Welcome, TIME Magazine Readers!

Hi Folks! Welcome to Free-Range Kids, where we (mostly) look at new ways to raise safe, self-reliant kids — kids at home in the world, happy outdoors, and even capable of entertaining themselves without the aid of Steve Jobs. We also look at stories in the news that illustrate Free-Range ideas in action — or the opposite. And we examine the disconnect between the fact we live in pretty safe times, but the media keep telling us to be scared from the second we wake up to the second we (try!) to go to sleep.

The chapters in my book, Free-Range Kids, illustrate the themes you’ll see here — and, of course, in it! (The perfect holiday gift, if I may say so myself.) Voila:

FREE-RANGE KIDS INTRODUCTION

WELCOME TO – YIKES!

THE FOURTEEN FREE-RANGE COMMANDMENTS

1 KNOW WHEN TO WORRY

Playdates and Axe Murderers: How To Tell The Difference

2 TURN OFF THE NEWS

Go Easy On The ‘Law & Order,’ Too

3 AVOID EXPERTS

Who Knew You Were Doing Everything Wrong? …Them

4 BOYCOTT BABY KNEE PADS

And The Rest of the Kiddie Safety-Industrial Complex

5 DON’T THINK LIKE A LAWYER

Some Risks are Worth It

6 IGNORE BLAMERS

They Don’t Know Your Kid Like You Do

7 EAT CHOCOLATE

Give Halloween Back To The Trick-or-Treaters

8 STUDY HISTORY

Your 10-Year-Old Would Have Been Forging Horse Shoes (Or At Least Delivering The Paper)

9 BE WORLDLY

Why Other Countries Are Laughing at Zee Scaredy-Cat Americans

10 GET BRAVER

Quit Trying to Control Everything. It Doesn’t Work Anyway.

11 RELAX

Not Every Little Thing You Do Has That Much Impact On Your Child’s Development

12 FAIL!

It’s The New Succeed

13 LOCK THEM OUT

Make Them Play – Or else

14 LISTEN TO YOUR KIDS

They’re Sick of Being Babies (Except The Actual Babies, Of Course)

SAFE OR NOT? THE A-Z GUIDE TO EVERYTHING YOU MIGHT BE WORRIED ABOUT

Animals (being eaten by); Bats (Metal); Bats (Vampire); Baby Formula; BPA Poisoning; Cell Phones and Brain Cancer; Choking On Food And All The Other Little Things Around the House; Cough and Cold Medicinitis; Death By Stroller; Eating Snow; Germs, Anti-germs and Shopping Cart Liners; Halloween Candy; Internet Predators and Other Online Skeeves; Lead paint, Lead Toys and Lead Everything from China; Licking the Batter Off Beaters While They’re Still Plugged In; Playground Perils; Pools and Water and Kids and Toilets; Raw Dough’s Raw Deal; School Shooting Stats; Sunscreen, Vitamin D, Skin Cancer, You Name It; Spoilage (of food); Spoilage (of children); Teen Sex; The Woods (playing in); Walking to school; Zoo Animals (in cracker form and otherwise).

STRANGERS WITH CANDY

Even the Folks Who Put The Faces On Milk Cartons Aren’t Too Worried

CONCLUSION

The Other Problem that Has No Name

And How to Fix It and Give Our Kids Their Childhood Back

That’s it! We’re glad you’re here! Have fun connecting with us and some new ideas. And coming soon — new feature: Find Free-Range Families in your own neighborhood! — Lenore

Dear Santa: Are You A Sex Offender?

Hi Readers — What’s Christmas without a little overkill, this time at the hands of the U.S. Postal Service? It is acting to keep our children “safe” — and joyless! That’s the true spirit of the season, the way things are going.

The Post Office is afraid of sex offenders responding to childrens’ letters to Santa– admittedly a concern, but compared to having volunteers answer  mountains of letters from needy children? As they have for decades? And what are the chances a Santa letter to a child along with some toys would wind up a horrible tragedy?

To me it’s another case of “protecting” kids that leaves the vast majority far worse off — just like when we take  all the merry-go-rounds off all the playgrounds just in case someone, somewhere could fall off. We’ve “protected” the kids, yes. Mostly from a joy.   Here’s the story, from the Associated Press:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Starry-eyed children writing letters to the jolly man at the North Pole this holiday season likely won’t get a response from Santa Claus or his helpers.

The U.S. Postal Service is dropping a popular national program begun in 1954 in the small Alaska town of North Pole , where volunteers open and respond to thousands of letters addressed to Santa each year. Replies come with North Pole postmarks.

Last year, a postal worker in Maryland recognized an Operation Santa volunteer there as a registered sex offender. The postal worker interceded before the individual could answer a child’s letter, but the Postal Service viewed the episode as a big enough scare to tighten rules in such programs nationwide.

People in North Pole are incensed by the change, likening the Postal Service to the Grinch trying to steal Christmas. The letter program is a revered holiday tradition in North Pole, where light posts are curved and striped like candy canes and streets have names such as Kris Kringle Drive and Santa Claus Lane . Volunteers in the letter program even sign the response letters as Santa’s elves and helpers.

North Pole Mayor Doug Isaacson agreed that caution is necessary to protect children. But he’s outraged North Pole program should be affected by a sex offender’s actions on the East Coast—and he thinks it’s wrong that locals just found out about the change in recent days.

“It’s Grinchlike that the Postal Service never informed all the little elves before the fact,” he said. “They’ve been working on this for how long?”

The Postal Service began restricting its policies in such programs in 2006, including requiring volunteers to show identification.

But the Maryland incident involving the sex offender prompted additional changes, even forcing the agency to briefly suspend the Operation Santa program last year in New York and Chicago .

The agency now prohibits volunteers from having access to children’s family names and addresses, said spokeswoman Sue Brennan. The Postal Service instead redacts the last name and addresses on each letter and replaces the addresses with codes that match computerized addresses known only to the post office—and leaves it up to individual post offices if they want to go through the time-consuming effort to shield the information.

Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.

“It’s always been a good program, but we’re in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information,” she said.

Moody stressed that kids around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.

But what will change are the generically addressed letters to “Santa Claus, North Pole” that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.

Those letters will still be forwarded to volunteers but it’s unclear yet if anything will be done with them. Those intercepted by the postal service will probably eventually be shredded.

 

NEW NEW NEW:
Hi Readers: Here’s a little update. The elves up north are fighting back.

Outrage of the Week: No Wine In Front of The Kids

Hi Readers! Here’s an advice column that had me reaching for the scotch. And I don’t even drink:

Dear Amy: My husband and I adore our grandson, who is a toddler. We watch him at our house overnight two times a month while his parents attend art classes.
Now that he is getting older, my daughter would like to start leaving him for longer stays — the most recent request is three nights/five days so they can attend a class out of state.
When our grandson was born, his parents created a list of rules regarding his care. I understood why they would want to do this.
One of the rules is that there is zero tolerance for drinking any alcohol by the primary caregiver (me).
My husband and I enjoy drinking wine every night. When my daughter and her brother were growing up, her dad and I always had wine with our meals.
I don’t mind giving up wine on an occasional evening, but as they start to ask us to care for our grandson for longer periods, I’m wondering if the no-tolerance rule is still an appropriate expectation.
We are responsible drinkers who enjoy wine. But are we pitting the safety of our grandson against our wine consumption? Are we being selfish, and could we possibly be accused of having a drinking problem by making an issue of this with our daughter and son-in-law?
Is responsibly drinking wine in one’s home mutually exclusive to being able to responsibly care for a child?
– WL

Dear WL: I support the “zero tolerance” policy of these parents. Even one glass of wine can affect your response time and sleep habits.
Speak with your daughter, and go over her list of expectations. You should ask her to negotiate a solution — the most obvious being that you and your husband trade off who is the primary caregiver in the evenings. This person will enjoy a glass of apple juice with dinner.
If you are afraid your daughter will bring up your drinking, then you do have problem. At the very least, your drinking is causing a problem with her, and you should be brave enough to address it.

Hey Amy! How about being brave enough to address the over-the-top fears many of today’s parents are indulging in? They’re a lot more damaging than a glass of Chardonnay.

These grandfolks are not running around the table, chasing each other with electric knives. They sound like normal, civilized people. If they’re irresponsible, so is all of France. The idea that they have to change their behavior because their grown daughter wants them to be even MORE perfect — or what she considers perfect —  is not something to encourage. Should she insist they only discuss pre-approved topics, too, and play no music composed after 1783? (Maybe she did, in her list.)

If the grandparents are actual alcoholics, then that’s another story and I doubt the mom would even consider leaving her kid with them. Since that doesn’t seem to be the case, I think the grandmother here is being extremely obliging. She’s not only giving her time, she’s shutting up about the rest of the rules her daughter has issued.

Daughter, hon, how about Universal Rule #1? “Be grateful for free babysitting.”  – Lenore

“Can These Parents Be Saved?” asks TIME Magazine Cover Story

Hi Readers — Wow. This is my dream article, and (perhaps) not just because it is high on Free-Range Kids! Check it out! Yay, Time! And please allow me to quote a part I find particularly salient:

Obsessing about kids’ safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics — the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google “America’s Worst Mom,” fills the first few pages of results — all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. (“Malta! An island!” she marvels. “Who’s stalking the kids there? Pirates?”) Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, “hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers.”

Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons’ school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being “at least part Sikorsky,” hiring a football coach for a son’s birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, “Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?”

From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, “10 is the new 2. We’re infantilizing our kids into incompetence.” She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It’s the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.

That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with “How can you let him go to the store alone?,” she suggests countering with “How can you let him visit your relatives?” (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) “I’m not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn’t be prepared,” she says. “But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources.” Besides, she says with a smile, “a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It’s nowhere you’d want to be.”

Let’s say it again: Hooray for Time Magazine! The tide is turning! — Lenore

Beware the Creepy Guy Offering You A Ride, Kids! …Or Not.

Hi Free-Rangers! You’ll like this one. And greetings from Boston where I’ve come to give a talk and also meet with the so-called “Sandwich Moms”! (A lovely group of moms from Sandwich who believe in Free-Ranging. Always nice to meet fellow believers!) — Lenore

Outrage of the Week Update: Teacher Who Let Kids Climb Cliff on Trial

Hi Folks! Remember the case of Lia Grippo, the California mom who runs a day care center with a focus on nature? Her plight constituted our first Outrage of the Week. She let three of the kids in her care — two of them her own — climb a cliff while on a field trip to the beach. (The cliff was not above the water.) Though her kids had climbed this cliff before (as have kids since time immemorial — climbing used to be a normal part of childhood), onlookers freaked out and called the cops. Child Protective Services was alerted, and pretty soon Grippo’s day care license was suspended. Now here’s an article about her from the local paper, the Santa Barbara Independent, bringing us up to date. She is due in court this Monday. According to the paper:

At a time when parents are encouraged to allot sufficient outdoor activity for their children, Grippo said she has been stripped of her childcare license for hosting a program which embodies outdoor exploration. “I think that there is a growing trend toward risk aversion in our society that has really gone over the edge,” Grippo said. “We live in a time that both our children and ourselves must be as safe as possible, rather than as safe as necessary.” According to the allegations by the DSS, Grippo violated the personal rights of children in her care by “not providing adequate care and supervision” to three children while they were “climbing a cliff approximately 125 feet high while naked or partially clothed.” Additionally, the DSS allegation states that Grippo allowed children in her care to be “expos[ed] to natural hazards (cliffs and ocean fronts), thereby placing the daycare children in substantial danger.” Grippo claims the children climbing—two of which were her own and one, a child of a close friend—are avid child climbers who had scaled the beachside cliff before.

…Lizelda Lopez, Public Information Officer for the Community Care Licensing Division of the DSS, said the department will continue to seek the revocation of Grippo’s license in spite of the appeal. “What happened could have killed these children, so we take this very seriously,” Lopez said. “That’s why we are seeking the revocation… she failed to protect these children from the potential of becoming seriously hurt.” Currently, there are 50,000 licensed childcare facilities in the state. The DSS only pursues revocation against only one percent of these facilities on average per year. “It is not our goal to shut these programs down,” Lopez said. “It’s our goal to make sure that our children are in safe environments.”

…Grippo has fashioned her career by emphasizing exploration of nature in her programming for children. “When we keep children from testing their own abilities at a young age, I think we are doing them a great disservice,” Grippo said. “Our culture has become so litigious… children aren’t being allowed to get muddy, climb boulders, or play in the creek.”

No one at Free-Range Kids wants to see children get hurt — especially not plunging off of cliffs. But if these kids have climbed this thing before, AND Grippo was watching them AND we agree that there is a difference between sending our kids off to the beach without any supervision versus encouraging them to do some of the things children (and animals) have done since the beginning of time, like climb and explore, under our gaze, THEN we have to wonder why the state is so dead set on ending this nature-based program. Especially since the parents of the kids IN it have supported Grippo.

The state is right, “What happened could have killed these children.” Then again, so could tripping over a Thomas the Tank Engine, or falling down the stairs at Child Protective Services.  Can we please remember that not everything a child does has to be on a mat? — Lenore

Ding-Dong. Who’s There? The Safety Police!

That’s what’s happening in England, folks: A new proposal to have safety experts go into families’  homes to make sure they’re utterly safe, right down the stair guards. Woe to the family that babyproofs in a manner not approved by the state!

Here’s the Times OnLine article about the new guidelines, and here’s a comment someone posted that I especially enjoyed:

[The article said that] “About 100,000 children are admitted to hospital each year for home injuries at a cost of £146m.”

I’m delighted to hear that. It indicates that at least 100,000 of the next generation will still be willing to take risks and behave uninhibitedly. It’s the other 10,000,000 I worry about, the ones who will be taught never to go out in the rain in case they catch a cold.

It’s not that Free-Range Kids rejects all safety measures. Are you kidding? Safety is GOOD. I personally love window guards and I put latches on my cabinets when my kids were younger. But I, for instance, think toilet locks are a waste of money. What if the government disagrees? What if I think it’s my job to teach the kids not to open the oven, but the government believes I ought to invest in some oven guards? And what if the government ends up endorsing baby knee pads? (Maybe that’s good because that way, when I feel like banging my head against a baby’s knee in utter frustration, neither of us will get hurt.)  – Lenore

There Was an Old Lady Who Lived in A Shoe, But She is Fine & Her Kids Are, Too

Hi Folks! When not busy blogging here (and lecturing, and writing non-blogs), I run a humor contest in the magazine The Week. My question is usually a wacky twist on something in the news and last week I was fed up with that pre-school TV show in England that had tinkered with the ending of Humpty Dumpty. Remember? Worried, I think, that their little viewers could not handle the shock and horror of Humpty’s actual fate, the show changed the ending to, “All the kings horses and all the kings men/Made Humpty happy again.”

So my Week contest asked readers to come up with another nursery rhyme with a new ending suited for today’s supersensitive, easily traumatized kids. Here are the fantastic results, below. If you want to see more contests from The Week, click here and then keep clicking, “For the results of last week’s contest” when you get there. My contest has been running for almost a year, so there’s a lot of fun packed in there!  Have safe, educational fun! — Lenore

UPDATED NURSERY RHYMES FOR TODAY’S TOTS

FIRST PRIZE:
Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her lightly baked fish.
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her, and said, “What a heart healthy dish!”
Robyn Sharretts, Danville, PA

SECOND PRIZE:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do
She asked a producer, who was in the know
“If I have octuplets, can I get a show?”
Lianne Kuboi, Honolulu

THIRD PRIZE:
There was a little girl who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
And when she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was bad, she had her iPhone taken away from her.
Mary Walker, Ocean City, NJ

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner
Eating a non-denominational winter-holiday pie
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, “I have an unhealthy relationship with food that causes my obesity.”
Bill Muse, Seattle

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
But faced foreclosure, didn’t know what to do
She appealed to her banker to lend her a hand
Now she sleeps on a flip flop out in the sand.
David Sorenson, Green Bay, WI

Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his britches on
One shoe off and one shoe on
That’s why she divorced you, John
Helen Kontis, Fort Lauderdale

Rub-a-dub-dub,
three men who can’t marry each other in a tub.
Cathy Curtis, Finksburg, MD

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
In this mortgage market, you probably will, too.
Michael Plittman, Pittsburgh

Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife would eat no sweet
When they added a pilates class
Their bods were hard to beat.
Bobby Schackow, Gainesville, FL

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider who sat down beside her and discussed his lactose intolerance all day.
Pattie Vespereny, St. Louis, MO

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, drinking her soy-based whey.
Along came a spider who sat down beside her and said, “Hey, did you get my latte?”
Marion Law, San Diego

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider who sat down beside her and asked if she’d had a nice day.
Adrienne Hochee, Mountain Center, CA (and others, similar)

This little piggy went to the doctor
This little piggy stayed home
This first piggy got H1N1
The other little piggy got none
Now all the little piggies cry, “We…we…we don’t know what to do!” all the way home.
Peter Savigny, White Plains, NY

Three blind mice, see how they run!
They all ran after the farmer’s wife
Who’s practiced opthamology all of her life
She restored their sight with a laser knife
Three vision-corrected mice
Nancy House, Nashville

There was an attractive, middle-aged woman who lived in a condo with a view
She had a fulfilling career and 2.1 children, too
She cooked them organic meals and homemade bread
She was their best friend, n’er a harsh word said.
Danielle Tallman, Litchfield Park, AZ

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son
Stole a pig and away did run
His lawyer could offer no defense
For this was poor Tom’s third offense.
Lois A. Dorschel, Hawthorne, NV

Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle rips free
But baby is perfect and wins a tro-phy.
Daisy Michael, Westminster, MD

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And can’t tell where to find them.
Leave them alone and they’ll come home
With their GPS to guide them!
Gail Noren, Fayetteville, GA

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
To fetch her poor dog a bone
When she got there, the cupboard was bare
So they ordered a pizza by phone.
Gene Hosey, Mechanicsburg, PA

It’s raining, it’s pouring, TV’s getting boring
The satellite’s gone, HBO is done and we can’t TiVo till morning.
Norma Herrera, North Bay Ridge, FL

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home!
Your house is paid off and your children are grown!
Mary Holz, Nipomo, CA

Jack be cautious, Jack slow down
Jack walk ’round the candle in your flame retardant gown.
Vicki Brownell, Blairstown, NJ

I’m a little hedge fund, short and stout
Here is a sure bet, do not doubt
When I get in trouble, hear me shout,
“Tip me over and bail me out!”
Marv Toyer, Carlsbad, CA

Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie
Kissed the girls and made them cry
Until one spoke to Georgie’s mom.
Then he was grounded and missed his prom.
Miles, Judith, David and Valerie Klein, Frisco, TX

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and sued the town
Jill installed plumbing thereafter.
Roberta Rathbun, Goleta, CA

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack sat down and looked around
Jill texted, “c u L8r!”
Julie Pilat, Los Angeles

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
From that day on they had it done
By one who’d crossed the border.
Tom Sheppard, Flat Rock, NC

…Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill sought pre-treatment approval from an in-network provider
Then carefully and safely walked down the hill,
As their policy limit was one such lifetime occurrence.
Warren Scrivani, Raleigh, NC

….Jack fell down and broke his crown.
But Jill stood by him during the press conference.
Ramon Presson, Franklin, TN

Parents Out to Get This Pre-K Teacher for “Endangering” Their Kid

Dear Readers — Take your chill pill FIRST. Then read on:

Dear Free-Range Kids: I’d like to tell you about a recent experience of mine and would love to get your feedback.
I am a mother of three children and a preschool teacher at a small, private preschool in my town.  About two weeks ago, my class of four-year-olds was marching in from the playground.  We routinely do this about five minutes before dismissal time.

The line leader on this particular day was a very bright, outgoing girl.  Unfortunately, I did not notice that, upon re-entering the building,  she did not turn into my classroom but marched right past it, rounded the corner and started walking down the main hallway of the school where parents were lined up to pick up their children.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, my assistant and I  had just seated ourselves on the rug with our other students to sing our good-bye song, when my missing line leader and her mother appeared in our doorway.  I am certain that the entire event could not have lasted more than two minutes.

The mother was visibly outraged with me for not noticing that one of my students was missing.  I have tried talking with her twice about this, her husband has complained to the director of the school, and they have threatened to send a letter to the school board.  The idea of her daughter being unsupervised in our school hall is absolutely unacceptable to this mother.  Instead of using this as an opportunity for her daughter to learn, she has refused to speak to her daughter about it.

My parent teacher conferences are tomorrow and would love to know your thoughts on how I should deal with this situation. Thanks — S.

I don’t suppose you could put those parents in a time capsule back to an era (perhaps 15 years ago) when two minutes in the school hallway by oneself in a secure location was not considered the end of the world? Or remind the parents that on a planet where something like a quarter of the population subsists on $2 a day, their child is safe and warm and fed and even getting an education, despite the fact she’s a girl! And she is not in a war zone, and not in a famine, and not eating dirt for dinner or being sold to the local warlord for a sack of rice and a skinny goat.  So to treat her tiny, nay, microscopic non-adventure as an outrage shows, if nothing else, a lack of perspective and gratitude so GET A GRIP!

I’m not sure that’s precisely the tack to take, so, readers, if you have any better ideas, I’m sure this teacher is eager to hear them. — Lenore

Read it and Seethe: The Homework Files

Hi Readers! I’m writing this at 10 p.m., when my younger son is finally going to bed after (not quite) finishing his 6th grade homework. I am so sickened by the fact the school day extends ad infinitum — and basically ate up all of yesterday, too, a beautiful fall Sunday. Grrrr.

Anyway, here’s a girl who put the whole issue into a letter that proves: 1 – Too much homework deadens the soul.  And, 2 – She is already so articulate she could drop out of school and still run for Congress. (Or from Congress, she’s that smart.) Here’s here piece, as posted stophomework.com, the fabulous blog run by Sara Bennet, author of The Case Against Homework.  Yes, I realize the letter was written by a private school kid and her experiences and expectations may not be quite the norm. (Who am I kidding? They are way OFF the norm!) But I still love her main point, as you’ll see.  – Lenore