In this sweeping article about the importance of free, non-adult-lead play — the kind of playing most of us remember doing, like, all the time as kids — psychologist Peter Gray does not mince words. The Boston College psychology professor and author of Free to Learn (as well as the author of one of the most popular psychology textbooks used at Harvard and elsewhere) writes: The famous developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1932) noted long ago that children develop a more sophisticated and useful understanding of rules when they play with other children than when they play with adults.With adults, they…
Author: lskenazy
“To avoid tragedy” the Gloucester Township, NJ, police department is warning parents: Do not let your kids eat unwrapped candy! Do not let your kids eat unwrapped candy! Do not let your kids eat unwrapped candy! Really — look at the “safety tips” below. It’s diagnosable OCPCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Poison Candy Disorder. And by the way, Gloucester Townshipians, you might want to remind the cops that, um, no child has ever been poisoned by a stranger’s candy on Halloween. So kids can “avoid tragedy” AND eat unwrapped candy till they vomit (from too much candy. Not poison). This is from the…
Sometimes you gotta think outside the trick or treat bag. So kudos to the National Reform Sex Offenders Laws organization for tackling the persistent, unfounded myth that sex offenders lure trick or treaters to their doom on Halloween. To help America move beyond this zombie-like fear that refuses to die, the organization is challenging the media to find even ONE case of a registered sex offender preying on a trick or treating minor. Just one. Ever. This challenge is in the vein of Prof. Joel Best’s decades’ long hunt to find any child who had been poisoned by a stranger’s…
Reprinted by popular demand (popular in my apartment, anyway) comes this piece of mine about Halloween. Just as I believe that all sorts of new educational products, courses and mandates migrate from the world of special needs (what is Gymboree but early intervention?), new fears migrate from Halloween to the rest of the year: Fears of predators, poisoners, kids as pedestrians — and all the awfulness that can occur if a child eats a sugary snack. HALLOWEEN IS TOO SCARY If you want to see something really scary on Halloween, come to my home about 9 p.m. I’m letting my…
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…
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 . .