Readers, I am thrilled that Andrea Peyser had the guts to put our kids-waiting-in-cars hysteria into focus. From her column today: “We’ve become hyper-fearful about any children being left alone for even a second,” said Lenore Skenazy, a public speaker and author of “Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts With Worry).”… “What we’re seeing this summer, parents who make a rational decision to let their kids wait in a car for a brief period are treated as if they’re leaving them in the Mojave Desert with an empty Dasani water bottle,” Skenazy told me. After…
Author: lskenazy
Readers — this is making my stomach turn, even though I, too, have felt frustrated at times when I couldn’t reach my kids. — L. KPTV – FOX 12
Readers — Here’s a note about a show I had not heard of. This post comes to us from David Kleeman a “playvangelist” at the PlayCollective, a research and strategy company in New York. For 25 years, he ran the American Center for Children and Media. SEE ANNE PLAY by DAVID KLEEMAN Finally, North America has a TV series for Free-Range Kids kids. If you have Amazon Prime, run (carefully…and not with scissors!) to check out Annedroids. In Canada, it will air on TVOKids. Tween inventor and scientist Anne lives in a junkyard and fashions “droids” from bits and scraps.…
Readers — Let’s help this woman and then incorporate the good ideas into our own crusades against advice and/or laws that are based on fear and catastrophizing, rather than reality and compassion. – L. Hi Lenore, I recently read your book and have been following you on the blog and twitter for a few weeks now. Thanks for opening my eyes and arming me with knowledge to fight back at certain attitudes. Every day I wake up to the news on a local commercial radio station in Calgary (Jack FM). For the last few days I’ve been aware that part…
Readers — This report by Noah Pransky, my new Journalism Hero, is so well done and so shocking, I hope that it gets reposted throughout the blogosphere: (I have removed the video because it automatically starts playing anytime you go to my blog.) It details how men who go online to adult chat rooms and begin chats with people who say they are of legal age, then get entrapped as “sex offenders,” when the date bait “reveals” that she is actually underage. (I think that the date bait is, ironically, actually OF legal age, PRETENDING to be under age, “to…
Readers — Here’s a nice note about a great show. Read it, watch it and then I have a proposal for you: Dear Free-Range Kids: Thank you for your efforts in helping kids regain the freedom they once had. This is a very worthy cause. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but I wanted to bring your attention to a Japanese TV show called “My First Errand/ Hajimete no otsukai.” You should be able to find a few episodes online with subtitles. It’s been running for 20 years and it features young children, typically aged 2-6, who are…
Here’s the ABC 20/20 segment on kids in cars that aired Saturday night. Kudos to host Elizabeth Vargas and producers James Wang and Sarah_Hoberman for doing what I consider a truly fair job, and not resorting to the usual fearmongering. – L Watch more news videos | Latest from the US
When you live in a world filled with excess laws and cruel, capricious or hamstrung enforcers, you can’t judge people by their felonies anymore: Dear Lenore: I thought of you tonight. We are interviewing a nanny and she disclosed to us that she has a record — a felony endangerment to a child. The reason? Her child was 10 and sick but their schedules did not work for them to get him, so he stayed home from school and she told the neighbor that he was there at the house by himself. She couldn’t get back to him for another…
Readers: This seems like a cause worth supporting! It comes to us from a reader in Kentucky. – L. Save Jacobson Playground There’s a wonderful playground at Jacobson Park in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s a “creative playground,” so named because (obviously) it encourages children to be creative in their play. Sure, there are swing sets and monkey bars. But there are also wooden towers with twisty stairs and little wooden crawlways under them, ramps, sliding poles, bridges, and a wooden pirate ship. The kids are not always viewable. Our children can play for hours…
Readers — This is a great Slate article summing up what the 24/7 news cycle is doing to us as people, parents and policy-demanders. It concentrates on the work of Mary McNaughton-Cassill, a professor at the University of Texas—San Antonio and “leading researcher on the connection between media consumption and stress.” When bad news rushes into the home with graphic images and breathless reports of horror day and night — and we tune in — we come to believe that things are completely terrible. So, writes reporter Jesse Singal: [H]istory — even recent history — is rife with examples of…