It feels almost like reading, “Thou art a wicked wench!”so archaic does this Facebook comment sound, at least to me. Suddenly obsessive worry seems so over. Anyway, this was posted below a column of mine that ran in the Chicago Tribune: Call me a Helicopter Mom all you want, but my child will never walk to school alone. That’s my choice for my child. He’s six and Thank Goodness for Family restrooms because I don’t trust a child going into the men’s public restroom alone either. There are bad people in this world and I am solely responsible for his…
Author: lskenazy
From today’s Personal Health column in the New York Times by Jane Brody: Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” after reporting in a newspaper column that she had allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire to encourage anxious parents to give their children the freedom they need to develop the self-confidence and resilience to cope effectively with life’s many challenges. One result was the publication in 2009 of her book “Free…
Note the name: This post comes to us from Katie Johnson Slivovsky, not Sikorsky. Katie has written pieces for Newsweek, Illinois Steward, and Chicago Parent. She works at the Chicago Children’s Museum and lives with her husband and two teens in Western Springs, Illinois. – L I’m a Helipad Parent, by Katie Johnson Slivosky If the term “helicopter parent” describes people who hover over their children’s lives, what kind of parent am I? I don’t have the skills, attention span, or desire to hover but I’m not a detached, lazy or disinterested parent. Then it occurred to…
Did you hear about the 10-year-old who rode his bike across the George Washington Bridge to New York City?! He says he, “pedaled twenty miles down unfamiliar roads and busy streets, past neighbors and strangers, out into the unknown….I didn’t need help form anyone. It took me all day, but I found the way and did it myself.” Later on, this independence seems to have served him well. He went to the moon. His name is Buzz Aldrin, and that’s a passage from the autobiography he wrote to inspire kids. Better not inspire them too much. Last week we all…
What is going on in Maryland? Here’s an email I got yesterday — Dear Free-Range Kids: I was recently involved in a “confined unattended child” case which has landed me with a misdemeanor and 6 months’ probation. The crime: leaving my sleeping 1-year-old daughter in the car with her 10-year-old sister for 10 minutes while I went into the grocery store. A woman that worked at the store called the police within that 10 minutes. The police said it was child neglect. I told him my daughter is responsible to watch her sleeping sister for 10 minutes, that…
“What if something bad happens to them? Even if the danger is one in a million, that doesn’t matter when it’s YOUR kid.” That’s often the response that greets parents who let their kids do anything on their own. It’s certainly the reason Danielle and Alexander Meitiv are dealing with the authorities after letting their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the park by themselves. This comment to yesterday’s post about the Meitivs strikes me as a fantastic way to stump the worriers: Make them worry more about NOT letting their kids do anything on their own. It comes…
Children, 10 and 6, are walking home from the park, by day. Someone calls the cops. The cops scoop up the kids and bring them home in a cruiser. And then — the nightmare begins. This is the story of the Meitiv family that I’ve been chronicling here and here for a couple months. Now it has hit TV:
Considering we have municipalities making it illegal for kids to walk home by themselves from the bus stop, this doggy story from Seattle should give everyone…paws: “Did that just happen?” That’s the reaction one bus rider had in Seattle, after realizing a dog had just joined him for a ride through the city, traveling several stops to her destination: a dog park. The story comes to us from Seattle’s KOMO 4 TV, which reports that Eclipse, the black Labrador who is winning fans for riding a city bus by herself, lives very close to a bus stop. Eclipse is owned…
Nothing against spas or a bit of pampering, even though that kind of thing isn’t for me. What I have against the spa market actively targeting the under-teen crowd is the idea that kids need fun to be DONE to them, not that they can MAKE their own fun. As Julie Turkewitz reports in The New York Times: It was a day out at the spa for Paige Ehresman and her closest friends. Manicures. Hairdos. Makeup. And some gossip — about second grade. The spa industry has begun to target children in a big way, going way beyond mother-daughter manicures.…
First, et out your hankies. Then, consider what would happen if everyone in town could thank and encourage each other via a public message board. That’s what one anonymous Canadian wondered, and so he or she started a website (and Facebook account) called “Spotted in Windsor,” in Ontario. It was inspired by a similar site the local university created, according to metronews.ca. Most of the posts are positive, but not all. They run from, “Lost, one necklace,” to, “To the jerk who ran over my toe with his shopping cart,” to notes like this from yesterday: I was walking through…