Hi Readers! As you may recall, I was recently in Australia, where I was sort of surprised to hear how much their culture mirrors ours in terms of fear. The Aussies seem to be a bit less frantic — props to them — but there were still enough, “What about predators?” to make me feel at home. (And, for the record, also enough Payless Shoe Stores and McDonald’s.) And now here’s this interesting note from down under about Halloween on the local soap opera: Dear Free-Range Kid: Here’s how nonsense goes viral. After having avoided the Australian soap ‘Neighbours’ for…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers — Read it and creep: This kfzeyatits fantastic article from The American Spectator is about how Manchester, New Hampshire, imposed a law, on the books for decades, making Halloween officially the Sunday afternoon BEFORE Oct. 31. The law was, of course, in reaction to all the usual Halloween fears — razors, poison, torture — that over the years were discredited. And yet the restriction lived on. Why was that such a crime? As author Andrew Cline so perfectly puts it: Halloween is more than a massive candy-grab. Prompting kids try on grown-up personas and slip into the darkness…
Hi Readers! Here’s a letter that’ll make you smile! — L Dear Free-Range Kids: Today, thanks in part to you, I am going to have a copy of my house key made for my son. My son is in second grade. He and his sister go to different schools and I thought it would be easy to do the carpool circuit, but logistics have made it a royal pain for him to sit in the car for an hour every afternoon, so he asked if he could start riding the bus. Wonderful idea, right? Friday morning I send him to…
Hi Folks! Here’s my Wall Street Journal column from today. Hope the link still works! (Sometimes the Journal only allows the first few graphs for free. Guess we’ll see!) Happy Halloween almost! L. P.S. I am off to Portland, Ore., to give a lecture, so I’ll be a bit out of pocket. Meantime, I just wanted to say that I’ll be on John Stoessel’s show, which repeats many times over the next few days, talking about the same thing: Parental fears. It was fun!
Hi Readers! I read this piece and it blew me away. It’s by David Hess, a minister outside of Rochester, New York. Kudos to him — and a thanks, too, for letting me reprint the whole thing! THE NEW URBAN MYTH: THE DANGER OF REGISTERED SEX OFFENDERS AT HALLOWEEN by David Hess It’s almost time for the annual Halloween sex offender hysteria. This seemingly has replaced the urban myths about poison candy and razor blades in apples. I was interested to find that there has actually been a recent empirical study of the issue. An article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch,…
Okay, Readers. Let’s help this mom out! Dear Free-Range Kids: Finding this blog several years ago validated my desire to back off and let my kids be kids. At that time, I was mostly associating with “helicopter parents” and feeling inadequate for not wanting to micromanage my children’s every waking moment. And yet, one helicopter parent I continue to associate with is really starting to get on my nerves, to the point where I don’t know how to respond any more. My 9-year-old son is good friends with a boy in our neighborhood, who lives only a couple of blocks…
Hi Readers — Just got this interesting story from Australia: Boys have been banned from a Sydney public pool’s locker room because the ADULT MEN using it fear they may be falsely accused of being pedophiles. So, for a while the boys had to change behind a stack of chairs, and now they’re changing in an unused clubhouse. This is not happening in clubhouses all over the place, so it’s not like a sweeping change. What IS sweeping is the hyper focus on — nay, obsession with — pedophilia, to the point where we almost can’t help thinking about it…
Hi Readers! I read this piece and it blew me away. It’s by David Hess, a minister outside of Rochester, New York. Kudos to him — and a thanks, too, for letting me reprint the whole thing! THE NEW URBAN MYTH: THE DANGER OF REGISTERED SEX OFFENDERS AT HALLOWEEN by David Hess It’s almost time for the annual Halloween sex offender hysteria. This seemingly has replaced the urban myths about poison candy and razor blades in apples. I was interested to find that there has actually been a recent empirical study of the issue. An article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch,…
Hi Readers! First of all, a thanks to all the people who have commented. It was a good reminder to me — as was part of the speech in the original post (“I suppose there are some things I would change, like make the BSA image more inclusive…”) — that the sad fact is that there is an official policy against gay and/or atheist leadership at the Boy Scouts. I hate that. And if I’d thought about that part more the first time my son went with a friend to a meeting, maybe I would have said, “Don’t go.” But…
Hi Readers! At the conference on the importance of play that I went to last week, I met Cindy Wilson, the communications director at Playworks. Playworks helps ensure kids get the chance to play at school every day. Yay! Their “recess coaches” taught some unbelievably fun games at the conference that had me — who literally got a “D” in gym — running around and laughing and not feeling like the girl who could never touch her toes. (Which I am. But still. Here’s where you can find how to play a lot of their games.) Anyhow, Cindy’s husband is…