Sometimes a gal’s gotta rant (again), so here goes: Shootings are devastating. Obviously! But I also wonder about the value of LUMPING shootings together and reporting them as such. My Yahoo newsfeed on Monday screamed, “GUN VIOLENCE ERUPTS OVER FATHER’S DAY WEEKEND.” Then, in a country of 333,000,000, it told of three shootings in three different states that left two dead. Tragic! But also…disorienting. Dare we check some actual stats? Gun violence is bad. Who would say otherwise? But “erupting”? That’s a verb that makes you think if you stick your head out the window, it’s going to get it…
Author: lskenazy
It is DELIGHTFUL to play when no one is being a jerk. It is EDUCATIONAL to play when someone is. So: By now you probably know that I recommend schools start a Let Grow Play Club. That’s when a school stays open before or after school for mixed-age, unstructured play in a no-phone-zone. Think of it as a wildlife sanctuary…for childhood. Kids of all ages play as if it’s 1952. An adult is there, but they’re like a lifeguard. They don’t organize the games or solve the spats. The kids do. Here’s what kid-organized play can look like. (Text continues…
This is far from the only mom I’ve heard from who grew up Free-Range — and happy about it — who then found herself helicoptering. I always try to explain that it is not that millions of individual parents suddenly and individually became neurotic basket cases. It’s that we are living in a culture turning an entire GENERATION of parents into what I call “worst-first thinkers”: People automatically leaping to the worst case scenario FIRST and then proceeding as if it’s likely to happen. (That’s what my Free-Range Kids book is all about — how we got to this point.)…
I’m hoping this note a Florida occupational therapist sent to Let Grow could change some lives! Good Morning! My name is Kara, and I’m a pediatric occupational therapist in Florida. I wanted to share some recent successes I’ve had with independence therapy and encouraging kids to do things on their own. If you’re not familiar with occupational therapy (OT), we are the medical professionals who help people do the things they want to do, have to do, or need to do, despite any diagnosis, disability, or illness. I predominantly work with autistic children of various ages and abilities. A girl who…
The texts started coming thick and fast on Friday: “You’re a clue on Jeopardy!” “This is the big time!” “What more can you achieve?” The clue: “LENORE SKENAZY, WHO WROTE OF LETTING HER 9-YEAR-OLD RIDE THE NYC SUBWAY LONE, MOVED THIS TERM FROM RAISING CHICKENS TO RAISING KIDS.” If you don’t know the answer…I’d be surprised. The contestant knew the answer, too. So this was, indeed, a pinnacle. But THE pinnacle of my career? Well, it has a lot of competition. There was the pinnacle of getting my first real job. (Thank you, Fred Danzig, RIP, at Advertising Age!) The…
This is the testimony researcher Sarah Clark gave last week in support of Let Grow’s “Reasonable Childhood Indepndence” law in Michigan. Read it and weep! My name is Sarah Clark. I am a research faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School, and Co-Director of the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health, which we call the Mott Poll. The Mott Poll measures parental attitudes, experiences and priorities regarding health-related issues and trends for US children, with the goal of representing the parental perspective in public dialogue about child health topics. We…
I remember loving the library like a second, more-exciting home. The children’s room was fun, but the Junior High Room? Aladdin’s cave! And the adult room? Studio 54! Or so it seemed to 13-year-old me. These three siblings seem to be following the same path. If you are a fan of kids — or kids’ spelling — you will love their reflections on their first solo walk to the library, and what they got there. This story comes to us from Holly Grant. She and partner Lenny are teachers raising their kids in Syracuse, New York. She writes — Hi!…
After hearing a talk by Let Grow Co-Founder Jonathan Haidt at the Grace Church School in Manhattan, Larissa Romans did a bit of a dive into childhood independence. As she wrote me later (we’d never met): During Jonathan’s talk he mentioned Free Range Kids, which I started this weekend. Both Jonathan and you mention The Let Grow Experience and this past afternoon I got the chance to explore it a bit. And here I am. As a child, I remember begging to peel oranges with a knife like my older sisters. I wanted to be a big girl. I do…
Putting Parental Fears in Perspective Kidnapping remains one of the top 3 fears of American parents despite its (thank God!) rarity. One way to fight that outsized fear is to watch the video below. Then, if you’re wondering about the actual odds of your child being kidnapped by a stranger — or need to see the other odds of other childhood calamities (except disease) to put things in perspective — we’ve got a WHOLE LOT of stats below! Video by Mike Kraus at MYLKmedia. Note: It is hard to find stats that exactly match up with each other. One organization…
In his blockbuster Atlantic piece out today, “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” my Let Grow Co-founder Jonathan Haidt says our culture gets it all wrong when it comes to kids: We “underprotect” them in the virtual world, and over-protect them in the real one. That’s the worst of both worlds, if we want to raise healthy, happy kids. The piece focuses heavily on how smartphones, introduced about 15 years ago, have “re-wired” childhood. They did this in part by throwing kids (and the rest of us) into a maelstrom of “likes,” comparisons, and misinformation. But phones also warped childhood by…