After hearing from so many parents worried that if they let their kids play outside or walk to school they could run afoul of the authorities, I wrote the statement below. Please fiddle with it to your satisfaction, then bring it to your mayor, or next town meeting, or post it on Facebook — or shout it from the rooftops. (If you do that, please take a video.) I believe that the first town that goes Free-Range will reap a ton of publicity, and property values will soar. (Buy now!) Eventually families will routinely seek out Free-Range cities or towns…
Author: lskenazy
A new law in Rhode Island will make sex offenders living beyond 300 feet of a school move to a place at least 1000 feet from a school. They have 30 days to uproot their lives. Guess who thinks this will make children safer? Only the R.I. Brotherhood of Correction Officers, which sponsored the bill. No one else. Not even law enforcers. As this amazing article by Amanda Milkovits in the Providence Journal reports (boldface mine): Remarkably, law enforcers, civil-rights advocates, supporters of victims of sexual assault and experts who study sex-offender management say the expanded ban could actually decrease…
What is most pernicious about our judgmental society is illustrated below. Just because you — or I — might not choose to transport our child to school the same way as this mom, that does not make her a menace. And disagreements should remain disagreements, not an excuse to sic the authorities on a parent who is raising her kids a little (or even a lot) differently from they way we’re raising ours. When did parenting differences become an opportunity to turn state’s evidence against a loving mom? Dear Free-Range Kids: I almost got reported to Child and Family Services…
Enjoy. Quibble not. All hail Remy, and producer/editor Sean Malone- L.
A 9-year-old girl starts coughing so hard in school that she can barely breathe. You’re the school officials. Do you: 1 – Take bets on how long till she turns blue 2 – Call your lawyer, just in case she dies 3 – Let her use her inhaler At Columbia Elementary in West Jordan, UT, officials chose “none of the above.” They certainly didn’t let the girl use her inhaler, for one simple reason: her name wasn’t on it. So of course they had to grab it away. I mean, just because SHE brought it in and SHE needed it…
Pretty much weekly I hear from some company that wants to solve a problem that does not exist: How to keep tabs on your children every second of every day, in order to keep them “safe.” Here’s the latest, from a company called FamilySignal: Why does this strike me as a corrosive idea? Because products like these are teaching our kids that they are never safe unless they are supervised — in person or electronically — by their parents. And they are teaching parents that letting their kids have any unsupervised time is something good parents don’t do. . Meantime,…
This mini-rant comes to us frorm Tara Lazar, a mom of two and children’s book author. Her website is taralazar.com. Dear Free-Range Kids: I tweeted this Parenting Magazine online article to you a few days ago but wanted to follow up because it has me so upset: “5 Safety Tips to Protect Your Kids from Abduction.” . The author is from a child-tracking GPS company, so of course it’s in his best interest to bend the truth. The article begins: . “According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year, more…
. My friend, colleague and hero Peter Gray, a psychology professor and author of “Free to Learn” (one of my favorite books!), makes the compelling case we often make here: Kids need a chance to play, explore, have fun, mess up, get mad, recover, and simply live some part of their childhood UNSUPERVISED for them to develop the emotional resilience they will need. You can’t become an adult if you get zero practice being one, thanks to constant oversight and intervention by “real” adults. I kept trying to figure out which parts of Gray’s essay, which appears on Psychology Today,…
UPDATE: TAG HAS BEEN REINSTATED! HERE’S A NOTE FROM THE SCHOOL DISTRICT ON ITS WEBSITE! District responds to concerns about tag September 25, 2015 – The ‘hands-off’ policy intended for unstructured play and recess however well intended, has led to confusion, false reporting and is clearly not supported by many staff and many parents. Although the plan was focused on keeping students safe, it lacked stakeholder participation and support. The expectations for student behavior both in and out of our classrooms can be found in the published Students Rights and Responsibilities. Playground rules and expectations can also be found in…
See the story below this one, about a dad whose kids were seized because he let them stay home alone part of the nights he worked as a bouncer. His kids are 8 and almost 12. Canada’s Ministry of Children and Families gives the age of 12 as a guideline for when kids should first be allowed a crumb of unsupervised time. And now, here is a story from Europe: If you listen to the end — the whole thing is just a bit over one minute — you’ll hear what age the BBC reporter Matthew Price THOUGHT the young…