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…
Author: lskenazy
. 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.…
Here’s an interesting dilemma: Dear Free-Range Kids: . I live in a neighborhood that is very much a throw-back to the 1970’s, complete with a lot of split level houses and a pool that has a real diving board and a ten-foot diving well. If kids can swim the length of the pool and have parental permission, at age 8 they can attend without a parent. . Wonderful! . But somebody always has to spoil it for everyone else, right? . Toward the beginning of the summer, a neighbor approached me to tell me she and another mom and…
By now you have heard that more people have downloaded Pokemon Go than any other app ever. That Nintendo’s stock jumped 25% in one week. That it’s getting kids to actually leave the house to go play — voluntarily! And you have probably also heard of the four guys arrested in a black BMW somewhere in Missouri for ostensibly luring some players to an secluded area with promises of prime Pokemon hunting, and then robbing them. So if you are part of the vast web of Very Concerned Adults whose life’s purpose seems to be dreaming up terrible things that…
After I read this poem that came to my inbox yesterday, I wanted to stand up on the subway and shout, “ATTENTION, EVERYONE. YOU WILL LOVE THIS POEM! You just might feel the same. It was published on the site American Life in Poetry, which bills itself as “A project for newspapers by by Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States 2004-2006.” The poem is by Carrie Shipers of Wisconsin, author of Family Resemblances: Poems (University of New Mexico Press). Mother Talks Back to the Monster by Carrie Shipers Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas, kissed…
In the morning, I like to take a walk with my friend, the mom of a 4-year-old. Lately, thanks to the terrible stories from Baton Rouge, Minnesota and Dallas, she says she has been feeling overwhelmed. Who hasn’t? And yet…and yet… The narrative of chaos and despair obscures and even discounts a different narrative that does not make it to the nightly news. (Which is morning-ly and noon-ly news now, as well.) It’s a narrative you’ll find in the “Crime Stats” tab at the top of my blog. And I was excited to also find it today in this perspective-granting…
The tale below comes to us from Alisha, a former paramedic who says she is “very safety conscious but sick of trying to raise a child in a 100% risk-free environment! Its not even possible.” I was actually talking about the TSA just this morning with a journalist who was asking when and how do we decide to expose our kids to “risk.” “Risk,” however, is a strange word. Everything contains a modicum of risk, including walking downstairs to breakfast. But once we focus on any risk, however slight, it starts to loom larger. And when we decide that we…
. Only in death, it seems, can a sex offender on the registry be considered a human worthy of love and sympathy. . Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old Baton Rouge man who was peddling CDs when he was shot by two police officers on Tuesday, was described by his friends quoted in this Reuters report as “a fun-loving guy” who was also a hardworking dad “who scraped together a living selling music recorded on compact discs.” . “He was a very nice guy, always smiling and laughing,” said Abdullah Muflahi, the owner of the store Sterling worked in front of. .…