Congratulations, Rhode Island! Looks like you are about to become the proud parents of every child in the state, pushing aside those stupid “real” parents, because you know so much more about how to raise their kids than they do! According to this AP article by Matt O’Brien: State lawmakers are debating a bill that would punish parents for leaving a child younger than 7 alone in a car. They’ve also proposed legislation to ban kids under 10 from being home alone and older kids from being home alone at night. Legislation could even extend to private preschools, where…
Author: lskenazy
Susan Solomon is an architectural historian who studies the science of play, the architecture of playgrounds (among other things), and what it takes to get kids doing their thing outside. The first step, of course, is just that: Getting them out the door. In this post on her Science of Play blog, she offers a way to make that happen. It may be easier than we thought! …American kids, when they have unstructured free time, seem to favor playing inside. Conventional wisdom cites computers, video games, and TV programs as some of the primary culprits that seduce kids into staying…
Imagine a world where a brief encounter between young people and strangers does not automatically warrant police involvement — or a news report. Now imagine you were in central Massachusetts yesterday where this “behavior” took place, in broad daylight. Would you call the cops? The TV stations? Would you beg “anyone with credible information about the incident” to call, as if there’d been a mugging, or murder? The 2016 answer is yes, as this story from WCVB attests. I’m reprinting it in its entirety in case you might otherwise assume I’m leaving out some salient details, like, “All the young…
. How does change happen? How do we give kids — and ourselves — the freedom we all deserve? Freedom to be part of the world? Sometimes all it takes is simply standing our ground and demanding our rights. Here’s what one mom did. – L Dear Free-Range Kids: I LOVE what you are doing and wanted to share an experience with you. I recently transferred my 8-year-old, 3rd grade son to a new, small charter school in San Diego. After school, my son goes to the Boys and Girls Club. When I transferred him, I thought it would be…
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…
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…