Today, let us give thanks for The Onion and pieces like — CNN Holds Morning Meeting To Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest Of Day ATLANTA—Kicking around ideas ranging from an uptick in child kidnappings to a new link between laptops and cancer, senior CNN staffers held their regular daily meeting this morning to decide which topic viewers should panic about for the rest of the day. “It’s always kind of tough to get our meetings going each morning, but once we got some coffee in us, we were able to toss around a few ideas on what…
Author: lskenazy
Most fascinating letter of the week (boldface and headings, mine): Dear Ms. Skenazy: I am the mother of four young children and a reader of your blog, which was introduced to me about a year ago by several unrelated people. I hope you don’t mind that I have a response to your recent post, “The Cult of Kiddie Danger.” I agree with your assertion that a component of your alleged “crime” in allowing your son to ride the NYC subway alone (and writing about it) was a sort of apostasy from the state religion of fear and helicopter parenting, but…
Americans remain confused about reality. As Vox reports: Nearly two-thirds of Americans think violent crime increased over the past year, even though violent crime has been on a general decline for two decades, according to a new Gallup survey. The survey teases out different mini-trends, but in the end Gallup concludes on its own site: For more than a decade, Gallup has found the majority of Americans believing crime is up, although actual crime statistics have largely shown the crime rate continuing to come down from the highs in the 1990s and earlier. …. Some argue that consumption of news…
Readers, here’s a piece I wrote for The Weekly Wonk that got picked up by Vox. My thesis: It is considered good, even holy, to imagine danger all around. The more perils you point out, the better a person you are. The Richland, WA, school district is phasing out swings on its playgrounds. As the district’s spokesman recently told KEPR TV: “It’s just really a safety issue. Swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground.” Ah yes, those dangling doom machines. All they sow is death and despair. But while this…
Readers — Do parents really have to strap a vital signs monitor on their healthy babies? That’s the question David King, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, sought to answer. And frankly, it was easy. No. No, babies do not suddenly need a real time, smart phone read-out of their heart rate, muscle movements, temperature, blood oxygen level and “pulse oximitry” (sounds soooo advanced!) . What’s more, the idea that this info prevents Sudden Infant Death syndrome is false. As King writes in the BMJ (British Medical Journal): In the 1980s and 1990s a…
Readers, I am sorry to report that, working their way through their Halloween stash, two kids in different parts of Canada found a needle in their candy. As every year I reassure parents that no child has ever been killed by a stranger’s candy on Halloween (that still holds true), a mom wrote to ask how would I respond to these incidents. Her feeling was that she wasn’t going to panic, but she did want her child to “be aware.” I wrote back that this made sense…kinda. Certainly, kids should know that if they bite down on a needle –…
Hang onto your goat. This story will totally get yours. It got mine. Dear Free-Range Kids: Every Friday, I pick my niece up from school. She is in 1st grade. Last Friday I was substitute teaching at her school, in her classroom no less. The fire alarm went off. Smoke from a building project was venting into the school building. It was determined that the fumes were negatively impacting the learning environment and school was dismissed early.I am on my niece’s emergency contact list. I am on her list of people allowed to pick her up. I…
It happened about 1,600 times in the last school year: Bus drivers in Hillsborough County arrived at the bus stops in the afternoon with kindergarten students who had no parents or guardians to meet them. So begins an article in Florida’s Tampa Bay Times describing the terrible scourge of parents who trust their kids to walk home from the bus stop. The problem, from the school’s point of view, is that if a security detail parent is NOT present, the child must be returned to the school, wreaking havoc on the bus schedule. But listen to the wording (boldface mine):…
What do they mean just “COULD”??? Don’t pussyfoot around this issue, media. Do your job and scare us properly about a non-existent threat!
Readers — I love that Fort Lee, NJ, sent a giant duck into traffic on Halloween to teach drivers to stop for pedestrians. Those who didn’t stop got tickets. It wasn’t really a sting, because cars SHOULD stop for pedestrians. So here’s the wacky part. (Yes, wackier than dressing up as a duck for your job. I once had to dress up as a Martian in a sequinned bathing suit. Work is work.) One of the women ticketed for not stopping claimed, in this interview, that as a woman, the duck scared her. Because of the long, sordid history of…