Michael Hynes is superintendent of the Port Washington, Long Island School District, just outside New York City. He’s also a Fulbright Specialist, TEDx speaker, author of “Staying Grounded: 12 Principles to Transform School Leader Effectiveness” — and a big part of the documentary “Chasing Childhood.” Please Note: Hynes graduated in the bottom 10% of his high school class, so he knows a bit about kids who are checked out. Play Club is a Silver Bullet for A Whole Lot of Students, by Michael Hynes I’ve been sharing the benefits of children and play in our schools for well over eight…
Author: lskenazy
Doonesbury sums up a whole lot of our themes — and gives us a name check — in today’s funny pages! In case it’s too small to read, here’s what it says: Alex Doonesbury (born Nov. 30, 1988, daughter of Mike and J.J.) is at her computer. It’s dinner time and she’s wondering where her twins, Danny and Eli, are. “They better not still be out at the quarry!” Then she gets a phone call from Danny and demands, “Where ARE you two? It’s after six! You guys want unsupervised play after school, you have to hold up your end…
Remember (or not!) the classic Allan Sherman song, “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” the letter from an unhappy camper? Today’s post involves something remarkably similar — except it’s updated. And it’s real. It comes to us from James Frank’s Wild Nature Adventure blog. “Ranger James” started and runs the Lure of the Wild Nature Camps in Catonsville, Maryland. Smart Devices are Hurting Smart Kids, by Ranger James As our camp’s Director my job is all about communication. To keep things running smoothly and safely I make a point to check in with our counselors and their campers as often as I can each…
As we approach the holiday of gratitude, here’s a little reminder that “stranger-danger” gets it wrong, and we should be grateful for all the humans looking out for kids. This video (click here) was sent to Let Grow by Rosalie Witt, an early childhood instructor, consultant, and coach in Connecticut who helped us pass that state’s “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill this year! It shows a little boy sitting down next to a bunch of different strangers — and what happens next. Clearly it was not filmed in the U.S. (It seems to be from a publication called Fabiosa, out of Cyprus.)…
Today’s pithy comment comes in response to yesterday’s post about a mom sick with fear because a man (!!!) was in the vicinity of her daughter. Nothing happened. And yet – because the press is so eager for any story of a child in peril – it reported the “incident” with the gravity usually reserved for a plane crash. (Remember Lenore’s dictum: If something is an “incident” it means NOTHING HAPPENED.) In fact, it was just a mom whose fear of predators got the best of her — in part, I’m sure, because of news reports like the one about…
“A mother’s worst nightmare almost came true in broad daylight after a man may have tried to lure her toddler daughter in a residential area.” . Gee, that’s a lot of hedging for the first paragraph of an article. Something ALMOST, MAY HAVE happened. Yikes! But so begins a “news” story on KHQ, a news station covering Post Falls, Idaho. I’ll leave you to guess whether there really was a bad man luring kids in broad daylight…or a Parks Dept guy setting up a T-ball game. . Here’s the write-up and the rather amazing TV story accompanying it that manages…
The New York Times columnist Jessica Grose has a plea for all of us adults: Stop Micromanaging Halloween. It’s a trend that’s been growing like the Great Pumpkin ever since from back when *I* was a kid being warned about poison candy. (The number of kids poisoned by a stranger’s candy in all that time? Zero.) But over the decades, the meddling has only gotten much more intense. There’s the new-ish phenom of the “Switch Witch” — guess who gets to play that role? She lets the kids choose a few precious pieces of their loot then swaps out rest…
Most parents believe it’s important for kids to develop independence in their elementary school years by doing things “away from direct adult supervision,” according to a new survey by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. But in a national poll of 1000 parents, the hospital found “a sizeable gap between parent attitudes and actions.” For instance, less than a quarter of parents of kids ages 5-8 let them prepare their own snack. Meanwhile, only half the parents of kids age 9-11 were willing to let their children find an item at the store while they shopped in another aisle. The majority…
When Henry was 18 he had sex with a 16-year-old he met on a dating app who said he was 18, too. The 16-year-old’s parents found out, called the cops, and Henry was charged with a sex offense. He took a plea: No jail time, in return for seven years on the sex offense registry. Henry’s is just one of about 60 registrants’ stories told by sociologist Emily Horowitz in her new book, “From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts Not Fear. If you believe that our country’s sex offense registries should actually make…
This article in the Journal of Pediatrics — Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing: Summary of the Evidence — has been getting a ton of attention in the last few days, especially on Twitter, so we are updating our blog post about it. If the article’s title sounds like what we’ve been saying here forever — darn tootin’. The authors are three prominent researchers in child development: David Lancy from the Dept. of Anthropology at Utah State, David Bjorklund at the Dept. of Psychology, Fla. State, and our own Peter Gray, a professor in the Dept. of Psychology and…