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…
Author: lskenazy
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…
If you look back on your childhood and what you did in your free time, the thing that you LOVED to do just may still be part of your life. In fact, please tell us stories of that — the thread from your childhood interest or obsession to your current work (or obsession). Me, I wrote all the time as a kid. Still do. Baked all the time. Still do. And I made posters and buttons with weird words on them, because I wanted to coin a phrase. But if I’d had had mounds of homework and only organized activities…
Demonizing anyone isn’t good — gays, Jews, blacks, you name it. And it is no less despicable when we demonize a group that has, until now, enjoyed exemption: Men. Let’s just not demonize, okay? Dear Free-Range Kids: In the early 2000s, as a member of a college honors society, I volunteer tutored at the college level. The lab there included volunteers-in-training and other development opportunities, so I had documentation I used to get employment at Sylvan learning center. They were advertising for someone to tutor high school math, science, and physics AP classes, teach an SAT prep course, and possibly…
Today’s post comes to us from Sally Mills Butzin, the mother half of the mother/daughter writing team behind Best Buddies Birthdays, a guide to homemade, low-tech b-day parties. I agree with everything Sally writes below, and yet must confess that when my kids were young we did all sorts of pricey parties, including one at McDonald’s, one at a children’s theater, and one at a bowling alley. (And if you want to know how these turned out: Flood in McDonald’s playroom meant kids had to slosh through stagnant water to get to ball pit. Missing actress meant the kids had…
Here’s a letter that had me wondering what to do, too: Dear Free-Range Kids: Curious as to how to best handle this. I have no children of my own, but I do have three dogs. My neighbors (row house neighborhood), let their three young children out to play alone, regularly. This is AWESOME. Kids need a little independence these days. . But here’s where the issue comes in. They have also allowed all of the other neighborhood children into their yard. So, what’s going on is their children are outside unsupervised, and then the number of children grow, sometimes over…
The girl is sooo cute. The parents are sooo worried. The message is sooo sickening: Welcome to the world, little one! Let’s get rid of that trust thing RIGHT AWAY. DISTRUST is the name of the game. Start distrusting already! Soon you may have to save yourself from a terrible man. Cookies are good — men with cookies are bad. Remember: Your job is to be cute and DISTRUST! Are these parents really convinced that their child will be lured away? And that when this is attempted, she will have to “save” herself? Aren’t most kids this age pretty supervised?…
When I was at the US Play Coalition conference at Clemson University last month, Kent Callison from the playground manufacturing company GameTime was talking about the importance of videos. He aired the one I posted here about how prisoners get two hours a day of “play” time outside, which is more than most of today’s kids get. Very powerful. As we got to talking, Kent showed me another video that blew me away, this one of two of his daughters on a day at school celebrating the fact, “It’s Okay to be Different.” It sure brought that point home for…