And basically get outdoors, if only to remember “that we’re just tenants — and ones without much sway.” Here’s the piece, by Nicholas Kristof, which quotes from Richard Louv’s classic, “Last Child in the Woods.”
Author: lskenazy
Cool entry on the “Alas, A Blog” blog questioning the conventional wisdom that holds: If only kids had more gym, health and nutrition classes, they’d all slim down. An eight-year study of about 1700 kids gave half of them a greatly enhanced gym/nutrition/health curriculum (and healthier cafeteria food), while the other half got the same old same old. Kids were measured in third grade and again in fifth and surprise (there goes the grant!), there was no difference in the two groups as far as weight was concerned. The “Alas” blogger rightly asks whether weight should matter…
Here’s a good idea for any community: Keep those darn kids out of the library! Certainly don’t want them milling around books and such. Next thing you know, they might want to take one home with ’em, just like a bottle of scotch. Luckily this small North Carolina regional library knows what’s good for kids. Read on! The Hyconeechee Regional Library staff would like to thank all of our customers for making 2009 Summer Reading a success! We hope that you will continue your library visits throughout the rest of the summer and into the upcoming school year. To…
The headline on this USA Today story sums it up: Playgrounds: They’re safer but still can be dangerous. As opposed to — what? Anything can be dangerous. Nothing can be 100% safe. Yesterday a man walking through Central Park got hit by a falling branch and now he’s in a coma. Should we cordon off Central Park? Chop down all the trees before another innocent victim gets hurt? What’s just nauseating about this article, detailing the potential risk of every square inch of playground equipment, is its complete lack of perspective. It points out, for instance, that thousands of kids…
So I just read yet another article about how to protect your child from all the perverts sliming around on social media, like MySpace and Facebook. Hooey. I’m all for protecting kids from crime and creeps, but the advice had it wrong. Both the Crimes Against Children Research Center and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society studied what happens to kids on line. Both concluded that when kids are posting photos and chatting with each other and even giving out personal info — the big “no no” everyone warns about — they are not putting themselves…
Hi Readers: Here’s a note of transformation from a mom of five who is going Free-Range after three decades of fear. Her oldest is 32, youngest is 10. Thank you, thank you. I went from “You have got to be kidding — she let her kid take the subway?” to “This makes so much sense and I totally have to change my mindset.” I am still reading the book, and I can feel truth replacing fear in my whole perception of life around me. I am in that rare statistic of knowing someone well who was abducted and murdered.…
At the risk of wasting my, “What is this world coming to?” quota for life (I think we’re only issued about 7 million), WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO? Look at this article in Tuesday’s Washington Post. It’s about a brand new device, normally used to secure NUCLEAR REACTORS now being used to secure a…pre-school. The doors at Lola’s Place pre-k in Maryland are guarded by a “vascular recognition system.” A what? “…a machine that uses infrared light to read a hand’s veins, 4 millimeters beneath the skin. Like fingerprints, vein patterns are unique, and the computer installed at Lola’s…
Hey Free-Rangers! Here’s a cool idea I got from the gal who runs the blog Mommy Wizdom. She said: Why not post a Free-Range Challenge and have folks write in to say how it went? Sounds good to me! So here’s Free-Range Challenge #1, based on a comment that just came into this site. A reader wrote: I live in a typical residential subdivision with my seven-year-old son. I honestly cannot remember ever seeing any kids riding their bikes or walking around the neighborhood in the 3+ years we’ve been living here. Everyone stays on their own…
If you needed more proof that our society is a little wacky when it comes to kids and safety, get a load of this: A North Carolina off-duty fireman SHOT A DAD RIDING HIS BIKE WITH HIS THREE-YEAR-OLD IN A BIKE SEAT because the fireman thought the road was too busy for this kind of fun. He said he found the situation “unsafe.” Guess in a way he was right about that. Here’s the story, sent in separately by a couple of Free-Range readers, Gyula Voros and Robert Freeman-Day, who found it on BoingBoing. You’ll be happy to hear that bike helmets…
English school boys are suddenly being forced to switch from old-fashioned ties to clip-ons. What overactive overprotective notion is behind this development, sent in by reader Gregory Sutter? The BBC explains: In May the Schoolwear Association, the trade body for the school uniform industry, said 10 schools a week in the UK were switching, because of fears of ties getting caught in equipment or strangling pupils. It’s about time someone put those fiendish neckties in their place! I just hope the authorities mandate adult supervision at tie-donning time, as kids could all too easily puncture their windpipes with…