Tracking Kids on the School Bus?!

Readers: It seems like in ancient times — that is, pre-iPhone — nervous parents just had to suck it up. Now, they create apps. The latest is an, “I’m on board the school bus!” alert, the brainchild of Manhattan mom who, according to this article, went into a “panic” when her 10-year-old son’s school bus was half an hour late one day in the second week of school.

Now, I understand that not knowing your kid’s whereabouts can be a miserable moment in parenting. But if you’ve been around the block (or your kid has!), you know that at the beginning of the school year the bus drivers haven’t gotten the hang of the route yet. Some of them take the long way home. It’s annoying, but does that mean the kids on the bus are in danger? Or that this new app does anything more than give the worried parent a new GPS’d dot on a map to obsess about on a daily basis?

My worry is that this app will go from novelty to must-have in a matter of years, and once again we will have a new layer of parental supervision that will start to FEEL necessary, though in reality, it isn’t. It’s just a new twist on the current cultural notion that if a parent somehow has his or her eyes on a kid, that kid is magically protected from everything bad. And if the parents’ eyes are NOT on the kid at all times, well, that indicates a bad parent. I still believe you can be a perfectly good parent and not track your kid like a shipment of plutonium (that happens to ride the school bus). — L.

Do we really have to know where our kids are every second of the day?

Two Stories You Won’t Hear on the News

Hi Readers! Here you go! — L

Dear Free-Range Kids: I live in a small town (less than 300 residents) in Southwest Pennsylvania,  and regardless of the image the local-ish news channels portray, it is VERY safe. I grew up in the house I am living in, my  parents live next door.

The other day I was working in the yard, repainting some furniture. I heard my 2-year-old come out  then turn around and bang on the door she just exited. My mom came to the door and asked Gwen if she wanted to come in. I didn’t hear anything else, and when I looked up a few minutes later and didn’t see my daughter, I assumed she had gone in with my mom. A couple minutes later, I went in to clean up. When I didn’t see my daughter, I asked where she was. Mom said she thought Gwen was outside with me. This started a search of the yard (large, nearly 3/4 acre, all fenced in), something that happens a couple times on most days. When we determined Gwen wasn’t there, we started walking up the street. Mom found her standing in front of a neighbor’s house three homes away, looking for the back-hoe she’d seen the day before. The neighbor who lived there was just walking over to Gwen to bring her down and see if she was ours. My next door neighbor, who was leaving for work, was also just coming out to see whose child it was.

Total result? A minute of semi-panic when we realized my two-year-old wasn’t in the yard. A five-minute conversation with a normally anti-social neighbor about her grown daughter at the toddler stage. And when my father came home, he moved the gate latch to the outside of the fence so Gwen can’t open it again. Nobody called the police or child protective services, no injuries occurred, and Gwen wasn’t even fazed  — though she WAS disappointed that the big machines were gone.

This is a big deal to me because Pittsburgh news (our closest “local” news) runs nearly weekly reports of parents going to court-mandated parenting classes or even losing their children because of similar occurrences where toddlers get out and wander unsupervised. In all of these occasions, when neighbors find random children, they don’t look for a parent, they seem to START by calling the police.

Then, today we went to our nearest park to play on the big swings. The park is right against the Youghigheny River, so there are a lot of water fowl. Gwen played until she realized the ducks were there! She wanted to go look. While there, she had a lovely conversation about the ducks with an older gentleman (75 or 80 years, probably), who was sitting on a bench watching the ducks, too. I actually walked back to the car (about 20 yards away) to get her drink while she sat and watched with him. She probably sat still for longer than anywhere else today. He was polite, patient, and seemed to find her constant observations about the ducks adorable.

Thankfully, the local city has not succumbed to the temptation to bar adults from enjoying the same areas as children, because both my daughter and the gentleman had a wonderful time.

Moral of the story: There are some areas of the country that haven’t completely succumbed to insanity, and I am SO happy to live in one of them, since we have been Free-Range with Gwen since she first became mobile. — A Happy Pennsylvania Mom

WTD? What happens when a toddler watches ducks with someone other than her parent?

Outrage o’ the DAY: Dad Branded ‘Perv’ For Photographing Own Kids in Park

Folks — it doesn’t get any creepier than this: A dad in Britain takes pix of his adorable sons on an inflatable slide and finds himself accused of all manner of disbusting stuff. Can we say it again? We are in the midst of a Pedophile Panic!

When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out.

But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a ‘pervert’.

The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop.

Picture of innocence: The photograph Gary Crutchley took of his sons Cory and Miles

One even accused him of photographing youngsters to put the pictures on the internet.

Mr Crutchley, 39, who had taken pictures only of his own children, was so enraged that he found two policemen who confirmed he had done nothing wrong.

Let’s hear it for the police…and sanity! — Lenore

Has Anyone Seen My Son?! One Mom’s Story

Hi Readers!
Here’s a story most of us can relate to, from mom of two Kelli Oliver George, whose funny, addictive blog is Rancid Raves.

I LOST MY SON AT THE FAIR, BUT I FOUND HIM — SUPRISINGLY! NOT

by Kelli Oliver George

I thought about Free-Range Kids long and hard last night when I lost my 3.5-year-old at a huge, dusty county fair with thousands of folks milling around.

 My baby! Lost! The entire time I hunted for him, I kept repeating to myself what this site has been preaching: the statistics are actually LOW and realistically, he was going to be fine, just fine. Here’s what happened:

 I went to the Leavenworth County Fair in Tonganoxie, Kansas with my sister and her kids. It was the typical fair scene — flashing lights worthy of a seizure, cheap stuffed animals hanging by their necks, chaotic bells, buzzers and carnival music blaring, the smell of grease lingering with the heavy scent of livestock. The fair.

It is a fair that was the highlight of my summers for the seven years I lived in Tonganoxie because everyone was there — even that cute boy you spied from a neighboring town at that track meet last spring. You begged your mom to make sure that your new school clothes were bought before the fair. THE FAIR. Ah, yes! This was a place I knew and loved!

And none of that mattered one damned bit when Arun went missing. He was with my sister and headed towards me, but at some point disappeared. He was gone, it was dark, and the population of folks seemed to be multiplying before my very eyes.

I leapt into action. Handing Anjali over to my sister, I told her to stay put. Then, methodically, I marched back and forth looking for my boy.

The entire time, I was fighting back the rising panic: After all, who has posted endlessly about “letting our children go”? Who has been shamelessly taunting child predators everywhere? Was this the universe’s lame attempt at bitch-slapping me?

I  saw some police officers and told them the situation. Meanwhile,I kept reminding myself of all of the sensible statistics that I have been reading on this site and in Lenore’s book for the past year. I grasped those facts and figures tightly as my talisman while I searched.

And then, after the longest 10 (15?) minutes of my life: there he was. As my sister had stood in place, she told everyone she encountered about Arun being lost. Someone brought him back to us.

Arun was not really aware that he was lost — in his mind, he was just hanging out by the super slide. What’s the problem, yo? I explained to him what happened and told him to thank the police officers for helping. We also had a very long talk about it on the way home.

What would I do differently? Last night, I had dressed Arun in a dark green shirt. I will definitely do brighter colors next time. And I will snap a picture of each kid on my cell phone at the beginning of events like this. And maybe I’ll use a good, old-fashioned Sharpie to write our phone number on their forearms. But that is it.

Afterward, my sister told me she was shocked at how calm I was during and after the whole thing. 

I wasn’t calm. But I’ll go to the fair with my kids again. I want my  children to grow up with SPIRIT and a love for discovering. I know that means that sometime, I may have to deal with another situation like this. But I refuse to be afraid. I refuse.