The great Dave Barry has a huge and wonderful piece at the Wall Street Journal. LOVE that man! The Greatest (Party) Generation Raising children wasn’t always an all-consuming job. Humorist Dave Barry on his parents’ wild parties and the grown-up escapades of the ‘Mad Men’ era We pick it up here, as he discusses his parents and their friends: ….And it wasn’t just cigarettes and alcohol they didn’t worry about. They also didn’t worry that there might be harmful chemicals in the water that they drank right from the tap. They didn’t worry that if they threw their trash into…
Author: lskenazy
If you think of all kids under the age of 18 as the same, you get crazy laws like no child under 18 can be left unsupervised. Wacky. You also get sex offender labels that make no sense. In Ohio, a 21 year old who had a 15-year-old girlfriend is on the sex offender list for 25 years. The authorities there are bending over backwards to act as if the community must be notified that this terrifying individual is in their midst. As Randy Ludlow in The Columbus Dispatch reports: Travis Blankenship is marked with what one judge describes as…
This excellent essay by Tracy Cutchlow in The Washington Post talks about how can we create community, trust and kindness — not to mention some kiddie self-reliance — instead of calling 911 when we witness a parenting practice we disapprove of. Cutchlow is a Seattle mom and author of Zero to Five: 70 Essential Parenting Tips Based on Science (and What I’ve Learned So Far). She begins: Would you call 911 if you saw a child sitting in a car parked outside a store, alone, engrossed in a video game? Or a 9-year-old playing alone at a playground? Or a…
Look! Up on the tab bar! There’s a new resource for all of us parents, and here’s what it says: Wondering if you can let your kids walk to the park or wait in the car for a few minutes — legally? This list should help. At Free-Range Kids, we believe parents are the best judges of what their kids are ready for, when. But the sad fact is, some loving and responsible parents have found themselves in legal trouble when a busybody or law enforcement official perceived their actions as unacceptable. Until the day we see the Free-Range Kids…
As a longtime fan of Sara Bennett and her Stop Homework movement, I was thrilled she sent this link today about a Manhattan public school that has decided to ditch homework. Then I was doubly thrilled to see: This is the school my own kids attended! It’s just a few blocks from the Empire State Building — a beacon for the whole country. Oh, how I remember the joy-crushing homework! Oh how I remember my own school afternoons spent drawing, writing, making coasters out of glue. (A bad idea, as it turned out.) And as I just wrote to the…
Lives there a parent who hasn’t, at some point, lost track of his or her kid? That’s just the way life is — imperfect! Until the authorities deem it a crime. In this case, CPS gets it TOTALLY RIGHT…but not the prosecutor. So don’t read this letter if you were hoping to have a good day. Do read it if you think you have any idea how to help or crusade for change. Speaking of which, the National Association of Parents is trying to create a fund to help parents dealing with crazy CPS issues. Here’s the link. -…
Here’s a great comment on the post below this one, about the Meitiv case. They Meitivs were, of course, investigated for letting their 10 and 6 year old kids walk home together from the park in suburban Maryland: I think we need to start lobbying state legislatures for reasonable laws that provide some clarity and security for families in these situations. As I understand it, this is the law the Meitivs were accused of violating: “A person who is charged with the care of a child under the age of 8 years may not allow the child to be locked…
The long-awaited decision from Montgomery County Child Protective Services has arrived at the home of Danielle and Alex Meitiv, and it finds them “responsible” for “unsubstantiated child neglect” for letting their kids walk outside, unsupervised. If that decision makes no sense to you, either — how can parents be responsible for something that is unsubstantiated? — welcome to the place where common sense crashes into bureaucratic craziness. It’s a mess. Although the investigation is “closed,” Donna St. George at the Washington Post reports that: CPS will keep a file on the family for at least five years and leaves open…
Check out the front page of the Sunday Times of London yesterday. And to think the idea of “Free-Range Kids” was considered controversial, dangerous and even crazy before. Can’t get much more respectable than this! — L
Do we really have to re-surface every playground in America because they aren’t safe enough? Tim Gill, author of the blog “Rethinking Childhood,” and Bernard Spiegel, granddaddy of the idea of “beneficial risk,” and Jay Beckwith, the venerated playground guru, are just some of the big names in the “play” world alerting us to potentially over-the-top new playground surface standards. The American Society for Testing and Materials will vote on these standards as soon as March 4 — Wednesday! — and so we have to register our thoughts, very soon. The rationale is that new surfacing will cut down on…