I Thought This Was a Parody

Wow- how sad it must be to live like that- where “close friends” are not trustworthy, where everywhere you go are alcoholic, drug-abusing pedophiles. Holy good god. I quickly scrolled down the comments and didn’t see anyone disagreeing with her guilty-until-proven-innocent-by-impossible-standards perspective, and that is incredibly saddening.

I don’t know what I’d do without my friends and community- I can’t imagine having a “safe list” of that few folks to turn to. (Or, really, an actual “safe list” for that matter… I just know who of my friends I can call upon when I need help or want to connect.)

“PS- Reading your blog post has made me aware that I should stop offering to watch other people’s children. It’s not something I do often, just when I see a friend in need. I’m sure they’ll tell me when they’re ready.”

🙁

This is awful. Naturally my heart goes out to those women who suffered abuse as children.

But this reaction is off the deep end.

Actually I’m hoping to move to a nation where my tax dollars will pay for such commie pinko things like socialized medicine and a vibrant middle class.

Anthony, I wish there was a like button on these comments, because I would have clicked it for your last statement! 🙂

When you dig through some of the comments, it seems clear that she intends to back off once her kids get a bit older, which sort of makes sense. I did respond to the woman who intends to stop offering to watch other people’s children, though.

Lenore wrote a column once about how excess paranoia makes people feel stupid reaching out and thus makes society less safe, and it’s true. I’ve given that one a lot of thought in my day-to-day life and tried to switch off both the “this person is just pretending to have a busted car so he can rape me” and the “better not try to help that lady or she’ll call the cops” tapes. If everyone thinks worst-first, pretty soon we won’t have a society left at all. We’ll just be a group of isolated, fearful people cowering behind locked doors with our televisions and gaming systems.

I’m sure there is more to her than that one post, but I agree with Lenore that it’s a completely paranoid post and it’s a very important issues.

It would be one thing if she posted about her personal abuse experience and why that is something that she, personally, can’t risk, even if she knows the statistics. I always have sympathy for that. But just randomly attaching to this whole paranoia thing? No, I do not accept that because it does lead to a less trusting, and therefore, less kind, society.

And that is not what we need right now.

I actually know someone who is like this woman. I suspect that there is abuse in the family of the person I know, and that is why she won’t let her kids do much by themselves – they might tell, and to her, abuse only happens to other people’s kids.

Wow, I was expecting that to be signed Jen or SKL.

enyawface, thanks for that helpful comment.

At least its an equal-opportunity distrust?

I believe in knowing care providers well and knowing how they respond to my kids and vice versa, I don’t know how much more I can find out or what some people are looking for. I have come to understand that nobody does a better job than A) My wife and B) Me of taking care of our kid. Everything else is compromise and hope that the people I trust are indeed trustworthy and my internal compass is right.

There is something very self-righteous about the post that is off-putting but I think it’s likely due to the fact we wouldn’t be friends anyway – I would have very much expressed that it is a pain in the ass to haul extraneous people to American Girl. Although, it could be handy to send my child off with her without tagging along!

HEY GUYS I GOT IT > OUR KIDS HANG OUT AT HER HOUSE LET”S ALL GO FOR COCKTAILS!!!!!!! She’d never ask for reciprocation – I so need more people like this around.

Matt L, I agree with you, except that if we all let our kids at her house while we went for cocktails, that would be what her next blog post would be about. “Why your kid is not welcome at my house!”

Matt L, are you enyawface?

SKL LOL! I didn’t think we needed to re-tread THAT discussion – agree to disagree on the men as babysitters issue?

She sounds very unpleasant. Presumably her blog readers have already self-selected themselves which is why you see the total agreement – I suspect there’s not a lot of room for disagreement there or you’re labeled as one of *them*.

I actually took her post a different way. She said, basically, that taking your kids to the store isn’t dangerous and that they were more likely to be victimized by people they know than random strangers. That is an entirely FRK sentiment.

I think that in some ways, when our children are young, we all have a “safe list” of people and activities. There are people that I like, but would not let my kids hang out with unsupervised. There have been homes that I didn’t want my kids to be in because I thought the dog there was a bit too uncontrolled.

That said, I tend to follow my gut and the feelings that my kids express. But I do keep any eye out for people that make me nervous. And I ask my kids if anyone that they have met makes them feel a bit off.

Remember, we are all clear that kids are much more likely to be harmed by family or acquaintance than by random stranger. So if we don’t give at least a cursory look at those acquaintances and family members, how exactly do we protect our kids from danger, especially when they are young?

Brian J – I get that and agree to some of your points but it was just her tone! (Jesus, hi there dad I’m parroting you) It felt like she was talking down to the whole world – maybe it was the varied assumptions etc that she likely threw in to be controversial. Yes, you have a duty to protect the children and all yes, you go with instincts but it seemed very overblown.

One of the reasons I like this site is because I get to read comments like Maggie’s. Otherwise I would not believe the stuff people can say to each other. If someone came up to me and started “what-iffing” to my face about what’s going on in MY house???! I don’t know what I’d do, but I don’t think it would be pretty.

my response over there:

Wow. I am so glad I did not grow up in any of your households. I had a really fun childhood — full of sleepovers, hanging out with friends, imaginary games (we pretended we were teachers, or stowaways on a boat), camping in the backyard.

When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother was an alcoholic and it resulted in one or two scary situations — there were instances where she threatened to take my friend away (she claimed domestic abuse but it was later proven to be false), she displayed erratic behavior, and once she threatened to jump out of a moving car while I was there. They weren’t good situations to be in. But, because my parents taught me well, I told them about situations that made me uncomfortable. They handled the situation appropriately. They said I could go over there when Dad was home, or I could bring the friend to our house.

This person remains one of my closest friends and if I had been forbidden from her presence, that wouldn’t be the case. And I learned a lot the dangers of alcohol abuse. I’m sure my parents questioned their decision to let me go over there in the first place, but they did — and I learned what is okay and what is not okay, and to always tell an adult when a situation makes you uncomfortable.

I’m 22 now. I’m still alive, and I’m responsible and capable of making my own decisions, and I’m grateful my parents were not as crazy paranoid as all of you. You say that the risk is worth ALL trade offs to your child’s well-being, their happiness, their ability to make decisions. Well again…thank God I didn’t grow up in your home.

PS — when I was growing up, crime rates were higher than they are now.

The Free Range philosophy seems to be well grounded in reality. For instance, you buckle your child up because car accidents are statistically a real threat. On the other hand, you let your child go outside alone because there is no real threat.

I haven’t read the Free Range Kids book yet, so I don’t know if this is addressed, but shouldn’t we base our discussion of child sexual abuse on reality? Poking around the other day, the statistic I saw on Wikipedia was that “approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children.” That’s significantly more than the 6% of people who will have an injury from a car accident in their childhood. It’s just plain shocking.

I’m looking forward to reading the book and hopefully seeing the above statistics broken down and the reality explained. I don’t want to become like the Safe List lady, but I want to make my decisions based on reality, not just on an affinity to the Free Range philosophy.

Maggie – true, they would likely miss that with their worst-first thinking!

Sounds like the kind of place I grew up – how awesome for them

They are all scary! I hope I don’t know any of those posters!

I too have mixed feelings regarding this particular issue. I agree with others in that it all as a whole seemed over the top paranoia. However, my mother was abused as a child by a trusted family member and it has left a huge impression on me. My mother had big time psychological issues as a result of the abuse inflicted upon her and she went the extra mile to protect me from it. I do feel the resposibility to do the same.

PS—oops, I’m sorry Lenore, I just now read that you would rather us not post dissenting comments over there, after I had already posted. Even worse(?), I suggested that she read your book!

LRH

I am disappointed at the level to which this discussion has sunk. Disagreement is great – healthy, respectful discussion is fantastic. But the nasty, mean comments are wrong. Spirited discussion and disagreement is of course fine and often welcome. Bullying someone on their own blog, again WRONG. My 2 cents.

That’s from a comment on damomma.com, BTW.

The Rebbetzin I disagree a bit. In terms of the mean-spiritedness, I would tend to agree, but if someone (and that includes Lenore, I suppose) posts something out there, especially something that is that inflammatory, it’s wrong to complain that someone posts to disagree. If the only posts you’re seeking are “atta boy” pats on the back, that’s unrealistic. Also, I wouldn’t call even the nasty comments “bullying.” I think that term is overused.

But yes, no need to be horribly nasty just the same. I posted over there having neglected to read Lenore’s suggestion that we not do so, but I was civil about it, I think.

LRH

As a long-time reader of this woman’s blog, I feel the need to defend her here. Like the Rebbetzin said, this one post does not reflect the whole picture. For example, check out her series about when she let her daughter go to a summer camp, the same one that she had an awful experience at as a child. She was able to overcome her fears of her daughter having the same bad experience and let her go.

And seriously, what is wrong with not leaving your child with just anyone? Who’s to say that the people on her “safe list” is just a handful of questionable people she has come into contact with? I truly admire her writing and I have learned some valuable parenting skills from her! I went over to her blog to read some of the comments from people who went there from here. Its sad to see all the judgment, when they haven’t even read anything more than that one blog post from her.

I read the blog post and skimmed the comments. I feel so bad for one woman who hasn’t seen a movie in five years because she is afraid to leave her daughter with a babysitter.

Spouses deserve our undivided attention just as much as our kids do–I always say my kids will be around for a short while, but hopefully my husband will be around much longer. Sometimes we have to be brave and take off our parent hats for an hour or two. I think it is good for the kids to spend time away from us as well and play with somebody new.

At 7:00 this morning I got a frantic call from a good friend asking if I could watch her boy as her regular babysitter came down with the flu. I didn’t have to submit a current criminal record check or supply her with a list of the activities we would do and the food I would give him. I answered the door in my PJs and she gratefully left us to hang out and play trains.

I am fairly certain there is no way I could be friends with that blogger, and there is NO way I would share my coke with her. (Soda!!!! )

BrianJ, those are real and good considerations, but I think what’s riling people about this is the “all my friends and family are innocent until proven guilty” tone. And the “one mistake, regardless of magnitude or outcome, and they’re done being alone with my kid forever” attitude. If that were the standard, I’d have had to give each of my older kids back to the hospital the first week, and the younger ones (after I had some experience) might have lasted a month.

There is one thing underlying the article that is good, but it’s being used in the wrong direction: be the parent. If something doesn’t feel or seem right about someone, anyone, even someone close to you in some way, don’t betray your own judgment about whether you want that person fully responsible for your child. That is a good message — I think the problem is that the trigger is set too sensitive, and their is a weird disconnect between claiming to respect people, and thinking they’re not safe to have your snowflake in their care unless they hurdle the very high barrier. Some have already commented about what this teaches your kids about who can be trusted — I think that’s a real problem, here. Yes, you need to teach your kids that not everyone can be trusted, and some tools for telling the difference — knowing those tools aren’t always perfectly calibrated. But teaching them by example to default to untrustworthy is a bad thing.

I’m going to jump in here with another defense of DaMomma. I’ve been reading her blog longer than I’ve been reading this one. Her writing style is great, and for the most part, her parenting style is very similar to mine. I definitely categorize her in the FRK realm. I don’t think it’s fair at all to mock her or even question her decisions when it comes to the people she allows to watch her children. Being careful about who you leave your children with is being a GOOD parent. Yes, you need to teach your kids about knowing how to recognize uncomfortable situations and how to react. But better if you don’t put your children in those situations to begin with, and that starts with being careful about who you leave with your children. I’m very relaxed about my 20 mo daughter, but I also have a very short list of people I trust with her alone. My safe list also has varying degrees, which will change as she gets older. Right now, it’s safe to ride in the car with (very few, I know a lot of distracted drivers), safe to leave with for an hour or so (pretty long), safe to leave with for most of the day (pretty short). Most of my concerns come not from a fear of pedophiles and abuse but from the understanding that Pappy likes to spoil her with ice cream for every meal, Uncle John likes to text and drive, and Great-gramma can’t always jump up fast enough to catch a running toddler who has something dangerous. A lot of my safe list decisions also have to do with the level of child-proofing a house has undergone and how closely a person agrees with my philosophies about discipline, etc. As she gets older, there will be play dates, mall trips, sleep-overs, etc. Those will all be covered by my evolving safe lists.

Gotta say, Lenore, this was a HUGE fail for you in my eyes, and makes me a little less interested in your blog now, since you’re starting to really reach for the sensationalism journalism instead of genuine interest in helping parents become better.

I want to know when sleep overs became the “thing” that all kids “have” to do. Why? Why is it so important to miss sleep and be a tired weepy or mean kid the next day, while also keeping the parents up all night?

It’s been a “thing” since I was a kid half a million years ago. Maybe it’s a regional “thing”? I dunno, I’d never do it for little kids, but pre-teens and teens are a riot! (The Monsters weren’t permitted to do the sleepover thing til they got to double digits.)

Younger Monster has friends stay the night virtually every weekend. Either Friday or Saturday, I can expect him to ask if [insert friends here] can stay over. The guests eat dinner with the family, then they disappear downstairs with Younger Monster to play video games. Tonight, I have a pair of brothers and another kiddo, they’ve brought their 360 controllers, and they’re online with a bunch of their friends and half of mine playing some “beat up the zombies at the mall” game. At 1AM, I will shoo everyone off to bed. (They will, of course, sneak back downstairs to watch movies, and they know that I won’t kill them as long as they don’t wake me up.) At 10AM, we’ll have a nice breakfast, and everyone will be gone by 11:30AM.

I don’t imagine it would be much fun with a bunch of 8 year olds, they tend to not do well on little sleep, but for the older set, sleepovers can be great fun.

Thank you for posting this Lenore! You are right on with posting. An EX-friend like this is the #1 REASON I read your book in the first place. When I suggested she read your book too she stopped talking to me for a very long time and now we are no longer friends. She cannot handle my free-range ways on top of her usual paranoia… Here is what I posted on Damomma’s blog. I think it is a nice as I can be about it. It’s a hot button for me.

“I once had a friend like you. We are no longer friends. I was sympathetic to her worries but they started to rub off on me and I started to worry too. It got to where I could not talk to her because she would inject her worries into any conversation and I’d hear a comment about not trusting my neighbors, the man who volunteers at preschool, and other Dads. She also did not like our guns and did not trust that we keep them locked up. She thought our kids would find where the code is written down (it’s memorized), she thought our son would see the code over our shoulder (he’s not in the room). It just got to be too much. I think she has very few friends because of this. She has a death grip on her kids’ forearms in public too. She cautions them about getting lost in Joann fabrics (I overheard when I ran into her the other day). Her youngest is afraid of his own shadow. The kids cannot play a fun game of chase without her son developing a fear of the children doing the chasing. Instead of telling him it’s all in fun, she “respects her child’s wishes” and avoids the children who scare him. Mind you this was just chasing at a playdate by kids he knows well —no name calling, no threats, just laughter. Why can’t she teach her child to have a voice? How will kids learn true danger if normal child’s play and other adults are never one the safe list. I hope you’ll reconsider for the sake of your children.”

I enjoy reading your blog, Lenore, and it has helped me shed a fair amount of the baggage that being raised by a decidedly paranoid, non-free range mother saddled me with. My children will surely thank you for this. However, I find a fair amount of self-righteousness here, which I find disturbing. That’s my two cents…

Ebohlman, I was just scrolling down to state exactly what you said!

As a continuation, most rapes of adults are also committed by people known to the victim. There may be people who lurk in alleyways and behind bushes at 1am waiting for lone women to come along to be raped, but statistically speaking, if you’re going to get raped it’s almost certainly going to be from somebody you’re in a relationship with, or have been in a relationship with in the past… and then followed by other people known to you in a depressingly long list of possibilities. (Probably best not to dwell on it, frankly.)

Neither adults nor children are typically attacked by strangers.

This seems unrelated, but of course advice given to women to avoid rape often has the same overall effect as advice given to parents to protect their children – it unnecessarily restricts freedom, and it gives people a reason to judge others if things go wrong and they DO get raped.

I couldn’t be friends with the blogger, not only do I need to be able to trust my friends with my children, I need them to trust me. In our house, we have the opposite of a safe list and have a “nuh uh no way” list. And that list is really short, thankfully, but once on, it’s pretty damn hard to get off. I don’t know if it’s because we surround ourselves with friends that we trust implicitly or we’re totally dense, but I’m pretty confident it’s the first.

We definitely pay attention to our guts when we are leaving our kids with other people or on play dates, without question. If I say “something makes me uncomfortable” or my husband says it, that’s the end of the discussion, we trust our guts and each other. (Up until recently I always went on playdates with my kids because they were more “the parents are friends so the kids are friends” situations, but now with the kids in school they have class mates they want to hang out with and daisy scout trips to go on and I want them to have those experiences, even when I can’t be there.) I do go along when I can because a. I’d really like to get to know the other parents at our new school, not because I don’t TRUST them, but because I want to know them it’s a small school and we’ll be together for the next 8 years and b. I like to volunteer with my children’s activities.

Next Friday my daughter is going over to a friends house after school with about a gazillion other little girls from her class. There will be 3 parents there. My husband and I will not be there. We ARE relying on other parents not only to look after our daughter, but on the other parents who are not there trusting the parents who will be. They know them better than we do, they have been at the school longer.

As much as I do wish I could protect my child and they will never be hurt, I can’t…and I SHOULDN’T. And to think I can protect them absolutely is setting myself up for failure. My goal as a parent is to teach my children how to be well functioning grownups. To go off in to the world. In order to do that there will be bumps and bruises, literally and figuratively. I want to teach my children to trust me and their father. That we are their fieriest advocates and we trust them. To teach them what is okay and what is not okay and if something feels NOT OKAY to stand up for themselves. We have started down that road by asking questions about their playdates, interactions with other people, teachers, scout masters, Sunday School teachers. Not in an accusatory/prying way, but in an interested way. While we are interested in what they are doing, we are more interested in how they’re behaving when they talk to us, that actually more than what it is they say. Red flags will go up if THAT changes. Red flags will go up if they suddenly stop telling us about their day.

I would be terribly sad for my children if my fear of “what if” stopped them from having a day. I’ve found a lot of parenting is biting my damn tongue!

~ Laura

Why exactly are people friends with people who are not to be trusted with their children? I can’t think of a single FRIEND (actual friend, not just person I know) who I would not trust alone with my child. If there comes a time when I begin to not trust them around my child, the friendship has probably run it’s course and will end. There are certainly people I’m more likely to ask to babysit. That’s not because I trust them more but because my child knows them better, is closer to them or they are more child-friendly. However, there’s not a single FRIEND who I would say “no” to if they wanted to take my child somewhere or if I needed someone to watch my child in an emergency.

As for allowing my child to go to her friend’s houses alone, considering her friends are all well-cared for and beloved children of their parents, I think I can trust them to care for mine for a few hours regardless of how well I know them. I’m not going to automatically assume that the parents of the other kids in my kid’s school are going to take wonderful care of their own child while leaving mine to play with the loaded gun in another room. I suppose that is a possible scenario but I’m fairly certain that it’s not the norm. If my daughter makes friends with people whose parenting of their own children I question, then I’ll limit her interaction with those particular kids to only in my presence. I just see absolutely no reason to assume that parents who are good parents to their own children would be negligent of mine while in their care. If anything, they’ll be more cautious with someone else’s child than less cautious.

I think some of you hear about awful things on the news and fail to distinguish that there are certain segments of the population where these things are predominantly occurring. I live in Georgia so a HUGE gun area but I’ve never once asked anyone about a gun. The reason is that accidental gun injuries where a child gets their hands on an unsecure gun are extremely rare in the middle class, functional families that we tend to interact with. Guns are left carelessly lying around in dysfunctional households with only a casual interest in their children and their safety but kids living in that situation are fairly obvious and I’m not going to let my child into those houses anyway. I feel confident that the parents of the well-cared for children in my daughter’s class have safely secured their guns away from their own children so mine will certainly not be able to get her hands on it (not knowing where it is).

I think most of this is a control issue. You want to be in control of your child at all times and you think that you are the only person who can care for your child correctly. I don’t care if my child is exposed to different ideas or different ways of doing things and I trust that someone who takes good care of their own children are not going to feed mine to the wolves the first chance that they get.

When it comes to supervision, I find that almost everyone I can think of is more “careful” about it than I am. Since I’ve been teaching my kids how to behave with minimal supervision for years, I don’t worry about what they’re going to “get into” at somebody else’s house.

The gun thing is important, but like another poster said, when you look at a person and overall he appears responsible and caring and his child is doing well, you don’t assume he is stupid about something so important as gun safety. There probably are folks who give their school-age kids more free rein around guns because their kids know about gun safety. Or maybe their kids own a BB gun and have free access to it. But by the time my kids have friends of that age, it’s up to me to teach them safe behavior concerning guns. (Which is a challenge when I get nastygrams if they mention guns in preschool, but whatever.)

So my concerns really aren’t about stupid or absent-minded parents. Well, you know what my concerns are by now! Stuff that can only happen when a child is alone behind closed doors with someone much older. I really wish it was as rare as some here imply, but it isn’t.

“Why exactly are people friends with people who are not to be trusted with their children?”

And that, my friends, is the $64 question.

“There probably are folks who give their school-age kids more free rein around guns because their kids know about gun safety. Or maybe their kids own a BB gun and have free access to it. But by the time my kids have friends of that age, it’s up to me to teach them safe behavior concerning guns.”

Yepper.

Yeah, there are people who think they are my friends and I tolerate them. One keeps popping into my mind. Every time I see her she offers to babysit my kids. Never remotely considered her offer. However, if I had a real emergency and none of my standbys were available, I believe she’d be “safe” with my kids.

On the other hand, there is someone very close who spends time with my kids often, but I would not leave them in his care for any extended time period. Sorry, he just gives me those kinds of creeps. Maybe I’m wrong, so sue me, but the answer is NO.

Hey guys – this lady actually seems quite nice. We’ve been exchanging e-mail and I think we overstepped a bit.

Maybe this lady is nice, but she did say a lot of extreme stuff on her blog which is not private, so I hope she isn’t too shocked that some readers misunderstood and reacted.

Personally I felt uncomfortable with some of the comments posted yesterday, and I didn’t post there. What someone writes (especially just a snapshot of it) doesn’t clearly reflect what kind of person one is, so without knowing more (or being personally attacked), I would at least try to keep my comments civil.

But, I think what concerned Lenore was the fact that the blogger’s “following” was so ready to agree with the post. So if the blogger’s intent was to be tongue-in-cheek, the effect was otherwise, and to the extent this affected others’ views and actions, I agree with pushing back. (Politely, of course.)

For us, the sleepover thing is simple. Since our kids are homeschooled for the elementary years, we pretty much know the families of all the kids they know well enough to be invited to stay over with. The exceptions would be some of the neighborhood kids, where we don’t know the families as well (or know things about them that make us think it’s fine for our kids to play together, but not spend large amounts of time with their families.) In those cases, we just tell the kids, “No, we don’t know the family well enough. We only do sleepovers with people we know well.”

When the kids are older and going to high school, they’ve shown good judgment in only forming close friendships with the kinds of kids we trust, and therefore by extension their families. Besides, by then, we know the kids are able to fend off most potential dangers. My 16 year old is at a sleepover right now with a family we’ve never laid eyes on, but we know she’s running with a good crowd, and doesn’t do seriously stupid things.

Tonight, I have a pair of brothers and another kiddo, they’ve brought their 360 controllers, and they’re online with a bunch of their friends and half of mine playing some “beat up the zombies at the mall” game.

Based on that very short description that sounds like “Dead Rising”, which has an ESRB rating of ‘M’. I don’t know how old ‘Little Monster’ is, but it does seem more than a little odd that you’d be happy being that ignorant of what they’re playing.

There’s a bizarre perception amongst a lot of people that video games are all toys for kids. They’re not.

Amen! Although I consider myself an over-protective freak when it comes to my children, (I’m always looking for “signs” of good parenting with the people I leave my children with), I’m not assuming everyone is snorting coke off their kitchen tables. But then, I also wouldn’t let my kids wander the supermarket unsupervised.

Although her post seems to contradict itself, one thing’s for sure. I now know why kids don’t come to my house for play dates anymore (they’re too busy safely running through Trader Joe’s cereal aisles… juggling scissors, maybe).

What I don’t get is this. How does she actually move anyone to the Safe list? What exactly do they have to do to prove to her they’re okay? Some of you have joked about background checks, but seriously, how do you ever know? I guess that’s why her list is so small and I see no way for it to get any longer.

“I’m not quite that confident that everyone has their guns locked up (even in the educated, middle-class).”

My child is barely 5 and all her friends are 4 or 5. I do expect that a responsible gun owner would keep their gun locked up if they had that age child in the house. No matter how much you think you’ve taught your child proper gun safety, at that age curiosity and desire to do everything big kids/adults are doing often trump what has been learned. Knowing the rules is not a problem, but having the self control to always follow them is.

At some point, I realize that I will have to teach my child about gun safety since guns are a fact of life where we live (although not as much in my school area where she is far, far more likely to visit with PETA members than the hunting set).

I remember being 5 and wandering around Safeway by myself. And this was only 15 years ago. The rule was I had to let my parents know first if I was going to go wander. Then they gave me an estimate about when we would be leaving. That’s all. And they knew I would probably be in the bakery getting a cookie.
My parents did have rules about sleep overs. But they made sense. They had to meet the kid, meet the parent(s), and see where the house was.
Our town is a small town, so everyone is either related or goes to church with one another… or both. The weird parents were the ones who were helicopter types. I remember thinking my friend’s mom was so weird because she wouldn’t let her daughter walk around downtown with me (At 11 years old) after school because, I quote, “A big white van is going to come and steal you away”. I didn’t even get that refernce until I asked my dad.
And it seems so sad to be so scared of those you know and love. Also, kinda expensive. What about all the free babysitters you’re missing out on? Sad how twisted and paranoid it’s gotten.

She’s still taking baby steps. But still neurotic. lol

Am I the only person who thinks my kids are more likely to have unhappy moments if they don’t get away from me enough? I mean, I love ’em, but maternal patience has its limits! If I only trusted 5 people to care for them without me there, they’d be in my hair way too much (and, they would miss good stuff like dance, karate, swimming lessons, making friends, bonding with extended family, etc., etc.). I just have to believe that that blogger was exaggerating for effect. (And effect she got.)

I just realized something about these articles and associated ‘worst first’ thinking that really bothers me. Its the complete lack of trust and faith these parents have in their kids.
Its not hard to arm your children with some simple non-alarming, things to do if they are in trouble; “I’m going to the girl toys for your cousins, holler if you need me.” or “If someone bothers you in the bathroom, shout and get out.” , that don’t terrify them, but just remind them to take control if they are frightened.
The confidence that they can handle most situations themselves is easy to instill. Even the littlest child can be taught some simple measures.
Why encourage children to think of themselves as victims? Its so un-necessary and so depressing.

SKL, every time I wander over to The Stir, I question my judgement in doing so too!

Someone left their kid at my kid’s birthday party. The kid kept coming to me and whining – so-and-so wasn’t playing with her, so-and-so was being mean to her, etc. Drove me crazy!!! I hate it when my kid whines so am definitely not thrilled when other people’s children are whining at me. I now want to insist that all parents MUST accompany their children to my child’s birthday parties so that they can listening to the whining their ownselves.

Truthfully, that is the only birthday party that I’ve been to where the parents left the kids (my kid is 5). I had two drop-offs but one was a friend’s child who I know well and who I knew was going to be dropped off. I’d love to drop my kid off that the party she has on Saturday so I could finish my Christmas shopping but it’s just not done. The way that the other parents looked when I mentioned that the one little whiner was dropped off I can definitely tell that my daughter would get blacklisted from parties if I did it.

Hmm, I guess it would depend on the kid and you’d want the hostess to know the kid a bit. My kids don’t tend to be whiners or otherwise high-maintenance. Anyhoo, we don’t really do “friend” birthday parties yet (haven’t been invited), though I did tell my kid she could have friends over for her 5th (next fall). I would assume the parents would know whether or not their kid was gonna be OK, but I don’t mind handling a few extra preschoolers for a couple of hours, either way (assuming potty trained, not biters/kickers/incessant screamers, etc.). I don’t know when I’d start expecting “all” the parents to shove off, but probably by age 7 or 8.

On second thought, I just though of a set of 4.5-year-old twins who I would NOT want their parents to leave at my house, LOL. Not for maybe a decade or two.

…Unless the parents know each other and they are hanging around to socialize with the other parents.

Oh wow I just had on if my pre k students moms ask me if i new of any parents that lived near her that would be willing to drive her kids 3 and 5 home once a week since her husband just had a car accident so they were down to one car. Turns out she lives just one street over from me so i volunteered myself and she was over joyed.

I also had a friend that worked at different day care that was down the street from mine and she would regularly take her kids (who were enrooled at my school the school was working at was not the best) into work with her and call me to pick them up and take them into work with me or sign them out of school and take them to eat at mcdonalds till she finished up.

I only knew my best friend less than a year (we met because her kids attended the daycare i was working at at the time) before i used to sign her son 5 at the time out and take him home with me and have my girlfriend take him fishing and stuff. if I was leaving early because he hated having to go there for after care.

Maybe if they had read that article they would have realized that they were taking a great risk in allowing me to be alone with their kids in a car or in my apartment Yes I’m a preschool teacher and have had all the background screenings but i guess one never knows….

Meanwhile when i was a kid I was allowed to go to any party sleepover play date or just roam around the neighborhood as long as it didn’t involve my parents picking up dropping off or participating that was in the mid 90s and today my 10 year old sister is allowed the same we just moved to a new neighbor and she was allowed to go trick or treating with the neighbor kids and their mother because nobody wanted to take her and guess what she came back a little wet because it was raining but completely unharmed…

SKL- re: car seats… how is it even possible to keep kids rear-facing for that long? We had to turn our kids around ASAP because there wasn’t room in the back seat (of our station wagon!) for rear-facing seats when my tall husband had the seat pushed back. Also, what about the kids’ legs? Isn’t there a danger of then clunking their pweshuss noggins off their own knees in a collision? Those things must be tucked under the kids’ chins. My kids HATED being rear-facing- it’s boring AND uncomfortable.

Or are we all supposed to drive gas-guzzling monster vehicles so there’s room for the kids to sit facing nothing until they’re twelve? Or have TVs installed in the backs of the seats so they have something to look at? The whole thing is completely ridiculous. I’m glad I didn’t see the original post!

As to parents staying at kids’ birthday parties, I would HATE if all the parents stayed at a party at my house! People I know, sure- that would be fun. But to have to entertain parents as well as kids and provide food and drinks for them? No thanks. Leave me your phone number and by all means hang around if your kid’s a brat, but otherwise, GO! Have a break! Have fun!

I was invited to stay at a party my son went to last weekend, and I would have felt bad declining… it was boring. Fun for the kids, but there was no reason for me to stay other than that I thought it was expected.

MFA Grad, this blog needs a “like” button for comments. Thank you!

Mrs. Embers, re car seats, you obviously hate your kids almost as much as I hate mine, LOL! I do believe there is a quiet marketing aspect to the whole car seat debate. When people heard I was adopting two kids, some people declared, “now you have to go buy a minivan!!” Most of the parenting suggestions on for-profit websites involve buying something. Kids are crabby on long car drives? You NEED a DVD player. Snacks, spill-proof water bottles – oh and to hold it all, here is a handy snack holder for their car-seat. (Never mind that your kid could choke on his snack in his rear-facing seat and you’d probably never know it.) Convertible car seats now have a higher rear-facing weight limit – so go buy a new one! Your kid shouldn’t wear a coat in his car seat, but here’s an expensive product you can buy to keep him warm AND safe! Suck it up, or why did you decide to be a parent in the first place?

They want to make a law for all parents based on a risk they can’t even quantify – the risk that, while driving with your tot/preschooler, you are going to be in a head-on crash so violent that your properly-restrained forward-facing child’s neck would be broken. So what if he breaks his legs in a rear-facing seat. An oft-repeated comment on such threads nowadays: “broken leg – cast it. Broken neck – casket.” So those of us who turned our kids earler than we “absolutely had to” basically didn’t care if our kids broke their necks.

I wonder if any of these people let their kids play sports?

Donna, I know, and some people brought that up. They were told, “so what if your child pukes on every trip, at least he’s ALIVE.” Amazing. What kind of quality of life . . . but some people are just full of hot air. I kept my kids rear-facing until 2.5 because I knew it was safer (we drive on icy freeways in the winter), AND they were petite and didn’t mind it (they were side-by-side, so they could look at each other and hold hands and stuff). You always have to weigh the pros and cons, but some people just don’t want to admit that.

As my kids got more verbal and smart about the world, I felt like they were missing a lot by only being able to look at what we’d already passed (and not much of that). We spend a fair amount of time in the car, so that just seemed like a big vacuum at that age. So I stuck it out until winter was over and then turned them. It was right for us. Lord help them if they make a law that says I have to turn them back around, LOL. My 4yo was 27 lbs at last weigh-in, so theoretically she could fall under a revised rear-facing threshhold. I just feel like at this point, it would be like making her sit in the corner. I might have to rebel (or force-feed my kid a lot of fat for a while).

If they did make a rear-facing-until-whatever law, I’d disobey it and hang the consequences. Redonkulous is redonkulous.

SKL, Apparently the parents saying that have actually never been carsick!

I have a super-petite 5 year old who might still fall within these new regulations. Since I already feel bad that she’ll still be wearing toddler clothes in elementary school and be stuck in a carseat for years after her friends, I think that it would be a bit cruel to also make her sit rear-facing. Although it may stop the backseat driving. Hmmm this regulation is sounding much better now ….

There’s an interesting exchange on the Dear Prudence column of last week (http://www.slate.com/id/2277841/pagenum/1) started by a mother who was frustrated that she couldn’t have a playdate for her son without having to entertain the other mother. I particularly like Prudence response to some of the reactions of other readers;

“But if after that the other mother then says, “I’d be delighted if you just dropped off Jeremy. Then you can be free to run errands or whatever. I’m fine watching the kids by myself, ” I would not then come to the conclusion she wanted me out of the house so she could perform ritual Satanic abuse.”

What really got to me were these comments below:

” That part is hard sometimes. Really, it means my kids don’t get a lot of play dates. And honestly? I think that’s okay. They go to school. They have activities. Play dates are special treats shared with the closest of friends, whose parents I know extremely well.”

ssfrigerio
” Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Exactly. My kids go to school. They have activities and sports. It’s not a right to have playdates with any or all of your friends. It’s a special treat, at least in our house.”

Playing at a friend’s house is now a special (and presumably rare) treat? I’m scared.