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.”…
Author: lskenazy
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…
It’s not what you think. As North Carolina’s PeeDeePost writes: PINEHURST — Two police officers with the Village of Pinehurst in Moore County stopped by a hill on which local children were sledding — and asked if they could get in on the fun. The roads were covered with ice on Tuesday, conditions that kept the cars in Pinehurst away. The neighborhood kids went out to play…Sometimes the best part of being out on patrol is the chance to make a good impression on those that you protect…Even when it means being a big kid right along with them! Well…
Let me know what you think of this 4-minute piece that just aired on NPR’s Morning Edition about that newfangled idea called “Free-Range Parenting.” (No, I was not interviewed for it.) The story points out that we are hearing more and more about parents arrested for letting their kids play outside or wait a short time in the car — stories you often hear here first — and then goes on to interview a variety of guests, including the head of the Child Welfare League of America. She defends the practice of checking up on all cases of neglect, even…
Loved this 3-minute commercial and you may, too. Not that I quite understand what it’s for, but it’s a good reminder that Free-Range Kids is the norm in a whole lot of the world:
What do our kids lose out on when we “protect” them from the world? Here’s a comment on the post from a few days ago, “How Did Your Adventures as a Kid Influence the Person You Are Now?” I would love to hear your stories of childhood’s enduring influence, too. – L Dear Free-Range Kids: So much of who I am can be traced back to my free range childhood. For all intents and purposes my grandmother raised me from 6.5 to 14. While I did live with my mother, my grandmother was in charge. My grandmother gave me…
Welcome, New Yorker readers and anyone else just hearing about Free-Range Kids! The lovely write up about me in this week’s “Talk of the Town” pretty much sums up what I’m like — a worrier mom who nonetheless believes kids don’t need a security detail every time they leave the house. There are so many of us who share this outlook and have been trying to give our kids the freedom to bike around the neighborhood, play at the park, or actually walk home from it, like the Meitivs in Maryland, without this being a big (or criminal!) deal. But…
Everyone needs a new hairstyle once in a while, and Free-Range Kids was getting to that point, metaphorically. (Its founder is getting to that point non-metaphorically.) So welcome to the new format of the site. You’ll find new features that I hope you’ll like, including a bigger tab bar, where it is now simple to find the crime stats that show that times ARE different today — they’re safer than when most of us were growing up — and the Free-Range Bill of Rights. It is also simpler now to see several recent stories at a glance. I envied that…