An alternative to paranoia regarding the safety of your children: Free Range Kids

Remember the woman who was criticized for allowing her highly competent 9-year old boy find his way home on the Manhattan subway? Her name is Lenore Skenazy. She's a syndicated columnist and she's not retreating a single inch. She has created a website called Free Range Kids. In April, 2009, she published a book called Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. Here's how she sums up the widespread American problem:

Somehow, a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing. They have lost confidence in everything: Their neighborhood. Their kids. And their own ability to teach their children how to get by in the world.

Lenore reminds us to consider our own "dangerous" childhoods when thinking of extending your own child's leash--and she has drawn hundreds of lively comments. What is general solution?

We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less. This site dedicated to sane parenting . . .

I started this site for anyone who thinks that kids need a little more freedom and would like to connect to people who feel the same way. We are not daredevils. We believe in life jackets and bike helmets and air bags. But we also believe in independence. Children, like chickens, deserve a life outside the cage. The overprotected life is stunting and stifling, not to mention boring for all concerned. So here’s to Free Range Kids, raised by Free Range Parents willing to take some heat. I hope this web site encourages us all to think outside the house.

This is a well-considered site with lots of ideas for tempering our paranoia about child abductions and sexual predators. Here are a few additional Free Range Children stories that I recommend from Lenore's site:

The end of the Super-Mom Era.

How cell phones can stunt your children's emotional growth.

Here's another article detailing the subway adventure. And here's Lenore's three-minute video describing her approach.

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Buchanan To The Defense…of Hitler

Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time. There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things. I don't care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications. The sky is falling, yes it is, and there's nothing we can do about it. Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling? Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people's day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history. Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom. Everyone needs a hobby. Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion. I wish them good times playing with their toys. But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they're trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

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Missouri’s Turn for Anti-Science Ridicule

A minor brouhaha erupted over a t-shirt in Sedalia Missouri. But this isn't about an uppity student. The band director designed an official band t-shirt to illustrate the evolution of brass music. What image did he choose to evoke the idea? Yep, a common ascent-of-man icon from the early 20th century. After some parents saw the shirt proudly worn at the Missouri State Fiar parade, they complained. From the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch:

"I was disappointed with the image on the shirt," said Sherry Melby, a band parent who teaches in the district. "I don't think evolution should be associated with our school."

What sort of science program do you think she had? What sort do you think she would vote for? The school quickly recalled the t-shirts, eating the cost of their production, and will be designing new shirts that don't offend by presenting an image that obliquely refers to actual science. Naturally, Pharyngula jumped on it. And in the Sedalia Democrat, they quote the assistant band director about pulling the shirts,

"If the shirts had said ‘Brass Resurrections' and had a picture of Jesus on the cross, we would have done the same thing," he said.

Apparently there is a strong belief that science is a religion that should not even be tangentially promoted over any other belief. And people wonder why I sometimes write that I live in the state of Misery.

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How to not conduct an interview of Dick Cheney

Andrew Sullivan puts a bright spotlight on Chris Wallace, who pretended to interview Dick Cheney. I agree with Sullivan that this is not journalism at all. It should get Wallace fired immediately. Except, perhaps, if those who employ Wallace like it when Wallace merely pretends to interview controversial public figures. Visit Sullivan's post at the Daily Dish and be amazed and appalled.

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