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…
Author: lskenazy
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.…
A tragedy occurred in Portland, OR, just a few days ago: A girl who went to bed after her dad’s birthday party was found dead 20 minutes later with a giant Mylar balloon somehow (the articles make it impossible to understand how) over her head. The theory is that perhaps she was trying to breathe in the helium to make her voice sound funny, but somehow this went hideously awry. All of which is enough to make your heart go sort of crazy with sadness and horror. But of course, we are not allowed to leave it at that. After…
In a piece I wrote for today’s New York Post, I talk about how the Oscars seemed completely fixated on the evils of not just racism, but rape. Especially child rape. The Academy Award for best film was about child rape (“Spotlight”), the best actress was in a movie about abduction and rape (“Room”), and the Vice President showed up and spoke about campus rape (as if it’s more prevalent than off-campus rape, which it’s not). Then rape survivors were featured on stage, and Lady Gaga sang about rape. And when ABC cut to commercials, often it was to advertise…
Last week, I wrote about the viral video of a man shouting at a woman for letting her baby wait in the car while she ran a short errand at Target. One commenter commented on a comment (how’s THAT for modern life?) and I thought it bore repeating. She was dumbstruck by the way the comments on the original video condemned the mom not for what DID happen, not for what was even anywhere near LIKELY to happen in the course of a short errand on a mild day, but what MIGHT have happened under far different circumstances. Wrote OUR…
. In this case, it’s a baby lamb the 3-year-old delivers. Brought to you by a blog that believes we are a culture with amnesia when it comes to remembering how capable, competent and curious kids are naturally. And as for the neigh-sayers? Baaaah humbug. . .
I was just whistling the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” which famously begins, “Well she was just 17, you know what I mean?” I believe I do know. Which made me think: John Lennon wrote the “You know what I mean?” line. He and the Beatles sang this song on Ed Sullivan in 1964, when John was 24. If he’d actually, um, followed through with anyone 17 — you know what I mean? — by today’s laws he would be a rapist in 11 American states where the age of consent is 18. These include California, Virginia, Oregon and…
If only there was a law preventing parents from making rational decisions about how to raise their beloved kids! That seems to be the consensus, at least about this particular case, as presented by this particular station: KHQ Spokane reported that a man noticed a baby in a car in a Target parking lot and confronted the mom as she returned after her brief errand. “You do not leave a baby in the car!” cried the man, Jon Evans, even though — clearly — she did leave the baby in the car, and the baby was fine. As babies generally…