Here’s a a piece in Canada’s Globe & Mail by teacher Dionne LaPointe-Bakota, about her 3-year-old Malcolm’s “wildness.” Malcolm growls and chases and brandishes sticks. Onlookers who see him always say something like, “My, you have your hands full!” She wonders if they really mean she should make her boy act more like a stereotypical girl: Malcolm and I met some friends in the park after their son’s music/art/dance class (I can’t remember which). Malcolm scouted out a stick as soon as we arrived and began to swing it around. I asked him to be careful and left it at…
Author: lskenazy
In an essay in today’s Washington Post, “Raising free-spirited black children in a world set on punishing them,” Stacia Brown sounds frustrated with the Free-Range Kids movement. She dearly wishes African-American kids could go outside and Free-Range without having to worry about actual discrimination and danger. (Me too!) And she is particularly angered that often low income African-American families who can’t or don’t supervise their kids every single second are not given the benefit of the doubt by Child Protective Services: Skenazy’s site is filled with stories of parents whose families have run afoul of Child Protective Services by allowing…
. Here’s a chunk of my piece that just ran on Politico. After explaining that I’m the mom who let her 9 year old ride the subway alone, yada yada, and that our society overestimates danger and underestimates kids (also yada yada), I went on to say that keeping our kids constantly supervised is — …catastrophic. Free play turns out to be one of the most important things a kid can do to develop into the kind of adult who’s resilient, entrepreneurial—and a pleasure to be around. You see, when kids play on their own, they first of all have…
Let’s help this lady! What CAN and CAN’T strangers do when they see a kid anymore? Dear Free-Range Kids: I am a flummoxed grandmother, age 67, from a rural community in the Midwest. What I see with kids today shocks and startles me. I don’t know when to say hi to a child for fear of getting a lecture from a parent about their child not knowing me (I’m a stranger), to even looking at a child when I walk in the park. When I travel by air and a child is being unruly by my side,…
Here’s a social experiment that is the yin to the Joey Salad’s video yang that “taught” us to beware of strangers. As Canada’s National Post reports, Vancouver police sergeant Mark Horsley borrowed an electric wheelchair and went undercover to the “drug-infested Downtown East Side” in order to catch the criminals preying on the most vulnerable: …The objective: pretend to be disabled and brain-injured from a motorcycle accident that never really happened. Play the “easy mark.” Bait criminals by flashing cash and valuables, such as cellphones and cameras. When they pounce, collar them. Make them pay. “My boss tied a pork…
A reader writes: I want to be a Free-Range parent. I really really do. I do try. Just last week I told myself to stay calm before saying anything to a parent who had allowed my son to swim in her pool before I arrived at a birthday party. There were 12 kids in the pool, 10 adults watching and there I was in full panic. But, I did calm down and did not freak out. I was soon advised that my son was the strongest swimmer of the bunch. . On a recent…
This story, from KHOU in Houston, is getting tons of attention and I think that will prevent the mom from losing her hard-fought new job! What’s great is that the whole country seems to have woken up to the idea that “unsupervised for a short time” does NOT equal, “In such terrible danger that only an awful parent would ever let this happen.” (See the Federal legislation from Thursday!) HOUSTON — A mother charged with abandoning her children at a Houston mall said she had just moved to Houston with her young son and daughter. Laura Browder said she had…
Sen. Mike Lee (R, Utah) proposed the first ever Free-Range Kids and Parents federal legislation, which was passed by the U.S. Senate yesterday. That’s right: a Free-Range Kids clause made its way into the Every Child Achieves Act, a re-authorization of major federal law that governs funding and regulation of elementary education in the United States. The Free-Range portion would permit kids to walk or ride their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate, without threat of civil or criminal action. This gives autonomy back to the parents when it comes to how much freedom we want…
A bunch of men and a little girl? This vignette came as a comment from Havva as we were discussing an idea that sounds almost creepy in our predator-obsessed world: the adults that kids are attracted to. I was forever questioning workmen and contractors in my neighborhood. One of the quick ways for mom to get me out the door was to mention there was work in progress near by. When I was 4 my parents added onto the house and I was all over the contractors. I got out my little shovel and dug the foundation…
What a thought-provoking video: The ad shows several grandparents reminiscing about their childhood fun outside — tobogganing, planting, fishing — and then several parents recalling that they’d build forts, or just head out to find friends to play with. Finally, their kids talk about their love of videogames and texting. The ad then shows those same kids after what can only be called an intervention. We see them running outside (toward a waiting parent), carefully riding a bike on the sidewalk, or being taught by mom how to plant a flower. (That kid did not look psyched to me.) It’s…