On a recent Saturday night, Marine Sgt. Aaron Rasheed was in Manhattan with his wife and three young children, including baby Elijah, who cried part-way through the new documentary they’d come up from Virginia to watch. I can’t blame the boy. “The Syndrome” is about Shaken Baby Syndrome — a heinous crime we’ve all heard of. Back in the fall, when Elijah was 3 weeks old, he suffered a seizure. Sgt. Rasheed and his wife rushed him to the hospital. The baby had two hematomas — blood on the brain (or at least it looked like that at the…
Author: lskenazy
As we say in our house all the time, “Go Dog, Go!” as in hooray and carry on: Dear Lenore, I was newly married but still childless when my little brother sent me the article you wrote about letting your son ride the subway alone. I was living in my home state of Montana, but had previously taught in the South Bronx so he thought I’d like to hear about your son’s adventure. Fast forward a year or two and I had a kid of my own and my brother sent me your Free-Range Parenting blog because I was…
Readers, one of you must be good at figuring out where to find the latest Simpsons’ episode, legally. (We have plenty of people in my home who can do it the other way.) If/when you do, please share its embed code. But until that date, here is a synopsis of last night’s season finale. According to the A.V. Club: In the end of “Orange Is The New Yellow,” The Simpsons’ 27th season finale, there’s a prison riot and a tornado. Marge is in the cooler because Martin’s overzealous mother spotted Bart playing—non-destructively even—in the park without parental supervision. Critic Dennis…
Readers, the weekend has gotten away from me, so let me simply post this article from The Independent, reporting that a school has stopped teachers from blowing whistles at the end of recess because the “aggressive” noise could scare some children: St Monica’s Catholic Primary School in Milton Keynes has said instead of using whistles at the end of playtime, staff must raise their hands to tell pupils when it’s time to stop. The ban was revealed by Pamela Cunningham, a teaching assistant at the school. In a letter to Country Life magazine, she said she still keeps her hand-carved…
How do you get kids back outside — and, incidentally, revitalize narcoleptic neighborhoods? You bring in risk. This New Zealand playground was designed to give kids a lot more “wheee” — or maybe “aghhh!” — for the buck. More than 6000 children contributed to the early stages of the playground’s development through the BNZ Amazing Place competition.They sent in their wild ideas for the ultimate playground, each dreaming bigger and better than the one before. They dreamt up “rocket lands”, dragon slides into sandpits, native fish aquariums and “dolphin rockers”. They wanted flying foxes that went through dark tunnels and…
Law school students at Britain’s University of East Anglia have been told not to throw their mortarboards in the air upon graduating — it’s just too dangerous. Instead, they are being asked to “mime” the gleeful tossing, with the caps to be Photoshopped in later, for an added fee of about $12. I guess as law students, these young folk should understand better than anyone the university’s desire to avoid all the pain and suffering — and litigation — that accrue from falling hats. . That being said, the Chronicle of Higher Education found only one case in roughly a…
This Saturday will be our sixth annual Take Our Children to the Park…and Leave Them There Day. That means I have six other blog posts explaining it. Allow me the favor of reprinting one of them, here: Yes folks, this Saturday is international Take Our Children to the Park…and Leave Them There Day, the Free-Range holiday that’s celebrated just the way it sounds: We all take our kids to our local park and, if they’re 7 or 8 or older, leave them there for a while, starting at 10 a.m. That way, they meet up with other kids from the…
This post comes from Mollie Shaw, a friend, frequent commenter, and Free-Ranger who is a writer and marketing consultant in British Columbia. Maybe it will resonate for you the way it did for me: Dear Free-Range Kids: I can remember feeling lonely as a young child in the 1970s. I have vivid recollections of being inside my house, on a weekend, or a long summer day, “nothing” on TV (the three major networks and fuzzy reception of PBS). If I had called all of my friends (I don’t think my mother ever made a call to another parent trying to…
Wow. I’m so impressed by Julie Gunlock standing her, well, guns, when talk show hosts try to suggest she might have done something wrong letting her three sons (9,7 and 5) wait in the car while she got a rotisserie chicken. Poise, compassion and common sense are going to win this! – L P.S. Here is the list of state laws about waiting in the car that Julie refers to. . . .
Because I understand that different generations have fun in different ways — I myself did not grow up whittling, for instance, nor have I ever played marbles — I solemnly swear not to say, “Can’t kids play for THREE SECONDS even on something as joyful as a TRAMPOLINE without needing a COMPUTER SCREEN to tell them what to do and how to have fun?” So I won’t. I’ll just show you the ad for the Springfree Trampoline “outdoor interactive digital gaming system” that lets kids interface with a computer game by jumping on their trampoline, sort of like Dance Dance…