Here’s the article I was hoping to write about the new Fisher-Price stationary bike that tots are supposed to ride while watching “educational” videos. But since Naomi Schaefer Riley actually got around to putting her thoughts on paper and pixel, all the words are actually hers. How do you like that? This is from her column in the New York Post: Exercise Bikes for Toddlers are a Terrible Idea, by Naomi Schaefer Riley Parents, repeat after me: Children are not just shorter versions of adults. This is the important message that seems to have been missed by the geniuses at…
Author: lskenazy
A year ago today, Mike Tang, a research chemist in Riverside, California, was frustrated and worried. He’d told his son to do his homework — read a grade-level book, like the teacher asked — but the boy, age 8, chose a baby book instead. . This was not the first time the boy had done this, and previous punishments like taking away his videogames hadn’t worked. So to put the fear of failure into his son, Tang drove him to the local shopping plaza at around 7:40 pm and showed him, “This is where homeless people sleep.” (There were no…
In California, a bill being introduced by State Senator (and pediatrician) Richard Pan, S.B.18, purports to ensure the rights of kids. The problem is: In the process it may curtail the rights of parents to raise their kids as they see fit. That is the fear, anyway. The rights that Pan lists are unquestionably great — the right of children to “appropriate, quality health care,” “social and emotional well-being,” “appropriate, quality education and life skills leading to self-sufficiency in adulthood” (right on!), and “opportunities to attain optimal cognitive, physical, and social development.” But who decides what IS “optimal social development”?…
This site tries not to wallow in nostalgia. (TRIES!) But the fact that this email comes from a reader who returned to EXACTLY where he grew up and saw only two kids is not just nostalgia, it’s anthropology: Dear Free-Range Kids: Two summers ago, I revisited my hometown for the first time in 6 years, after my dad died. A small city actually – it grew to 50,000 souls and leveled off at that number about 3 decades ago. The town is lovingly preserved….so much so that about 90% of all the schoolboy haunts I remember are still remarkably intact.…
Aiden punched Noah because Noah wouldn’t let him on the slide! Ooh! Now what? Well, if this took place in Missouri, at recess, Aiden could be heading to jail. In an era when we have finally come to realize that zero tolerance policies and the kyetrdysia school-to-prison pipeline are permanently damaging kids by saddling them with criminal records and churning them through the justice system, Missouri is going the opposite direction. Starting this year, KFVS reports, a new statute increases the punishment when students get into a fight: The change means that if your student is caught fighting once they…
Sometimes when I post about the Sex Offender Registry, I get comments like, “Those scum don’t deserve to EVER live a normal life!” This note below is to remind us that a study of 17,000 people on the registry by the The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board found that about 5% were “clearly dangerous,” and 100 could be classified as sexual predators. Not that the other thousands and thousands of registrants were all Romeo and Juliet cases, or teens who sexted. Just that most people who have been arrested for a sex crime don’t do it again. Some will.…
These musings come from a reader who blogs at southgeek and describes herself as “someone who sees and greatly fears that our personal freedoms and independence are being sold down the river in exchange for imaginary security. And when it comes to security of children, well, all bets are off.” . Agreed. But today she sent me a grumbling, discerning email about the way weather reports keep getting more and more hysterical, and that’s what I’m posting here: . Dear Free-Range Kids: Years ago when I moved to Alabama, I first saw meteorologists on the local TV stations breaking away…
Many of you sent in this dramatic story of a dresser falling on a Utah 2-year-old and his twin brother rescuing him from underneath it. It sickens me the way KSL TV news showed the worst part of the video three times in two minutes, but here you have it: . As MSN reports: A video monitor in the bedroom of twin brothers Brock and Bowdy Shoff, 2, captured an unsettling incident last week in which a dresser toppled on the pair as Brock climbed in an open drawer. Brock can be seen trapped for nearly a minute before Bowdy…
Here’s Harvard’s Steven Pinker musing on what happens when a legitimate movement — the movement to improve child safety, for instance, or to awaken sensitivity to minorities — achieves its main goals, but insists on acting as if today’s dangers and insults are on par with those of the past. His point about child safety — that it’s good kids are no longer coal miners but ridiculous that in the name of the self-same “safety” today they not longer get to play at the park alone — is a building block of the Free-Range Kids movement. We, too, want safe…
Voila a wonderful sign and wonderful way to ring in a New Year! Sent to us by a guy named Marty: In case you couldn’t read the sign, some highlights are: Let’s work together to help and support each other. We all share this world together. Let’s make the words below important again! *Please *Thank you *Yes M’am *Yes Sir *How can I help you? *Of course I’ll help! *I’m sorry *I forgive you *I respect you *I see your point *I couldn’t disagree with you more. Let’s go grab a beer! That one is my favorite. It’s way too…