Hi! I’m Lenore, the gal who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone, wrote a column about it, got slammed in the media and labeled “America’s Worst Mom.” I started this blog to explain that I LOVE safety — helmets, seatbelts, mouthguards — but don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. Lots has changed since that spring weekend in 2008. Parents and educators are starting to worry about the disappearance of childhood free time. Psychologists are studying the crucial role of free play. This year Oklahoma and Texas passed laws inspired by the Free-Range…
Author: lskenazy
It’s not just that Oklahoma State Rep. Chad Caldwell (R) and Rep. Jacob Rosecrants (D) both believe parents shouldn’t be arrested or investigated for letting their kids have some “reasonable independence.” It’s that they both remember their OWN reasonable independence — and are grateful for what that freedom made them into. Read about the way childhood (especially play time) influences us for life, by clicking here to go to Let Grow. Photo by Annie Spratt (she is the absolute BEST!) on Unsplash
A 10-year-old boy picked up from his Chicago public school seven minutes late triggered a call from the school to the Department of Child and Family Services. Fortunately, the school community has rallied around the mom and son, writing a letter to the CEO of the Chicago Public School system saying that, “We do not think it is reasonable to equate being late for pickup, in isolation, with child neglect.” Let’s narrow those neglect laws so they can’t be triggered by the blips inevitable in any family’s life — including a late pickup on the second day of in person…
A dad takes his daughter for a walk in the rain and a passing van thinks he is tormenting her. Called to the scene of the “crime,” the cops back the dad — but the folks in the van don’t take, “Everything’s fine” for an answer. The dad’s story and our take on it are over at Let Grow. Click here! Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
How does it feel? Read my thoughts (as it were!) over at Let Grow. Click here! And think about the fact that when China makes its students wear uniforms that track what time they arrive at school, whether they are snoozing in class, and where they go when they go home, we understandably feel this is creepy. But is America so different? It’s not the government tracking kids, per se. But we parents do a lot of it, as do schools. What does this portend? Photo by Parker Coffman on Unsplash
…their dad, Nevada physician Daniel Hansen, supports the Reasonable Childhood Independence bill being introduced in his state today. As he wrote to his legislators: To be clear, I personally deal with horrible cases of neglect and abuse and do not want support of this bill to be construed as any form of leniency for such actions. Fortunately, I do not think this bill…does anything to weaken our state’s position on abuse and neglect. Quite the contrary; I think this bill will promote responsible parenting and free up more resources for law enforcement and Child Protective Services to focus on true…
The idea that anytime kids are outside, making noise, someone is at fault — the kids for yelping, the adults for not supervising and shushing them — is pernicious. It turns independent kids, and the parents raising them, into a public nuisance. (Noise-sance?) And yet, that’s exactly what a new app in Japan is doing. Read my thoughts, which you can probably guess, over at Let Grow by clicking here. Photo by note thanun on Unsplash
Even during this very strange year, the middle school counselors in Milburn, NJ, were seeing the same anxiety in kids that had been on the rise for seven or eight years before it. Kids were very worried, often about scholastic achievement. How could the counselors help them? They asked kids to go home and…help out around the house. Vacuum. Sweep. Wash the dishes. The results were wonderful. And that, frankly, is The Let Grow Project for you: giving kids some trust and responsibility, and watching it work its magic. Read about it — and see the kids — by clicking…
As Let Grow works with five states on Free-Range Kids bills this session, some lawmakers remain skeptical that their state’s definition of neglect needs narrowing. But they do. Here is Let Grow’s map of all 50 states’ neglect laws. Unfortunately, 47 of them are so open-ended that too much is left to the discretion of everyone but the parent. That is undermining the independence of parents AND kids. Unless there is obvious danger that parents are consciously or recklessly ignoring, they should be the ones to decide when their kids are ready for some unsupervised time. Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma (today!),…
From an op-ed in yesterday’s Las Vegas Journal-Review by Nevada State Sen. Dallas Harris and Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, titled, “Don’t Criminalize Childhood Independence.” Maybe we look like complete opposites. One of us is a gay, Black and a Democratic mom of one from Clark County. And one of us is a white, Republican and a mom of eight — grandmother of 20 — from Northern Nevada. But we are thrilled to be working together because we are in heated agreement when it comes to this: Kids have the right to some reasonable independence. And parents have the right to give…