. From Camp Insurance-in-the-Woods comes this tale: . Dear Free-Range Kids: I’m not sure if you’ve written anything recently on sleepaway summer camp becoming less and less Free-Range, but I wanted to share the experiences of my 12-year-old daughter, who just returned from a one-week camp run in a partnership with the YMCA. . There were certainly aspects that taught independence and managing without parents, but there was a bit too much hand-holding for kids not used to helicopter parenting. At the performance for families on the last day, where I was given a wristband with my child’s name…
Author: lskenazy
This week, Ikea made a sweeping recall of its 29,000,000 dressers sold in America and Canada: After the deaths of three toddlers, Ikea has agreed to immediately stop selling dressers that too easily tip over, and to offer full refunds to millions of customers who bought them. The recall applies to 29 million dressers, some sold more than a decade ago, including the company’s popular, low-cost Malm line. By Monday, Ikea’s website no longer carried the Malm models blamed in the deaths, which fail industry stability tests. Details of the agreement, which a federal agency source briefed on the matter…
Here’s how worst-first thinking and insurance issues (the two are linked, of course) corrode community, example #763: Dear Free-Range Kids: I previously had helped a couple of times in our church’s nursery. Due to gaps across caregivers on the latest occasion, I was approached by a kiddo who needed to use the potty, and so I helped her. I later was redressed by church nursery staff and had a terse confrontation with the church director of children’s ministries. No men were to ever change diapers, etc, etc. The staffer cited the risks of men being child sexual predators. Of course,…
Paula Fass’ new book The End of American Childhood is a history of childhood and parenting from the nation’s founding to the present. Fass, a University of California-Berkeley history professor, reveals how our values of independence, self-definition and success have affected our attitudes toward child rearing. The excerpt below comes from a chapter on the rise of parenting expert in the early 20th century. It discusses how new scientific expertise (some wise, some wrong) changed American parenting. Before that, very few laws or regulations restricted family life. This largely laissez-faire perspective gave way to much more self-conscious forms…
Okay, quick facts, since we are all familiar with scenarios like this already. According to reporter Glen Luke Flannagan in The State, a newspaper in South Carolina: A Lexington County woman who police say left two children alone in a vehicle Friday afternoon told law enforcement that the truck was running, locked and air conditioned. The sheriff’s department declined to specify what danger the children were in during the Friday incident when asked by The State on Tuesday. Um…maybe because they were not IN any real world danger? But when the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department charged Maria Rivas-Velazques, 34, with…
Below are some tips sent to me because, as a mommy blogger, I am assumed to be constantly looking for some expert to tell clueless, flummoxed me how to talk to my kids about __________. Fill in the blank. Something awful. It could be ticks, cancer, earthquakes or, God help us, the election. Today (somewhat belatedly, no?) I got an email with advice from a psychologist on “How to Approach Mass Shootings with Your Child.” Um, most of us do not approach mass shootings. We run away. But of course, it’s really about how to approach the topic of mass…
File it under “Fear of frying.” A school in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands between England and France) has cancelled its annual beach trip due to the possibility of sun. Students from St George’s Preparatory in St Peter normally enjoy an end-of-year beach day but the school decided to cancel the outing, citing warnings about the dangers of mid-day sun exposure. “In recognition of the Jersey Health department’s advice regarding the dangers of the midday sun, it is with considerable regret that I have decided to cancel our annual day on the beach in July,” Headmaster Colin Moore wrote,…
This weekend, 11-year-old Reilly McMillan and her sister Gracie, 8, have a sad, government-mandated task ahead of them. They must take down the tree swing in front of their house — the one they made and put up with their dad. It could “chafe” the tree’s bark. The problem is that while the tree is on a patch of lawn that the Calgary, Alberta, family mows and rakes, it is separated from their property by a sidewalk, making it a officially a city tree on city land. An onlooker noticed the swing a few months after the McMillans put it…
What a friend we have in Garry! This ran the other week: In case you can’t read it, it says: Blue Mom: Hey look boys — a new playground. boys? How ridiculous is this? Pink Mom: Sorry? Blue Mom: This playground! It’s so safe and sterile! Everything’s rubberized and low to the ground. Kids have a basic need to experience risk. To face fear and overcome it. That’s how they become confident. But this place? My guys are totally bored here! Pink Mom: Which ones are yours? Blue Mom: They’re right over there. Pink Mom: Um…over where? Blue Mom: Across…
Here’s an excerpt from my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal: A Parent’s Nightmare—Increasingly Unlikely by Lenore Skenazy In the past two decades stranger-danger child murders have dropped enormously, according to a new Justice Department report. In 1997 there were 115 “stereotypical” kidnappings of children under age 17—”stereotypical” roughly translating to “like the ones you see on ‘Law & Order.’ ” These are kidnappings at the hands of a stranger or slight acquaintance. Last week the department released a bulletin with figures for 2011. Roughly the same number of kidnappings, 105, occurred, but only 8% ended in murder. In 1997,…