A very positive piece! Running to do more media and hope to write more soon! — L
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers — Just watching the Take Our Kids to the Park Day story on WABC, one of my four TV appearances today (WCBS, WABC, WPIX and WNBC) and find it amazing that the famous lawyer interviewed, Ron Kuby, warns parents that letting your kids have some unsupervised time at the park is illegal. Actually, it is not illegal, according to New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, which says there is no specified age at which a kid can be outside (or inside, for that matter), unsupervised. I think all of us agree that we wouldn’t want to leave…
Hi Folks — Well, yes, the cover of the NY Daily News. That’s good and bad. Good — it certainly gets the word out. Bad, maybe this headline: “Leave Your Kids in the Park: Mom’s Bizarre Campaign.” Put that way it does sound a little bizarre. But what’s way more bizarre to me is the doctor that the article found to interview: Dr. Alan Hilfer, chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, says a 7-year-old shouldn’t be left alone in a backyard, much less a park. Really? What is happening in his backyard? The proverbial alligator up from New…
Hi Readers! Getting lots of interest in Take Our Kids to the Park…And Leave Them There Day. Watch for it/me on CNN on Thursday at about 11:30 a.m. EST, and in a whole bunch of radio interviews and newspaper articles over the next few days. Meantime, here is a GREAT QUOTE from the former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. He appears along with a lot of other well-known and loved New Yorkers, including Regis Philbin and Ray Romano, on a new DVD called New York Street Games (which also comes with rules for the old-fashioned games, like stickball, and…
Hey Readers — Short, sweet and safe. Wise words lifted from a comment that just landed here: “Dear Free- Range Kids: [I am a] Peds ICU nurse and can tell you that the real dangers are overlooked. Lock your second story windows, make sure your kids understand car and bike safety. Model safe behavior. Don’t talk and text while driving. It really is simple. Also, I can tell you that I have NEVER once taken care of a kid who was assaulted by a stranger. I have taken care of MANY who have been…
Hey Folks — Branching out. Here is my story on the cover of today’s Salon, all about how our quest to make playgrounds safer than safe has also made them safer than fun. Here’s a snippet: …For the past 40 years or so, we have certainly been working to make our playgrounds safer than safe — maybe even safer than fun. Seen an old merry-go-round lately? Or a swinging gate? How about a seesaw — the kind without springs, where, when your so-called friend suddenly plopped you down, you felt it? Didn’t think so. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has…
Hi Readers — Usually I flip through parenting magazines and am amazed by all the items, activities, foods and basic childhood rites of passage they find dangerous (and possibly deadly). But kudos to Parents Mag for this lovely little blog post about Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day — which is coming up this Saturday. The tone is receptive, open and calming. Couldn’t ask for anything more. Of course, there are some comments along the lines of, “This is absurd!” and, “Life isn’t the way it was when WE were kids,” and, “It’s easy to…
Ahoy There, Readers — Have you seen this ad? From the folks who brought you the ap (or network, or whatever) that allows you to track your teen daughter’s ever step at the mall comes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAhWp81BZ_M Talk about raising resilient kids who can roll with the punches! Talk about getting your priorities straight! Talk about having a memorable birthday party, thanks to an unsuspecting cowboy the wee pirates could truss to a tree! Anyway, everything I’d like to say about this spot — and world — has been said already with great gusto by Tom Henderson at ParentDish. And so,…
Hi Readers — I leave you with this story to ponder this weekend. An 8th grade boy with autism whose mom says he has the mental capacity of a third grader drew a small stick figure boy pointing a stick-figure gun at a stick figure teacher. The charge? Oh, you know if it from my headline. Good ol’ “making terrorist threats.” Remember: When stick figures’ guns are outlawed, only outlaws (who are stick figures) will have guns. — Lenore
Dear Readers — Oh my god, this is a BRILLIANT essay by security expert Bruce Schneier. He’s a guy who thinks a lot about terrorism, but his words will make sense to all of us who are concerned with the difference between real danger (which we’d like to guard against) and “worst-case thinking,” which over-reacts to unlikely scenarios. Listen to this Schneier-ism: There’s a certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for…