ThisFox 59 WXIN ad is so classic it belongs in the Fearmongering Hall of Fame…or maybe on The Simpsons. I so wish I could find the embed code, but I can’t. (Can anyone? Please send!) In any event, here’s the transcript. Imagine dirge like music and out-of-focus pictures of kids playing (which happens to be my other bugaboo. As if showing the faces of frolicking kids automatically puts them in grave danger!): SCARY ANNOUNCER: There’s a safety concern lurking in your neighborhood playground. CONCERNED MOM: Alarms definitely went off. SCARY ANNOUNCER: And your child could fall victim when you least…
Author: lskenazy
Dutifully documenting the end of human trust and common sense, I give you this: Dear Free-Range Kids: I love my Church, but I was really turned off by this new policy: “To date, we have allowed students to check themselves out of the Tweenz class rather than requiring a parent to pick them up.  However, going forward, for the safety and security of our children, we will be requiring you to pick up your child with your parent sticker that matches the unique alpha-numeric code on your child’s sticker.  Children will not be permitted to leave the Tweenz class without…
A reader in the U.K, Hazel, sends us this strange story of a 14-year-old girl who went to retrieve her backpack, which a friend had hung on the school fence as some sort of minor joke. But then, reports The Mirror: She used a tree stump to reach the strap of her bag but her friendship ring got snagged on the fence and tore her finger apart… Ugh. The ambulance came but it was too late to save the finger. (Yes, her middle one.) But what prompted Hazel to send the story was that the girl’s mom, Zoe, is now…
Readers, here’s my piece on sex offender laws that’s in today’s New York Post. If you have sons, it might give you pause. Bogus ‘sex offender’ labels are ruining lives by Lenore Skenazy What’s the most common age of sex-offenders? It’s not a trick question, but unless you follow this stuff closely you’ll almost certainly answer wrong. In fact, most people are shocked to learn that the most common age of people charged with a sex offense isn’t a creepy 39, or 51. It’s 14. That’s right. As the US Bureau of Justice reports: “The single age with the greatest…
When I spoke at the Velo-City Conference in Austria a few years back, the speaker before me declared that helmet laws are so cumbersome and they make biking seem so scary that instead of keeping kids safe, they’re simply keeping kids from biking. Well that shocked me. I’ve always loved helmets and insisted upon them for my kids…who, come to think of it, are not avid bikers. Now along comes this brilliant piece by Sue Knaup, Executive Director of One Street, an international bicycle advocacy organization. Like the Velo-City speaker, she, too has found that “overzealous bike helmet promotions are…
This just in, from news.com.au: An explanation for the clapping ban we were discussing today on the post before this one. Turns out — A SYDNEY primary school imposed a clapping ban on its students in favour of “silent cheers” because one of its teachers wears hearing aids and found the noise of applause too loud, the NSW Government has said. The admission by Education Minister Adrian Piccoli came after news.com.au’s storyabout Elanora Heights Public School’s ban on clapping announced in a school newsletter. The latest edition of the northern beaches school’s newsletter advised parents that “silent cheering”, “pulling excited…
Elanora Heights, a public school in Sydney, Australia, has banned clapping out of “respect” for noise-sensitive students. Instead, kids can “conduct a silent cheer.” Woo hoo! Sorry… I mean (I am waving my hands in the air in front of my laptop while grinning excitedly). As The Herald Sun reports: In its July 18 newsletter, the Elanora school has published an item under the headline “Did you know” that “our school has adopted silent cheers at assembly’s” (sic). “If you’ve been to a school assembly recently, you may have noticed our students doing silent cheers,” the item reads. “Instead of…
. David Pimentel is law professor at University of Idaho and the father of six Free-Range kids. He writes and speaks about why it’s wrong to legally mandate helicopter parenting. You can find his articles here. And here’s his post on an important verdict (subheads and boldface, mine): . In a critical decision in favor of Free-Range Parents, the Maryland Court of Appeals just reversed the conviction of Beverly Annetta Hall for child neglect. . Ms. Hall had left her 3-year-old child in the care of his 14-year-old sister. In the middle of the night, after everyone in the house…
This comment came in the other day and deserves a closer look. It comes from “Scout Mom,” the mother of two 9-year-olds. And she later found out that at meal time, it was not that each girl had to drink a specific amount, it’s that each table had to collectively drink another two bottles of water. Completely off topic vent here. Well, I guess it’s on the topic of over “protecting” kids. My 9yo got sent home from sleep-away camp this week. Why? Because of water obsession on the part of the staff / volunteers. It was…
Because I am on some “mommy blogger” list, I get pitches all the time from “freelancers” who’d like to write for me. Most often they are from companies looking for free publicity. Sometimes they’re trying to promote a product overtly, as in, “I would like to write an article on how to choose a crib,” signed something like, “Jenny@cribs.com.” But sometimes they offer a generic parenting topic they hope is interesting enough for a blogger to slap on her site, and then it’s embedded with links to whatever the company is pushing. That’s what I assume this one is, below.…