This thoughtful note came in response to my post about the child-tracking devices being marketed for Halloween. These devices promise they will provide “peace of mind” to parents otherwise terrified because their kids (even teens) are out in the world, unsupervised. Dear Free-Range Kids: As the mother of two teenagers I can appreciate how it feels to lose your peace of mind. I never worried about them walking a half mile to the ice cream place when they were younger or any of the traditional stranger-danger that gets discussed here, but now there are times that I worry when they…
Author: lskenazy
From poison candy to prowling predators, we keep confusing Halloween’s “spookiness” with actual dangers to our kids. Having scared ourselves to death, we then insist on making the the day ever more supervised. How far overboard can we go? Here’s a wonderful piece by Anat Rubin at The Marshall Project, titled, “This is What Happens to Registered Sex Offenders on Halloween”: Before the sun sets on Halloween, Allen O’Shea will make his way to the local courthouse in Gaston County, North Carolina, where he will remain for several hours under the watchful eye of law enforcement until trick-or-treating has ended.…
Riveting thread on Reddit: “Children of Helicopter Parents: What was the worst or most embarrassing thing they put you through?” Particularly interesting is the idea that the parents described below are simply “overprotective.” They sound much more seriously ill than that. We live in a society that almost INSISTS we overprotect our kids, on pain of blame, shame and/or arrest. But the Reddit parents are not simply driving kids to playdates. They area obsessive in their fears and protections. So I’m not sure this thread makes any point other than that it is difficult to be the child of mentally…
Here’s a jolly little artifact that one of you photographed in a Chicago-area restaurant: .
I’ve been wanting to stick a stake through this latest HUM (Halloween Urban Myth) for a week now, but darned if Janelle at RenegadeMothering didn’t go and do a fantastic job of same, which some of you sent me. (Thanks!) Her post, “Dear Internet, Nobody’s Going to Put Ecstasy in Your Kids’ Candy” begins: Okay, Internet. We have to talk. Again. You must knock it right the fuck off with your timely and earnest warnings to “moms and dads” to BE ON THE LOOKOUT for Ecstasy pills that “look like candy” and may be put into their kids’ trick-or-treat bags.…
A Philadelphia area man with autism is being held on $100,000 bail for talking to some children. The man, Daniel Lee, 26, of Wayne, PA, spoke to a group of three siblings, 8, 9 and 10 on Wednesday, asking them about their school and telling them he was on his way to a cabin in the woods. It’s unclear if he told the kids he wanted them to join him or not. (News accounts differ: See this and this.) He walked off then found and talked to the kids again 20 minutes later near Wayne Elementary School, whereupon the children’s…
I got a very sweet note from a guy named Daniel asking if he could write a piece for us about metal detecting. “As you can probably tell from my email address, I do help run metaldetector.com, and the piece does include a link back to my site. But not to a product page or anything like that. I just like sharing relevant content that helps get others interested in my hobby,” he wrote. So I said I’d take a look. Having spent my whole childhood looking for 4-leaf clovers, and dedicated my book to the teacher who took her…
Halloween is the ultimate Free-Range holiday — the one day of the year kids are encouraged to go out in the world, on their own, and make things happen. They: *Dress up like adults (or at least not like the kids they are) *Take to the streets *Interact with strangers. Repeatedly! *Work and get paid (okay, it’s not “real” work, but they run around ringing doorbells and get paid in candy.) In other words, this is a totally subversive day, proving to kids that however much they are supervised the rest of the year, they obviously don’t need it. They…
At Free-Range Kids, we fight daily against the idea that there is one “right” way to parent. We also fight the criminalization of normal, rational parenting choices, like the decision to let a kid wait in the car for a couple minutes, or play outside unsupervised. Let us remember that formula feeding, too, is a choice that parents should be able to make without being shamed or, worse, punished. So here’s a wonderful piece from the New York Times by University of Toronto Prof. Courtney Jung, making just those points. In “Overselling Breast-Feeding” Jung writes as a mom who breastfed…
Nineteen year old Zach Anderson’s case made headlines across America after he was sentenced to 25 years as a sex offender for sleeping with a girl who said she was 17, but turned out to be 14. He was also given 90 days in jail, and forbidden to use a cell phone, or computer, or live anywhere near where children congregate. This included his family’s home, as it is near one of those big-time child magnets: a dock. But thanks to dogged protesting on the part of his parents, and the reporting of the Elkhart Truth’s Tim Vandenack, who brought…