World’s Worst Mom on TV

I have praised Skenazy many times, as far back as 6 years ago. I am glad to see her get some favorable attention, such as this New Yorker article:

Free-Range Kids, a movement committed to rolling back the excesses of the helicopter-parent era. (From the group’s Web site: “Fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”) The movement was founded by Lenore Skenazy, a former columnist for the News and for the New York Sun, who achieved mommy-blog infamy when, seven years ago, she wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son, armed with a map and a MetroCard, find his way home from Bloomingdale’s. Skenazy published a book and now has a reality show, “World’s Worst Mom,” on the Discovery Life Channel. In it, she swoops into the homes of overprotective parents and persuades them to let their offspring perform such retro tasks as riding city buses alone and setting up a lemonade stand. “The kids are thrilled,” she said the other day at her family’s apartment, in Jackson Heights, Queens. “And the parents are happy you’ve replaced their dystopian horror story with reality.” ...

“If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would you have to keep him outside for him to be abducted by a stranger?” A week? She shook her head. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand years.”

She is just saying what should be obvious to anyone with any common sense or to anyone who looks at actual risk figures.

Most women would respond to her "750,000 years" with a dopey answer like "but what if it were your child?" Yes, my child should get the benefit of the facts also.

Either she is the only mom with common sense, or the only one with the guts to say the obvious, I'm not sure.

Here is from a leftist site:

There’s no sugar coating this folks, we need to stop being parenting wusses. Everyone (or every sane person) wants their children to grow up to be happy, successful, and able to care for themselves. But the efforts undertaken by parents’ to promote their children’s own welfare too often crosses the line into overprotecting and isolating their children. There’s also a severe risk that parent’s could end up instilling an unshakable sense of fear and paranoia in their children.

It’s gotten so bad that some parents are even promoting what they call “Free Range” children. Yes, granting your children what used to be “taken for granted” freedoms now has a chic label. ...

Worse yet, the American government is increasingly adopting the mantra of “nanny-state” in the most literal way. It has almost become criminal for parents to parent their kids, at least without adopting the approved over-parenting position pushed by social welfare services. ...

We’ll be raising kids that are terrified of the world and terrified of living independently. It’s time parent’s take back what’s theirs (their kids) and stand up for their own rights (basic parenting choices, in this case). I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be laws that protect children, but these laws need to be put in a rational and restrained context.

NPR Radio addressed free-range kids this morning:

A 10-year-old may be perfectly fine walking alone in one neighborhood, he says, but might not be safe in another with drug dealers on the corner.

"Parents who live in poverty are more likely to be helicopter parents." - John Myers, family law professor

"We hate to say that the people that live in those two communities ought to be treated differently because we would probably get into uncomfortable issues of socioeconomic status and ethnicity," he says. "But that's the reality in our country."

So I guess that they have to arrest whites to cover up the fact that they prefer to arrest blacks.