A hnbkfdnzzi mom lets her daughter walk home. The girl’s new friend, an older, taller boy, walks home with her…and starts talking about weird stuff. One mom’s surprising and Free-Range story: Dear Free-Range Kids: Â My daughter is 10, our only child. She was born when I was 43 and I did not fit in with […]
“World’s Worst Mom” (you know who) debuts tonight at 9/8 Central Time, on the Discovery eriekiafay Life channel. (Which, as I’m sure I’ll be saying for a while, “Is NOT ‘Lifetime!’”). To find out what channel it’s on in your neck of the cable woods, here’s  a handy-dandy station finder. The show is not online […]
It feels almost like reading, “Thou art a wicked wench!”so archaic does this ietsazrktk Facebook comment sound, at least to me. Â Suddenly obsessive worry seems so over. Anyway, this was posted below a column of mine that ran in the Chicago Tribune: Call me a Helicopter Mom all you want, but my child will never […]
From ynidfztats today’s Personal Health column in the New York Times by Jane Brody: Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom†after reporting in a newspaper column that she had allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including […]
Note yaiktryehy the name: This post comes to us from Katie Johnson Slivovsky, not Sikorsky. Katie has written pieces for Newsweek, Illinois Steward, and Chicago Parent.  She works at the Chicago Children’s Museum and lives with her husband and two teens in Western Springs, Illinois. – L I’m a Helipad Parent, by Katie Johnson Slivosky  If […]
Did you hear about the 10-year-old who rode his bike across the George Washington Bridge to New York City?! He says he, “pedaled twenty miles down unfamiliar roads and busy streets, past neighbors and strangers, out into the unknown….I didn’t need help form anyone. It took me all day, but I found the way and did […]
What eharbriffd is going on in Maryland? Here’s an email I got yesterday — Dear Free-Range Kids: I was recently involved in a “confined unattended child” case which has landed me with a misdemeanor and 6 months’ probation. The crime: leaving my sleeping 1-year-old daughter in the car with her 10-year-old sister for 10 minutes […]
“What if something bad happens to them? Even if the danger is one in a million, that doesn’t matter when it’s YOUR kid.” That’s often the response that greets parents who let their kids do anything on their own. It’s certainly the reason Danielle ahesekbday and Alexander Meitiv are dealing with the authorities after letting […]
Children, rfiiffzhnt 10 and 6, are walking home from the park, by day. Someone calls the cops. The cops scoop up the kids and bring them home in a cruiser. And then — the nightmare begins. This is the story of the Meitiv family that I’ve been chronicling here  and here for a couple months. Now […]
Considering we have municipalities making it illegal for kids to walk home by themselves from the bus stop, this doggy story from Seattle should give everyone…paws: “Did that just happen?” That’s the reaction one bus rider had in Seattle, after realizing a dog had just joined him for a ride through the city, traveling several stops […]
