File it under “Fear of frying.” A school in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands between England and France) has cancelled its annual beach trip due to the possibility of sun. Students from St George’s Preparatory in St Peter normally enjoy an end-of-year beach day but the school decided to cancel the outing, citing warnings about the dangers of mid-day sun exposure. “In recognition of the Jersey Health department’s advice regarding the dangers of the midday sun, it is with considerable regret that I have decided to cancel our annual day on the beach in July,” Headmaster Colin Moore wrote,…
Author: lskenazy
This weekend, 11-year-old Reilly McMillan and her sister Gracie, 8, have a sad, government-mandated task ahead of them. They must take down the tree swing in front of their house — the one they made and put up with their dad. It could “chafe” the tree’s bark. The problem is that while the tree is on a patch of lawn that the Calgary, Alberta, family mows and rakes, it is separated from their property by a sidewalk, making it a officially a city tree on city land. An onlooker noticed the swing a few months after the McMillans put it…
What a friend we have in Garry! This ran the other week: In case you can’t read it, it says: Blue Mom: Hey look boys — a new playground. boys? How ridiculous is this? Pink Mom: Sorry? Blue Mom: This playground! It’s so safe and sterile! Everything’s rubberized and low to the ground. Kids have a basic need to experience risk. To face fear and overcome it. That’s how they become confident. But this place? My guys are totally bored here! Pink Mom: Which ones are yours? Blue Mom: They’re right over there. Pink Mom: Um…over where? Blue Mom: Across…
Here’s an excerpt from my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal: A Parent’s Nightmare—Increasingly Unlikely by Lenore Skenazy In the past two decades stranger-danger child murders have dropped enormously, according to a new Justice Department report. In 1997 there were 115 “stereotypical” kidnappings of children under age 17—”stereotypical” roughly translating to “like the ones you see on ‘Law & Order.’ ” These are kidnappings at the hands of a stranger or slight acquaintance. Last week the department released a bulletin with figures for 2011. Roughly the same number of kidnappings, 105, occurred, but only 8% ended in murder. In 1997,…
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…
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…