The principal of an elementary school in Magnolia, TX, has forbidden parents from picking up their kids to walk them home. No matter how close the children live to the school, they are required to take the bus or be picked up by car, Fox 26 in Houston is reporting. If not, the local authorities are ready to enforce the rule with arrests for trespassing. The ostensible reason for this step at Bear Branch Elementary is “safety.” It always is, right? What I couldn’t glean from the story is whether kids are allowed to leave the school, by foot, without…
Author: lskenazy
A South Carolina mom who let her 9-year-old nephew walk her 3-year-old son to the McDonald’s less than a quarter mile away has been — I’m sure you can finish this sentence in your sleep by now — arrested and charged with child neglect. The reason? According to WSPA News 7: . The officer says the boys had to cross a street and pass several businesses and homes to get to the eatery, putting their safety at risk. Oh if only the kids had passed something less inherently dangerous than a home! Or business! The mom, Tiesha Mesha Hillstock,…
This story is everywhere today. As CBS News reports: A 9-year-old reporter who wrote about a suspected murder in her small Pennsylvania town is defending herself after some locals lashed out about a young girl covering violent crimes. Hilde Kate Lysiak got a tip Saturday afternoon about something untoward happening on 9th street in Selinsgrove, about 150 miles northwest of Philadelphia. She went to the scene to get the details and posted a story and video clip on her website the “Orange Street News” later that day. “Hi, Hilde Kate Lysiak here reporting from the Orange Street News on the…
As you know, I’m no fan of on worst-first thinking — thinking about the worst case scenario first and proceeding as if it’s likely to happen. Turns out neither is Juliette Kayyem, even though serious, intensive, worst-firsting has sort of been her job. Kayyem was Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs in the United States Department of Homeland Security. She also served as co-Director of Harvard’s Long-Term Legal Strategy for Combating Terrorism, and held other positions at that university. On WGBH and other media, she’s the Security Mom. Now she’s got a book out: Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting…
This dad cannot be the only person out there who wonders how much a baby can handle in terms of dirt and bumps: Dear Free-Range Kids: Please direct to where I can find research, or better yet, documentaries about what minor risks that you don’t need to worry about with infants — like if they hit their head while playing with a chair, or touch a slipper or an unvacuumed floor. My frustrated son is counting on you. My wife is overprotective but it’s just because she is misguided. Like a lot of people, she thinks that you need to…
Check out the brilliance of these British kids. According to the Daily Mail: Aged between six and 12, they were on an Easter egg hunt in the middle of a field near the village of Capel, Surrey, when they spotted the helicopter circling. I highly doubt I would have been nearly as resourceful as these “Tremendous 12,” as they’ve been dubbed by the press: Describing what happened next, one of them, a nine-year-old girl, said: ‘It was really noisy and we could see it said “police” on the bottom. Then we saw a man running along the side of the…
Free country? Not if you think your kids are old enough to walk to school AND learn a lesson. A Tennessee mom, Lisa Marie Palmer, learned this the hard way, after she made her kids walk to school when they missed the bus. Wait a minute — she made her kids WALK? Outside? To school? How could they possibly do THAT, I’d like to know. It’s unheard of! Of course this is a crime! As the local Times Free press reports: It “appeared as if she was driving ahead of the children and allowing them to walk and catch up…
Here’s a charming little nugget sent to us by a reader named Kathleen, who writes: Dear Free-Range Kids: I thought you would enjoy this artifact of saner times. I draw your attention to the 4th column, last paragraph before the lists begin. It’s part of an article in a July, 1865 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that talks about the police, and devotes a paragraph to describing how kindly police officers treated lost children and their efforts to return them to their parents. The article is titled The Police of Brooklyn. And here is that very paragraph! (And yes,…
Here’s my piece from last week’s New York Post about how we get so used to over-the-top security measures that we think we can’t reverse them. But maybe we can. Maybe we must. Our Unfounded Obsession with Safety Is Costing Us our Freedom by Lenore Skenazy As you inch your way through security at the airport, you’ll be relieved of your penknife and terrifying tube of Pepsodent. Your unopened can of Coke will, of course, be thrown in the trash, along with any snow globes, and off go your shoes. When at last you’re reshod and passing the duty-free shop,…
For a while, our cousins across the pond had a hard time distinguishing between the truly risky and and the truly ridiculous. Recall that in Britain last year, a school told a blind girl to stop using her cane, because it posed a tripping hazard to the other kids. This is also the country where many schools have banned tag, snowballs, and, in one case, frilly socks — a tripping hazard yet again. (Maybe Monty Python wasn’t exaggerating with those silly walks.) And then there was that headmistress who blacked out the eyes of kids in the yearbook, so no…