Hi Readers! Yes, here is another “I left my kid in the car for a sec” story. Why? Because I am astounded to find commenters even here on Free-Range Kids berating the parents who make this sane, safe choice when circumstances call for it. These parents are not leaving their children in active volcanos. They are leaving their kids in the equivalent of a playpen while they run an errand. It is time to decriminalize this behavior and time to realize, as some commenters have written: not every moment of parenting has to be OPTIMAL or PERFECT. If that’s what…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Readers! You’ve seen some of the facts here before — like the fact no child has EVER been poisoned by a stranger’s candy, as far as university research can tell — but if you need a little Halloween pep talk, here it is, on Huffington Post. My main point? If you want to see where childhood is headed, look at Halloween. It’s going from a joyful, neighborhood, kid-centric day (or night!) to a parent-planned, neighbor-distrusting, often indoors and/or daytime “event,” slathered in suspicion and Purell. Why? The “sake of the children,” of course. And to think I used to…
Hi Readers — and BOO! Oh my God! Sorry! I hope your kids weren’t reading over your shoulder! I didn’t mean to scare the little dears — it could traumatize them for life! Imagine the psychiatric bills — or years in the insane asylum! That’s the way we’re supposed to think of kids now: Too delicate for ANYTHING, including, apparently, being even slightly spooked by a holiday hitherto dedicated to spookiness. As this New York Times article documents, schools and community centers across the country are asking that kids not wear any disturbing, scary or politically incorrect costumes. I guess…
Hola Readers — I’m just back from Spain, which seems a little more Free-Range than America. (And Canada. And especially England!) One Madrid playground my son Izzy and I visited actually had a see-saw, something you rarely see (saw) in America anymore, thanks to the fear of bump-induced lawsuits. Izzy declared it the most fun piece of playground equipment ever, after merry-go-rounds. (Another childhood standard on its way out, for the same reason.) The two of us were speaking at a conference sponsored by Audi on the topic, “The Streets Also Belong to Me!” — “Me!” being children. The chief…
Hi Readersttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UjGwW9FN_4Take a Valium THEN read this: Two “adventure” playgrounds in England have BANNED PARENTS. After all, parents are adults and so are sexual predators, so from now on, in the land of the Magna Carta, only playground workers who have passed a background check will be allowed in. Why? Councillors in Watford claim they are only following Government guidelines and cannot allow adults to walk around playgrounds “unchecked”. You know, I never thought of myself as walking around “unchecked” before. Anyway, more bureaucracy: “Due to … regulations we have a responsibility to ensure that every authorised adult who enters…
I just finished reading what could be considered a perfect companion book to the Free-Range Kid movement, The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish. Lenore has blogged about this before, and Sara’s terrific website stophomework is on Lenore’s blog roll. In a nutshell: Bennett and Kalish state that there is little or no correlation between homework given in elementary and middle school and increased scholastic achievement. And health professionals state very clearly that children should be outside PLAYING and not spending time indoors doing schoolwork. As a matter of fact, some of the actual homework “incidents” mentioned…
Hi Readers — Hope you saw this piece in The Times: Disney is offering refunds to any parents who bought its Baby Einstein videos and found, to their shock, that watching shapes, songs, kids and colors on TV did not turn their babies into instant geniuses the way a name like “Einstein” might suggest. This mea culpa is a huge victory for the Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, which got the Einstein folks to drop the word “educational” from their marketing materials a few years ago. This new refund is an even bigger deal, because now the company has to…
Hi! The Deputy here! My dad recently told me about a friend of his–this would be the 1940’s–whose mother told him to pick five schools he might want to attend. He chose the five, she told him to give the schools a ring to let them know he was coming for a visit, gave him train tickets and some spending money, and sent him on his way. Alone. He was…13. These were boarding schools we’re talking about! Let’s contrast this with some stories I have heard about today’s COLLEGE students. These are very reliable accounts, not urban myths, and so…
Good afternoon! The Deputy here; lucky Lenore is still in Spain! In the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times today, the headline reads, “Guardians of Their Smiles: It’s fun to post pictures online of baby’s first bath, but some parents wonder if it’s safe.” As the article points out, much of this fuss can be chalked up to “technopanic”, not reality. The article quotes David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. “‘There is this characterization of pedophiles using the Internet as an L. L. Bean catalog, but this is…
Speaking of playgrounds, I was perusing mental_floss and they have a list of Ten Unusual Playgrounds from around the World. Wow! Fun! Here is the kind of playground I remember from my youth. (No,no — hat’s not me!) Not terribly unusual I guess, but still fun, right? While searching for just the right jungle gym image on the internet, I found out that The Playground is a rather hot topic. There are books such as American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space by Susan G. Solomon. There are blogs devoted to playgrounds. There are blogs that discuss playgrounds. And there is even…