Hi Readers! Here’s a guest post from Laura Vanderkam, a journalist who blogs at my168hours.com, writes for The Wall Street Journal (among other fancy places), and just came out with the intriguing book: “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.” Here she ponders: Are Parents Spending Enough Time with Their Kids These Days? by Laura Vanderkam This loaded question usually starts a discussion of some perceived social ill: killer hours, working moms, maybe the frenetic pace of modern life. Certainly, many people worry that society is coming up short on this front. As Ellen Galinsky of the Families…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers — Soon I will be compiling stories of Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day, which went well in parks around the world (well, not a TON of parks, but they WERE around the world and all the participants enjoyed the day). But in the meantime, I just got this gut-kicking story by a really great reporter, Brendan Lyons, in the Albany Times Union: Two years ago, Anne Bruscino was a 21-year-old college student studying to be a special ed teacher and working part time at a day care center for kids with disabilities.…
Hi Readers — Here’s a nice note from one of you with some great ideas. Read on! And to any New York City dwellers: If you want to join me, I’ll be at the Ancient Playground at 10 tomorrow morning. That’s next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 85th and 5th. Maybe see you there! Otherwise, folks, aim for a 10 a.m. meet up at your local playground, to maximize the chance that we all run into each other! — L. Dear Free-Range Kids: Lenore is right in that if anything happens to any child at a park this…
Hi Readers! In response to my downer about dealing with a tsunami of media “What If?”s, here’s one woman’s note answer to: What happens when you, with some slight hesitation, let your child go outside on her own? Dear Lenore: I understand your anxiety, and can only join the chorus of those saying please, please don’t give up. Your book has SIGNIFICANTLY changed our family for the better, and we were already what I called “half-range” to begin with! My daughter (10) has been riding her bike to school for a month now, with buddies, but no adult. …
Okay, first, here’s the positive piece I showed you folks yesterday. It ran on The Huffington Post. Now here’s another, from Canada, by Shannon Proudfoot at the Canwest news service. She even found a dad to interview who did not think the idea was nuts. As for TV, this interview was fun to do, since the anchor — funny, bright Rosanna Scotto, an anchor on New York’s local Fox channel — was openminded. And here’s an earlier post on the topic that ran in SFGate, by Amy Graff, who is going to take her own 7 year old to the…
Hi Readers! I’m writing this today, because by evening tomorrow, I have a feeling I will be in the crosshairs for something that has happened to some child somewhere in this country, or even another country that has heard about Saturday’s “Take Our Children to the Park & Leave Them There Day.” After doing nine TV interviews, a couple dozen radio interviews, and being written about in papers that called me everything from “crazy” to “moron” — and one that even ran a political cartoon showing despondent kids abandoned by their drunk parents, who are raising a toast to “unsupervised…
A very positive piece! Running to do more media and hope to write more soon! — L
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…