Let them play

"If you’re over 35, you probably remember playing outside till the streetlights came on. But today, a lot of parents worry that if they let their kids play the old-fashioned way – spontaneously, unsupervised, with whoever’s available in the neighbourhood — their children will be bullied by kids older than them.

Here are six ways you can help them (and you!) put those fears in perspective:

1. Mixed-age play reduces bullying ...
2 A little discomfort is a good thing ...
3. Not all meanness is bullying ...
4. Fight jerks with 'social jiu-jitsu' ...
5: Teach The Three R’s [Recognise, Resist, Report]...
6. Ask: What kind of childhood do you want for them?

"Finally, have other parents to try to remember how much they loved playing as a kid.

"Then ask: 'Do you wish your mum was watching you the whole time? Do you wish she was in the tree house with you? Do you wish she was there when you were talking to your friends? Do you wish you were kept ‘safe’ by never having any unsupervised play time, so you’d never possibly deal with a bully?

"'If so, then do the same for your kids. But if you think you got something out of your time with friends, outside, playing and dealing with the inevitable conflicts, why not give that same gift to your kids?'

"And then…open the door."

~ Lenore Skenazy from her post 'Six Truths about Bullies and Bullying'

Independence for Teenagers!!

"As the twenty-first century progresses, more and more teens are 'failing to launch,' to reach the classic milestones of independence that we used to take for granted.

"In 1998, close to half of American 16-year-olds had a driver’s license; by 2018, it was only a quarter.

"In 2006, the average [university] student communicated with a parent around 10 times per week; by 2013, this had climbed to 22 times, with students often initiating the contact.

"In 1985, 45 percent of 20 to 22-year-olds were living with their parents; by 2003, it was 57 percent.

"And in 1982, just under half of young adults aged 23 to 24 were receiving financial assistance from their parents; by 2011, this figure had climbed to two thirds.

"In the words of one expert, '18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.'

"One theory offered up by pundits for why teens and young adults are less mature than they used to be is that parents are simply enabling their offspring to remain immature by failing to allocate them real-world responsibilities sooner. ... by depriving them of responsibility, we’re doing our adolescents a disservice.

"Some studies have even suggested a relationship between [household] chores as a child and effectiveness as an adult. For example, one study followed ~450 underprivileged boys from age 14 through to middle age and found that the best predictor of success as an adult was their capacity to work in childhood. ...

"Teens are perfectly capable of making the occasional dinner, and doing their own laundry if they want to have clean clothes; at the very least, they’ll know how to cook for themselves and operate the washing machine as and when they leave the nest."

~ Daphne Adler, author of the book Debunking Teenagers: 200 research-based parenting strategies to help you navigate the “tempteen” years, from the post 'How to Make Your Teen into a Capable Young Adult'

RELATED:

Housing: "It's just a complete cultural disaster unfolding in slow motion with the younger generations"
A "primary cause of the rise in mental disorders" is helicopter parenting
The “youth mental health emergency”: Too much “safety” has backfired

A "primary cause of the rise in mental disorders" is helicopter parenting

"Be home before dinner!"

"This article in the 'Journal of Pediatrics' ... summarises a wide swathe of evidence showing that a major (but not sole) cause of the increase in anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts among young people over recent decades has been the continuous decline in opportunities for them to play and roam independent of adults. ...

“Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. ... [C]hildren who have more opportunities for independent activities are not only happier in the short run, because the activities engender happiness and a sense of competence, but also happier in the long run, because independent activities promote the growth of capacities for coping with life’s inevitable stressors.” ...

    "Emily Oster, author of several popular books on data-driven parenting including “Expecting Better,” examined the paper and wrote in her substack that ... it is indisputable that kids are less free, and less trusted to be competent, responsible, resourceful young adults than they were in the ’80s ... Meantime, [we have] met [Year 7 children today who are] not yet allowed to play at the park, walk to school, or cut their own meat.

    "Why are trust, responsibility, and independence so crucial to kids’ mental health?

    "Because that’s how you get a sense of what you can handle, and of who you are in the world: A competent, growing person — not a baby or a bonsai tree.
    "Children need independence milestones.
    "Think about a time you were trusted by your parents or another adult to do something without them — come home by dinner, run an errand, walk your sister to soccer…
    "That’s a milestone we don’t SEE as a milestone, because it seems so…minor. But those are the milestones that mark the path to maturity. Take them away, and kids are stuck in baby mode, feeling helpless and needy.
    "And depressed and anxious.
    "The 'Journal of Pediatrics' article talks about how important it is to have an 'internal locus of control' — a sense that you can make things happen, and deal with problems that arise. An 'external locus of control' — as I think you can guess — is the feeling that someone or something else is in the driver’s seat. (And you’re in a 5-point harness.)
    "Our culture accidentally swapped out childhood freedom and responsibility for adult-run activities. We thought we were eliminating risk, and making them happy.
    "We went too far....

“[C]oncern for children’s safety and the value of adult guidance
needs to be tempered by recognition that children need ever-increasing opportunity to manage their own activities.”

"The message through all of this — including, now, a peer-reviewed journal article — is simple: When adults step back, kids step up."

~ Lenore Skenazy, from her post 'Over the Decades, As Kids’ Independence Declined, Their Anxiety Increased'

The “youth mental health emergency”: Too much “safety” has backfired

"[NPR Radio] is devoting this whole week to the 'youth mental health emergency.' That is how this sad and scary moment is being described, as childhood anxiety, depression and self-harm shoot upward....
    "[Children’s] free time and free play have been declining since the 1970s, replaced by adult-supervised activities. The understandable goal was to keep kids safer and safer, by always watching, teaching, and helping them... Wouldn’t conventional wisdom suggest that keeping someone safe would make them feel LESS anxious?
"    'You’d think!' [says Let Grow co-founder Peter Gray] 'But here’s the catch ... Everyone has something called a "locus of control." When you have a well-developed INTERNAL locus of control, you feel you can handle things, solve problems, make your own decisions. You are in control of your life.

    "'An EXTERNAL locus of control is when you feel people or forces outside of you are in charge. Someone else is directing you. You don’t have the ability — or even the opportunity — to deal with the problems and possibilities of everyday life. 'And people who lack that ability, regardless of age, are far more susceptible to anxiety and depression.'...
    "'Overprotective parenting has become the norm and it’s very difficult to do something counter to the norm.”...
    "To [the] query about social media being the real problem, Gray pointed out study after study has found that kids online would RATHER be hanging out together in real life. But when that’s impossible — or when there’s always an adult supervising — online becomes the only place to gather....
    "By overseeing so much of kids’ lives we accidentally sucked out the independence, competence, autonomy and fun. It’s not hard to give all that back, once we realise that truly making kids SAFE means protecting their internal locus of control."

~ Lenore Skenazy in her post 'Peter Gray on NPR Today: Constant Adult Supervision is Destroying Kids’ Mental Health,' quoting Peter Gray, author of this recent piece in The Journal of Pediatrics: 'Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing'

 

"When Children's Independence Goes Down, Their Mental Health Issues Go Up"

"A wide swathe of evidence showing that a major (but not sole) cause of the increase in anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts among young people over recent decades has been the continuous decline in opportunities for them to play and roam independent of adults...
    "Reversing this trend — stat! — is key, as 'children who have more opportunities for independent activities are not only happier in the short run, because the activities engender happiness and a sense of competence, but also happier in the long run, because independent activities promote the growth of capacities for coping with life’s inevitable stressors.'
    "Why are trust, responsibility, and independence so crucial to children's mental health?
    "Because that’s how you get a sense of what you can handle, and of who you are in the world: A competent, growing person — not a baby or a bonsai tree....
    "The 'Journal of Pediatrics' article talks about how important it is to have an 'internal locus of control' — a sense that you can make things happen, and deal with problems that arise. An 'external locus of control' — as I think you can guess — is the feeling that someone or something else is in the driver’s seat. (And you’re in a 5-point harness.)
    "Our culture accidentally has swapped out childhood freedom and responsibility for adult-run activities. We thought we were eliminating risk, and making them happy.
    "We went too far."

~ Lenore Skenazy, from her post 'When Childrens’ Independence Goes Down, Their Mental Health Issues Go Up: 'Journal of Pediatrics''

RELATED:

"Sittervising." Don't get up.

Pic from Let Grow

"Its latest find is 'Sittervising.' The not-exactly-groundbreaking idea is for a parent to SIT while their kid plays, rather than feeling obligated to jump in and toss the ball, be the snowman, or praise every single scribble the child creates.
          "Yes, it’s too bad that there needs to be a word legitimising this already totally legit behaviour, but golly — we’re glad there is! Just as “Free-Range Parenting” became the name for a whole bunch of practices encouraging independence, 'sittervising' gives tired, trusting parents a way of explaining their decision to intervene a little less. It’s not laziness. It’s not neglect. It’s a belief that kids can and should spend some time figuring out how to have fun without dragooning an adult."
          ~ Lenore Skenazy, from her post 'Lets Hear it for Sittervising'

Independence!

"Children are like fireworks — a small container crammed with potential. But it requires a spark before it shoots off and dazzles us all.
    "Independence — an adult believing in them and trusting them to do something on their own — IS that spark."

          ~ Lenore Skenazy, from her post at Free-Range Kids

"Think how much childhood has changed, based on our collective misperception of stranger danger...."

"Think how much childhood has changed, based on our collective misperception of stranger danger. As reported here just last week, the age that parents now let their kids play outside, unsupervised, has gone up by TWO YEARS in just one generation. Parents who played outside on their own at age 9 now give their own kids that freedom at age 11.
          "What’s more, all sorts of studies show kids are spending far more time on the couch, on devices, on homework, on organised sports — on almost anything indoors and/or adult-supervised, because, in part, this feels like risk mitigation. We’ve mitigated risk to the point where kids now spend an average of 4 to 7 MINUTES A DAY outdoors in unstructured play. This does not feel like an unalloyed triumph."

          ~ Lenore Skenazy, on 'Putting Covid (and other) Risks to Kids in Perspective'

 

"Kids are not less safe today."

"It goes without saying that no one wants a child to be hurt, ever.
    "Sometimes, though, it seems as if we believe that with enough child-surveillance, parent-surveillance, blaming, shaming, investigating and arresting we can achieve perfect childhood safety: Just make sure kids are watched 24/7 — and hound the parents who don’t do that.
    "That’s why we really have to think about actual safety and not just the knee-jerk response: 'Never let them out of our sight till they’re 18!' ...

    "The [real] safe word is 'Confidence'....

    "Kids are not less safe today."

~ Lenore Skenazy, from her post 'Second Thoughts on Keeping Kids Safe by Never Letting Them Out of Our Sight — and the Enduring Myth of Stranger Danger'

.

"Preventing access to unstructured play can deprive children of the opportunity to develop risk-management skills that are necessary for them to thrive." #QotD

"If a parent worries that unsupervised play is dangerous, the [Canadian Public Health Association, with support from the Lawson Foundation] responds:
    "'It is understandable you’re concerned for your child’s safety, and these concerns are appreciated. Children actually learn new skills when we allow them to engage in unstructured play, and they’re less likely to have more serious injuries later on. They are able to learn about their physical capabilities which allow them to rely less on adults to manage their environments.
    "'Preventing access to unstructured play can deprive children of the opportunity to develop risk-management skills that are necessary for them to thrive as they grow older. These skills include learning how to navigate risky circumstances and environments, knowing personal physical limits, how to cooperate with peers, and solve unforeseen problems.'"
~ from Lenore Skenazy's post at 'Let Grow': 'Let My Kids Play Outside With All Those Strangers and Cars??? An Evidence-Based Response'

[Pic from Let Grow]
.

Want safer kids? Send them into traffic

 

Heading into work this morning was a breeze. A short, easy trip. I’m guessing your’s has been too, these last two weeks.

Amazing how well the roads work, isn’t it, when kids are enjoying their school holidays and their mummies aren’t driving them to and from bloody school twice a day!  (Four trips every day, plus coffees – take all those trips off the traffic on our clogged roads—four trips multiplied by a frighteningly large proportion of the 770,000 children who attend school every day—and you get roads that work roughly the way they were designed to, and you wouldn’t need to talk about things like charging cars to enter Auckland: A bad idea.)

So the roads work better, and the kids are all better off too. They get to enjoy a little bit of independence.

Q: Why don’t stay-at-home mums stay at home and let their children make their own way to school? Fair question: Crime is decreasing, roads are safer, finding their own way to and from school is a great way to encourage and develop independence … but they don’t. Instead, every morning and every afternoon, these helicopter mummies strap their babies in, cocoon them in the safety bubble of their family car, and then head out to fill up the roads and help ensure their babies never fully grow up.

Want safer kids? Send them into traffic.

It would be much better for all of us.

Think about how important it is for your child to learn independence; place the infinitesimally small (and falling) chance that something bad might happen to them while walking against the certainty that something bad will happen to them if they don’t: they will never fully grow up.

Crikey, even the so-called “walking buses” you see—those regimented cocoons boasting hi-vis-vested volunteers guiding children along the street as if fearful they might show an interest in what’s going on around them—even those are more about exercise than they are independence. Yes, they help everyone else using the roads by keeping a few mummy’s cars off it, but they’re a symptom of helicopter childcare rather than a thirst to break out. If independence is your goal and you do have volunteers who want to help, then why not try this for your “walking bus”: instead of having your volunteers walk with the children as little policemen, with the volunteers taking responsibility for behaviour, have them stand only at the trickier street corners to ensure children know what they’re about there, and take their own responsibility for the rest of their journey.

If you want your children to become adults, then letting them learn how to make their own way is crucial.

Lenore Skenazy from the highly-recommended Free-Range Kids blog (a Free-Range Kid being “a kid who gets treated as a smart, young, capable individual, not an invalid who needs constant attention and help”) offers three tips for helping children become streetwise:

1. Teach them to cross the street. Above and beyond the look-both-ways mantra, Skenazy advised her own sons to make eye contact with drivers when possible at intersections, telling her children that while drivers don’t have the right of way, they often take it.
2. Never multitask while crossing the street. No headphones, music, calling or texting at an intersection.
3. Speaking to strangers can be okay, but never follow one. On public transit, such as with her son’s infamous first solo subway ride, children may want to ask for help with directions, which Skenazy encourages. “You can always talk to a stranger, you cannot go off with a stranger,” she says. And teaching children to only speak to mothers with children or police officers is unnecessary, Skenazy says. “The odds that the person you ask for help is a murderous stranger is very small,” she says. “And most people like to help each other.”

Basically, Skenazy says,

giving your child a free-range childhood gives them a place in the world, not just inside our homes.
    But whether you're letting your 8-year-old walk to school on his own or letting your 6-year-old daughter walk up the path by herself, wannabe free- range parents might consider the story of a 10-year-old kid who rode his bike across the George Washington Bridge to New York City on his own.
    He pedalled 30 kilometres down unfamiliar roads and busy streets, past neighbours and strangers, out into the unknown. "I didn't need help from anyone. It took me all day, but I found the way and did it myself," he recalled.
    This free-range kid went to the moon. His name is Buzz Aldrin.

So instead of more roads and charging cars to enter Auckland: A bad idea, how about we try to get a cultural change

FURTHER READING:

• WAKE UP AUCKLAND! You do not have a traffic problem – Teknonym, WHALE OIL
• Why Can’t She Walk to School? – Jan Hoffman, NEW YORK TIMES
• When is the right time to let your child walk to school alone? - Hannah Sung, GLOBE & MAIL
• What's So Scary About Walking to School? – Lenore Skenazy, CREATORS.COM
• Whatever Happened to Walking to School? – Lenore Skenazy
• Free range parenting: Neglect or common sense? – Bess Manson, STUFF

.

Fixing those fragile campus kids

“Safe spaces” on uni campuses where students’ delicate sensibilities are protected.

Sensitive wee flowers so terrified of being “micro-aggressed” they bully anyone their feelings tell them might “trigger” them.

Mob rule on campuses demanding “freedom” from ideas or even events that might challenge them.

Self-infantilising students everywhere are finding ideas so scary they're demanding you check your privilege and check out of their personal and public spaces:

• A Colorado University anti-racism rally was recently cancelled because the organisers are white.
• Free yoga classes at the University of Ottawa were recently cancelled  because yoga is now apparently inappropriate cultural appropriation.
• Students at Yale spit on other students and try to get their professors ousted because said professors don’t believe it’s their job to police Halloween costumes for political correctness.
• Cambridge University students demanding that anti-abortion speakers be barred from speaking on campus
• University College London’s students’ union (UCLU) voted to ban Nietzsche reading groups on the grounds the ‘far-right, fascist ideology’ threatened the ‘safety of the UCL student body and UCLU members.’

So well-satirised in this wonderful short film, from the UK to the USA to Australia to little old NZ “University has become the place for teenagers to go when they wish to delay being an adult, rather than being the bridge to independence it was once considered to be.”

So what can be done?

Recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, Douglas Murray said something amazing. He said:

The surprising thing is not that young people would rebel. Young people have always rebelled. That’s what young people do. The surprising thing is why the adults give in.
    I think this is far more relevant today than in 1968. The amazing question that hovers over Yale University is why the adults take it and the kids run rampage over Yale University. And this is the really large problem which Islamists and other terrible people are simply taking advantage of.
    Somebody needs to say to the girl shrieking at her professor, 'If you cannot cope with Halloween costumes, then you’ve got no place at a university, because you’re going to have no chance at dealing with quantum physics or Shakespeare or Heidegger if Halloween spooks you out this much. You’re a useless person, and you’re going to go into a useless career, because if you’re a lawyer, and you’ve gone to Yale, but you’re too sensitive to hear about rape cases, you're not going to be able to represent anyone in a court of law. You’re no use to law. You’re no use for literature because you might read a novel that will trigger you. You’re no use for the sciences. You’re no use for anything.'
And that’s what the adults should be saying.

They should. But how do we fix the problem? And how do we find young folk who are any use to law, to literature, to science?

At root, “post-modernism, deconstructionism and progressive education have caused today's rebellion against the mind,” so in the end you have to blame the philosophers for the campus insanity. But fixing the philosophy requires new philosophers on campus ready and able to challenge the regressive post-modernists. Which means, independent young thinkers.

Where are they going to come from in our mollycoddled over-nannied world?

Here’s another answer. Jonathan Haidt, the NYU Professor who co-authored the explosive Atlantic piece,”The Coddling of the American Mind,” was asked “how to prevent another wave of kids on campus who can’t handle reading a disturbing book, or sharing the campus with a visiting speaker whose views contrast with their own.” In an article titled “Revenge of the Coddled” he responded that we have to “think young.” So obviously, education committed to encouraging independence in young children such as Montessori education is crucial. But there’s so much, says Haidt, that parents themselves can do:

Children are anti-fragile. They have to have many, many experiences of failure, fear, and being challenged. Then they have to figure out ways to get themselves through it. If you deprive children of those experiences for eighteen years and then send them to college, they cannot cope. They don’t know what to do. The first time a romantic relationship fails or they get a low grade, they are not prepared because they have been rendered fragile by their childhoods. So until we can change childhood in America, we won’t be able to roll this back and make room of open debate.
    My biggest prescription is that in every hospital delivery room, along with that first set of free diapers, should come the book: Free-Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. If everyone in America read the book Free-Range Kids the problem would be over in 21 years, when the first set of tougher kids filled our universities.

Free-Range Kids author Lenore Skenazy reaffirms that

the way to raise resilient kids is to be sceptical about the message we get all the time that they are just moments from doom: An encounter that will haunt them, a loss that will derail them, or an unsupervised couple of minutes that will result in their disappearance. Our society obsesses about the way kids can die in an instant, and ignores the fact that 99.9999% of them won’t, and most of THOSE will emerge no worse (and possibly better) for the wear.
    Haidt’s premise is that by avoiding more and more of our “fear triggers” (like, “She’ll die if she goes around the corner without me!”) we give those fears more power. They grow, and so does our kids’ anxiety.
    I love safety, but it’s true that once we let our kids do things on their own, the pride and confidence that they feel and that WE feel goes a long way to restoring “normal anxiety” back to its set point, instead of the red alert it is on today, all the time.
Including on campus.

[Hat tip Monica Beth]

On not driving helicoptered kids to school

How has your driving to work been these last couple of days? I’ll put money it that it’s been way better for you too, now that kids are enjoying their school holidays and, crucially, their mummies aren’t driving them to and from school twice a day!

Subtract those four trips a day from the traffic on our clogged roads—four trips multiplied by a frighteningly large proportion of the 770,000 children who attend school every day—and you get roads that work they way they were designed to.

And the kids are all better off too.

Why can’t stay-at-home mums stay at home and let their children make their own way to school? Fair question. Crime is decreasing, roads are safer, finding their own way to and from school is a great way to encourage and develop independence … but they don’t. Instead, every morning and every afternoon, these helicopter mummies strap their babies in, cocoon them in the safety bubble of their family car, and then head out to fill up the roads and help ensure their babies never fully grow up.

Want safer kids? Send them into traffic.

It would be much better for all of us.

Think about how important it is for your child to learn independence; place the infinitesimally small (and falling) chance that something bad might happen to them while walking against the certainty that something bad will happen to them if they don’t: they will never fully grow up.

Crikey, even the so-called “walking buses” you see—those regimented cocoons boasting hi-vis-vested volunteers guiding children along the street as if fearful they might show an interest in what’s going on around them—even those are more about exercise than they are independence. Yes, they help everyone else using the roads by keeping a few mummy’s cars off it, but they’re a symptom of helicopter childcare rather than a thirst to break out. If independence is your goal and you do have volunteers who want to help, then why not try this for your “walking bus”: instead of having your volunteers walk with the children as little policemen, with the volunteers taking responsibility for behaviour, have them stand only at the trickier street corners to ensure children know what they’re about there, and take their own responsibility for the rest of their journey.

If you want your children to become adults, then letting them learn how to make their own way is crucial.

Lenore Skenazy from the highly-recommended Free-Range Kids blog (a Free-Range Kid being “a kid who gets treated as a smart, young, capable individual, not an invalid who needs constant attention and help”) points out that you have a chance to let them start.

Coming up on Oct. 5 is a great holiday: International Walk to School Day. The only sad thing?
That we need it.

She offers three tips for helping children become streetwise:

1. Teach them to cross the street. Above and beyond the look-both-ways mantra, Skenazy advised her own sons to make eye contact with drivers when possible at intersections, telling her children that while drivers don’t have the right of way, they often take it.
2. Never multitask while crossing the street. No headphones, music, calling or texting at an intersection.
3. Speaking to strangers can be okay, but never follow one. On public transit, such as with her son’s infamous first solo subway ride, children may want to ask for help with directions, which Skenazy encourages. “You can always talk to a stranger, you cannot go off with a stranger,” she says. And teaching children to only speak to mothers with children or police officers is unnecessary, Skenazy says. “The odds that the person you ask for help is a murderous stranger is very small,” she says. “And most people like to help each other.”

Basically, Skenazy says,

giving your child a free-range childhood gives them a place in the world, not just inside our homes.
    But whether you're letting your 8-year-old walk to school on his own or letting your 6-year-old daughter walk up the path by herself, wannabe free- range parents might consider the story of a 10-year-old kid who rode his bike across the George Washington Bridge to New York City on his own.
    He pedalled 30 kilometres down unfamiliar roads and busy streets, past neighbours and strangers, out into the unknown. "I didn't need help from anyone. It took me all day, but I found the way and did it myself," he recalled.
    This free-range kid went to the moon. His name is Buzz Aldrin.

FURTHER READING:

• Why Can’t She Walk to School? – Jan Hoffman, NEW YORK TIMES
• When is the right time to let your child walk to school alone? - Hannah Sung, GLOBE & MAIL
• What's So Scary About Walking to School? – Lenore Skenazy, CREATORS.COM
• Whatever Happened to Walking to School? – Lenore Skenazy
• Free range parenting: Neglect or common sense? – Bess Manson, STUFF

Against anonymous commenters

Mark Steyn attacks anonymous commenters too timid to put a name to their opinions.

Kathy Shaidle and Gavin McInnes have been discussing online anonymity. I agree with them. You’re not in the battle unless you put your name to it – and don’t give me that Scarlet Pimpernel stuff: you’re not riding out after dark on daring missions, you’re just reTweeting some bloke’s hashtag.
    Mr McInnes is withering about the cyber-warrior ethos – the butch pseudonym, the graphic-novel avatar. But, cumulatively, it’s making the Internet boring and ineffectual for everyone other than Isis…
    There are alwaysrational reasons for not flying under your flag. But cumulatively and objectively they have a corrosive effect. McInnes cites the stand-up mommy who, in response to the arrest of a parent who let her children walk home from the park unaccompanied, organized a "Leave Your Kids At The Park" day - to demonstrate to the statist control freaks that they can't arrest us all. Her name is Lenore Skenazy, not "WarriorPrincess437"

Frankly, if you can’t take your own ideas seriously enough to put your name to them, then why the hell should anyone else? That’s the lesson from the likes of Lenore and Steyn.

Yes, it’s true (as Steve Kates responds) that “free speech of unpopular opinions – meaning opinions that are unpopular on the left – is not so free after all, but comes with a huge potential cost.” That “the anonymity of the net allows many of us to say things in public that we are very aware may have us receiving modern versions of being burned at the stake or sent to the gulag.”

But while “there are always rational reasons for not flying under your flag … cumulatively and objectively they have a corrosive effect.” And it remains true that for every opinion coming from an avatar, one from someone using their own name is more genuine.

Because one of us is real and the other isn't. Which means that one of us has his own skin in the game, and he doesn't want to waste his time trying to figure out whether the other one's deranged obsession is simply the usual basement blowhardry…

It is also true that virtually without fail every single scurrilous or cowardly attack online comes from some anonymous blowhard hiding behind a self-fantasising nom-de-plume. Like the current loony from Los Angeles who’s been spamming the comments section here at NOT PC for the past week with links to white supremacist websites and claims about something called Tavistock—which I had to Google to discover is among the internet’s 4th-most popular bizarre conspiracy theory among loonies who still haven’t learned to tie their own shoes.

So until the spamming stops, or slows – or until shops in Irvine, California run out of tinfoil—I’m afraid I’ve had to apply moderation to all the comments here.

Which won’t bother most of you, since you don’t often bother to comment anyway, whether anonymously or pseudonymously or not.

“Takaharu Tezuka: The best kindergarten you’ve ever seen”

I love Japanese architect Takahura Tezuka’s attitude to designing for children …

PS: On the need for some danger, you might want to keep up with Lenore Skenazy at  Free Range Kids.

“No more little children being dropped off by their mummies”

I love that headline above chosen by Lance Wiggs in promoting a sensible, yes, sensible, proposal by the Greens to encourage children to walk and cycle to school instead of being dropped off by their mummies. Stop mummies taking a round trip twice a day, then our roads are that much less congested (ever noticed how much easier it is to drive around when schools are on holiday?) and everyone else’s trip becomes that much quicker.

How did children end up being bubble-wrapped like this by their mummies?

When I went to school over 30 years ago [says Lance] the norm was to walk, cycle or take public transport. Similarly a colleague I spoke to yesterday said that when he went to school in Tauranga 20 years that there were hundreds of bike racks at his school and it was hard to find a place to park his bike. And I talked last night to someone from Hawkes Bay, and when she went to primary school a little over 10 years ago cycling was the norm as well.
    But there has been a dramatic shift to little children being dropped off by their mummies (that’s how we would have cruelly described it at school) over the last 20 years. And the result of the critical mass shifting is that it’s now deemed too dangerous for kids to cycle or walk to school. But a lot of that perceived or real danger is the very traffic caused by those car driving mummies.

Exemplified maybe by whole fleets of lunching ladies manoeuvring around outside schools in large cocooned SUVs (and they’re driving these cocoons for their kids’ “safety”) at the very time when the roads and foot paths outside schools are filled with little people who can’t be easily seen from behind the wheel of a large SUV.

    It’s a vicious circle [says Lance], exemplified by another conversation yesterday with someone who firstly talked about how she used to cycle in Auckland, then about how cycling in Auckland became too dangerous because of the cars and poor infrastructure, and then about how cyclists in Auckland are painful and dangerous when she drives her car. I struggled to get her to understand the causes and effects.
    We need to break this circle of despair, and get people back onto the streets, walking and cycling. We are seeing this start in some cities, Wellington especially, and successes in Auckland with multi-use areas like Fort Lane and Elliot Street. The end game is that New Zealand has vibrant walkable, liveable cities, with incredible people-filled street life and places to live that attract and retain the best talent.
  So it’s great to see the Greens today launched a cycling to school policy. It’s a clever start.

It might be (though for the life of me I can’t see why it should cost taxpayers $50 million.)

It made me think of this neat talk by the hyper-energetic “World’s Worst Mum” Lenore Skenazy, author of the Free Range Kids website, arguing we should Quit Bubble-Wrapping Our Kids!

When CATO Institute meets the Greens. Always a good moment.

Why? And how? [update 3

WHY?

THAT’S THE FIRST question everyone asked after another idiot committed suicide by massacre, shooting twenty-six adults and youngsters in cold blood in a school in Connecticut before—well, who the hell cares what happened to him after that. Twenty-six human beings died, and something non-human.

Why did he do it? Why do any of these random shooters do it? An email doing the rounds attributed* to Morgan Freeman (the modern American “voice of God”) has one answer:

This may sound cynical, but here's why.
    It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. [The Columbine murderers] are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
    CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day-care center or a maternity ward next.
    You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news.

Sound comments. As a news consumer myself, I’ve never found it hard to turn of the news at times like this.

And at this blog, I’ve always followed the policy of never naming murderers. Why give them the oxygen of publicity.

THE NEXT QUESTION EVERYONE was asking was How?

How can this be stopped from happening again? Answers were rolling in even before the mourning started, and well before facts started to come in. President Obama said “meaningful reform” must be enacted so it won’t happen again. Rep. Dianne Feinstein has a bill all ready to put to Congress in the first week of the next session, banning … something. And talking heads and talkback callers everywhere are calling for guns to be made harder to obtain, semi-automatic weapons to be banned,  gun licensing to be made harder the “gun culture” and gun ownership to be throttled by lawmakers bringing a clipboard to a gunfight.

Throttling gun cultures with more laws. Prohibition. This surely ignores that only the law-abiding listen to such laws. 

And what have all the laws against guns in schools done but disarm everyone there—leaving defenceless the people who run them and all the youngsters they should be protecting, and telling murderers they get at least thirty minutes of safe shooting before any threat to their life is likely to arrive.

It is said that as the armed idiot roamed the corridors bravely killing unarmed six- and seven-year-olds, a very brave school principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung (right) charged him in a desperate attempt to stop him. She died in the attempt.

Imagine yourself in that position, desperate to save the children in your care and utterly powerless to do anything about it.

I wonder what you would have wanted in your hand when you confronted the gunman: a small handgun? or a clipboard?

* * *

*Probably incorrectly. But since Morgan Freeman is the name most Americans would come up with if asked to name the man to play the voice of God, he’s the obvious choice for the actual author(s) to pick.

UPDATE 1: Lenore Skenazy from Free Range Kids comments:

It’s impossible not to feel afraid, sad, sickened and deeply pessimistic when something like this occurs. However, “something like this” — well, there aren’t a lot of somethings like this, and that’s a truth I am desperately trying to remind my heavy soul. It may feel like “school shootings happen all the time,” but they don’t. They are rarer than rare. They are as unpredictable as anything can be. And if today we find ourselves making a mental list, “Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook,” that’s because they are few enough, in a country of 300 million, that we know their names.
    This does not mitigate our sorrow, but it can — with some effort — mitigate our fear. It is not to dismiss the parents’ pain that I encourage you to turn off the TV. It is to keep some perspective…

And she points out the deadliest school massacre in US history was in 1927—and why its aftermath matters now .

UPDATE 2: Foregoing the knee-jerk, Australian Tim Blair takes the wide perspective, observing there are both more guns in the US, and fewer deaths…

There is always a bigger picture. In the case of the latest horrific US mass shooting, the bigger picture is this:
    There are around 310 million non-military firearms in the US, basically enough to equip every man, woman and child with a deadly weapon. Close to 5.5 million new firearms are produced within the US every single year – two million more than the entire amount of firearms owned by Australians. Another three million firearms are imported to the US annually. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans have at least one firearm in their house. The market for firearms has increased constantly since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, with Smith & Wesson expecting almost $400 million in gun sales during 2012.
    And the rate of firearm-related murders keeps falling.
    You read that correctly. As the number of guns in the US increases, the deaths keep going the other way. “The rate of gun-related murder and manslaughter fell 11 per cent from 2008 to 2010, the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available,” Businessweek reported in October. Moreover, “the gun-killing rate has fallen a total of 51.5 per cent since 1993.”

UPDATE 3: Fred Rogers talks about discussing tragic events in the news with kids, which at the moment encompasses everything from Newtown Connecticut to Apia, Samoa. It includes this piece of advice for all of us:

[Hat tip Noodle Food]