Hi! I’m Lenore, the gal who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone, wrote a column about it, got slammed in the media and labeled “America’s Worst Mom.” I started this blog to explain that I LOVE safety — helmets, seatbelts, mouthguards — but don’t believe kids need a security detail every time they leave […]
It’s not just that Oklahoma State Rep. Chad Caldwell (R) and Rep. Jacob Rosecrants (D) both believe parents shouldn’t be arrested or investigated for letting their kids have some “reasonable independence.” It’s that they both remember their OWN reasonable independence — and are grateful for what that freedom made them into. Read about the way […]
A 10-year-old boy picked up from his Chicago public school seven minutes late triggered a call from the school to the Department of Child and Family Services. Fortunately, the school community has rallied around the mom and son, writing a letter to the CEO of the Chicago Public School system saying that, “We do not […]
A dad takes his daughter for a walk in the rain and a passing van thinks he is tormenting her. Called to the scene of the “crime,” the cops back the dad — but the folks in the van don’t take, “Everything’s fine” for an answer. The dad’s story and our take on it are […]
How does it feel? Read my thoughts (as it were!) over at Let Grow. Click here! And think about the fact that when China makes its students wear uniforms that track what time they arrive at school, whether they are snoozing in class, and where they go when they go home, we understandably feel this […]
…their dad, Nevada physician Daniel Hansen, supports the Reasonable Childhood Independence bill being introduced in his state today. As he wrote to his legislators: To be clear, I personally deal with horrible cases of neglect and abuse and do not want support of this bill to be construed as any form of leniency for such […]
The idea that anytime kids are outside, making noise, someone is at fault — the kids for yelping, the adults for not supervising and shushing them — is pernicious. It turns independent kids, and the parents raising them, into a public nuisance. (Noise-sance?) And yet, that’s exactly what a new app in Japan is doing. […]
Even during this very strange year, the middle school counselors in Milburn, NJ, were seeing the same anxiety in kids that had been on the rise for seven or eight years before it. Kids were very worried, often about scholastic achievement. How could the counselors help them? They asked kids to go home and…help out […]
As Let Grow works with five states on Free-Range Kids bills this session, some lawmakers remain skeptical that their state’s definition of neglect needs narrowing. But they do. Here is Let Grow’s map of all 50 states’ neglect laws. Unfortunately, 47 of them are so open-ended that too much is left to the discretion of […]
From an op-ed in yesterday’s Las Vegas Journal-Review by Nevada State Sen. Dallas Harris and Assemblywoman Alexis Hansen, titled, “Don’t Criminalize Childhood Independence.” Maybe we look like complete opposites. One of us is a gay, Black and a Democratic mom of one from Clark County. And one of us is a white, Republican and a […]
