How can you tell when a culture is changing? When something that was once normal suddenly seems wrong. This can be good — grown African-American men no longer called “boy,” grown women at the office no longer automatically called “girl” — or it can be ominous. The story below is silly, but ominous. Our culture has nurtured the knee-jerk suspicion that anytime a man is interested in young people, watch out. Dear Free-Range Kids: Something happened the other day that made me think of your blog. In honor of the 30th anniversary, I was re-watching “Back to the Future” with…
Author: lskenazy
Jonathan Haidt, the NYU Professor who, with First Amendment firebrand Greg Lukianoff co-authored the explosive Atlantic piece,”The Coddling of the American Mind,” was asked how to prevent another wave of kids on campus who can’t handle reading a disturbing book, or sharing the campus with a visiting speaker whose views contrast with their own. He was interviewed for Firstthings, the journal of religion and public life, by Dominic Bouck, O.P, a Dominican brother of the Province of St. Joseph, in an article titled “Revenge of the Coddled”: BOUCK: So how do we move forward, out of this vindictive attack culture?…
Dear Free-Range Kids: I have been reading your blog and it is like a breath of fresh air in today’s world! My daughter is now 6 and I try to encourage her to walk on her own in our neighborhood, to the park, to the store, and EVERY time she is stopped by a well-meaning adult saying she should not be by herself, and one guy calling me (she knows my cell phone number) and then threatening to call 911! So now she is afraid to walk alone because of these well meaning adults, not because of fear of getting…
The Daily Mail is not known for its stunning objectivity and calm. And yet, most of this Free-Range Kids story by Lauren Libbert is great — except for the scourge of modern journalism, the inevitable “Yin/Yang.” So while the reporter describes two Free-Range families, along with a third that I would consider a bit beleaguered, the “expert” she quotes to provide the yang argument against Free-Ranging is way off. He confuses Free-Range Parents with parents who completely ignore their children and their safety. What really kills me is when an objective truth — school age kids CAN play pretty safely…
A blind girl in Britain has been told she cannot use her cane at school because it presents a tripping hazard. A tripping hazard, that is, to the people who can see her — and her cane. According to the Bristol Post: Lily-Grace Hooper, who is seven, suffered a stroke when she was just four days old, which left her virtually blind. But her school, Hambrook Primary School, has now told the youngster she can no longer use her walking cane, because it could trip up teachers and other pupils at the school. A risk assessment by Gary Learmonth from…
Okay, okay, the mom shouldn’t have left the keys in the car when she ran in to do something quick at work before taking her son, age 8, to school. But here’s what happened next, in Norfolk, VA: Two men who stole a car from outside a Norfolk post office discovered a young boy inside the vehicle… so they dropped him off at school! Norfolk Police say they responded to a call shortly after 8 am in the 400 block of W. 20th Street for a possible stolen vehicle. 13News Now has learned that two carjackers got into a car…
The Evening Standard announced that Facebook will “automatically warn parents if they share pictures of their children with the public by accident.” Thank goodness! Imagine if the public saw a photo of my child at the park! All bets are off! Here’s how Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of Engineering, explained the new feature: “If I were to upload a photo of my kids playing at the park and I accidentally had it shared with the public, this system could say: ‘Hey wait a minute, this is a photo of your kids, normally you post this to just your family…
Just had to share this, a few days late: An emu on the loose in Delaware caused two schools to go into lockdown. As one student told his grandpa, a big bird was outside and police were chasing it, so couldn’t play on the playground. And they say Americans are getting soft. Here’s a picture of the elusive threat:
While I can’t be sure that these incidents of overkill are increasing, what I am certain IS happening is the demonization of men in the vicinity of children. It also seems to me that we must have a surfeit of police, at least in some neighborhoods, or why would this non-incident warrant NINE cops’ attention? From The Daily Kos comes this story: ….After about 25 years in the NYC metropolitan area, I recently returned home to where I grew up in south Jersey. My stepfather had passed away last October, and my 88 year-old mother didn’t want to leave the…
This piece was written by a University of Pennsylvania junior, Alec Ward, back in April, long before campus speech became such a major national story. He found himself puzzling over the same thing I was pondering the other day: If students are unhappy, uncomfortable, or offended, isn’t that a very different thing from feeling literally “unsafe?” And yet “unsafe” is the word being used. Why? This ran in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the college paper: Reconsidering the rhetoric of safety, by Alec Ward On Monday of last week, conservative writer David Horowitz gave a speech on Israel at the University of…