Instapundit...

I was just discussing this very thing with the 11-year-old today:

Almost everyone I know started with crappy jobs like hauling shingles up a ladder, but if you’re not willing to do the crap work chances are you won’t make it that far. There are lots of jobs advertised but there are lots more that aren’t.

She mentioned that she and a friend were naming jobs they wouldn't want when they get older; she mentioned working in a fast-food restaurant. I pointed out that they were actually okay jobs; that they were good for an entry level; that often if you work hard at one, you can get promoted relatively quickly; that they often have reasonably good benefits; and that people want to know you can do the awful jobs before you can get a better one.

I also pointed out that it was a good second job when you were just starting out. I told her that you often have to take a job that doesn't pay enough when you begin. It might be in your dream line of work at your dream company, but you are still getting paid bupkis. You take it, hoping that you will get promoted and move towards the job you really want. In that case, you often need to work two jobs. So, don that polyester uniform and pay the rent!

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

From: Can a Playground Be Too Safe? - NYTimes.com

Is anyone really surprised by that?

If, as has been reported, some teachers marched their students to the Madison Capital to participate in the demonstrations, I have one question: did they have permission slips from their parents?

At every school I know, the teachers need a permission slip every time the kids are taken off campus--even for regular monthly trips, a permission slip comes home every time at our school. I've always assumed that was due to a law. If so, can't parents protest the taking of their kids without permission?

..."Take your child to the park...and leave them there day"

Last Saturday was "Take your child to the park...and leave them there day." This was proposed by Leonore Skenazy, the author of "Free Range Kids". She proposed that parents look and see if they have well-populated and generally safe park nearby, and if their kids are 7 or 8 or older (she pointed out that 7 is the age when kids around the world generally start walking to school alone), that parents simply drop them off for a period of time. She said it could be for just 15 minutes while you walk around the park, or for longer. The problem being that kids are isolated from each other and from society, live sedentary lives, all at a time when the world is safer than it's been for the last 30 years or more.

Some statistics:

Are you afraid of being struck by lightning? No? Why not? Because the odds of getting struck by lightning are-- 1 : 280,000

• Number of missing minors each year (includes teen runaways, parental abductions, and kids who wandered away for a couple of hours): 750,000 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Number of missing minors who are kidnapped by strangers each year: 115 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Number of missing minors who are kidnapped by strangers each year and never return home alive: 50 ⁽¹⁾
  
• Rate of sterotypical kidnapped kids who remain unrecovered/killed vs all missing: 1 : 15,000
  
• Number of kids in 2000: 72,000,000 ⁽²⁾
  
• Rate of stereotypical kidnapping per capita: 1: 626,086
  
• Rate of stereotypical kidnapping and murder or never-recovered per capita: 1: 1,440,000

• Number of children injured annually in car accidents: 184,000 ⁽³⁾
  
• Number of children killed annually in car accidents: 1,335 ⁽³⁾
  
• Number of children: 72,000,000
  
• Chance of child dying in car accident: 1 : 53,932

• Number of minors who die of cancer every year: 2,300⁽⁴⁾

In other words:

• A child is 11.6 times more likely to die in a car accident than be kidnapped by a stranger.
  
  
• A child is almost twice as likely to die of cancer than in a car accident.
  
  
• A child is 26.7 times more likely to die in a car accident than be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.
  
  
• A child is 46 times more likely to die of cancer than be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.
  
  
• A person is 5.1 times more likely to be struck by lightning than a child is to be kidnapped and killed by a stranger.

It's a pretty-safe world out there. Maybe it's time we act like it.

(1) link: DOJ report on Stranger Kidnappings (data is from 2002)
(2) link: US Cencus data 2000.
(3) link: CDC data from 2008.
(4) link: Cancer facts.

I've heard of over-parenting in college, but this is stunning, pathetic, ridiculous, and so many more adjectives I can't think of right now (just had some tequilla).

[ Time ] Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, [...] But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; [...] By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

These should be fully-fledged adults, pioneering their way through the first-real-job jungle, machete in hand and and just enough rations in their ruck sack to get them to Wednesday. Instead their parents are acting like their kids are 3-year-olds on the first day of preschool!

And, I must say, what's wrong with the kids-cum-adults?! Isn't this what the teenage years are all about? Isn't that when you distance yourself from your parents, assert your independence and demand to be treated like an adult (...one who still has mom do their laundry and the rents pay for tuition, of course.) How can any self-respecting 21-year-old stand to have this kind of oversight? It's one thing to consult with parents when dealing with such a brand new world as employment contracts, but the extent of the dependency this article suggests is deplorable.

Read the whole thing. I'm generally in favor of the Free Range movement, I have Leonore Skenazy's book and I'm a regular follower of her blog (See just to the right here for the link permanently installed on our links list -->). Our only problem around here is the plethora of bums. When you have a strung-out guy living at the bus stop on your corner, you're a little wary about letting the kids out the front door (especially the 9-year-old girl).

(As a completely non-sequitur aside: I knew the Time magazine had a cover story on over-parenting, so I went to their website to try to find it. It took me a while to do so. You would think that the story that they decided would sell the most magazines this week would be prominently displayed on their website. Instead, it was third on a list on the bottom half of the page, and took me half a minute and a double-check that it wasn't last week's cover story to find it.)

(As a second completely non-sequitur aside, this is a quote from a little later in the same Time article:

"Eleven parents are sitting in a circle in an airy, glass-walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream."

You know, I'm pretty darn sure that all ice cream is gluten-free. At least, I've never seen a recipe that calls for flour!

So, my question is, is it the parents who are dorks for insisting on gluten-free ice cream, or the reporter for writing such stupidity?)