This week’s New Yorker contains possibly the most devastating article I’ve ever read: Sarah Stillman’s, “The List,” subtitled, “When juveniles are found guilty of sexual misconduct, the sex-offender registry can be a life sentence.” Stillman calmly details just how shocking and sadistic our sex offender laws are, from arresting tweens who played doctor, to treatment that’s a mish-mash of pop psychology and medieval torture. For instance: One treatment involves measuring an offender’s response to pornography with a “penile plethysmograph” — a.k.a. the “peter meter.” (See below.) Do we really want our government measuring the circumference of people’s penises? Stillman also…
Author: lskenazy
Plush Toy is Secret Signal to Sex Traffickers, Says WFLA TV By buying a plush toy with a heart on it, Tampa mom Nicole O’Kelly unwittingly alerted predators that her little girl “is ready to be traded for sex.” Or so reports (if that’s the word) the station WFLA. Using a garbled mishmash of horror and hysteria, correspondent Melanie Michael told viewers that the toy, a pink stuffed truck recently purchased at a Monster Jam event, “held a sick secret; a disgusting calling card for creeps. The heart on the toy was a symbol for pedophiles.” Um…what? The heart within…
Almost every time I’m interviewed about “Why I Let My 9 Year Old Ride the Subway Alone” (and he’s 17 now!), the interviewer finally leans over to ask, “But Lenore, how would you have felt if he never came home?” Since I think the interviewer can pretty much guess how I’d feel, it finally occurred to me that this is not a question — it’s an accusation. “How would you have felt…” is code for, “How come you weren’t thinking about how terrible you’d feel, knowing the role YOU played in this easily preventable tragedy?” Parents are constantly exhorted not…
Rhode Island, you may recall, has proposed some of the most anti-Free-Range laws in America: *The law proposed by four legislators in 2014 that would have made it illegal to let any child under 7th grade get off the school bus without an adult waiting there to escort him or her home.That bill died, perhaps after some agitation from this blog. *The law proposed in January that would fine parents $1000 and have them lose their drivers’ licenses for three years if they let their kids under age 7 wait in the car, even during an errand. As if a…
Sometimes you have to look at our culture like an anthropologist: What artifacts are precious to the people of today, what activities are protected? It is with those glasses on that we examine this article in Acculturated, which quotes a real estate agent saying: “Buyers today — especially millennial buyers — want everyone to have a private space of their own to decompress under one roof, and the bonus room/playroom outweighs a large yard in their buying decision,” said Patty Blackwelder, a buyer’s agent with Twins Selling Real Estate Realty Associates in Northern Virginia. “The first item that seems to…
This post comes to us from early childhood writer/speaker/wise woman Heather Shumaker, author of It’s OK Not to Share. Tomorrow her new book comes out: It’s OK to Go Up the Slide , which includes Free-Rangey chapters like Safety Second, It’s OK to Talk to Strangers, and Ban Elementary Homework. It even offers sample scripts and ideas for how to opt out of the homework-heavy culture, along with her renegade views on technology, kindergarten, princesses and more. Her books, blog and podcast are at: www.heathershumaker.com. What I appreciate so much about Heather is how she sees that the more we…
How about we all take this pledge: “The next time I see a child who seems upset, I will not immediately assume I’m witnessing either an abduction or abuse. If I am worried, I will watch a little longer, or politely inquire as to what’s going on. I will not dial 911 unless I see the child is in immediate, obvious and grave danger. Signed in non-hysteria, ______________” Deal? So spread this pledge around. It was inspired by this note I just got from Austin: Dear Free-Range Kids: Someone just called the police on my 41 yo nanny who had…
How can you not love this story? Siblings Jack and Phoebe Gore, 10 and 7 respectively, hung out the proverbial shingle and started a detective agency in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood. They charge $6 a case and, according to DNAInfo’s Carolina Pichardo: With only a few weeks in business — and using nothing more than a whiteboard, notepad, handmade fliers and a customized badge their grandfather, a retired lieutenant of the NYPD, gave them — the brother-and-sister duo have helped their neighbors find everything from a lost dog tag to an earring to a wad of cash. The…
Leigh Ann Arthur, a South Carolina teacher at the Union County High, left her phone on her desk when she went out to do hall monitor duty. A student picked it up and fiddled with it. Then, according to Reason.com: After discovering the phone was unlocked, he went through Arthur’s photos, eventually finding some sexually oriented shots that Arthur says she took for her husband. By the time she returned to the classroom, the student [had taken a photo of the sexy picture with his own phone and] was texting the photos to other students. According to Arthur, he told…
Just in case you haven’t seen LosFelizDaycare on Twitter, here’s an introduction. Somehow it has its finger on the sticky pulse of whatever is pickiest, priciest, smuggest and nuttiest in the world of children and their precious adults. You sort of have to read a bunch of them to get the whole vibe which is — yes — exceedingly politically incorrect. Exceedingly. My favorite tweet of late: “To address the recent gossip – we’ve heard the rumor that Zaire’s mommy had an epidural during her birth and we’re looking into it.” Here’s a taste, picked from the most recent material.…