This piece comes to us from Sam Flatman, an outdoor learning specialist and an Educational Consultant for Pentagon Play. Sam has been designing school playground equipment for the past 10 years and has a passion for outdoor education. He believes that outdoor learning is an essential part of child development, which should be integrated into the school curriculum at every opportunity. Should We Shelter Our Children From The News? by Sam Flatman Is the world really such a horror show? With fresh reports of terrorist action hitting our TV screens each week, the media would have us all believe that…
Author: lskenazy
At a lecture I was giving yesterday, one parent asked a good question: What if you WANT your kid to go knock on a friend’s door to play, or ride their bike around the neighborhood…but the kid shows zero interest? That reminded me of a story told to me by a Washington Post reporter. Her son was 8 at the time, and one afternoon the carpool picked him up, dropped him off at home and drove off. But… The house was locked. It was a day the boy was supposed to stay at school. Somehow the carpool mom didn’t know…
It is better for pre-schoolers not to play on their new playground equipment at all — equipment that is on grass and dirt, not concrete — than to let them play without 6-inch-deep mulch underneath, according to regulators. A pre-school in a disadvantaged neighborhood of Charlotte, NC, received the equipment as a donation, which seemed like a gift from heaven. But then it learned that it must keep the kids off the equipment until somehow the school gets a donation of $1,100, which is what the mulch will cost. As Mark Price at the Charlotte Observer writes: “The kids can’t…
The New York Times article on Playborhood, the open-to-all playground that Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike Lanza organized on his front and back lawns, continues to elicit a ton of comments and commentary. Here’s what Lanza wrote on his own Facebook page. And here’s a post by Tim Gill, the British visionary who blogs at Rethinking Childhood and has spent 20 years fighting for the right of kids to have some free, unsupervised time. Gill points out that there is no such thing as zero risk. Yes, we can minimize risk, and we actually have — we currently live in the…
In Silicon Valley, a dad named Mike Lanza wanted to create for his three sons the same kind of Free-Range childhood he’d enjoyed as a kid back in Pittsburgh in the ’70s: Time with buddies, having adventures, riding bikes and goofing around. Since this is the 21st century and childhood is so much more supervised and organized, he decided to turn his home into a bastion of freedom and community. So he did something I just love: in a neighborhood of where the average home is $2 million, he placed a picnic table on his front lawn. He and his…
Here’s a photo from Britain, where it was once absolutely common to let your kids wait in their buggies while you went shopping. Isn’t it odd the way what’s normal in one era seems nutty in another, even though the world has not changed that much — just our perceptions of it? (Here are some crime stats to make you feel great.) We can’t bring back the past, but we can salvage some of the practices that made life nicer. And one of them was trust. L . .
In a hallelujah moment for parents everywhere, charges have been dropped against Susan Terrillion, the Maryland mom who took her kids, 8 and 9, on a trip to to Rehoboth Beach, DE, and left them at their vacation home while she went to pick up dinner 4.5 miles away. While she was gone the kids, who’d been instructed to stay inside, didn’t. Instead, they took the family’s two dogs out to relieve themselves. The unleashed dogs proceeded to run off, and a man driving by almost hit them (the dogs, that is). As he got out to help the kids…
The show Stranger Things takes place in the ’80s and you know what they say (or at least what the novelist L.P. Hartley said): The past is foreign country. On the show, kids ride their bikes and have adventures on their own. Here’s what one of the show’s stars, Millie Bobby Brown, says about then versus now in an interview with Jen Chaney at Vulture: As somebody who wasn’t alive in the ’80s, what felt weird to you about kind of going back in time and seeing how things were back then? Was it the lack of modern technology? .…
Helicopter parents get a lot of blame and I don’t want to add to it. I want to end it. For the most part, parents helicopter because society DEMANDS it. There are schools that won’t let kids walk home on their own, and cops who chide parents who let their kids play outside. There are companies peddling devices to GPS our kids, or read their texts, or watch their keystrokes, warning us of the horrible things that will happen if we don’t. Then the media blasts us with horror stories. So the Free-Range movement is not anti-helicopter parent. It is…
After a neighbor called the cops and CPS on a mom whose child was 50 feet away from her in her own large backyard (see the post right below this one) and the cops, thankfully, realized how ridiculous that was, the mom wanted to fight back. She pondered suing the neighbor. She wanted to make it clear to the neighborhood — and world — that kids have the RIGHT to play outside, if their parents think they’re ready. . Many of you readers cautioned against this, saying let’s not fight excess legal involvement with excess legal involvement. But David DeLugas,…