Readers — Here’s a piece about businesses that cater to kids and make a policy of not allowing adults who are child-free to enter. The examples are Legoland outside of Boston, which we have discussed previously, as well as a local kiddie farm (not that they raise kiddies, they raise pettable animals) and the ubiquitous Chuck E. Cheese. What dismays me about the ban on child-free adults is how grateful some parents seem to be, even though, a generation ago, I really don’t think there even WERE such bans. So the bans are actually serving to DE-NORMALIZE the idea of…
Author: lskenazy
Readers, great news from Port St. Lucie, Fla, where, this summer, Nicole Gainey was arrested and taken to jail in handcuffs for letting her son, 7, walk to the park! Thanks to the Rutherford Institute for this story AND for arranging defense for the single mom! Florida officials have agreed not to pursue the prosecution of a Florida mother who was arrested and charged with child neglect for allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house. In doing so, the state has effectively put an end to the criminal case against Nicole…
Readers — I am no daredevil. In fact, I’m actually sorry the words “extreme” and “sports” even met. BUT I am dazzled by the fact that this footage exists: The childhood adventures of several kids who went on to found or pioneer “sports” like bungee jumping and God knows what else. As The (Australian) Daily Mail explains: Growing up, [Clive] Neeson and his ‘oddball friends’ created an early version of snowboarding — grabbing some wood and sliding along the hilly slopes – windsurfing and hang gliding, long before their popularisation into main stream sports and filming it all along the…
Readers — I published this on Reason.com, hoping to get attention for this case. BUT once again, I do not want it scaring parents into quarantining their kids. I just want to spread the outrage, the way outrage spread in the wake of cops arresting Debra Harrell, the McDonald’s worker who let her 9-year-old play in the park. Once we get a groundswell of Americans on our side — the side that is against prosecuting parents who give their kids some independence — it will become normal (or at least a parent’s prerogative) to let kids walk to school and…
Readers — This is a piece from Grandparents.com pleading with grandparents to listen to reason, hope, joy and the real numbers when it comes to the people they love most: Their grandkids. Some excerpts: “Anything could have happened. There are predators out there. A school parking lot is the perfect place to pick up two kids, especially when you see them crying and scared.” That’s Nicole Rodgers, a Canadian mother whose children, 7-year-old Austin and 9-year-old Keirstin, weren’t kidnapped, assaulted, or harmed in any way. Instead, the kids’ Red Cross swim program on Prince Edward Island dropped them off eight…
From G.K. Chesterton, a journalist who gets it. For “man falling off scaffolding” substitute any tragic story of a child in the news. “It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still…
Readers — It’s kind of amazing to hear all the reasons we can’t trust our kids to be smart, safe or competent. As Peter Gray puts it in his book, Free To Learn, “I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today.” More proof: Dear Free-Range Kids: I stumbled upon your book while reading an article about a woman who was arrested for letting her 7 year old walk to the park alone, and I wholeheartedly agree with re-normalizing childhood. It’s sad that I live in a…
Dear Readers — Please note that this letter is not recommending a Free-Range regimen for everyone or anyone, it is just this family’s experience. But a heartening one! (Boldface, mine.) Dear Free-Range Kids: My 10 y.o. son is an impulsive, ADHD type, also recently diagnosed with Aspergers. He’s been kicked out of several daycares and before/after school care places over the years and is often in trouble at school and on the bus (despite not giving my too much trouble at home). At the end of last school year, he got kicked out of literally the last after-school…
Readers — A 6-year-old boy with autism had disappeared from his San Jose, CA home at 9 a.m. Turns out, he had wandered off and was found in the middle of the night by a group of homeless men and women who live in an encampment nearby. Does this remind anyone else of the Guinevere and the Fire song posted here last week? The one in which a girl, heeding her mom’s advice, avoids seeking help from the Aboriginal encampment near her home and runs to a white family much further away — and in the meantime, her mom dies?…
Readers — Here’s a note to us about excessive school security: Dear Free-Range Kids: A local retired police office has written a book on how he thinks schools should prevent mass shootings. Tucson News Now Of course the author includes a chapter on what he feels schools should be doing to prevent mass shootings. Some of his suggestions include: Making each school accessible by only one central exit and entry point, installing a locked door that could withstand gunfire and a “greeting window” made of bullet proof glass, training some of the school staff to carry guns, and he suggested…