A Baby, A Stranger, And Starbucks

Hi Readers! Want to know what happened?  Read on!

Dear  Free-Range Kids: It’s so inspiring to hear that there are others out there who refuse to freak out at every little thing.  I am a first time mom to a now 4-month-old and I don’t sterilize his pacifiers when he drops them on the ground, I refuse to ever use a shopping cart cover, and a month ago, I did the unthinkable.  I left my baby with a stranger while I used the bathroom at Starbucks.

My son and I were about three hours into a road trip heading back home, and I needed to use the bathroom, and he REALLY needed to get out of his car seat. Hence,  a Starbucks stop. I looked around and found an older, grandmotherly lady sitting with a mom-like lady.  I approached them and said, “Excuse me, I really have to use the restroom. Would you like to hold a cute baby for a moment?”  (Thankfully he wasn’t screaming any more since he was out of his car seat. And he IS pretty cute, if I do say so myself.)

They were surprised and delighted.  I used the restroom, and 30 seconds later, reappeared, my baby none the worse for wear.

I sat with the ladies who were thrilled to have a cuddle with a boy  who is very smiley and social.  It turned out the older lady IS a grandmother, and the other lady was her daughter.  We had a lovely chat for  about 20 minutes, and the grandma even insisted I take a picture of her and my son on her cellphone.  The whole experience made their day and I found myself marveling at the fact that such a little thing, approaching some perfectly sweet-looking strangers for help was something most parents today would absolutely freak out over.

I haven’t told many of my friends for fear they will think  I am an irresponsible parent, but in reality, I think it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and I’m determined to not live my life in fear thinking that child molesters lurk in every corner (of Starbucks!), just waiting to snatch my babe away.  Thank you for your book and your blog and a return to sanity.

You’re welcome! Thanks for a charming tale that shouldn’t be so surprising, but to many folks probably is!

More Brilliance from Cracked

Hi Readers! I’m becoming a Cracked addict. (Har har. I’m sure NOBODY ever thought of that before.)

Anyway, here are the definitive, “7 Things Good Parents Do (That Screw Up Kids for Life).” I especially endorse the one about teaching kids about “stranger danger.” (The caption is still making me laugh.)  Enjoy! — Lenore

Hate to Say I Told You So…

Well, no I don’t. Secretly, I think we all love it. So, here’s a great article from CNN of all places (the network some dub the Child-Napping Network), all about how we have to get kids playing outside more, and schools have to give them more run-around time, too, instead of just more test prep. Otherwise the kids are going to end up with all the things I don’t like to dwell on: Obesity, heart disease, etc. The article dubbed kids’ sit-around lifestyle “A Coronary Time Bomb.”

And get this: One reason so few kids are outside, according to CNN, is…the cable news cycle, scaring parents into keeping their kids cooped up inside.

Hmm. Well, we take our Free-Range promoting stories where we can get ‘em. — Lenore

Is It Really Wrong for A School Administrator to THINK?

Hi Readers — Here’s a fantastic article on the Cub Scout-with-a-spork story — the one where a 6-year-old was sentenced to 45 days in reform school for bringing his beloved fork/knife/spoon eating utensil to school. The article, by Mark Steyn (my former colleague when I worked at The New York Sun),  goes on to look at other issues of Zero Tolerance, including the girl suspended for bringing a knife to cut a cake, wherein school “spokesapparatchiks seem befuddled when asked why even their most basic human impulses no longer function.”

That is exactly the issue: What to do when administrators everywhere — from the schools to the hospitals to the airports to the courts — are strictly forbidden to use any common sense, empathy, wisdom or human decency? And they comply?

This article reminds me that I have to recommend, again, the mindblowing book, Life Without Lawyers, by Philip Howard, head of Common Good. His plea is for leaders to boldly re-assert their ability to make judgments. After all, that is what they are supposed to do — that’s why they are in positions of leadership! To constantly defer to one-size-fits-all rules is an abdication of their responsibility, which is to THINK and yes, to JUDGE situations using their rusting hearts and minds.

Why is it so radical to ask that humans act like humans instead of droids? — Lenore

Outrage of the Week: Maternity Ward Edition

Hi Readers! Here you go!

Dear Free-Range Kids: I just had my first child a couple of months ago and within a day had our first experience with extreme safety proponents. I was in the hospital and a friend had come to meet my son. We decided to go on a walk around the ward, just so that I could stretch my legs. I picked up my son and we had a nice stroll around the ward. As we were heading back to my room one of the nurses yelled at me for carrying my baby around. Apparently, in that hospital, infants are only safe if they are transported in bassinets. Parents need not apply.

I’m sure this is only the beginning! — J.

It sure is, J. But congrats on starting the journey! (Even if the hospital says you did it wrong.)– Lenore

My Free-Range Lecture At Yale

Hi Readers!
This is an hour-long lecture I gave at Yale last month, about everything Free-Range. Just thought I’d put it up here. Looking at it has taught me a couple of things, perhaps most saliently:  My green jacket is way less cool than I thought it was. Also: Need haircut!

Anyway — here you go. (Somehow I couldn’t embed the video itself):

http://bit.ly/48NA8h

– Lenore

When Can Parents Trust a Teen?

Hi Readers — Let’s help this teen together, shall we? Here is his letter:

Dear Free-Range Kids: You probably don’t get too many emails from kids and teens, but being a child with overbearing parents I have some things I’d like to ask.

I’m in the middle of reading your book (how sad, a kid reading a book on parenting) and I find it very intriguing. Actually,  my parents let me be fairly free in my childhood. The problems I’m facing now are being free enough in my teen years.

I can now drive and my social life is returning (I used to be quite anti-social). I can handle the curfews  and the need to answer the cell phone when my parents call, but the problem that I am facing is what happens when my friends’ parents are not home, or when my parents want to call someone’s house before I go over. My parents go insane over the prospect of a friend not having a parent home, or of me not having them home when I am hanging out with a friend. I feel like this is very detrimental to my social life and I’d like to give you an overview of different factors that come into play.

I’m an avid reader (non-fiction books on politics, economics, and history), and my parents always tell me I am very mature for my age. As a matter of fact I socialize very well with many adults (sometimes better than I do with kids). I am in a martial arts class (Oom Yung Doe, to be specific) and I truly have developed a system of responsible/socially conservative principles that I adhere to — not because my parents said so but because I truly believe in them.

I have been offered drugs (only weed thus far) and have always turned it down. Nowadays kids don’t put as much pressure on other kids to drugs — contrary to what many adults think. As a matter of fact, there are many situations when one kid will put more pressure on someone and the rest call him out and tell him to “stop being a dick… dude.” They realize that peer pressure is a bad thing. Furthermore, I suffered from a major depression in 8th grade and I saw, first-hand, many kids with psychological problems (many of them pertaining to drugs) and I saw how much drugs can screw up your life.  I would never take that risk.

I have a close enough relationship with my parents to let them know that I have been exposed to drugs and always turn them down (and they believe and trust me). But I really feel let down when they feel that I cannot make a proper judgment on what friend’s house it’s ok to go to. They build up my ego with this praise of my maturity but then shoot me down and act as if I can’t make proper values assessments. I feel as if this will tear our relationship apart because exposure to these things is inevitable unless I’m truly locked in cage and became a “teacup child.” (But generally teacup children go off to college and then get incredibly drunk and high and it works against what the parents were planning.)

What I now have been driven to do is to say that I am hanging out at a friend’s house and then, when I get there,  we all head out somewhere else. I don’t like lying to my parents but I want to maintain a social life and get a girlfriend for once (that is right, age 16 and I have never had a girlfriend).

So, as you can see, I have a few questions. Where is the line drawn? Should I really not be allowed to go to a kid’s house if the parents aren’t home, or without my parents and theirs being in contact? How do I get this across to my parents?

Please, please, please respond and I will be incredibly grateful.

That’s the letter. Personally, I’d say two things to the writer:

1 – His parents may be more worried than they’d be otherwise because they remember his bout with depression and it scared them to the core. (Understandable.) If it reassures them to have some basic contact with his friends’ parents, that shouldn’t be such a big deal.

2- Knowing that their fear comes out of love and perhaps trauma, he has to assure them that he is almost of legal age, he has made the conscious decision not to take drugs, and he is both mature and responsible. They can’t ask for more than that, except to have him also promise never to get into a car with a friend who has been drinking or doing drugs. Of course, if it would help, maybe he and his parents could also pay a trip together to his former psychologist or his pediatrician, who could assure them that at some point kids need to be able to hang out together without direct parental supervision.

I’m wondering if you, readers, have any more advice for the parents, or for the letter writer. If so, please add it. Maybe he can share your thoughts  with his folks. Thanks! — Lenore

A Very Short Review

Hi Folks — Just found this description of me on one of my YouTube videos. I think I should put it on my business cards:

LOL. man i love this lady, but she sounds crazy sometimes. even though she’s right and makes sense

 

Is Your Child in DANGER?

Hi Readers! Here’s a nifty little brochure I picked up the other day for a child safety device. I won’t say which one, since I don’t want to give it any publicity. Perhaps you’ll see why. Here’s what the brochure said, in all its grammatical creativity. Please note: The dot-dot-dots are theirs. I haven’t left anything out of this lovely intro:

PLEASE TAKE NOTICE…ANYONE CAN HARM A CHILD

Sexual predators…how do you recognize them?

Everyday you see relatives in your house, you pass people on the street, you watch television, the computer brings different individuals into your home and work place.

Does it ever enter your mind about who these individuals really are?

What do they think? Where are they from? What are some of their inner thoughts? We have heard about stranger danger…but who is really a stranger in your life?

Think about it…

If you are home and the repair person comes to fix an appliance and your daughter sees Mommy speak to them and has them in the house then they think they are a friend. This is not all together true. When Mommy is not home they come back to the house and the child thinks that it is OK to let the person in. Let’s think again. This is NOT OK.

A perfect opportunity to catch a child off-guard and the person can have their way with the child. Mommy may never know if the child doesn’t tell or the person kills the child and leaves without a clue they were ever there.

OK — that’s it. Let’s just examine a few of the points, beginning with that first paragraph: “Everyday you see relatives in your house (relatives? yikes!), you pass people on the street (strangers going about their own business? yikes!), you watch television (and it’s really scary when the people start climbing out), the computer brings different individuals into your home (yup, they walk right out) and work place (well, some of the people there ARE scary. Point granted).”

In other words: Every single person your child encounters, from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to sleep, is quite possibly a sexual predator. Why this brochure neglected to add, “Every night you meet scary people in your dreams, too,” I can’t say. Seems to fit. Anyway, your child is ostensibly at risk from people in her home, outside her home, and even in household appliances.

Next, the reader is encouraged to IMAGINE everyone’s innermost thoughts — which is such an accurate way to figure out the world, right? Whatever you do, don’t actually talk to people. Just imagine their most disgusting, disturbing thoughts.  Especially…

The repairman’s! Because he’s going to come back and kill your child “without a clue they were ever there.” So now we’re not just talking about scary people climbing out of the TV, we’re talking about guys who know how to repair washing machines AND commit the perfect crime. What a gigantic demographic.

But what really gets my goat is the brochure’s main, pleading message, “Please take notice. Anyone can harm a child.” Why bother begging us to take notice? That fear has become the default setting for many parents these days: Don’t trust anyone at any time, anywhere.

So why should we trust the folks who wrote this brochure? — Lenore

The Real Threat Online

Hi Folks! Wow, leave your blog for one little day and the talk turns to porn. I feel like the Free-Range Parent of a blog.

Anyway, I was in D.C. at the Family Online Safety Institute’s annual conference and it was fantastic to be among all sort of bigwigs from places like Yahoo and Disney and BT and TimeWarner, all listening to panelists putting online fear into perspective.

As far as kids go, the biggest danger online is not predators (just like predators aren’t the biggest risk off-line, either, in what we quaintly used to call the “real world”).  No, the thing I realized I have to sit down with my kids and talk about is “reputation management.”

Maybe this is blindingly obvious to everyone else, but it struck home with me: When we were young, the stupid things we did lived on maybe in our diaries. Maybe we’d hear about them again at reunions. But this generation’s stupidities do not die, they pixelate. Post a picture of yourself holding a beer — or anatomical part — and even if you think it is never going to go beyond the friend or two you sent it to, you just never know.

It’s hard to make kids think about the future impact of a dump profanity or pajama party picture.  But if we parents frame it in terms of something they’re really aiming for — a team, a scholarship, a future boyfriend or girlfriend  – they’ll take some note.

As Anne Collier, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, put it: “Kids need to be their own spin doctors now. Even ‘private’ profiles are pretty public. If your children are going to post a lot of photos of themselves and blog about innermost thoughts or gossipy stuff about friends, they need to be aware that ‘privacy’ is highly relative. Friends can copy anything kids post and paste them anywhere they want (and turn into former friends).  That means teaching our kids to do a little critical thinking about what ‘everybody’ — including school administrators, potential employers, and Grandma — would think about what they’re posting.”

…It’s after school now and I just tried doing that with my 13-year-old, by the way. It wasn’t a fun conversation, but I’m glad we had it. Along with the birds and the bees we’ve got a new topic now: Bytes.

For more sane advice about youth and tech, visit Anne’s website, NetFamilyNews.org and ConnectSafely.org. — Lenore