Welcome to Free-Range Kids. Can you say “Free-Range Kids”? Free starts with F, and F is a letter! Like this “letter” I got, below…except “letter” is not the same as “letter,” and…oh gosh! If they ask you that question on your SATs, just choose, “C,” because you don’t want to leave a question blank! This came as a comment from Stacey Gordon on the post, “To Get Kids Cooking, Stop Talking.” Come on… You know good and well that children cannot exist outside the constant stream I call the CONE OF VERBIAGE that keeps them SAFE, or just from…
Author: lskenazy
This essay comes to us from Natalie Johnson, a mom of three who wants to Free-Range, but feels some of the ever-more-common misgivings about letting her kids out of her sight. Natalie works at The Wild Network, a non-profit in the UK that helps communities get the tools and inspiration they need to “re-wild” children in their own neighborhoods. The group was launched after the success of the documentary Project Wild Thing, which looks at the reasons today’s kids don’t play outside as much as previous generations. Their website is here, their Twitter feed is @wearewildthing, and here they are…
Did you noticed the Free-Range Kids’ moment at the Oscars last night? No, not the one where everyone suddenly had to problem-solve on their own and rise to the occasion — just like kids do in free play, the activity we have snatched (like an Oscar!) from them. It was this moment, as described by Jocelyn Noveck in The A.P.: Winners often thank their moms, but Benj Pasek, one of the best original song winners from ‘‘La La Land,” had an especially endearing shoutout for his mother. ‘‘I want to thank my mom who is amazing and my date tonight…
Your fun for the weekend, from The Onion, which gets it just about right just about every time: WASHINGTON—Saying no one in the country is responsible or reliable enough to serve as a legal guardian, child protective services officials from all 50 states confirmed Friday that they had found all of the nation’s adults unfit to be parents and had taken custody of approximately 80 million children. Child welfare workers told reporters they removed all persons under the age of 18 from their unsuitable living situations and placed them under state supervision after home visits revealed that none of the…
UPDATE! It will come as no shock to readers of this blog that the shirt on the windshield turned out NOT to be a bold new way to kidnap and sex traffic mall workers, but was in fact a “random prank.” Imagine that. * On my Yahoo news feed comes this story of a young Michigan woman who found a shirt wrapped around one of her windshield wipers. Admittedly, that is odd. But odder still is how this non-event has gone viral — 100,000+ shares — along with breathless warnings about how we must all be on the lookout for…
A quick and accurate look at where have all the children gone, from a blog called Fix.com: Source: Fix.com Blog If you have any other theories as to why we don’t see as many kids playing outside, on their own — or how to restock the pond, as it were — let us know. And coming soon: An infographic on the benefits of free play. – L.
Here’s a sign from a church in suburban Chicago. The reader who sent it to me wrote: I’ve shown this sign to quite a number of people expecting them to be as floored as I am. Nearly universally, though, the reaction has been along the lines of “well, you can’t be too safe these days. Things are different than when we were young.” I don’t know whether it’s more frightening that kids are being mandated to be supervised in the bathroom long after they no longer need physical help, or that we as a society seem to be accepting that…
Woo hoo! Here is the very first official Free-Range Kids video, by yours truly and genius Mike Kraus from MylkMedia. It explains — cheerfully — how we get risk wrong and end up terrified for our kids. Buzzfeed did a wonderful synoposis. Buzzfeed, baby! Please, please share this on Facebook and everywhere else! It will help your friends understand how society floods us with fear, how we’re pre-programmed to hold onto the most horrifying images, and how our brains work like Google. When we ask ourselves, “Is X safe?” our brains retrieve the easiest information to find — the scariest…
The temporary injury of a girl whose brother hit her in the eye with a foam Nerf gun dart has made the news, at least in the Daily Mail. Love or loathe them, the fact that they ran a large article and four pictures on this one incident (and remember “incident” is the word we use when nothing much really happened), is a perfect example of the way we look at childhood. It is always through the lens of what could go tragically wrong, and what we can do to prevent that rare problem from ever happening again. Here you…
“Free-Range” can mean many things to many people, which is fair, I guess. It’s not like I have the trademark on “free-range.” But I actually do have the trademark on “Free-Range Kids” (because my friend is an intellectual property attorney), and the Free-Range Kids book/blog/movement does not believe that serious illnesses can be cured homeopathically, or that kids don’t need any rules whatsoever in their lives. That being said, I don’t think any of us should care how long this mom, or any mom, does or doesn’t breastfeed her kids, and I am not against giving kids free time and…