This festive season, remind parents that their precious kids could be abducted and killed if the rescue dogs don’t find them immediately. What better way to send happy holiday greetings than the $19.99 FindEm Kit, that preserves a child’s scent for the day they are abducted? As the website declares, “A Child Goes Missing Every 40 Seconds.” Ok, so they forgot to add that a child going missing has nothing to do with the number of children who are actually abducted. Just like the number of children falling off swings is not the same as the number of children who…
Author: lskenazy
Readers — I hope that this is the story of just one over-coached kid. But…maybe not. This is a piece from SpikedOnline by the inimitable Josie Appleton who runs the Manifesto Club in Britain, which is like Free-Range Kids mixed with Reason.com. A “panto” is the age-old, slapstick, audience-participatory Christmas pantomime show (not silent!) that has delighted Brits for hundreds of years. Until now. Turning All Adults into Panto Villains, by Josie Appleton It is a tragic fact that today’s child-protection culture and related laws often have the perverse consequence of leading decent adults to withdraw from interacting with…
Hi Folks! I was just reading the latest from the amazing Centre for Parenting Culture Studies in Kent, England, and found this piece by Zoe Williams, author of the new book The Madness of Modern Parenting. (Then I ended up reading some other stuff by her, like this. So fun!) This piece ran in The Guardian. Go Zoe! (Boldface mine.) The Madness of Modern Parenting, by Zoe Williams Plainly, something is up with the business of parenting, the way we parent, the things that are now perceived as minimum parenting standards…. [I]t has become something that one does well or…
GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU PERVERT…and please bring me a toy firetruck. Assume all Santas are child molesters and teach kids not to sit on their laps. That’s what a well-known “child safety expert” in Australia is suggesting. Child protection activist Hetty Johnston this week backed the concerns of Queensland parents worried the time had come to stop their children sitting on the lap of shopping centre Santas for Christmas photos. “What we would like to see is shopping centre owners updating their child protection policies,” Ms Johnston said. “The directive would be for children to stand beside Santa,…
Then they came for the merry-go-rounds, and I said nothing. Then — The city is putting the brakes on spinning playground equipment following reports of injuries, a Parks Department spokeswoman said. Rotating metal saucers that kids ride at two Park Slope [Brooklyn] playgrounds were recently welded into place so they can’t move, and the city has made similar modifications or removed a total of seven disks citywide “in the interest of public safety,” the spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman declined to discuss how many injuries had been reported or other specifics. Turning the spinning disks into statues angered Park Slope parents,…
Readers — The so-called “Cinderella Law” working its way through Parliament may sound as if it is going to rescue ragamuffins stuck in their own little corner in their own little chair. But in fact, by expanding the definition of child cruelty to include emotional, psychological or even intangible nnzersdana harm, it holds the threat of criminalizing any of us who think our kids can handle more than the state (or some tsk-tsk’ing agent) believes they can. So if I think it’s fine for my kid to play outside unsupervised, or stay home alone a bit, but the state thinks,…
Lots of good ideas here (from Clickhole):
LOOK! Thank you, Marjorie Ingall, for making this into a Bingo Card! (And here’s a site that allows you to do the same. So fun!) Readers — Commenter Jenny Islander sent in this brilliant Child Hysteria Bingo board! Feel free to add more ideas: Welp, I think I’ve finally read enough of Free-Range Kids to make a Bingo board. Make a 5×5 grid, put Free [Range] Space in the middle, scatter the other options randomly over the grid, and play along! SCARY BLACK PEOPLE SCARY MEN SCARY PO’ FOLKS FACTS SCHMACTS, WE’VE GOT A WITCH HUNT GOING…
Readers — The belief that our kids are in constant danger from the worst of the worst of the WORST can (and did) lead to cases like this. As reported in Saturday’s Austin American-Statesman by Chuck Lindell — Austin day care owners Dan and Fran Keller spent more than 22 years in prison after three young children accused them of dismembering babies, torturing pets, desecrating corpses, videotaping orgies and serving blood-laced Kool-Aid in satanic rituals so ghastly, their names became synonymous with evil. It was the early 1990s, when a cottage industry of therapists, authors and investigators argued convincingly —…
Readers — My kids are far from babies, so I don’ t know if the following comment is true across the board. Is it? Sounds quite likely. It came in response to my post about the Owlet device that measures your baby’s blood pressure, movements, oxygen level, etc. — L. On a related note, is it just me, or have baby products become more of a pain to use in the last few years? It is almost as though the product designers said. “If our product isn’t a huge inconvenience to use, parents won’t believe that they are suffering…