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,…
Author: lskenazy
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…
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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…
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…