rating: 5 of 5 starsThrow away your children's educational toys , remove all your baby-proofing gear and let your kids go crazy!
Well, not really. But wouldn't it be great to not be so nervous and fearful of every little thing that could possibly happen to your kids? Is the world really that much worse than when we were kids? Were our parents bad parents for allowing us to play outside unsupervised and *gulp* letting us eat raw cookie dough?
Free Range Kids discusses the way we today have grown into a society full of fear. Children are no longer allowed the opportunities to explore, play, exercise and have fun. Society today would rather have educational toys that teach what is outside your front door rather than giving your child the hands-on experience.
Lenore Skenazy takes these horrible threats to our children and transforms them into her very own 14 Free Range Commandments. She lays them out there in black and white with the "real" statistics and shows us just how naive we are today. (Did you know no one has every died from poisoned Halloween candy?!? EVER!!)
No one wants to put their child in danger or be judged by the better than thou parents and Skenazy does an amazing (and humorous) job at showing us how ridiculous some of our fears really are.
This is the mother to all parenting books. Before you open up any other parenting book besides as a reference, read this one! Don't let the parenting book business, the baby-proofing business or the media scare you. Trust your instincts (and help your child acquire his/her own.) You know your child(ren) better than anyone. No child needs or has ever needed 24/7 supervision. Just like our parents, we need to lay out the foundation, teach them to be safe and then trust them (just like our parents did with us) to do so.
1 comments:
Yes! I saw this book and this topic has come up several times in the discussion courses I head. I have mixed feelings on this. I definitely am more of a free ranger, yet not to the extent of my childhood (major dysfunction there). The world is definitely a different place from when I was young. Still, the kids need experiences and safe freedom. With loving guidance and a watchful eye, they can have the best of both worlds. So many wonderful educational tools that they can take out into the yard and get dirty!
Lack of sleep and brain farts are keeping me from responding better than what I just did!
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