Folks — Below is a 1-minute taste of the 13-part reality show I host, “World’s Worst Mom.” It’s like The Supernanny, except instead of dealing with out-of-control KIDS I deal with PARENTS and their out-of-control worries — like the mom who would only let her son stand on his skateboard on the lawn and NOT MOVE. Or the mom who’d take the family’s freshly cooked dinner and nuke it for 5 minutes to kill the germs. Or the mom who insisted her 13-year-old son still come with her into the ladies room. I spent five days with each of these…
Author: lskenazy
Readers — Here to help you start your day with a little scream (beats coffee!) comes this story from KMOV in St. Louis, MO. Apparently, last week, the mom of a special needs son got a “frantic” call from his teacher. She rushed to the school, got buzzed in and ran to his classroom, committing a cardinal sin: She didn’t sign in. Informed of her transgression by a school administrator, the mom asked to have the sign-in book brought to her but was informed: Too late, the police were already on their way. And so they were. She was taken…
Dear Free-Range Kids: I am a professional woman who became a stay at home mother to a 10-year-old boy. I would describe him as very bright, highly energetic and reasonable. Here is my dilemma: We live in a city of about 50,000 in North NJ. He has recently made it very clear that he wants to walk home from school by himself across a number of streets (about 1+ mile). It has now started to impact his mood and I am worried. I want to give him independence and see him succeed. Having done it myself (in Brooklyn)…
Readers — Here’s an experiment carried out in London: A TV station had two little girls, 5 and 7, take turns looking lost in a large shopping center. Only one retiree stopped to ask if the child was okay. Now, I don’t think that means every human who passed by the kids was and heartless OR afraid of being mistaken for a pedophile. I easily might have passed by, too, if I was in a hurry and barely noticed the child, or if she looked like she was playing a game, or if I assumed a parent was probably…
Dear Readers — A few of you sent this sad notice in yesterday. It came from USA FAIR — “Families Advocating an Intelligent Registry” — a group trying to reform our sex offender laws that are too encompassing to be fair or effective. (You can get on the sex offender registry for peeing in public, going to a prostitute, even having consensual sex with a teen your exact same age — none of which pose a threat to children.) I once interviewed Rev. Hess for an article on sex offender restrictions on Halloween. Wish I’d spoken with him more. -…
A rant. A true rant. I wanted to rant along! This comes to us from a mom who identifies herself as “The Non-Murderer.” Dear Free-Range Kids: So I had a crazy afternoon that thankfully ended well, but once I was in a calm place, I had to ask myself, “What would Lenore think of this?” That, and “What’s wrong with the world?”Please excuse the ranting tone: Dear lady in the hotel parking garage, I’m the one who called out to you, panicked, in the garage. I claimed to have locked myself out of my car, while a baby was…
Here’s the article everyone’s talking about, folks: “The Overprotected Kid,” by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. She chronicles all the things we talk about: The lack of free time kids have, the excess supervision, the need for adventure — the whole shebang, including interviews with many of the folks you’ve read about here: Peter Gray, David Finkelhor, Tim Gill… So — enjoy! (Or whatever the word is for reading something you agree with that makes you sad and mad.) — L …I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though…
Readers, This is an excerpt from the book, “From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back,” by Julie Gunlock (her real name — not a political statement!). I love this book for its smart, funny look at the excessive fears foisted upon parents, forcing us to hover, because it really does feel as if everything — from cupcakes to chemicals — is out to harm our kids: From Cupcakes to Chemicals, by Julie Gunlock. Excerpt from Chapter 2, “Be Afraid of Everything” A few years ago, I was watching…
What a good idea! If any of you try this (or decide to give up worrying for a specific amount of time, just as an experiment), please let me know how it goes! – L Dear Free-Range Kids: The other day I let my 5 and 2 year-old kids walk down the block. It was a big deal. It was a rainy day, they wanted to go puddle splashing, but they had never walked that far alone. It involved crossing one street. We live in an area that doesn’t get much traffic. But I told my daughter (the five year-old)…
UPDATE: Good news! Following talks with the Pennsylvania Council for the Blind, the school district will allow an “orientation and mobility instructor” to appraise Deven’s situation, and possibly allow him to get off the bus on his own (with some caveats). The update is here. Readers — This story about a blind kid who doesn’t want to be babied by his (lawsuit-fearing) school is all about making a Free-Range Kid into an invalid: Born blind, Deven Phillips has been in Nazareth Area schools his entire life. His mother, Paula Smith, has made every effort to raise her 13-year-old son…