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…
Author: lskenazy
. 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…
Just two days after the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that a social worker was allowed to insist an 8 year old boy not be left alone two hours after school, despite his mom’s belief that he was fine, a dad had his daughters, 8 an 11, seized from his home on the same premise. Martin Solotki told the Province newspaper that: …last Thursday he got texted at work at 9:30 p.m. by his ex-wife, who said she’d taken his daughters on behalf of a social worker. He says he ran home and called the RCMP a number of times…
This extremely helpful post comes from Rachel Howe, a writing teacher and mom in South Philly, where she started the South Philly Parents Resource Center. What she’s describing sounds like a sort of “consciousness raising” or support group, without the heavy title. Dear Free-Range Kids: I’ve got three children to chase after (and I do mean chase), on top of the usual adult responsibilities of mopping floors and making car payments. I really love spending time with the kids — finding hermit crabs on the beach, snuggling at bed time, etc., etc. My problem is that I rarely get to…
Oct. 17 and 18 I’ll be speaking at the amazing Battle of Ideas in London. The weekend’s wide-ranging topics include “Is Happiness Good for You?” “Can Big Data Save the World?” and “The Lighter Side of the Dark Net.” (Which I can’t wait to hear!) My session is, “Free-Range Parenting: Reckless or Responsible?” I was invited to speak by Ellie Lee, director of the Centre of Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent in Cantebury and co-author of “Parenting Culture Studies” (Palgrave, 2014). She calls herself a “parenting non-expert,” a term I love so much, I plan to borrow…
. Our culture SAYS we want to raise independent, problem-solving, self-reliant young people. We even have groups like the Scouts and Guides to foster just that spirit. And then for one reason or another — insurance, fear, knee-jerk no-saying — we do this: Dear Free-Range Kids: I really enjoyed the movie this morning about the Japanese child. But right now I’m seething with frustration because I went to pick up my 9-year-old daughter from her Girl Guide meeting 1.5 blocks away last night after receiving an email saying that no girl was allowed to walk home alone. I went in…
Usually I don”t have the patience to watch an 8-minute video, but this one fascinated me: . The two families — one Japanese, one Australian — are obviously hand-picked and hence not a random sample. But Japan DOES trust its kids out and about at an early age, and clearly this is not beyond what the kids can handle. Meanwhile, western countries, including my own, come up with all sorts of reasons that kids are simply not safe anytime they are unsupervised. What’s worse, this paranoid outlook is becoming the law of the land, as we just saw in the…
An 8 year old cannot stay home alone, even for two hours after school, British Columbia’s Supreme Court just ruled. A mom had been doing just that, without any problems, until a social worker was alerted to the situation. (Possibly by the husband from whom the mom is separated.) According to the Vancouver Sun: A social worker visited the home and told the mother a child under the age of 10 could not be left alone. She asked the mother — identified only as B.R. in court documents — to agree to a “safety plan.” When the mother refused, the…