File this under The Law of Unintended Consequences, or, more precisely, Force-feeding Young Children Academics Backfires. It comes from an article in the Washington Post by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, author of Taking Back Childhood: …The pressure to teach academic skills in pre-K and kindergarten has been increasing since the passage of the No Child Left Behind act 15 years ago. Today, many young children are required to sit in chairs, sometimes for long periods of time, as a teacher instructs them. This goes against their natural impulse to learn actively through play where they are fully engaged—body, mind, and spirit. Play…
Author: lskenazy
No matter how you feel about gun control, this case is disturbing: A high school student who made an anti-gun-control video for class has been ordered to undergo a 5-hour psychiatric evaluation. Frank Harvey, a senior at Manville High School in New Jersey, says he did the project for a college readiness class last year. As he told New Jersey News 12, “It was assigned by the teacher.” The teacher now says she cannot recall assigning it. His video featured news stories of people who had used guns to fend off home invasions, and some political cartoons that lampooned gun…
. All hail The Onion and it’s “Today Now” show! As the host notes of this story, “It’s the moment that every parent with a 20-foot long snake fears most, and one you can’t possibly predict.” (Sorry about the 30-sec ad before it…which I don’t even understand): . . .
Wondering just how OCD our culture can get when it comes to child safety? In a recent post by a woman worried sick about everything she ate, drank and did while pregnant, she mentioned an article that actually explained “How to Use Mouthwash While Pregnant.” It tells pregnant women to stop using any mouthwash with alcohol in it, as “alcohol affects human development and can cause irreparable cognitive, physical, and neurological birth defects.” YOWZA! That makes it sounds as if rinsing with about a tablespoon of mouthwash is going to turn your kid into a turnip. And THEN it has…
Readers — Have you heard of this program? Is there a way to counter its draconian decrees? Dear Free-Range Kids: I have been a volunteer for many years at my church, but now we have a new pastor, and he brought with him this child care worker training program called “MinistrySafe.” While it is just a set of online videos, and the church is paying for it, it is filled with nonsense statistics about stranger danger. All this seems like the “stranger danger” nonsense that my own generation had to grow up with. It’s no wonder Gen-X is so…
The next time you are having issues with your school (or neighbors, or ex) about letting your child walk home, please print this out. Point by point it explains how walking is not just healthy and fun, it’s actually safer than insisting children NOT walk. This comes to us from Michael Lewyn, an associate professor at Touro Law Center, where he teaches environmental law, property and wills. His scholarship can be found at this page. His passion is below: WALKING IS LESS DANGEROUS THAN NOT WALKING by Michael Lewyn . As readers of this blog know, children who walk more…
Here’s a nice note to start your week: Dear Free-Range Kids: I just wanted to thank you for your blog. I am a teacher and I am about to become a parent for the first time. Since I spend so much time working with and thinking about kids, a lot of my life is saturated in worry about their safety and well-being. Finding your blog has helped me to relax and to realize many of my worries do not come from within, but by a culture of hypervigilance and overstated risk. As you’ve mentioned in previous postings, pregnancy exacerbates worry…
Have any of you come up with a workable solution to schools that won’t let parents decide how their kids get home? This is something we could all use — especially this mom: Dear Free-Range Kids: I am hoping that you might have some resources and/or know of people to point me to who can assist me with an issue that has recently come up: Background: My family and I live in a very small town in Massachusetts and send our two boys to private school there. The boys are in 2nd grade and pre-K. Last year, when my oldest…
You’ve probably been hearing about a new book that takes aim at “parenting,” pointing out that we don’t “spouse” our spouses, we just love them and live with them. But once parents start TO parent, they often feel they are actually able to control the person their child becomes. (I’m pausing while you ruefully snort.) So here’s a review of that book, The Gardner and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik. Reviewing it is Linda Flanagan, a writer, editor, high school cross-country coach, and erstwhile competitive runner. She is a regular contributor to the NPR education blog MindShift, as well as…
. Old school school security irked me because it was so pointless: Write your name on a sheet, show ID, get a sticker. Plain busywork. But school security has ballooned since Sandy Hook and now in addition to being pro-forma, it is also wildly expensive, diverting funds from anything remotely educational. So kudos to Sasha Abramsky for this piece in The Nation, The School-Security Industry Is Cashing In Big on Public Fears of Mass Shootings, which begins: “Security was the number-one factor for me in choosing a school,” explained one of the mothers I met late last winter at a…