Most of you won’t remember this Sesame Street classic — or will you? Some day this kind of independence will be normal again. Parents will trust their kids. Kids will trust their abilities. And it will seem sick and strange to call 911 to report a happy, confident child becoming a part of the world. […]
Over at Let Grow we have a LESS THAN ONE-MINUTE video by professor/author/TV host Tim Caulfield on how to rationally determine if you should let your child walk to school. Check it out by clicking here!
Rachel Flynn, a professor of child development and therapist, recently testified in support of Nevada’s “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill, saying that over her 23 years in practice she has seen kids in decline as their unstructured, unsupervised time evaporated. This, she testified, was across the board: The decade prior to my doctorate I was a […]
Kids and parents — rejoice! Both Texas and Oklahoma passed laws yesterday that ensure parents that giving their kids the freedom to do things like play outside, walk to school, and wait at home will NOT BE MISTAKEN FOR NEGLECT! If you’re a Free-Range fan, you may recall when Utah passed its first-in-the-country Free-Range Parenting […]
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 […]
