Hi Readers! By now, you probably have seen the shocking video (below) of 7-year-old Brittney Baxter fighting off a would-be kidnapper in the toy aisle of the Bremen, Ga., Walmart. What you may not realize is that this is a scene you will be seeing forever — replayed on the news and then re-imagined on “Law & Order” (though the show will change the name of the store, or maybe the guy will be kidnapping twins). Then you will see it playing again in your very own brain when you wonder to yourself, “Is it safe to let my child…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers! Down in Australia I’m sort of happy to say a tempest is brewing over whether it is up to parents or police to decide when a child is “old enough” to walk around outside. According to this story on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald: Officers told a Hornsby mother it was ”inappropriate” for her 10-year-old daughter to catch a bus unaccompanied, and warned a Manly father whose seven-year-old son walked alone to a local shop that while they would not alert DOCS [Dept. of Community Services], they would file a report. Really? File a report…
Hi Folks! In the midst of all the usual nuttiness, let’s celebrate a nice little moment, courtesy of a mom of four in Nebraska. You’ll note, she takes a lot of precautions because this was a first. Eventually, she won’t need them and neither will her kids because they’ll all be more confident and competent, which is pretty much the Free-Range goal! — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: Just wanted to send a little note about our own personal Free Range Success story. Our family recently moved from the Northern Virginia/DC suburbs to a small suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. It is…
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…
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…