Think of our proud founding fathers, the Minutemen who ran in from the fields to wage a revolution. These were ordinary people entrusted to win the freedom of an entire country, accustomed as they were to toiling, being tested, and rising to the occasion. Here’s how we breed that out of our kids: Dear Free-Range Kids: My son is doing a play or something tomorrow. Teacher asked for props, including a shovel. My son has this kids’ gardening shovel. I knew he’d never be allowed on the bus with it. So today, since he had a dentist appt, I just…
Author: lskenazy
From my mailbox, two neatly twinned items. First, a Facebook rant sent in by a mom disgusted by it: Dear “Nana” – It was selfish to leave your Grandchildren strapped in their car seats in the sun today as you bought your Subway. I was in Subway with you and continued to 7 11, on my way to my car your precious grandchildren yelled for me and I stopped, they pointed where “Nana” was, still in Subway. Nana appeared at the Subway door and I asked her why the children were left in the hot car? Her answer was: The…
We live in the information age, which means living in the excess information age. And as most of us have come to realize, almost anything can be deemed “bad” for kids by someone somewhere. My favorite example comes from the Julie Gunlock book, “From Cupcakes to Chemicals,” where she writes about listening to the news one night and hearing how dangerous it was for kids to drink from the garden hose. As if this is their sole source of liquid for 18 years. Now here’s a new screed on the topic from fed-up mom Sara Kallies in the Huffington Post,…
UPDATE: The parents of the boy who wormed his way into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo will not be prosecuted. That is fantastic news for anyone who has ever lost track of a beloved child for a few seconds, minutes or hours — in other words, every parent on earth. (Including the Prime Minister of England, who accidentally left his kid at a pub.) As the prosecutor put it: “If anyone does not believe a 3-year-old can scamper off very quickly, they’ve never had kids,” Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said at a news conference Monday. “Because they…
. Have a great weekend!
A study in England has found that one in five young children is reported to child protective services. One. In. Five. This 45-second audio clip from the BBC’s Today Programme is described thusly: One in five children born between 2009 and 2010 were referred to social services before the age of five because of fears of neglect or abuse, according to researchers from the University of Lancashire. Professor Andy Bilson told Today presenter Justin Webb that the 150,000 referrals of concern was “creating a huge haystack in which we are trying to find the needle of the children who are…
In which self-righteous shamers leave the gorilla world behind and return to harassing more mundane moms: Lenore, I just experienced my first crazy ‘concerned citizen’ this morning. I stopped at the dairy mart to get my son some breakfast on his way into daycare. When I’m running late, he waits the 3 minutes I’m inside the store, within my line of view. I came out this morning and this lady was screaming at me about how she could’ve got in the car and kidnapped him. I told her she was crazy and got in the locked car with the keys…
The account below seems to capture the shocking and chaotic scene at the Cincinnati Zoo, where a toddler wiggled his way into the gorilla exhibit and had to be saved, unfortunately by zookeepers shooting Harambe, the 400-pound gorilla holding onto him. The gorilla died. The boy has been treated and released from the hospital. The public has, naturally, weighed in on this, as if any of us in our armchairs have any insights as to what was happening or should have happened. Many people are livid that the zookeepers killed the animal, but just as many seem to be blaming…
Granted, if children’s dictionaries were never updated, they might be learning “A is for alchemy,” or “B is for bellows.” (Feel free to add your own outdated faves.) But it nettled more than few scrappy scribes to see some of their favorite childhood outdoorsy words flung into the moat of history. As reported by Alison Flood in The Guardian: “A” should be for acorn, “B” for buttercup and “C” for conker, not attachment, blog and chatroom, according to a group of authors including Margaret Atwood and Andrew Motion who are “profoundly alarmed” about the loss of a slew of words…
Trying not to scream about this article in the Toronto Star, “Child Abduction and Murder Paint a Chilling New Portrait.” As reader Frankie wrote: Just the WORST kind of scaremongering!! They use these huge scary numbers but the bottom line is that in all of Canada, coast to coast, there have been an average of THREE kidnappings a year over the past 50 years. THREE. Seems they had to go back 50 years to get enough data to even do a statistical analysis. More pedestrians were killed just in Toronto last month alone. This piece…