Dear Free-Range Kids: I’m not sure that this is one article you want to deal with the comments on (!), but the verbiage of it struck me:

Falling toilet seats: Rare but growing risk for boys

It isn’t the article so much as how it’s reported…a few examples:

“It’s a toddler basically potty training who doesn’t have the most advanced motor skills and they just don’t have the reflexes to move fast enough,” said Dr. Benjamin Breyer, the study’s lead author from the University of California, San Francisco.

“To us, that was striking. That was unexpected. You think of the bathroom as a safe place,” he said.

“Only five adults were caught by falling lids.”

The researchers write in the journal BJU International that while these injuries are rare, the number of “crush injuries” increased by 100 ER visits every year, with 1,707 ER visits reported in 2010.

This data can be the tip of the iceberg, because there could be kids who are hurt whose parents don’t bring them to the ER. So this could be an underestimation of how often this is going on,” Breyer said.

Clyde, N.Y. — A Wayne County man is now facing four charges for Endangering the Welfare of a Child after he interrupted an act of vandalism at a home he was renovating for his father-in-law.

The incident unfolded around 9 p.m. Saturday when Jesse Daniels said he told his wife to call 911 after he heard loud noises coming from the home next door and saw an individual striking a wall with a hammer.

Daniels tells 13WHAM News he ran next door and found four children, ages eight and ten, doing damage to the property.  Daniels said he took a hammer from one of the kids and corralled them into a closet while he waited for police to arrive.  Daniels estimated that the damage to his father-in-law’s property exceeds $40,000….

Clyde Village Police took the children back to their parents and filed felony criminal charges of Burglary 2nd Degree and Criminal Mischief 2nd Degree…. On Monday police returned to Daniels’ home and arrested him on four counts of Endangering the Welfare of a Child.

The parents of the alleged mini miscreants claim Daniels traumatized and mistreated their kids. While I don’t want any kids mistreated either, it does feel as if the parents’ anger is slightly mis-directed. What think ye? – L.

In brief: An Atlanta mom and her three kids got off a bus stop that is across a busy highway from her home. She COULD have dragged everyone to the next light,  three tenths of a mile up the road, but it seemed to make sense to try to cross. Not only was her apartment in sight across the way, but the other passengers who disembarked were crossing the highway right there, too. So she and her kids made it to the median, but then the 4-year-old squirmed away and got killed by a drunk driver. The driver was convicted of a hit and run.  The mom was convicted of vehicular manslaughter. Yep. But as [Transportation for America's David] Goldberg says:

What about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators who allowed a bus stop to be placed so far from a signal and made no other provision for a safe crossing; who allowed – even encouraged, with wide, straight lanes – prevailing speeds of 50-plus on a road flanked by houses and apartments; who carved a fifth lane out of a wider median that could have provided more of a safe refuge for pedestrians; who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work and groceries despite having no access to a car? They are as innocent as the day is long, according to the solicitor general’s office.

Now the story has a new ending. The judge offered the mom a second trial (not sure how that works) and this time, she was allowed to plead guilty only to jaywalking, with a $200 fine. And there is even some hope that this heart wrenching example is leading Georgia to take note of the need for safe road-crossings at bus stops.

Let’s hope it also leads folks to stop automatically blaming parents when a child tragedy occurs.  Said in 2011 and I’ll say it again:

When we prosecute parents who are trying their hardest, who make mistakes, or who misjudge a situation, we are prosecuting them for being what parents have always been: human. Not superheroes with super strength, judgment, fortitude and foresight.

A human parent is what I am and what we all are. Let’s not make that a crime. — Lenore

Dear Free-Range Kids: Hey, worst-first thinking has a psychological category all its own!  Look at this excerpt from Difficult Personalities by Helen McGrath and Hazel Edwards.

Protective pessimism can take many forms, but essentially it is about always assuming the worst will happen and behaving accordingly.  Protective pessimists believe that if something can go wrong, it will.  If something bad can happen, it will happen, and it will happen to them.  Rarely do they expect good outcomes.  So they miss out on the joy of anticipation and dwelling pleasurably on the “nice” aspects, in case the gap between pleasurable “dreams” and the reality is too great. They are not game to tempt fate by hoping, dreaming, or wanting, in case they get caught unprepared by negatives.  They prepare for disillusionment, sadness and tragedy by protecting their projections with pessimism so they will not get caught by future disappointments.  Instead of living up to expectations, they live down, and are often negative in other ways.  Other people don’t like being around pessimistic people because they can be contagious.

Lenore here: The two things that interest me most about this are the way worst-first thinking sucks the joy out of life by infusing each moment with potential doom. And, two, that it’s contagious.

So Is Worst-First thinking the best friend a marketer can have? After all, it makes us ready to buy anything promising safety. But also, by spreading misery, it makes us even more desperate for something that can cheer us up. Maybe something we can buy. And so instead of embracing life, we embrace stuff.

Hmm. – L. 

Don’t give the gift that keeps on giving: Fear.

Erno, Lenore, Erika at the Gyori home in Csobanka!

We met way on a train going from Paris to Istanbul – same route as the Orient Express – except really cheap. I was traveling solo, and at the time (don’t do the math) Eastern Europe was still Communist, so it was kind of cool for folks on this side of the Iron Curtain to meet a young woman from the other side.

And vice versa. Somehow Erno and I got talking and he ended up inviting me to stay with his family for the night, in Budapest. His mom fried fresh fish his dad had just caught, spiced, of course, with paprika. The grandparents were there, too, reminiscing about the time the granddad was taken prisoner by the Americans in WWII and ended up being a chef for them in a German hotel. (Not a bad war, for him, so he was happy to see an American again.) It was a memorable night.

Then, two years ago, Erno heard me on a radio interview broadcast here and – thank you, Facebook – got back in touch. When I was coming to Europe to give some talks, I wondered if I could swing by – and here I am. Now Erno has a beautiful family of his own – wife Erika, and daughters Eniko and Julcsi. Time flies. And in a few hours they’re taking me to meet his parents again!

I mention all this because when I was heading out on that long-ago trip, lots of people thought it sounded great – including my wonderful parents, who gave me their blessing. But there were also those who said, “You’re going to Turkey? Haven’t you seen ‘Midnight Express’?”

It seemed weird to me that people were avoiding an entire country based on one terrifying movie. Still does. Except now I have a word for it. They were worst-first thinking. One scary story was enough for them to think: “Turkey? That’s where Americans end up in jail!”

I didn’t end up in jail. The Turkey part of the trip was fantastic, too. Istayed with a bunch of families I met along the way, who fed and fed and fed me, just like Erno’s family is doing today.

Long story short?

Free-Range isn’t just for kids. It’s sort of a way of life. Live it and some day you may find yourself in the home of old friends in the sunniest town in Eastern Europe, about to go eat fresh strawberries from their garden for breakfast.

Thank you, mom and dad. – L.

. 

“Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun.” 

Talk about absolute blather. Is there any proof of this whatsoever? How about the fact that millions upon millions of kids have played with toy guns  for generations without growing up desensisitized to what a REAL GUN is? By the principal’s logic, my husband should be a heartless murderer — he played with toy revolvers as a kid, as did his brother. And yet they both seem very aware of the difference between a toy gun and a Colt 45 (unless that’s the beer. Either way, they also know the difference between BEER and guns. And they don’t even mix them!)

The principal’s statement irks me because he’s making up a reason to be yet more terrified about our kids: How endangered they are now, how dangerous they’ll become.  Can’t win. Everything is just danger on a stick.

Best comment so far: “Does a Pop Tart shaped like a gun count?” Considering how afraid we are of everything having to do with kids (even them MENTIONING the word “gun”), I should hope so.

And before we get into a gun control debate — which I hope, hope, hope we don’t — please remember the point of this post: The thought train of the principal:  If a child plays with a gun he will grow up cavalier about (or worse, enamored of) real firepower. THAT’S what interests me. Not the ol’ gun debate. - L

Will playing with this turn kids into thugs?

As the reader who sent us this news story wrote, “To hear some of the comments, you’d think they were planning to build a gun store/brothel/drug den!” Notes the article, citing the local parents’ concerns:

 The business fronts, doorsteps and play areas of the concerned would all be traversed by the hostel’s travelers if it is approved by City Council later this month.

My favorite comment from one of the folks quoted in the article is, ““You don’t want lots of different kinds of people [to] come in and out around kids.”

Of course not! Children should not have to interact with or even find themselves NEAR any adults not pre-screened and pre-approved by their own loving parents. Any strangers in town should, after a thorough background check, be issued a permit, good for a proscribed amount of time, that allows them to walk (but not loiter)  near the day care centers a certain number of times. (Two should be sufficient.) Otherwise our precious kids are in GRAVE DANGER! They always are! – L

Don’t tell me there are ADULTS just WANDERING around there!!

Kids Microadventure from Alastair Humphreys on Vimeo.