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…
Author: lskenazy
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…
. If you can stand it, please take a look at this article from the Sydney Morning Herald about the death of a 5-year-old boy who tripped on his pre-school’s steps. Is it just me or is the way it’s presented…sickening? The story features photo after photo of the sweet-looking child: five of them, one sadder than the next, since we all know that this boy will never smile again. It’s as if the paper is banging us over the head with pain…but to what end? What is it trying to do with this kind of coverage? Here’s a snippet:…
Here’s a tail-wagging excerpt from a book you might want to fetch: Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World, reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. It’s by the power team of Dr. Brett Finlay, a microbiologist specializing in bacterial infections who is also the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Marie-Claire Arietta, assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Calgary. For more info, see: www.LetThemEatDirt.com. Bring on the Slobberfest, by Dr. Brett Finlay and Dr. Marie-Claire Like many parents and grandparents…
This just popped up on a neighborhood listserv: Just a quick question about preK: my child is in preK at [local school] and I’ve been a little surprised that they haven’t been doing anything educational. My child was in preschool at [other local place] before and they used to read books, paint, practice letters, etc.. There was always a learning theme too. I saw the handwritten schedule the teacher left yesterday and it was something like: play dough time, bathroom, playground, table toys, lunch, nap time, movie time, bathroom, dismissal. My child also reports that there’s a lot…
When Curious George was born 75 years ago this month, his German Jewish parents, H.A. and Margaret Rey, were fleeing the Nazis. They took George with them, in the form of a manuscript. As Alison Lobron notes in The Boston Globe: Three generations children have grown up with Curious George, who celebrates his 75th birthday this month and continues to star in several new stories a year. He’s still inquisitive and prone to find trouble. But as tastes and publishing standards changed, George lost some of his curiosity — and his adventures have largely lost the element of danger. Of…
This piece by Christine Burke on ScaryMommy is about how we interpret the world. Or at least that’s how I interpret it. It begins: We did everything “right,” and yet, it still happened. We moved to a neighborhood with thoughtful neighbors and wide, safe streets. We enrolled our kids in a school district known not only for its exemplary teachers but also for its low violence and drug statistics. Our kids know how to dial 9-1-1 and they know how to call a neighbor for help if we aren’t home. Stranger Danger. Scream, kick, and yell for help if someone…
A dad in Ostego, Michigan, population 3,956, terrified parents, police and school administrators by handing out teddy bears to people he passed on the street, including children in the presence of adults. It was Ken Cronkhite’s attempt to spread some happiness and help his 89-year-old father, the owner of an 800-teddy bear collection, to downsize. And it backfired. As news spread of a man, a plan, and his plush toys, the police department’s phone lines lit up. Officers sped off to patrol the bus stops as at least one frantic mom ripped apart her kid’s bear to see if it…