Kids Should Be Blindfolded and Dropped in the Woods at Night

In the Netherlands, kids grow up with more independence than in the United States.

Blindfolded kids, driven off in a car, and dumped into the woods at night. In America, we call that a crime. In the Netherlands? It's called a "dropping," and it's a beloved childhood tradition.

"It's a rite of passage," says Mark Pols, an investor living in Silicon Valley who grew up in Holland. When he was a kid, Pols says, droppings (pronounced drope-ings) were always a part of scouting—and still are. "There'd be various degrees of challenge, meaning what time of night, how far away you'd get dropped, how few people you'd get dropped with, etc."

Pols' first dropping was at age 11, which seems typical. He was in a group of five or six kids, all blindfolded and dropped well past sundown at some distance from the scout camp. "In our case, we had a little crude map and the purpose was to find a road and navigate your way back," Pols says. "It was really exciting because it was dark and we were given one flashlight. Maybe we had to walk a mile or something, but it felt really far and scary."

In some camps, then and now, staffers accompany the kids but hang behind so the campers have to figure out the route on their own. "We don't help the kids go in the right direction at all," says Birgit Hartkamp, a sales rep in Utrecht who grew up going to an astronomy camp that did droppings and later became a counselor there. "At one point I made the kids walk in a circle for five hours and then they realized they were 200 meters from the place they had to be. I knew it the whole time."

It sounds like no matter what the theme of the camp—music, science, horseback riding—a dropping is generally part of the experience in the Netherlands. Schools also do droppings when they take students on camping trips. Nowadays, some programs allow one or all of the kids to have a phone. But no matter how it's done, the dropping is the highlight of the trip and takes place halfway through the session.

Hartkamp recalls a time a camper "was not making any friends and he wanted to go home before the dropping. It was his first time. I sat down with him and said, 'Please don't go home. If you really want to, I cannot stop you. But please wait till Sunday, because Saturday night is the dropping.'"

He stayed and the dropping changed everything. "That night he made so many friends," says Hartkamp.

What is it about this strange experience that has the power to change a child so quickly? To me, it sounds remarkably like the exposure therapy used to treat anxiety.

In this type of therapy, a person who is afraid of something—for instance, cats—is first exposed to a cat all the way down the hall. At the next session they may be put in a room with a cat. Finally, they pet the cat or have it sit in their lap. With each exposure, the false belief that cats are a threat ebbs away. So does the belief that interacting with a cat is too much to bear.

Replacing that dread is confidence. A new study of adults terrified of two things—heights and spiders—found that when they were treated for one fear, their fear of the other abated too. In psychology speak, their newfound confidence "generalized."

Since most kids are afraid of the dark, afraid of the woods, and afraid of getting lost, a dropping sounds like a therapist's dream, accelerating exposure therapy in one wild night. Dropping may be one of the reasons kids in Holland are some of the happiest in the world.

"I remember just feeling scared, but not scared to the point I'd never do it again," says Kimberly Humphreys, a Dutch mom of three now living in Brisbane, Australia. In fact, she went on droppings year after year, always "realizing I could do things that I thought I wasn't capable of." That's the opposite of anxiety.

It's also existentially reassuring to know that the people who love you most—your parents—are certain you can handle this experience.

"You'll have to ask them—I don't even know much about it," said Christel Hartkamp-Bakker, a scientist and educator in Holland, when asked about the droppings her three kids (including Birgit) had been on. Because it's something they themselves went through as children, parents don't seem to think twice about droppings. And in a way, the droppings are a kind of "exposure therapy" for adults, too—exposure to letting go.

Hartkamp-Bakker was quick to point out that her girls weren't facing any real danger during their dropping. The Netherlands is extremely safe. "And you can't really get lost here in the Netherlands. You're always somewhere in reach of houses or people living somewhere," Hartkamp-Bakker says.

Dutch kids also grow up with more real-world independence than American kids do, so the dropping isn't their first time out and about on their own. Kids in Holland bike to school starting at age 5 or 6, and it's not unusual to see first-graders riding the local tram without a parent, says Pols. As the kids get older, resourcefulness is just assumed. On school trips to a new city, they may be expected to get from a museum to the hotel on their own.

Is it time to bring the dropping tradition to America? Parents here could certainly use a little help letting go. A University of Michigan/C.S. Mott Children's Hospital study last year found that the majority of American parents of children ages 9 to 11 won't let them do much unsupervised, including play at the park with a friend or trick-or-treat. Only 50 percent would let their child go to another aisle at the store.

But perhaps the Scouts could introduce the dropping as, say, a merit badge activity?

"Oh God, no," says New York City Troop 1 Scoutmaster Carolyn Casey. "If kids got dropped off in the woods and got hurt or lost, there'd be lawsuits all over the place," Casey says. She also wasn't confident about the Scouts' map and compass skills. And, she notes that unlike in the Netherlands, the woods in America are lovely, dark, and deep—and big.

Casey has been a Scout leader for 20 years. In that time, she says, "I've seen it get more cautious. On trips, we have a lot of parents coming along, a lot of safeguards."

Droppings are unlikely to make the leap from Holland to the States. Pols, who has lived in both countries, explained why he thinks that is: "America has decided, by and large, because of the way the legal system works, to essentially not do any meaningful tradeoffs, just go for the lowest risk possible." As a result, children here are constantly supervised.

The results are scarier than any moonlit forest.