The idea that anytime kids are outside, making noise, someone is at fault — the kids for yelping, the adults for not supervising and shushing them — is pernicious. It turns independent kids, and the parents raising them, into a public nuisance. (Noise-sance?) And yet, that’s exactly what a new app in Japan is doing. […]
Even during this very strange year, the middle school counselors in Milburn, NJ, were seeing the same anxiety in kids that had been on the rise for seven or eight years before it. Kids were very worried, often about scholastic achievement. How could the counselors help them? They asked kids to go home and…help out […]
As Let Grow works with five states on Free-Range Kids bills this session, some lawmakers remain skeptical that their state’s definition of neglect needs narrowing. But they do. Here is Let Grow’s map of all 50 states’ neglect laws. Unfortunately, 47 of them are so open-ended that too much is left to the discretion of […]
From an op-ed in yesterday’s Las Vegas Journal-Review by Nevada State Sen. Dallas Harris and Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, titled, “Don’t Criminalize Childhood Independence.” Maybe we look like complete opposites. One of us is a gay, Black and a Democratic mom of one from Clark County. And one of us is a white, Republican and a […]
This sad story is getting a lot of attention, which is great. A 24-year-old Youngstown, Ohio, mom was working her shift at a pizza parlor when someone alerted the cops to her kids, unsupervised, in their hotel room. When the cops knocked, the 10-year-old explained their mother would be home by 10. The cops then […]
Let Grow’s annual Think for Yourself Essay Contest asks high school students intriguing questions about the role of free speech and open-mindedness in their everyday lives, including: *When did you speak up — or not — knowing your view might be unpopular? *Was there a time you could have taken offense […]
To “future-proof” is to design a piece of software, or a subway, or almost anything else expensive and important, with an eye toward the future. You try to build in flexibility for whatever is coming ahead. For instance, when I was a kid, my grandfather still had a giant radio console with an empty square […]
For over a decade I’ve been thinking about how we got so scared for our kids — and how our kids got so scared of seemingly normal childhood activities. Enter John Piacentini, a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA where he runs an entire program — CARES — dedicated to identifying and reversing anxiety in kids. […]
“Stranger Danger” gets it SO WRONG that even the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is asking adults to stop teaching it to kids — or believing it themselves. Over at Let Grow today I discuss the enduring legacy of the evil stranger trope and what to teach kids instead. And as I point […]
…turn a budding interest into an adult-led activity. It’s as simple as that. Over at Let Grow, we’ve got some more observations of what turns on a child’s curiosity and the modern way to accidentally turn it off. Click here to read Part 1 of How to Nurture Kids’ Curiosity.
