When a man noticed a little girl wandering by herself near a softball game in Lakeland, FL, he correctly assumed she was lost and started taking her around, trying to help her find her family. But when the father was alerted by bystanders that some stranger was walking toward the playground with his daughter, he went and punched the man out. The police report is here. As NBC News reports: The well-intentioned act was mistaken for a kidnapping attempt. You know why? Because we have this MOVIE PLOT SCENARIO on infinite-loop in our brains, telling us that this is how…
Author: lskenazy
A reader writes that her high school student son is not allowed to cross the street you see here: Dear Free-Range Kids: So, my son is going to Summer School. I got a note from the school district transportation department just now with information about Summer School busing and you have to see this. I took a screen shot to prove it because it is too crazy. This bus is ONLY for high schoolers. Kids going into 10-12th grade! Do you see that in all caps and bold?! With an exclamation point! STUDENTS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CROSS McCALLUM!…
Thanks to The Arkansas Project, we can all now ask the question posed in this headline: Should You Be More Afraid of Carjackers — or the Zippers on Your Pants? Recall that the Arkansas Senate passed the Free-Range Kids Bill of Rights, which says, essentially, “Our kids have the right to some unsupervised time, and we have the right to give it to them without getting arrested.” But it was voted down in the House of Representatives after the Speaker, Jeremy Gillam, said that at least one provision — the one that would allow parents to let their kids wait…
As a country, we have been warned to never let a child wait in the car, as if merely waiting briefly in a parked car leads to death. Fortunately, a 2010 study published in Forensic Science, Medicine, and Pathology looked at the actual circumstances surrounding the deaths of kids in non-moving cars. (Recall that the most dangerous place for a child in America is a MOVING car. In 2007, 36 children died of heatstroke in cars, while 905 died in crashes. Maybe we should criminalize driving?) So here’s the stat that we should remember: From 1999 to 2007, 231…
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…
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…