Kids and parents — rejoice! Both Texas and Oklahoma passed laws yesterday that ensure parents that giving their kids the freedom to do things like play outside, walk to school, and wait at home will NOT BE MISTAKEN FOR NEGLECT! If you’re a Free-Range fan, you may recall when Utah passed its first-in-the-country Free-Range Parenting […]
Archive | 2021
Dear Media: Stop Publishing, “Mom Was About to be Trafficked” Stories Based on NOTHING
A woman’s spidey senses went wild on a Target run, and she was ABSOLUTELY SURE she was about to be trafficked. How could she be so certain? She saw three different men, all shopping and not smiling. They looked so evil, her blood ran cold. When she went outside (accompanied by store personnel, at her […]
Kids Today Don’t Play Outside Until They are Two Years Older than The Age Their Parents Were Allowed Out
A British study confirms something that you may have been feeling: Ten is the new two. More precisely, 11 is the new 9. Parents who played outside at age 9, on average, now don’t let their kids go outside, unsupervised, until age 11. This is not in response to an actual rising crime rate — […]
A Not-So-Humble Brag: Yours Truly is a Clue on Masterminds (And Thank You, Ken Jennings!)
And if you like the whole Free-Range Kids gestalt, come visit LetGrow.org, the nonprofit that grew out of it and promotes childhood independence right and left! @FreeRangeKids Lenore Skenazy, did you see you were a question on @GameShowNetwork’s Masterminds? 👏👏👏#freerangeparenting pic.twitter.com/j2zCAMIBBw — Freedom Fest (@TheFreedomFest) April 21, 2021
A Worried Mom’s Letter to her Third Grade Son (When, Hopefully, He is Outside Playing)
Becky Diamond is a reporter who has spent years and years in actual war zones. But now she’s really scared. She’s worried about what is happening to childhood. The scheduling, supervising, intervening, optimizing — and the psychological issues those can engender. So she wrote a letter to her son reminding him — and herself — […]
Where Can You Find Other Parents who Want to Give Their 5-Year-Olds a Knife?
When you feel ready to let your kid use a sharp knife, or bike around the neighborhood, or go on a stone-cold, old-fashioned, Nerf and Sprite-fueled playdate, you might want to have the wind at your back — that is, some other parents cheering you on, or helping you let go, or simply eager to […]
Kids Reading Children’s Books from the ’60s and ’70s Don’t Understand Why The Characters Got to Go Outside without Adults
Harriet the Spy. Encyclopedia Brown. Meg and brother Charles Wallace, Ramona, Beezus, Pippi, and that My Side of the Mountain Kid (what WAS his name?). They all shared something other than spunk. Freedom. Freedom of movement was a given in mid-century children’s literature. Of course the kids starring in books did more than most of […]
A Gym Teacher Devotes Some P.E. Time to Plain Old Free Play — And WOW!
Gym teachers don’t have to have kids doing specific sports or skills all the time. When P.E. teacher David Benay decided to devote some class time to free play, outside, he was amazed by how active his students were, and how many lessons — physical and social — they were getting. When a tiny game […]
To Stop Kids from Bullying, School Replaces Recess with Poetry Reciting
“I think this school is making a mistake,” tweeted Jonathan Haidt, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” What school? The Hackney New School in London that I write about over at Let Grow. (Click here to read.) “A school without bullying sounds like a utopia, but it is achievable,†Hackney’s head of school […]
Welcome, Free-Range Parents, Educators, Media and the Free-Range Curious!
Hi! I’m Lenore, the gal who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone, wrote a column about it, got slammed in the media and labeled “America’s Worst Mom.” I started this blog to explain that I LOVE safety — helmets, seatbelts, mouthguards — but don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave […]