Come Monday, a new issue of The New Yorker will be landing in the mailboxes of the diehards who still get hard copies of magazines. So while this wonderful 90th Anniversary issue of the New Yorker is still current, allow me to excerpt a bit from the Talk of the Town piece I am saving forever. (Then again, I am saving all my New Yorkers forever. Doesn’t everyone? Aren’t you actually not ALLOWED to throw them out, like batteries?) Raised Eyebrows Dept. FEBRUARY 23, 2015 ISSUE Mother May I? BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE Recently, in Silver Spring, Maryland, drivers at a…
Author: lskenazy
We went RVing a few years ago courtesy of this very group — Go — RVing — and found kids at campsites seemed really Free-Range. There was such a sense of community in the woods, and this is such a lovely commercial. (And why didn’t I come up with the word “wildhood”???)
Thanks to our mistaken belief that no one under 18 can have any legitimate sexual feeling — and hence any sex they’ve engaged in was coerced and bound to render unspeakable emotional harm—we have laws on the books like this one in Wisconsin, according to USA Today (boldface mine, all mine!): In 2012, state lawmakers passed into law a mandatory, minimum three-year prison sentence for possessing child pornography. Previously, judges had the discretion to order lesser penalties depending on the circumstances. That means a 17-year-old who receives explicit images from a younger friend can be sent to prison for possession…
Here’s a poem that sums up the Free-Range world view, sent to us by a reader Jennifer Daly, who describes herself thusly: “I live in Shrewsbury, MA. I work in Engineering and IT. I have a 6 yr old and a 2 yr old. I have 17 yrs of Aerospace and Defense consulting with 6 yrs of being the dept IT manager in Engineering for BAE land and Armaments (combat vehicles). My husband is a fire engineer and volunteer fireman. My husband has two degrees. I have none. I am dyslexic and very innovative. I found a way to learn…
SET YOUR DVRs! WORLD’S WORST MOM is on on DISCOVERY LIFE this MORNING in just about an HOUR! Episodes at 9, 9:30, 10,10:30 a.m. Eastern Time. (The first two are reruns.) Find Discovery Life on your TV. The time slot of the show has changed a couple times, so I just wanted to alert you. And if your cable provider does not carry Discovery Life, why not call and complain? (What a relaxing and fun way to begin your day!) — L
Has anyone fought a school bus policy requiring adults to wait with their kids at the bus stop? Last year, a ridiculous bill to mandate this for anyone under 7th grade was floated in Rhode Island and, thankfully (with some help from this blog), it died a quiet death. So often, legislators seem to dream up ways to “save” children from nearly non-existent threats. The unintended consequences, meantime, are enormous: Suddenly, an adult has to be available to wait at the bus stop every morning and afternoon till a kid turns 12! In the case below, it is not a…
The Philadelphia Inquirer has a story about what happened when an old man started to hang out with a boy he met at the museum. Can you imagine this unfolding the same way today? When Dave Schwartz was a boy, his father was constantly in the hospital, and his mother would drop him at the Penn Museum while she visited her husband. Beginning in 1961, when he was 8, Schwartz spent years among the mummies, the giant sphinx, and other antiquities. “I’m kind of a museum orphan,” he says now, at age 61. “I literally grew up in that museum.”…
I realize that what recently transpired in Alabama was probably cold and unpleasant for those involved. But…is it the kind of hardship that constitutes news? Yahoo reports: Icy roads forced a college basketball team to walk two miles to their hotel after their bus was unable to drive down an Alabama interstate. Ericka Smith, a sophomore with the Middle GeorgiaState College basketball team, told ABC News [ABC News!!!!] that her school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams boarded a bus Friday afternoon en route to Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, Tennessee, for games this weekend. But the bus had to stop…
A mom is wracked by guilt for letting her son wait in the car…at an age he could easily have opened the door himself if he was hot. As she writes in Yahoo Parenting: I left my kid, 7, and my dog locked alone in our Jeep for about 10 minutes a few weeks ago — and I still feel guilty about it. The drive-through at my bank was out-of-service. I turned around to the backseat to face my son, Jack, and said, “Dude, stay put. You’re in charge of Lucy.” I cracked my passenger side front window a little…
Today’s guest post contributor is Robert Franklin. He’s an attorney and parenting activist who writes the blog and serves on the Board of Directors of the National Parents Organization, the largest organization in the country promoting shared parenting post-divorce. – L Free-Range Parenting Frees Kids & Child Protective Services Too, by Robert Franklin The case of Alexander and Danielle Meitiv of Maryland has done a lot to bring the issue of Free-Range Kids to public consciousness. Good. The more we question the notion that no unsupervised child can be safe for an instant, the better. But the Meitiv…