My daughter will be 14 in a month. She has two older brothers so I will admit that by the third I'm more relaxed than I may have been with my oldest child, but I always based what I allowed them to do by their personality and level of maturity. My daughter's best friend has parents who believe every person in the world is looking to rape their daughter and they're doing a good job of making her believe that. She is not allowed to sleep at my house because my two sons probably will not be able to control themselves and will probably molest her. They didn't say that exactly, not about my boys, just about boys in general. Of course, I'm happy she doesn't sleep here because I'd have to kill them should they ever accuse my sons of such a ridiculous thing.

This same mother posted on FB after this boy's tragic murder that she doesn't care that her kids think she's the wicked witch. She now feels validated for never letting them do anything. Forget that her daughter is online on Twitter and FB all day talking to strangers and exchanging personal information. I'm sure that's much safer than allowing her daughter to go for pizza or ice cream with a group of her friends.

I've taught all of my kids to trust their gut when it comes to people. They were encouraged to be friendly and polite to all people including strangers. This poor kid who was killed trusted someone in his community when he got lost. I've always taught my kids to go to a mom, dad, or someone in a uniform nearby, preferably a cop, but in the case that a cop wasn't around, someone with kids or who works wherever we were. I believe this kid trusted the killer because he was a fellow Hasid. That would have been someone he was most likely taught to go to in an emergency which makes it even sadder. Keeping kids in though because of this isn't going to make the world a safer place. There will always be bad people and crimes of opportunity. For all the things I teach my kids and try to protect them from, there are millions of things I couldn't possibly predict. I will never teach my kids that the world is a bad scary place and to be afraid of every person and situation. Personally I think that's a terrible thing to teach.

So the child of hasidic jews, tuaght to trust other hasidic jews, is killed by a hassidic jew - and this situation, where the guy taught as 'safe' was acctually dangerous, is proof that strangers are dangerous?

Luj, every time something happens to a child, people scream about how unsafe the world is. Maybe Caylee Anthony would be alive today if she had been allowed to wander.

And what's really awful is how much this kid's parents are going to be judged for this by other parents who "would never" allow this to happen to them.

Skenazy makes a great point, though, that these same judging parents would want all the sympathy in the world if there kids were to be killed in a car accident.

In reference to the odds calculation that Skenazy writes about: I believe that misconception is caused by the perceived levels of control. Emphasis on the word "perceived". I hate to say this, but there is no human so deluded about their own capabilities as the average American behind the wheel of a car. The state of driver education in the U.S. is beyond pathetic: in most states, written exams focus almost solely on traffic laws, and you can pass the driving test if you know how to start the engine and operate the turn signal.

Few drivers have any experience with a car at the limits of control, and so when it does happen, they haven't a clue what to do. When I was a teenager, one day I found a gravel road out in the sticks that had two virtues: (1) some pretty sharp curves, and (2) it was surrounded on both sides by hay fields, and there were no ditches or culverts. I ran my car up and down that road at increasing speeds, and I learned what understeer and oversteer felt like and how to control them. I practiced hard braking and learned to recognize wheel lockup and other anomalies; my old Pontiac had a bad problem with rear axle hop under heavy braking, and I learned to deal with that.

That knowledge has saved me in a lot of situations. I know how to handle the car in a bad situation; but more importantly, I know what my own limits are and when to park it. I haven't been in any kind of accident since 1989, my fault or otherwise. Remember, who's at fault in an accident doesn't matter much if you're dead.

Just a note here: Levi Aron is an Orthodox Jew, but not a Hasid. No one in the Kletzky family had seen or heard of him before, as far as I know. To Leiby, he would have been a stranger. A Jewish stranger, but still a stranger.

Helicopter parents might think they're reducing their kids chances of being abducted or murdered at the age of 10, but they're increasing the odds of something horrible happening to them at the age of 20, or whenever they finally leave the house. Safety comes from good judgement, which comes from experience. If kids are forbidden from experiencing the big bad world at a young age, they will never develop the judgement to navigate it safely when they're older.

I thought he was walking home from school, turned wrong, and ended up at a dentist office where he encountered the man? No?

Momof4, he was walking home from camp for the first time and got lost during his walk. He encountered Levi along the way and went with him while he paid bill at the dentist. Surveillance shows the boy waiting outside the office for the man for 7 or 8 minutes. We can only presume the man had promised to take him home and the boy was waiting for what he thought was someone helping him.

Martin, I've read different reports as to whether Levi was a Hasid or orthodox. I don't think the boy's parents knew Levi but again, from what I know of the Hasidic community, they are a close knit community and would most likely tell their children to seek out another Hasid for help in any situation even one they do not know.

While I absolutely agree that what happened to this poor little boy should not be the basis for a sound argument to discredit "free range parenting"... the counter to it:

"To which I would like to pose a different question, based on the fact that 25 times more children die as car passengers than as abduction victims (that is, about 1,300 children younger than 14 die in cars annually, whereas about 50 are murdered by strangers): "Is Putting Your Kid in the Car Dangerous?""

....is not helping. Two fallacious arguments does not sound reasoning make.

Ignoratio elenchi.

Feebie, I think the point to the question was to illustrate how ignorant the other argument was, not to take serious issue with having children in cars.

"Ignoratio elenchi. "

That's the best Italian-Jewish name I've ever seen.

How much freedom to allow a child is a difficult decision for a parent to make. Every child, parent and neighborhood is different so there is really no one right answer. If your child is mature then that helps in certain situations. But some neighborhoods are not even safe for adults to walk through.

The car analogy is a little off because that is something that cannot practically be avoided in modern life. Letting your child walk alone is something that can be avoided without too much difficulty in most instances. But children by their nature do dangerous things like climb trees or ride their bikes in the street. They also make bad decisions.

My daughter liked to fly out from between the bushes at the end of our driveway into the street because our house is on a hill. It took a good deal of discussion and punishment to break that habit. For a while she was without her bike because of it. If I am sitting on the hill I will let her know when the street is clear and she can still have the fun of riding fast out into the street but she has proven that she can't be trusted to look out for cars on her own so it is forbidden for her to pull this particular stunt without supervision. She gets leeway appropriate to her skills and responsibility and she is allowed enough room to develop both.

Every situation is different so I am not sure we gain a whole lot by arguing over a particular case. Parents should be the most capable to judge what is allowable and they have the greatest to lose next to the child whose judgment is not fully matured yet.

Yeah, let's make Afghanistan safe, while creeps like this walk around Brooklyn.

Of course this is every parent's worst nightmare, but the chances of such a horrific thing happening are staggeringly low. My greater fear is actually what I see as far more likely (based on statistics) -- my kids being so non-functional that they'll want to live with me until they are 30!

And that's the way-too-common result of kids being so sheltered that they do not build their judgement or problem-solving skills. If kids are not given opportunities to do things on their own like play unsupervised in the neighborhood or at the park, or walking home, if their parents are constantly supervising and arranging play dates and driving them everywhere and protecting them from everything, the kids never have to use their own common sense, never learn to take small, manageable risks and develop judgement and critical thinking skills, and they never have to rely on themselves. These skills don't just magically appear at 14yo (or 27yo), they must be developed with practice that starts at a young age with appropriate and ever-growing degrees of independence. This sheltered, protected childhood leaves us with a generation of entitled, narcissistic "adults" who are totally dependent on their parents, incapable of functioning in the world, get and keep a job, pay rent and bills, etc. -- a generation of 20-somethings living in their parents' basements.

That is my biggest fear for my kids. And that is why I steel myself against my own fear of the possible (but improbable) boogeyman in the bushes to let my kids play unsupervised and start to take on age-appropriate responsibilities and independence, so they can build their skills, independence, creativity, accomplishment, judgement, critical thinking, risk taking, and common sense. And hopefully be better prepared for the world when they grow up so they can function as independent adults.

| Yeah, let's make Afghanistan safe, while
| creeps like this walk around Brooklyn.

There you go again, doing that floor wax thing.


As if...!

(1.) As if the sarcastic "Yeah" at the top were anything but a spasm of teenage loneliness.

(2.) As if Afghanistan & Brooklyn had anything to do with each other. Like, at all.

(2a.) As if law enforcement were the problem in this case.

(2b.) As if the military activities in primitive Afghanistan were in any sane appraisal thematically coterminous with police work in one of the oldest cities in the United States.

(3.) As if the neighborhood where this happened weren't one of the most socially-integrated and neighborly-attentive in the western world.

(4.) As if it weren't New York City herself that had suffered the greatest blow from monsters running unchallenged through the mountains of Afghanistan.

(Etc.)

And once again, the telling facet of your comment is the unspoken presumption that if you were in charge of all the deadly force, you could apply it to just-the-right people to make the world a better place to live.

The sarcasm is just how you beg us to ask you for details of your plan.

But instead of asking, let's all use our imaginations! Let's imagine BOTU were policing our streets with Afghanistan-style military power, and with sufficient intrusion to anticipate freak eruptions of mental illness like the one seen in Brooklyn last week.

What would that city be like for us?

BOTU promises to start with the "creeps like this"....

Sometimes I just adore Crid! Don't leave us again, Crid!!

Even though statistically more children die from car accidents than from abductions, people will tell themselves that driving a car is a necessity over which they can exert at least some control. But once you send your child out the door alone for the first time, basically he's on his own. Ultimately he has to handle whatever happens next by himself.

From what I read, the victim's parents did a dry run of the walk home with him first to make sure he was up to speed. So it sounds like they did everything they could to prepare him for his first taste of independence, and through no fault of their own it just ended horribly. As much as I still agree with the free-range concept, chances are you're never going to convince these parents to try this again with any additional children they might have. And really, who could blame them?

Tweet of the day!

jennyandteets Jenny Mollen

The woman who botoxed her 8year old for beauty pageants lost custody. The child didn't look surprised.

2 hours ago Unfavorite Retweet Reply

God, I love that shit.

Votre copie : ce sont de nombreux valables propos de discussion mais je discute de la sincérité de certains arguments écrits par ici dans ce premier post.