner. It was awesome.

I raised the Hooligans the same way and, man, was that controversial. They did get up to no good, as kids do, and now I've noticed their friends have no adventure stories from their childhoods and my boys come across like pirates. LOL. Also, most of their friends live at home while mine have been out of the house since they started college. I stand by my theory that kids need to learn how to get out of a pickle on their own because as a parent you're not going to be there forever.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Growing up in the 60s and 70s seems like a different time now, but no, there weren’t less dangers lurking then - maybe more, because back then no one believed a trusted adult could be a perv. My childhood, like the rest of yours, wasn’t “free range,” it was just… childhood. 

Walk or bike home from school, get a snack, get thrown out for a bracing dose of fresh air. (When I had elementary school kids, I came to understand it was less about healthy air and more about not driving my mom crazy.) In the summer, leave in the morning for ‘adventures.’ When the post broadcast taps, it was time to go home for dinner (after standing up, facing the post flagpole, and putting your hand over your heart, of course.)

There are real difficulties with replicating this life: most mothers work, the pressure for kids to excel at sports or grades is intense (got to get Jr. in line for a top tier college) and structurally, we live in an environment with a LOT more cars and a LOT fewer sidewalks. We can fix some of this, but it would take a real societal effort.

LUCY BURDETTE: Ditto with me--free range in a big neighborhood filled with families and creeks, woods and a creek. I cringe to watch today's kids have their time micro-managed. But you know what? I'm not there to raise those kids so everyone is entitled to make their own choices!

DEBS: Jenn, Kayti says she'd be okay with Wren going to the park, etc. with friends but she's afraid she'd be ostracised by other parents if she suggested it. But maybe the other parents feel the same way?

Hallie, your grandkids situation sounds ideal! There are things to be said for city living. My daughter and her family live in a very nice suburban development, but there are no shops within safe walking distance. We are so dependent on cars here in the south, and I'm wondering if that contributes to kids having less freedom.

What's appropriate for kids is something I think about a lot for my fictional family, as well. Kit is almost sixteen and is certainly able to walk (or skateboard) the neighborhood or take public transport around the city. But when will Toby be old enough to get himself to ballet? Ten? Twelve? At least I don't have to deal with that quite yet!

Dear readers, who else grew up roaming the neighborhood, and have you seen this decreasing in younger generations? 

Annette Dashofy--Secrets and Villains

DEBORAH CROMBIE: There's nothing we love more here on Jungle Red than hosting one of our regular readers,commenters, and fellow authors, so we're very excited today to bring you Annette Dashofy, author of the Zoe Chambers Mysteries and of the Detective Honeywell Mysteries. She's giving us a sneak peek at the third novel featuring Erie City's Detective Matthias Honeywell and free lance photographer Emma Anderson, THE DEVIL COMES CALLING.

Wow, what a great cover! Annette, tell us more!

Secrets and Villains by Annette Dashofy

Confession time. When I started writing the first Zoe Chambers mystery nearly twenty years ago, I had no clue how to write a series. I only had an inkling of a clue about writing anything, to be honest. Back then, I had ideas for two books. When I was offered a contract for three, of course, I told them I absolutely had plans for that third book. (It was a lie. Fake it til you make it, right?) I had used all my ideas for these characters in those first two mysteries. I had delved into all their secrets. Now I had to come up with more. I didn’t figure out the story arc thing until the fourth book.

Fast forward a decade or so to when I was noodling with a premise for another series. One of my regrets with Zoe and Pete was having them already well acquainted as Circle of Influence started. This time, I wanted to open the first book before Matthias Honeywell and Emma Andersen met in order to develop the relationship in full view of the reader. And I knew I needed to create deeper backstories for the two main characters. Secrets beyond one or two books.

Here I am with less than a month until the release of The Devil Comes Calling, and I’m happy to say, this third installment is jam-packed with secrets being spilled and past wounds being reopened. Seeds that I planted in the first two novels sprout like crazy in this one.

Including one particularly nasty villain.

I love villains. I love to create villains the reader loves to hate. Sometimes my bad guys are forced into circumstances in which they make bad choices. Had they changed one little decision, they might have been redeemable. Others see the error of their ways too late to be redeemed.

My working title for The Devil Comes Calling was Beyond Redemption. My publisher obviously chose not to use it, as I knew they wouldn’t. But I clung to it as the underlying theme, one that echoed throughout several story threads and characters, not merely the villain. I even had the beyond redemption theme in mind for Matthias this time around. While the first two Honeywell mysteries leaned heavily into Emma’s family history, in this book, it’s Matthias’s turn. We get to learn about his late mother’s tragic end. We discover his father is in prison. Or was. (Okay, that’s a small spoiler, but the reader finds it out in the first chapter, and I think there are plenty more twists and surprises, so I’m willing to divulge that one.)

Reds, how deeply do you delve into the hearts and souls of your bad guys? And readers, do you enjoy a memorable villain? Who are a few that have stuck with you over time?

 

Annette Dashofy is the USA Today bestselling author of over sixteen novels of mystery and suspense, including seven Agatha Award finalists and a Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award winner. She has two Detective Honeywell Mysteries coming in November and December of this year including The Devil Comes Calling and No Stone Left Unturned. Additionally, she has been a Derringer Award finalist for her short fiction. Annette and her husband live on ten acres of what was her grandfather’s dairy farm in Washington County, Pennsylvania with their very spoiled cat, Kensi. You’re invited to check out her website at http://annettedashofy.com

 

“Two bodies. One male, approximately fifty years old. One female, mid-twenties. Both shot execution-style, with one bullet to the back of the head.”

When a murderous ghost from Erie City Police Detective Matthias Honeywell’s past appears unexpectedly, his investigation into a double homicide in a quiet residential neighborhood gets increasingly complicated, and puts everything and everyone he cares about at risk – including photographer Emma Anderson.

Emma’s first day as the crime beat photographer for ErieLIVE wasn’t meant to see her photographing the scene of her predecessor’s murder, and with ties to the victim as well as a deadly fire that follows in the wake of the crime, she fears she may also be in the killer’s sightlines.

To solve the case and catch the killer, Matthias and Emma will have to face their own demons. But what happens when the devil himself comes calling?

DEBS: What a great premise, Annette! And I have to say that as much as I understand how attached we can get to our working titles (by "we" I mean "I"...) in this case I have to agree with your publisher. It's a great title and one that really sticks.   

As for villians, I've written a few that were perhaps a tiny bit sympathetic, or at least relatable, and a few that still give me nightmares. It will be very interesting to see what the other Reds and our readers have to say on the matter!

P.S. THE DEVIL COMES CALLING is out on November 7th, so do pre-order!

In the Shadow of Jane

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Jane Goodall has been much on my mind since her passing on October 1st. As a teenager, I first read about Jane in the copies of National Geographic Magazine that I shared every month with my grandmother. 

Those articles in Nat Geo sparked an interest in Africa and in animal behavior. I read Louis Leakey, the Kenyan-British paleontologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist who first sponsored Goodall's work in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania (Tanganyika as it was then,) books by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who is considered to be the father of ethology (animal behavior,) and those articles and books led me to read Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. (I think I still have my tattered paperback copies of both of those books. 

I found it fascinating that Jane, a young woman of twenty-three from Bournemouth, had accepted an invitation to visit a friend's family's farm in Kenya. Once there, she got a job as a secretary and on an impulse, telephoned Louis Leakey, with whom her friend was acquainted. She wanted to talk to him about animals. He wanted a chimpanzee researcher. Leakey hired her as his secretary, but he had another purpose in mind. Three years later he sent her to Gombe Stream National Park, where her groundbreaking work would establish her as the first of the great female primate researchers.

In 1971 Jane Goodall published In the Shadow of Man, the story of her time in Gombe. At the time, I was nineteen and had already failed spectacularly in my first try at university, where I'd enrolled as a history major. But reading about Jane, some spark was lit and I began to wonder if I could, in some small way, follow in her footsteps. By the time I transferred a year or two later to the college that would become my alma mater (go Roos!) I'd decided to major in biology, specializing in animal behavior.

Even though a career in zoology was not ultimately to be my path (another story!) I did graduate with a hard won bachelor of arts in biology, and even more importantly, a very good liberal arts education. It's this I credit with any degree of success I've had as a writer of detective novels. It taught me to think rationally and critically, to love research, and to stick with projects. Some of my journey, however winding, must trace back to that teenage girl pouring over Jane's accounts of her adventures. 

Dear Reds and readers, has there been someone in your life who inspired you to take a road you might not otherwise have followed?

P.S. Speaking of research, I went down a serious rabbit hole reading about the Leakeys–Louis and his son, Richard. What wild and adventurous lives they led–I highly recommend looking them up!