This reassuring note comes to us from Anna Borden, a stay-at-home mom from Enderby, British Columbia, mom of Dexx (stepson, currently 13), Wesley (4), and Rylee (3). I met her at a talk I gave in the Canadian town of Salmon Arm (!) last week: Dear Free-Range Kids: I got the pleasure of being a stepmom before I had my own children. I believe he was 8 when I started to leave a note and show up 30 minutes after him, after school. In the morning he would walk himself up one km to the bus stop (crossing the…
Author: lskenazy
Gotta love this guy! Guisepe Spadafora travels around the U.S. serving free tea from his mini bus, creating community just by opening his doors and inviting people in. What a nice little reminder that you can be a man with a van — a stranger with a van — and not a predator! Kudos to Isabelle Altman at The Columbus Dispatch for this delightful feature (and to Luisa Porter, who took the great photo): Guisepe Spadafora says he began serving free tea when he was living out of a pickup in Los Angeles. The 22-year-old Washington native had just graduated…
From an article I wrote for Reason magazine: A mother is puttering in the kitchen, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. We see the clock on the wall. We see her expression grow from cheer to terror. And somewhere in the streets below, we see a man buy a little girl a balloon. If your pulse is racing already, thank Fritz Lang, director of M, the 1931 picture that taught filmmakers everywhere to hook audiences with the primal emotion of heart-stopping fear for our kids. The latest iteration of this formula is Kidnap, wherein loving, gorgeous Halle…
The picture below was taken by Heather Whitten in 2014. Her son had been sick with Salmonella, so her husband took the feverish, vomiting, diarrhea-suffering boy into the shower with him and there they sat for three hours as all the crap washed out of the boy, over them both, and down into the drain. Overwhelmed by the bonding before her, Heather, a documentary photographer, took the photo and posted it to Facebook. Facebook took it down but Heather reposted it several times, including the story behind it, and Facebook reversed itself and said fine. It went viral, naturally evoking…
This elegantly written essay is by a dad I’ve met, Michael Brendan Dougherty. He longs to raise his child Free-Range but believes it may be impossible in this day and age: The “free range kids” movement speaks exactly to what I want for my children: a childhood that teaches independence and self-reliance, a childhood like my own. And yet I’m worried that I can’t avoid the helicopter. I know that crime is way, way down from when I was a free range kid. (Back then it was just called “childhood.”) I know that the chances of stranger-danger are infinitesimally small.…
A new app being prepared for launch, the Kiddo, promises parents that at last they’ll be able to monitor almost every aspect of their children’s lives: Login to the Kiddo app. Tell the app about your child; enter age, gender, height, and weight. Turn on Bluetooth, and then sync the Kiddo with your smartphone. Identify healthy habits you want your child to adopt and select appropriate goals. It’s just like programming your breadmaker! Except…it’s your kid. The Kiddo tells you you child’s activity level, sleep patterns, and if it could, I’m sure it would tell you what’s going on in…
Remember the bad old days when a rape victim would show up in court and the defense attorney would say, “Why was her skirt so short?” As if the woman caused her own rape. Only gradually did it dawn on us that this is blaming the victim. Once we recognized how cruel and clueless this is, we became a more empathetic society. Except when it comes to moms. “Blaming Mothers: American Law and the Risks to Children’s Health” is a new book by Pace University law professor Linda C. Fentiman. It looks at why we keep moms in the crosshairs…
This letter struck me as absolutely right: Dear Free-Range Kids: This article appeared on my FB. http://www.kcci.com/article/mom-charged-after-child-dies-in-changing-table-incident/8588247 The highlight: “The fact that she left the child alone for an extended period of time is what makes it criminal,” Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek said.” My thoughts: She should not be charged as a criminal. This is an ACCIDENT. She did not INTEND for her daughter to die. They don’t describe how long the child was left, but I’d take the mom at her word that it wasn’t very long, probably a few…
Please share this with friends who are skeptical of school bus safety. EdWeek is reporting: In spite of recent high-profile bus crashes, a new Government Accountability Office report suggests school buses are probably still a safer way to get your kids to school than driving them yourself. From 2000 to 2015, there’s been on average 115 fatal crashes involving a school bus each year in the United States, the GAO found—that’s only a third of a percent of the nearly 35,000 fatal crashes during that time. The number of crashes remained relatively steady during that time. Got that? One third…
UPDATE: My bad for not noticing this note was written by a man, not a mom. And could it be he holds the patent? Wow, this sure does seem like a regular ol’ mom just writing in about a toy — the Fisher-Price Exercycle we were discussing in yesterday’s post. I’m sure there was no corporate brand manager behind this at all! Lenore and Naomi have lost touch with their inner child and apparently not studied on the subject of active/interactive/virtual learning. It is well known that activity spurs a child’s endocrine system to produce Brain Growth Hormones (i.e.BDNF). …