Here’s just one of the many eye-opening chunks of a study of 5–point harnesses (the kind that go around the waist, between the legs and over the shoulders), by social-worker-turned-movement-therapist Barbara Chutroo: Infants’ brains have fewer neurological networks than those of adults but they grow rapidly. This rapid neurological organization of experience occurs in response to sensory and movement stimulation. Piaget said the child’s first stage of cognitive development (thinking) is sensory motor, meaning that infants think through sensory and movement explorations. As a child receives sensory information, the child organizes a sense of the world and of his or…
Author: lskenazy
As you may have heard, “Old Enough” is the Japanese reality show now on Netflix showing kids age age 5, 4, 3 and even 2 running errands on their own. It’s a bit extreme (2-year-olds shopping?) but also extremely lovable. The kids are sometimes a little scared or sad, but they are also incredibly determined. As I wrote over at Reason.com, we see one girl, age 4, tasked with fetching a cabbage by herself: Her mom has left one for her in the barn, but the girl assumes she must pull one from the patch. Cabbages grow on stalks thicker…
Random passersby convinced they care more about our own kids than we do? They’re rampant. “Put a sweater on that kid!” “Don’t let her ride that way.” “Your little girl looks so tired!” Those kind of comments are what we might call gran-eurisms: Things a passing grandma might say. Of course they raise a hackle or two, but what gets my increasingly short-tempered goat are the ones convinced that THEY are aware of imminent danger to your kid that YOU are too stupid, self-absorbed or awful to trouble yourself about. That’s what happened to this fellow, Johnny Roccia, when he…
See the police blotter below, for the rest of the lady’s complaint. It was sent to us by Jim Epstein, a video producer at Reason. In fact, Jim made this Halloween video with me a few years back. And, heck, he also made this video of two very, very anxious parents in Queens who finally let their kids, 10 and 12, walk to the store on their own, once I paid them a calming (“YOU HAVE TO LET THEM GO!!!!!”) visit (“I’LL STAY WITH YOU AND IT’LL BE GREAT!”). Actually, it WAS great and afterward, the parents started letting…
Aside from Daylight Savings Time it feels like there is almost NOTHING both parties agree on anymore. Except for Free-Range Parenting! Last week the Colorado State Senate joined the Colorado House in UNANIMOUSLY voting for what is now called the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill. It had two Republicans and two Democrats officially sponsoring it, but in the House, TWENTY SEVEN representatives asked to please be listed as CO-SPONSORS. Yes, yes, it still has to be signed into law by Gov. Jared Polis, and we won’t count our chickens, etc., etc. (Even though there are at least 27 of them.) BUT…
In other cultures, the idea of parents getting on the floor to play with their kids is as strange as the idea of parents getting on the floor to slurp their water from a bowl. It simply isn’t done. Anthropologist David Lancy has studied childhood the world over, and in most of the places — other than the Utah city where he lives — kids ran around in a mixed-age group, playing, helping out, watching adults and copying their skills. But they did not expect adults to play with them. When I was raising my kids, however, I thought that…
Imagine going to a party and no one shows up. That’s childhood in a lot of towns today. Even kids who’d love to walk down the block won’t, if there’s no one outside to play with. Vanessa Elias, a parenting coach and mom of three in Westport, CT., realized that her town needed to make an actual COMMITMENT to getting kids to go outside and do things, unsupervised — especially going outside to play. She felt that re-activating kids would be one way to combat the tide of anxiety and depression plaguing so many young people. So she and several…
Dan Emery’s three kids are 21, 18, and 15. They live in a suburb outside of New York and grew up being allowed to go places on their own, make their own money from odd jobs, and deal with their own minor issues at school. In a piece over at Let Grow Dan (owner of the NY Guitar School) interviews them about how these Free-Range experiences forged them. The answers should give us all some support for loosening the leash. For instance, one of his kids said she was glad she got to be out and about on her own,…
In the dystopian (and un-put-downable) novel, “The School for Good Mothers,” parents who don’t helicopter get sent to a state re-education school. There, each interaction they have with their child is graded to see if it is kind enough, warm enough, educational enough, safe enough (obviously!) and selfless enough. Yes, this is a parody of the standards some social service agencies demand from parents — especially moms. But how much truth is embedded in “Good Mothers”? Can you really get your kids taken away from you for trusting them to walk home from school, or not getting them to quiet…
A researcher who spent 10 years following 3000 kids who applied to get free pre-school in Tennessee discovered the opposite of what she’d expected: The ones who got in — demographically identical to the ones who didn’t — were doing worse all around by 6th grade. Worse on tests. Worse on discipline. Worse when it came to being diagnosed with learning difficulties — that is, the pre-k kids had developed more of them. Over at Let Grow (here) I talk about what the researcher herself believes may be the problem with a pre-k program deliberately designed to boost underprivileged kids,…