Well, with a couple of caveats, that is. First of all, the segment could be postponed indefinitely, should any “real” news develop. Secondly, the piece is about a Free-Range tangent, the whole issue I call the “Kiddie Safety Industrial Complex” — that is, the multi-billion dollar industry that has given us superstores full of baby products that didn’t even exist a generation ago. Things like the baby bathwater thermometer that warns you if your baby’s bath is “TOO HOT!” (Never mind the fact that, unless you have no central nervous system, you could probably figure this out with…
Author: lskenazy
…and ends up a journalistic superstar! (Albeit several years later.) Susan Toepfer, former editor of Quick & Simple, OK, and the juicy bits of People turns out to have been…a Free-Range Kid! So Free-Range that she and her friends got picked up by a stranger when she toddled off (literally) with some friends. Read all about it at the new blog, True/Slant! While you’re there, True/Slant’s parenting blogger, Karen Dukess, has a lovely review of Free-Range Kids, which she calls, “The Parenting Book That Beats Valium.” (I think I’m going to have a T-shirt made!) Her piece…
A Reader Writes: “The amount of fallacies propounded by the supporters of this idea is astounding… and that includes the author of this site. She apparently thinks that only fatal abductions are a risk to be worried about, and also stacks a number from just one source against the entire population of the U.S. It’s essentially a lie. “The idea will not catch on in a big way, of course. But even so, it is just a matter of time before someone who has posted on this very page has a child suffer an injury or abuse,…
With Mother’s Day upon us like a breakfast tray of hot coffee accidentally spilled on the blanket (amid tears), it is time to ask that equally burning question: What do moms want? The answer? We want to relax a little. Not just relax in bed reading People and under a hot, soggy blanket. We want a whole new way of parenting that is not quite so overwrought. That’s a tall order in a country that has brought us a dozen different parenting magazines, a whole section of the book store devoted to childrearing issues, and the typical baby…
Or at least they let me expouse my views in today’s op-ed pages. A Happy Mother’s Day to them! And a Happy Mother’s Day to The Week (my favorite magazine), which printed a nice, big excerpt from Free-Range Kids (the book). And yet more good wishes, this time to ABC World News Tonight, which is doing a Free-Range story on Sunday night. Check your local listings (as they say). And now, if you’re a mom, eat some bon bons! If you’re a dad — hey! Put down that bon bon and head out to the park with you-know-who. You…
First off: HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! Is this way way WAY too tacky? I hope not. I am fresh out of great Free Range fodder for a sec, so here is an interview with me that is up now on the cool website Motherhood Later than Sooner. (Yup. I’m an older mom.) I promise not to keep self-promoting, but now I am taking the rest of Friday off (okay, one more bit of self promo: to film a Free-Range piece that’ll be on ABC World News Tonight on Sunday night.) That’s it. Enjoy your breakfast in bed and…
Hi Free-Rangers and Others! Below you’ll find a post that I just loved from the blog Rancid Raves. It’s about my book, but it’s also about the big issue of, “What if?” I.e., how come so many parents immediately try to conjure up the very worst case scenario whenever we give our kids an ounce of freedom. (Or half ounce, even.) The post is by a woman named Kelli and I herewith present it to you! WHAT IF? by Kelli Oliver George What if?? I dedicate this post to a mom I used to hang out with long, long…
Granted, this quote is about a competely different topic — one I don’t even want to discuss here: swine flu. BUT this observation by Professor Dirk Brockmann, who models epidemics, holds so true for so MANY fears, I just had to to shout it out. Here he is, as quoted in today’s New York Times: “People have a very weird perception of large numbers. If you have 2,000 cases of flu in a country of 300 million, most people think they’re going to be one of the 2,000, not one of the 299,998,000.” That is just how our minds…
Hi Readers! Quick answer to the question a lot of commenters have brought up: Are crimes against children down so dramatically simply because there are fewer children left outside to be victimized? And doesn’t that prove that we SHOULD keep our kids cooped up? Very reasonable questions. But no: Keeping kids cooped up is not the cause of the crime decline — and so it’s not what we need to be doing. The head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, points out that ALL crime has been declining since the early ’90s — property crimes, assault, sex…
Hi, Free-Rangers! Leaving behind the topics of politics, feminism, environmentalism and all that, here is a comment from a few posts back: “I work in law enforcement in the child predator unit in a mid-size city. Kids meeting people on the Internet is the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t sound like anyone here has any idea of the extent that perpetrators use new technologies to victimize. I won’t “bore” you with details since you don’t think this stuff can happen to you anyway. No one does. “But it is kind of sad to me to see how proud people…