More than half of all 14-year-olds are NOT ALLOWED OFF THEIR BLOCK (finds an Institute for Family Studies survey of 25,000 Americans)? That is LITERALLY, not figuratively, WACKY! It’s like believing that if you eat a KitKat your ears will SPURT BLOOD! A friend just wrote to say that my job is hard because not only do people not realize there’s anything OFF about this constant terror for our kids, it has become completely normal and even valorized. BUT! The fact that there’s now a bill in CONGRESS saying that America has gone overboard on safety and this is ruining…
Author: lskenazy
Bi-partisan bill would stop investigating Free-Range parents Son in Famous Meitivs of Maryland Case Weighs In — as Does His Mom How do you get more kids out and about on their own – and assure parents this won’t be mistaken for neglect? That’s a question Let Grow has been addressing since we were founded in 2017 to make childhood independence easy, normal and legal. The legal part got a huge boost Tuesday when Rep. Blake Moore (R., Utah) and Jennifer McClellan (D., Virginia) introduced the Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act in the U.S. House of Representatives. Its purpose…
Everyone’s watching the Netflix 4-parter Lord of the Flies. So let me repeat what the great Peter Gray says about that story: IT. IS. FICTION. We can’t use it as a reason to give kids less freedom because “this is what happens.” Because it’s not. (The REAL story of 6 kids marooned on an island found them working cooperatively and rescued more than a YEAR LATER. Look up “Tongan Castaways.” The boys not only maintained their humanity, they worked as a group, kept a fire burning the whole time, and even held funerals for the birds they cooked for food.)…
The social commentator Matthew Yglesias posted a note about his son’s childhood on Twitter yesterday — under an amazing (and, to me, infuriating and heartbreaking) graph from the Institute for Family Studies: Wrote Yglesias: My son (age eleven) is definitely allowed to go places in the neighborhood but compared to how I remember myself does not have that much interest in doing so — “at home” has become way more entertaining than it used to be and most of his friends don’t live very close to us. I replied: It’s way easier to get our kids outside when there are…
“Lenore, did you say you don’t CARE about kids and phones?” That’s what a child psychologist just emailed me. MY RESPONSE: It’s NOT that I don’t care about phones. It’s that this is how kids are growing up (from an article I just read): Last week, my grandson asked permission to walk to the store 3 blocks away. His mother checked the GPS tracker on his phone, reminded him about stranger danger, and set a 20-minute timer for his return.” That childhood would depress ANYONE. Being treated like a Brinks delivery: tracked, timed, watched, warned, distrusted. Not to mention underestimated,…
I was writing up my email “Vacation Response” for today and tomorrow as I prepare for the Passover seders (the holiday is celebrated two nights in a row) and realized I wanted to share it here. So — voila! Hi Friend! Today marks the beginning of Passover, the holiday celebrating freedom from Pharoah — and tyranny. Not sure that this holiday is what forged by worldview, but it helped. Each year we tell the story of how we were slaves in Egypt until we couldn’t take it anymore and left. (Rather dramatically.) The causes I believe in, starting with childhood…
This is the second of my two-part “series” (does two essays = a series?) highlighting the bi-partisan nature of the Free-Range Kids movement. I spoke with Jennifer Newsom and Abby Cox who are married to governors of two very different states: California and Utah. Where they overlap is in the desire to give kids a wonderful, real-world childhood. My Newsom interview ran last week. This is my interview with Utah First Lady Abby Cox. Cox is a champion for educators, foster kids, special ed, and the Special Olympics. She is also the wife of Gov. Spencer Cox. Born and raised…
PART 1 Have you noticed that childhood independence is almost shockingly NON PARTISAN? It’s not a right or left-wing thing to want your kids to be able to walk to the store, play outside, or spend some unsupervised time at home – without being investigated for neglect. That is one reason Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, has been able to help pass “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws in 12 states so far, usually with bi-partisan co-sponsors and often unanimously. (I am president of Let Grow.) The law is WILDLY bi-partisan because it simply guarantees parents that …
Every year, the New York Toy Fair takes over the huge Javits Convention Center and shows us the future: i.e., thousands and thousands of toys. I’ve been going off and on for decades and here’s what I saw this year: STEM? MEH. NOW IT’S ALL ABOUT “MESH” A few years ago it was hard to tell the Toy Fair from MIT. The aisles were filled with Science Technology and Math – “STEM” — toys teaching everything from AP bio to quantum physics. Any toy that wasn’t particularly scientific nonetheless claimed it was: Toy cars taught Newtonian laws of motion. Toy…
The situation was this: A 6-year-old rode off on his bike and stayed out for two hours, without his parents knowing where he was. That would have had me, yep, me, very worried. But when a mom asked Slate for advice on how to deal with this situation – and with her husband saying this was no big deal, he used to ride his bike at that age — an advice-giver went ballistic. “Even 10 minutes gone without explicit permission and knowledge of where exactly you could find him would have been too much! As soon as he was out of your sight,…