Hi Readers! We are so concerned for our kids’ safety, the apparently the safety of our safety precautions isn’t safe enough, either. Read on. — L Dear Free-Range Kids: It’s been a beautiful week in upstate New York, with temperatures nearing 60 mid-week. But students in my school district cannot play on their school playgrounds. In January, the Saratoga Springs School District announced that all school playgrounds would be closed until sometime in April, since the cushioning material under climbing structures is frozen and therefore deemed unsafe. Ironically, the safety material we installed — and I’m sure it wasn’t cheap…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers — This mom wrote to me wondering if what she just experienced is normal. I’m wondering, too! — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: I have a situation perhaps your readers can help with. Yesterday my daughter came home from playing at the “new” neighbor’s house with a 4-page liability waiver that they want us to sign! Wow! I guess that dangers lurk over there – in the form of a trampoline — and if she is going to set foot on their property she needs a release first. I can’t help but feel paranoid — should I then be…
Hi Folks! This is my piece that ran in last week’s Wall Street Journal. Have a good week (and some “vigorous activity”). – L. The Importance of Child’s Play by Lenore Skenazy A new study of how preschoolers spend their days may make you want to run around screaming, which is apparently more than the tykes themselves get to do. After interviewing child-care providers from 34 very different Cincinnati-area center — urban to suburban, Head Start to high income—researchers found that kids spend an average of only 2% to 3% of their day in “vigorous activities.” Can you imagine that?…
Hi Folks! Here’s why I rag on the parenting magazines. Not only do they obsess about every little detail of parenting as if it’s a make-or-break decision, but often they indulge in Worst-First thinking (dreaming up the worst possible scenario and proceeding as if it is likely to happen). Here’s a shining example, cribbed from a longer article in Parenting (via CNN), titled, “The New Playdate Playbook.” It’s a Dear Abby-like list of Q&A’s for parents totally stressed out by the enormous difficulty of planning, running, overseeing, perfecting and interrupting their kids’ playdates. (And “sitch” is, of course, short for…
Hi Readers — This note was originally a comment on the post below this one. Its poignancy hit me particularly hard because today’s New York Times has a piece by Jane Brody — “Communities Learn Good Life Can be a Killer” — about the effect of sprawl on health, autonomy and, of course, childhood. I’m not sure how to suddenly re-urbanize vast swaths of suburbia, but I’m glad that city planners are looking into it. — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: Before moving to my current home in Germany 6 years ago, I lived in a small town (about 5,000 people)…
Hi Folks! Talk about a beacon of hope. A Hollywood ending! Success! Get this: As you may recall, a few years back, a mom from small-town Mississippi wrote to this blog in a quandry. After teaching her 10-year-old son the route to soccer, she’d let him walk there — less than a mile — by himself. On that first time out, a cop picked him up, scolded it wasn’t safe, and tracked down the mom. He told her he’d received “hundreds” of calls to 911 about the boy and that he could book her for “child endangerment.” That mom was…
Hi Folks! Just read a wonderful, cogent Q&A with Barry Glassner, the author of The Culture of Fear and now the prez of Lewis & Clark University. He’s been tracking our escalating worries for over a decade and come to the same conclusions as me (he came to them first!!) about where the fear is coming from and perhaps how to fight it. My favorite part of the interview: Why are so many people afraid of such extreme possibilities? We need to be careful to distinguish how people respond to fear mongering and who is spreading the fears. If…
Hi Folks — This blog, as you know, is always trying to distinguish between real threats to children and the over-hyped ones. In this case, the fear of children being neglected or falling behind has gone overboard. The mom is due in court this morning — Wednesday. I wish her a lot of luck, and a judge with compassion and common sense. — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: Here in Loudoun, VA, I am a the mother of three little girls at an elementary school who was just ARRESTED for getting my girls late to school. After the fifth offense there…
Hi Readers: Please don’t think I’m posting this as a “blame the victim” story, as I myself don’t know if I’d keep my wits about me in a fire. The story, nonetheless, is this: A house shared by seven members of Boston University’s Sigma Alpha Mu went up in flames on Sunday morning: BU Police Chief Thomas Robbins says his department received a call from a parent of one of the students in the apartment, whose first response was to call home. Robbins says he hopes that students learn to make their first and immediate call to 911 or to…
Hi Folks! Here’s a great profile of Danah Boyd, an Internet researcher who hops over hysteria to look at how young folk really use social media. I heard her speak at a Family Online Safety Institute conference, and, as the NY Times profile points out: “She was the first to say that the teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online,” said Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft who works closely with Dr. Boyd. “It’s not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids, it’s that these bad things are in…