This weekend I was talking to an acquaintance — smart, funny, well-read — who said she assumed most people on the Sex Offender Registry are dangerous, because “they just keep doing it, right?” The answer: . That piece is running on the New York Times Op-Docs page (opinion pieces in documentary form). If you want to see more about this issue by filmmaker and Bronx Defender David Feige, I recommend his movie Untouchable. As for whether kids are safe in a neighborhood where there’s a registered sex offender, it turns out that kids are in more danger from people they…
Author: lskenazy
We keep cutting down on kids’ play time so they can do “more important” things. But this West Coast mom of four writes: Dear Free-Range Kids: Today I took my son to the pediatrician for his annual physical. He’s 11. I mentioned the slight turn in of his ankles that I had noticed and wondered if that was cause for concern. She told me his was slight and caused by weak hip flexor muscles. She also told me that it’s a common issue and she’s seen some quite severe, and if you’ve ever seen kids who look like they’re walking…
A mom from Australia writes: Dear Lenore: I had your Free Range Kids book lying around and home and my daughter starting reading it. Now, she is a huge devotee of the FRK movement, and she is doing a school project on it! Her favourite free-range things to do are going the park by herself, and going shopping by herself. Both the park and the shops are a short walk from our house, but do involve her taking her own pocket money and spending it, and crossing the road by herself. She really wants me to send you a photo…
Canada’s national paper, The Globe and Mail, just came out with a big, blazing, bad-ass defense of everything we are fighting for. It specifically said: Free-Range Parenting may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but practising it should not demand state intervention. If that’s not legitimacy, what is? The piece was prompted by the case of a British Columbia dad who taught his kids, ages 11, 9, 8 and 7 to ride the bus. A busybody assumed this wasn’t safe and called Child Protective Services. CPS found the dad, Adrian Crook, exemplary. BUT it also ruled that kids under age…
Steve Yoder, a reporter who writes frequently on sex offender issues, sends us this piece: A potentially catastrophic storm is headed straight at Florida’s mid-section, which includes Polk County south of Orlando. So on Wednesday, county sheriff Grady Judd tweeted a warning — but not about evacuating or finding higher ground. “If you go to a shelter for #Irma, be advised: sworn LEOs [Law Enforcement Officers] will be at every shelter, checking IDs. Sex offenders/predators will not be allowed.” You might think that now would be the time for a top cop to put all hands on deck to rescue…
A mom writes: Dear Free-Range Kids: We are a homeschooling family of 7 children ages 16-4, but our kids participate in sports at the school at our church. This year I was asked to coach the elementary cross country team. The students aged 6-10 run a lap around the campus (about a half mile) to start practice. On this particular morning, I had 6 runners. The smallest was my own, and she is 7. One boy had a meltdown (he has Autism) and I had to call his mother. As I get off the phone, a woman from the school…
Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor of Reason Magazine (where I am a contributor) interviewed the Fox Business Network host Kennedy. I’ve been on Kennedy’s show, she is fantastic and funny and Free-Range, but I never knew this had happened to her: REASON: What keeps you awake at night? Obviously you have a chance to talk about that on your Fox Business show every day, but the bad news of today doesn’t necessarily reflect the kind of macro stuff that makes me either happy or unhappy about where we are in the world right now. KENNEDY: My thing is slow-burning statist mission…
Adrian Crook, the dad behind the blog 5Kids1Condo, taught his four oldest kids — 7, 8, 9 and 11 — how to ride the city bus to and from school for the past two years in Vancouver. The result? Fantastic. The kids love it, and became friends with the bus drivers. Once Adrian even received an email from a random bus passenger saying what a pleasure his well-behaved kids were. BUT (you knew there had to be a BUT) recently someone reported these “unsupervised” kids to the Ministry of Children and Family Development — the Canadian equivalent of Child Protective…
The Tallahassee Democrat reports that a bill filed by Rep. Emily Slosberg, D-Boca Raton would make it illegal to leave a child age 6 or younger in the car for any length of time. But why? Considering more kids die in parking lots than in parked cars, and that the kids who DO die in parked cars were forgotten there for an average of 4.6 HOURS, not a few minutes, this bill is motivated by a misguided sense of danger. No one thinks kids should wait in cars for a long time, but that is already against the law in…
A federal judge in Colorado, Richard Matsch, has agreed with what we have been saying for a while here at Free-Range Kids: The public sex offender registry is not making kids any safer. At the same time, it is cruel and unconstitutional. The judge ruled in a case filed by three men on the registry. All have been unable to live normal lives as registrants. Remember our story from last week about Adam, the mentally disabled man on the registry? He lost his part-time job of wiping tables — a job he loved, as well as the chance to participate…