ArcaMax

If you want to keep your kids safe this summer, don't focus on stranger danger. (Especially since the vast majority of crimes against children are committed by people they know.) Focus on water danger.

Teach your kids to swim.

I say this as a non-alarmist mom dedicated to actual safety, not security theater or moral panics. David Aguilar, the ...Read more

Child protection laws and policies that determine at what age kids can do things on their own are often wildly out of whack with actual child development -- and grossly underestimate kids' capabilities.

That's not just ME saying that. (Even though I always do.) Now it's all there in a comprehensive review just published in Social Policy ...Read more

Maybe this happens if you're a guy, too. I don't know. But if you're a woman and you use a restroom at the airport, chances are pretty good there will be a sign in the stall that says, basically: "Are you being trafficked? Here's a number to call."

This may seem like a public service, but in reality, it's just the latest iteration of a long-...Read more

Summer awaits, and with it, beaches, and with them, reads. Here are the most anticipated titles of summer 2023.

"The Body Keeps the Scone": In this slightly less hopeful follow-up to his 2015 bestseller, Bessel van der Kolk explains how the painful aftermath of delicious but detrimental decisions at breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, dunch, ...Read more

"My children were the targets of attempted kidnap," Katie Sorensen, 31, announced in a viral two-part video on Instagram two years ago.

Last week, the "mom influencer" was found guilty of falsely accusing a couple of trying to abduct her kids. She faces a fine and up to six months in jail.

What happened?

In December of 2020 Sorensen was at a ...Read more

"How many of you have closed your email and then immediately reopened it because you might have just gotten an email?"

Laughter rippled through the audience -- including me -- as we listened to Emily Cherkin give a talk at The Brearley School in Manhattan about tech and kids and us: parents, kids, educators, email addicts.

Cherkin, aka The ...Read more

Two Colorado child care workers will go on trial this June for presiding over a day care center where a 5-year-old pulled down a 3-year-old's pants. Twice.

Amy Lovato and Roberta Rodriguez of The Schoolhouse day care center in Poncha Springs face criminal charges for not reporting this to the authorities quickly enough, and for putting the ...Read more

Children in Virginia can now play outside without their parents getting investigated for neglect. Imagine that!

Sunday night, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed what is colloquially called the "Reasonable Childhood Independence" bill -- and was formerly known as the Free-Range Parenting bill. It passed both houses unanimously.

Wait -- Democrats and ...Read more

An article about to be published in the Journal of Pediatrics is titled, "Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children's Mental Wellbeing: Summary of the Evidence."

The authors are three big names in child development: Anthropologist David Lancy, psychologist David Bjorklund and Peter Gray, a professor in the Dept. of ...Read more

Meet Flaco, the Free-Range Kid... who happens to be an owl.

At age 13, having spent almost his entire life in the Central Park Zoo where he was pampered, loved and educated (his home had a mural), this Eurasian eagle-owl was suddenly sprung from his cushy confines the night of Feb. 2. Someone -- not me! -- cut a hole in his wire mesh cage and ...Read more

This fall, just as Keith Kaplan was finishing up his first term as a town councilman in the New York suburb of Teaneck, New Jersey, he proposed a Reasonable Childhood Independence bill. It states that when parents allow kids to perform age-old independent activities, like walking or playing outside, they are not guilty of "neglect" unless the ...Read more