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…
Author: lskenazy
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…
Readers — Did you know that until now, prisoners up for parole would automatically be turned down if they continued to “insist” they had not committed the crime? Using the dumbed-down, talk-show psychobabble that passes for truth in our justice system, proclaiming innocence was actually considered PROOF that the prisoners were in denial, hence, unrehabilitated. And so, those who maintained their innocence spent MORE TIME IN JAIL. Here’s the story from yesterday’s New York Times about it. Kudos to reporter Stephanie Clifford. And the Free-Range point? It’s a little around the bend,but here goes. We all know that when a…
Readers — A playground in Seattle specially designed for kids with autism, cerebral palsy and other special needs was ordered destroyed by a bureaucrat (or bureaucrats) who declared it extremely dangerous…even though over the course of its 10 year history, no child was seriously injured on it. You can see some pictures from the playground on Reason.com, where I wrote about the case, pointing out that: The thing about kids with special needs is that they often have to spend a lot of time in less-than-fun institutions. Hospitals. Therapists’ offices. Waiting rooms. The “Wild Zone,” as the play area was…
Readers — Schools shootings are rare and random. They are also horrifying. When we hear about one, joy drains out of life for a while. It is into that vacuum that “solutions” rush in. The latest is a system of censors that supposedly can identify where a shot is coming from, should a madman enter a building. Made by Shooter Detection Systems in Massachusetts, the system can cost $20,000 to $100,000 per school. A grammar school in Methuen, Mass., was used on Veteran’s Day to demonstrate the product. As the Associated Press’ Philip Marcelo writes: In the live demonstration, the…