The latest parenting insanity is coming from England: Popular TV personality Kirstie Allsopp let her 15-year-old son go on a 3-week train trip around Europe with his 16-year-old buddy — and found herself under investigation by child protective services. Here’s the happy tweet that started it all: Kirstie’s story inspired a lot of folks nostalgically recalling their own youthful travels. But then, as dusk must follow dawn, the trolls followed the fans: He’s too young, the Twitterverse spat. Anything could have happened! The world is unsafe and so is Kirstie Allsopp! . Kirstie punched back. Sure, every kid is different,…
Author: lskenazy
Hi Folks! I wrote this piece for my syndicated column, but am posting it here because it gets at one of the core beliefs not just tearing divorced families further apart, but driving many parents mad with guilt and worry: The idea that kids need a mega-dose of mom to grow up healthy. As we discuss here (endlessly), secure parent/child attachment is good! But so is trusting that kids will end up decently well-attached without constant, intensive adult supervision! So here’s my column on… The Solomon of Divorce “Relationships don’t last anymore,” observed comedian Rita Rudner. “When I meet a…
“The Hero’s Journey” is the name we give to the universal journey into risk and fear to achieve something important. All of us grow when tested this way — whether or not we succeed. Those challenges can run the gamut. For one boy, 11, doing his Let Grow Independence Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his challenge was…finding an item at the grocery store. In the half-minute video below, Kathleen Murphy, the young man’s teacher at the Fayette Street Academy charter school, explains what happened. She also told us that though she was assigning the Let Grow Experience every-other week…
Folks — This is a topic that sometimes comes up and is indicative of our culture’s worst-first thinking: The idea that anytime anyone takes a picture in public that happens to include kids, the kids are automatically in some sort of danger. The “thought” process seems to be: Someone photographed my kid? HOW DARE THEY? As if anyone with a camera is a pervert. As if kids in public should be treated as if they were in private. As if one’s particular kids are SO ATTRACTIVE, they are obviously going to be pimped out. That’s a pretty unrealistic outlook. We…
Social media influencer Erin Loechner walked away from a million fans – literally — to live a low-tech and, dare we say it, Free-Range lifestyle. Among other things, this involved a deliberate decision, described below, NOT to track her daughter, even though the 8-year-old was going around the neighborhood, alone. Chasing Slow, Erin’s first book, was a bestseller. Now she’s inspiring others, including kids, to reconnect with the real world through her new book The Opt-Out Family: How to Give Your Kids What Technology Can’t. Erin, her husband, and their three kids, 12, 8, and 4. This Q & A,…
Honest and searching. That’s how I’d describe this essay by Sybille Bruun, PhD. Sybille conducts research in cognitive science in education at Teachers College (Columbia University) and has had over a decade of experience in New York City’s public and private schools. She’s also the mom of the twin boys above, age 10 — the ones pictured! Get Lost, by Sybille Bruun I was lost. Not in-danger-of-being-eaten-by-a-grizzly-national-parks lost. Just New Jersey lost. The fine Garden State has a lot of roads and, as it turns out, many of them look the same. Concrete pavement and horizon this way, that way. I…
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…
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…