To See Where Childhood Is Headed, Look at Halloween

Hi Readers! You’ve seen some of the facts here before — like the fact no child has EVER been poisoned by a stranger’s candy, as far as university research can tell — but if you need a little Halloween pep talk, here it is, on Huffington Post. My main point? If you want to see where [...]

Halloween: Too Scary for Kids?

Hi Readers — and BOO! Oh my God! Sorry! I hope your kids weren’t reading over your shoulder! I didn’t mean to scare the little dears — it could traumatize them for life! Imagine the psychiatric bills — or years in the insane asylum! That’s the way we’re supposed to think of kids now: Too [...]

The Dame in Spain

Hola Readers — I’m just back from Spain, which seems a little more Free-Range than America. (And Canada. And especially England!) One Madrid playground my son Izzy and I visited actually had a see-saw, something you rarely see (saw) in America anymore, thanks to the fear of bump-induced lawsuits. Izzy declared it the most fun [...]

No Parents on the Playground! (They Might Be Predators)

Hi Readers — Take a Valium  THEN read this: Two “adventure” playgrounds in England  have BANNED PARENTS. After all, parents are adults and so are sexual predators,  so from now on, in the land of the Magna Carta, only playground workers who have passed a background check will be allowed in. Why? Councillors in Watford [...]

Homework is a Free-Range Topic

I just finished reading what could be considered a perfect companion book to the Free-Range Kid movement, The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish. Lenore has blogged about this before, and Sara’s terrific website stophomework is on Lenore’s blog roll. In a nutshell: Bennett and Kalish state that there is little or [...]

A Baby Einstein or Your Money Back

Hi Readers — Hope you saw this piece in The Times:  Disney is offering refunds to any parents who bought its Baby Einstein videos and found, to their shock, that watching shapes, songs, kids and colors on TV did not turn their babies  into instant geniuses the way a name like “Einstein”  might suggest. This [...]

School Spirit

Hi! The Deputy here! My dad recently told me about a friend of his–this would be the 1940’s–whose mother told him to pick five schools he might want to attend. He chose the five, she told him to give the schools a ring to let them know he was coming for a visit, gave him [...]

Reality Check

Good afternoon! The Deputy here; lucky Lenore is still in Spain! In the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times today, the headline reads, “Guardians of Their Smiles: It’s fun to post pictures online of baby’s first bath, but some parents wonder if it’s safe.” As the article points out, much of this fuss [...]

Speaking of Playgrounds

Speaking of playgrounds, I was perusing mental_floss and they have a list of Ten Unusual Playgrounds from around the World. Wow! Fun! Here is the kind of playground I remember from my youth. (No,no…that’s not me!) Not terribly unusual I guess, but still fun, right? While searching for just the right jungle gym image on [...]

And you thought the playground was a happy place…

Hi all! The Deputy here…I have the distinct honor of being Lenore’s guest blogger for several days because Lenore will be jetting off to Spain to promote the Free-Range Kid movement! Hopefully she’ll be sending in a few posts in between talk shows and tapas. ☺ I have been reading this blog for quite a [...]