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…
Author: lskenazy
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 (Feel free to add your own outdated faves.)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…
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…
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…