A woman’s spidey senses went wild on a Target run, and she was ABSOLUTELY SURE she was about to be trafficked. How could she be so certain? She saw three different men, all shopping and not smiling. They looked so evil, her blood ran cold. When she went outside (accompanied by store personnel, at her […]
A British study confirms something that you may have been feeling: Ten is the new two. More precisely, 11 is the new 9. Parents who played outside at age 9, on average, now don’t let their kids go outside, unsupervised, until age 11. This is not in response to an actual rising crime rate — […]
And if you like the whole Free-Range Kids gestalt, come visit LetGrow.org, the nonprofit that grew out of it and promotes childhood independence right and left! https://twitter.com/i/status/1385012305813905410
Becky Diamond is a reporter who has spent years and years in actual war zones. But now she’s really scared. She’s worried about what is happening to childhood. The scheduling, supervising, intervening, optimizing — and the psychological issues those can engender. So she wrote a letter to her son reminding him — and herself — […]
When you feel ready to let your kid use a sharp knife, or bike around the neighborhood, or go on a stone-cold, old-fashioned, Nerf and Sprite-fueled playdate, you might want to have the wind at your back — that is, some other parents cheering you on, or helping you let go, or simply eager to […]
Harriet the Spy. Encyclopedia Brown. Meg and brother Charles Wallace, Ramona, Beezus, Pippi, and that My Side of the Mountain Kid (what WAS his name?). They all shared something other than spunk. Freedom. Freedom of movement was a given in mid-century children’s literature. Of course the kids starring in books did more than most of […]
Gym teachers don’t have to have kids doing specific sports or skills all the time. When P.E. teacher David Benay decided to devote some class time to free play, outside, he was amazed by how active his students were, and how many lessons — physical and social — they were getting. When a tiny game […]
“I think this school is making a mistake,” tweeted Jonathan Haidt, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” What school? The Hackney New School in London that I write about over at Let Grow. (Click here to read.) “A school without bullying sounds like a utopia, but it is achievable,” Hackney’s head of school […]
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 […]
