Every Single Kid Gets a Personalized Handshake Here’s a heartwarming story about a North Carolina teacher, Barry White — but basically it’s just an excuse to show this fantastic video. All I have to add is this: I once heard that NO programs work when it comes to changing kids. This revolted me! Then the person (whoever, wherever it was) added: What DOES change kids — what changes all of us — is almost always a RELATIONSHIP, not a program. Of course, programs create new relationships. But there’s truth to the idea that connecting is what we need and want,…
Author: lskenazy
Here’s a kind of wacky thing that happened in Louisiana last week, courtesy of Ashleigh “Flossy” Dowden, who describes herself as a “mom, wife, sister, actual ex-felon, proudly progressive political pain in the ass, crazy cat lady, dirty joke teller, and garden geek who lives in the neighborhood spooky house.” . Okay then! Here’s the little note she sent: Man looking for dog caused hysteria among parents in Ascension Parishhttp://www.wbrz.com/news/man-looking-for-dog-caused-hysteria-among-parents-in-ascension-parish Hysteria! Panic! Men! Naturally, I asked her to elaborate, and she did: Ascension Parish is just a few miles away from where I live in Baton Rouge. 30 years ago…
This Daily Mail piece by David Derbyshire is so profound it has been cited over and over: How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations: an interview with four generations of the same family about how far they were allowed to wander as kids. It comes from Britain but will sound familiar to anyone in the Western world — alas! When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his…
So here’s what happened: A babysitter came to pick up five kids at a New York City public school, including one she hadn’t met before, but whose name was — well, this New York Post article doesn’t say his name, but it was the name of another boy as well. The teacher gave the babysitter the wrong boy, age 5, and off the babysitter went — for half an hour: “It is a parent’s worst nightmare to have their child taken from school by a stranger,” said the family’s attorney, Israel Klein. Ignoring the child’s frightened protestations, the unnamed sitter…
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…
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…