About a week ago, you may recall, a Maine mom was charged with child endangerment for letting her 7 year old play by herself for an hour in the park visible from the family’s porch. This is a letter by a Free-Ranger to the Police Chief there, who defended the summons as well as the fact the girl was taken by cruiser to the precinct, instead of back across the street to her home. It’s everything a letter should be, and everything our country should be, too: Smart, sane, and unwilling to buy into child safety hysteria. Chief Janine RobertsWestbrook…
Author: lskenazy
This excerpt from Julia Lythcott-Haims’ new book, “How to Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success,” is more than viral. It pleads with parents to step back and let kids make their own decisions — and mistakes: The data emerging confirms the harm done by asking so little of our kids when it comes to life skills, yet so much of them when it comes to academics. The data do look alarming, A survey of college counseling center directors found 95% of them believe that the number of students with significant psychological…
The front page of today’s New York Times features the case against Zach Anderson, a case you read about here three weeks ago. Zach is the 19 year old who met a young woman, 17, on “Hot or Not,” had sex with her once and now sits in jail. When he gets out next week he will spend the rest of his life on the Sex Offender Registry, and the next five years forbidden to go online. Because, it turns out, the girl lied and was actually 14. But really because our Sex Offender laws fail to distinguish between the…
Kids, age 5, at the bus stop. Strangely enough, this isn’t a “social experiment” to show how endangered they are. It shows something else. Something you don’t see much of on American TV.
From last night’s email: Dear Free-Range Kids: . Hello! My name is L. and today I had a pretty traumatic experience. I am a nanny for 3 children and haven’t been doing it for too long.. Today when I had the kids I needed to get gas so I pulled into the nearest gas station pulled out my card and swiped at the pump, the pump for whatever reason told me to pay inside. So I cracked the window even though the temp was around 65 and windy I even had a light jacket on, and locked the doors. I…
Readers — Pay heed this important warning! Hi Lenore, I hope all is well! I wanted to circle back on a story idea I sent your way about helping your kids adjust their sleep schedules during the summer…Kids of all ages think of summer as an amazing time to stay up late, sleep in and spend their days playing outside or laying on the beach or the couch; however, these actions can truly disrupt sleep schedules and lead to long-term health effects. Well of course! Everything presents a danger to children and a challenge for the vigilant parent. Children have…
Is there a “right” way for kids to play in nature? A letter I got: Dear Free-Range Kids: At my son’s former pre-k, he and another boy were picking leaves off of an overgrown bush while adults were talking. The boys were quiet, engaged, and the bush seemed pretty hardy. When the teacher and the other boy’s dad realized what was going on, there was lots of Very Concerned Talk about respecting the bush, and keeping it nice for the other kids, and sort of a glance towards me like: Really? You watched this? Whatever. It’s not like it was…
In the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” a princess is placed atop a pile of mattresses. Her exquisite sensitivity allows her and her alone to feel the pea underneath them all. You’d think that would signal to everyone: “Get away from that princess! She’s impossible!” And yet she has become a role model… For our country. A country that seems to value hyper-sensitivity as evidence of moral worth and goodness. This brings us to an amazing essay by Judith Shulevitz in yesterday’s New York Times titled, “Regulating Sex.” Shulevitz clues us into the mullings of the American Law…
“With Justice for All,” a blog about what’s wrong with our sex offender laws, ran this piece about how over the top our fears can go. The blogger, Shelly Stow, consistently nails the media for its craven habit of jumping on any sex offender-related item and turning it into something so scary that it allows us to go about our day feeling outraged, terrified and angry — three emotions we can’t seem to get enough of. Embarrassingly enough, the piece she links to is from the paper I worked at for 14 years, the New York Daily News: The headline…
A 7 year old in Westbrook, Maine, was playing at the park within eyesight of her family’s house. Someone called 911 (of course) and police swooped in. They took the girl to the precinct because, as this WMTW reporter notes, “Mom WASN’T watching.” You mean, mom didn’t devote her afternoon to sitting at the side of the park and watching her child’s every move? Tsk, tsk. The child was on her own for about an hour and, as the town’s police chief tells the reporter, “That’s a long time for a 7 year old girl to be by herself any…