Childhood in The Netherlands, NOW, as observed and written up by Kate Darnton in The Boston Globe: The Dutch loosen up early. My husband and I were thrilled when we arrived in Amsterdam to find that many playgrounds have cafes. On sunny afternoons, parents meet after work to sip Aperol spritzes while their kids scale a climbing structure. No mother stands beneath it yelling, “Be careful, honey!” No father hovers by the sandbox. They just let it be. Their approach is not the same as neglect. Dutch parents are there — or, to use the current lingo, “present” — when…
Author: lskenazy
My piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, “If You’re a Kid, the Experts Want You to Have a Fun-Free Summer,” was inspired by the warnings some of you sent me from a blog where the pediatrician advised parents about the multitudinous dangers of letting their kids play in the sand: “Remember when digging in the sand at the beach was a fun activity for young children,” says the website KidsTravelDoc. “Sorry. No more. Based on recent findings, only with lots of do’s and don’ts is frolicking in the sand a healthy activity, says the U.S. Environmental Protective [sic] Agency.” I…
Here’s the scoop, short and sweet, from Newday, about Colorado which may consider a ban on letting parents buy their pre-teens a smartphone: A proposal cleared by state ballot officials for 2018 would ban the sale of smartphones to children younger than 13. Backers of the childhood smartphone ban would need about 300,000 voter signatures to get on the ballot. It seems unlikely that 300,000 will support this measure, so I’m not too worried. But here are the details, in all their bureaucratic glory: The ban would require cellphone retailers to ask customers how old the primary user of the…
Omaha, Nebraska: A woman taking her niece out of the SUV on Tuesday afternoon was shocked when the wind blew the door shut with her keys and the child inside. The car locked. The aunt, the girl’s mom and two other relatives frantically tried to get the door open using a hanger and screwdriver, and when they couldn’t, they called 911. The cops arrived, broke the window, and got the child out, safe and sound. Then they ticketed the mom on suspicion of child abuse by neglect. As The Omaha World-Herald reports: Lt. Darci Tierney, a police spokeswoman, said the…
This comes to us from law professor and transportation activist Michael Lewyn, who recently published “The Criminalization of Walking” in the University of Illinois Law Review. It focuses on two ways the government punishes pedestrians: through jaywalking laws and by using child neglect laws to punish parents who let their kids walk. Here’s a relevant bit for us! The Criminalization of Walking by Michael Lewyn Anti-jaywalking statutes punish walkers for the simple act of crossing the street, by imposing fines and even imprisonment for anyone who crosses a street in midblock, or who crosses at an intersection without specific…
As I wrote in this month’s Reason Magazine: We All Scream for the Ice Cream Man’s Head The idea that ice cream men cruise around looking for victims is simply an urban myth. Paul DiMarco has been selling ice cream in Poughkeepsie, New York, for two decades. He owns a fleet of trucks. When one mom confided to him, “You gotta be careful because there’s a lot of pedophiles in this world,” he recalls replying, “That attitude falls into the same category as ‘All black people that drive Cadillacs are pimps,’ and ‘All clowns kill little kids.'” Of course, some…
Melissa James is a 38-year-old copywriter in Yorktown, VA, wife of a Department of Defense analyst and mother of two who decided to do something a little…wild: Dear Free-Range Kids: I enjoy your website and had declared myself a Free-Range Parent about a year before discovering you. (I had adopted the term after reading the articles about the kids walking home from the park whose parents kept getting reamed for “negligence.”) Anyway, very few kids in our upper-middle-class, very safe neighborhood are ever seen outside. People know my two—Audrey, 7, and Preston, who turns 10 today — because they are…
These tips from HealthyChildren.org for when a child can go to a public restroom are not just hilarious and ridiculous, they are also insane, starting with this one: ​The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children feels that children of any age should not be permitted to use public restrooms alone. Any age? Why? Simply to keep Americans so scared of stranger danger that they keep supporting the Center? The website goes on to gift us with: My Public Restroom Survival Guide Never send a child into a public restroom alone. Ask for assistance from a security guard or employee…
This piece originally appeared at the National Association for Rational Sex Offense Laws site. What Luke Heimlich did was wrong and deeply disturbing. It also sounds like it was not a one-off. But he was punished, he was treated, and he has not re-offended. If he hadn’t slipped up on an administrative issue — missing a registration date — he would be going on with his life. How does “outing” him make anyone safer? And if it doesn’t, then what’s the point, other than shame and vengeance? Who do we allow to redeem themselves, and who do we condemn forever?…
This persecution of parents who love their kids and make the rational decision to let their them wait in the car a few minutes MUST STOP. Here is the latest case, reported by Elizabeth Broadbent at ScaryMommy (which should be SCARED Mommy in this case!). The mom, Heather DeStein, 28, has a 3-month-old. She drove her husband to work, and by the time she got to he store, her baby had finally fallen asleep. It was 36 degrees outside, and much warmer in the car, where the heater was running. The baby had on a winter onesie — “the kind…