Hi Readers — Enjoy! (And just don’t ask if I get MY kids, aged 13 and 15, to do all this stuff. Wish I did!) — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: I just had a great `Free-Range’ moment! I regularly get my kids (5 and 7) to do chores around the house, unloading/loading the dishwasher, laundry sorting/loading/folding, vacuuming, etc. Today my son cut his finger while unloading the dishwasher at my mom’s house. It was on one of those huge chef knives and it went pretty deep so I make the trip to the ER since I didn’t know where Urgent…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers! Here’s a nice piece from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — Canada’s PBS) about Free-Ranging, Slow Parenting and my show. It’s about 12 minutes long. If I could figure out how to embed the video right here, you know I would. But I can’t, so click away! And in more TV news, this just in, from a reader in England: World’s Worst Mom starts airing in the UK on Monday 9 January on Real Time (Sky 240, Virgin 271) at 10pm (22:00). That’s tonight! Cool! L. UPDATE! Thanks to a reader named Gustavo, now I have an embeddable…
Hi Folks! As a reader named Michele wrote to me last week, “2011 wouldn’t quite be complete without wrapping up the year with another recall for the safety of our children!” She was referring to the recall of a mere 300,000 “Colorful Hearts Teddy” Build-a-Bears because the material they’re made of is “sub standard,” and hence COULD rip, and if it did, the eyes COULD fall out, and these, in turn, COULD pose a choking hazard. That’s a lot of “coulds,” and the Consumer Product Safety Commission notes on its website that it has heard of no incidents or injuries.…
Hi Readers! Here’s my Wall Street Journal oped from last week. Enjoy! (Or whatever.) — L. Perhaps 2011 will be recalled as the year that a toddler accidentally got served an alcoholic drink at a Michigan Applebee’s. Not the biggest news this year, but the fact that it was a national story at all shows we can’t seem to tell the difference between one stupid accident and a terrifying trend that we must do something about immediately! The Applebee’s saga, back in April, was just this: Some waiter grabbed a mislabeled container and poured the 15-month-old a very potent cup…
Dear Readers: As the new year begins, I’m looking back on things I meant to comment on and here’s a piece from November that gets my goat. It’s an essay by a mom who declares she would like to be more of a Free-Range parent, but she simply cannot. How come? Because she recently heard the story of an elementary school principal in some city not her own, who secretly videotaped boys using the bathroom. Now, this sounds like a disturbed and disturbing guy. Yecch. But the mom strikes me as disturbed as well. She seems to be saying that…
Hi Readers — I’m sharing this reader’s story because I like to remind us, from time to time, that the intense fear of our kids being beyond our sight, doing ANYTHING on their own, is not just “normal parental concern” kicking in. It is NEW. It is born of this era. (I explain how it came about in my book). And, just like the fear of neighbors-as-witches in Salem, some day it will seem weird and inexplicable. I’m just hoping to hasten that day. And here’s a note from a reader in Florida that may help! — L. Dear Free-Range…
Readers — As we enter 2012, there is cause for hope, as this article shows. Legislators in Colorado, home to the Columbine massacre, are taking a new and rational look at their zero tolerance laws. These are laws that REQUIRED schools to act brainlessly and not distinguish between, say, a wooden replica of a rifle and a smoking AK47. Laws that told school administrators they’d be WRONG to treat a butter knife as a butter knife rather than as a deadly weapon. According to the website TimesCall.com: A legislative committee moved forward with a proposal that seeks to give education…
Hi Folks and Merry Christmas, Hanukah and whatever else good is going on. In the spirit of reaching out, creating community and, of course, eating, here’s a great idea I just heard about: The Big Lunch. Check it out: The Big Lunch is a very simple idea from the Eden Project. The aim is to get as many people as possible across the whole of the UK to have lunch with their neighbours in a simple act of community, friendship and fun. This year it happened on Sunday 5th June when the best part of two million people took part.…
Hi Folks! This reader talks about an issue that I am of two minds about. On the one hand, I truly believe — based on FBI statistics — that schools are extremely safe places and school shootings/terrorist attacks/mayhem are rarer than rare. On the other hand, tornadoes are pretty rare, too, and we had our share of those drills when I was a kid. Of course, preparing for tornadoes (and fire) had a different social message to it. We were preparing for acts of God, not acts of unspeakable human depravity that just might be committed any day by anyone…
Hi Readers: Is there some way we can convince Americans (and then the world, and then the galaxy) that taking pictures of a child who is out and about in public is not the same as sexually violating them? Because the fact is: Most people taking pictures of kids are not doing it to get off on ’em. And for those few who are, dare I ask: So what? It’s like that disclaimer at the end of a movie: No child was harmed in the making of this photo. I think the hysteria about kiddie picture taking stems from a…