Fear is a virus. It can spread even to the independent reaches of Scandinavia, as this letter suggests. It comes to us from Ingebjørg Berg Holm, an interior architect, novelist, and mother of two adventurous kids, aged 4 and 6.The 6-year-old walks himself home and runs small errands. His little sister is looking forward to do the same when she reaches his age. Dear Free-Range Kids: I stumbled across your blog googling kids-safety. I am Norwegian, and I have recently become concerned about what I see as a worrying trend:”Americanisation” of parenting. Just as in USA (and Australia, apparently,) parents…
Author: lskenazy
The New Albany, OH, chief of police is advising parents not to let their kids go outside on their own until they are 16. According to this piece on News10: New Albany’s police chief wants parents to understand that kids younger than 16 simply cannot defend themselves against an attacker. Chief Greg Jones says 16 is the appropriate age to allow children to be outside by themselves. “I think that’s the threshold where you see children getting a little bit more freedom,” he says. Not a lot of freedom, mind you. Just a “little bit.” His stay-close-to-mommy rationale? While the…
There has been an outpouring of online sympathy for the parents of the boy who was killed by an alligator at a Disney resort in Orlando, which just goes to show that sometimes the internet has a heart, and sometimes it calls for blood. The question is why. In contrast with the half a million people who signed a petition against Michelle Gregg, the mom whose 3-year-old son got into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo, leading zookeepers to kill 400-pound Harambe, commenters have not gone insane over the fact that officials have already “put down” four Disney-area alligators,…
I wish I knew how to answer this dad, but I don’t, so I’m crowd-sourcing. If you’re a lawyer, or have been through a custody battle with Free-Range implications (here the subject of a Law Review article), please weigh in. The one resource I did direct the dad to is California Safe Routes to Schools. This organization believes in kids walking to school and tries to make sure all kids can. Here’s the national site, in case you want to contact them yourselves. And I’ll be speaking at the Oregon Safe Routes to Schools conference in Eugene this Monday night,…
The title of this Time piece, “Parenting is Now Officially Impossible,” made me sit up. It’s so true! Anything we do as parents can and may be used against us. It’s like living in a totalitarian state — we are not free to raise our kids as we see fit because we are being watched and judged. We make choices based on fear of busybodies and the authorities they can summon by punching three digits into their phone. This surveillance society has become so normalized that yesterday I was listening to a June 9 episode of Marc Maron’s WTFpodcast a…
How do parents get the idea that if they aren’t playing with their kids, they’re not doing their job? . It’s such a new and culture-specific idea that when I interviewed David Lancy, author of The Anthropology of Childhood, he said that other cultures actually guffaw at the idea of parents sitting on the floor and playing with their kids. To them it’s as bizarre as sitting on the floor and lapping water from the doggie bowl. . Not that it’s wrong to play with your kids, obviously. It just shouldn’t be the only option kids have. And yet, here’s…
A mom who let her 8-month-old twins wait in the car with the windows down, within her view, for 10 minutes, finds herself released on a $25,000 bond and electronic home monitoring. As Patch reports: ALSIP, Ill. — An Alsip woman was arrested after she left her infant twins alone in a car while she went to register her older child for school, prosecutors said. Sarah Laveille, 28, appeared before Cook County Judge Peter Felice on two misdemeanor counts of child endangerment. The prosecutor said that around 8:50 a.m. Monday, Alsip police were called to Prairie Junior High School, 11910…
This is a fascinating Facebook rant by a woman I don’t know but am now hoping will be my FB friend, Sara Mabin. It was posted on June 3, so IGNORE the gorilla references. I think she is so right that society seems bent on glorifying the good old, “Lean on Me” days, even while crucifying any modern parents who don’t monitor their kids’ lives and choices. However, what I have not heard is today’s parents insisting that their OWN parents knew where they were at all times, which is the jumping off point for her piece: This is the…
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…
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…