Watch Lenore Skenazy Preach Child Safety Sanity on ABC's 20/20

Nachoman-au / Wikimedia Commons

Reason's Lenore Skenazy was interviewed on ABC's 20/20 about helicopter parenting and the rush to lock up people who leave their kids alone for even short amounts of time in relative safety. As Skenazy told reporter Elizabeth Vargas:

"We've created a culture where we've almost deliberatley confused people as to what constitutes a danger. We really think that the minute a parents leaves the car, if the car is unattended for any moment at all, a child dies."

The whole segment, "Parents Become Subject of Hot Car Witch Hunt," is well worth watching. Head on over to Free Range Kids to check it out.

More from Lenore Skenazy here.

Comments

[Libertymike]

What would the safety satraps think of what my father permitted 41 years ago when (sorry I posted this just 5-6 weeks ago)I wanted to go to see a night Red Sox game at Fenway?

My aunt was going to grad school in Boston and she had an apartment in the Back Bay (a little more than a mile from Fenway. She was at my grandmother's and going back to Boston late on this Monday afternoon, late in June. I called my father at work and asked if I could go to Boston with my aunt and then go to the Sox game.

My father let me go. After arriving at my aunt's apartment, I walked, alone, a 10 year old kid, to Fenway Park. After the game, I walked back to my aunt's apartment, all alone. The game did not end until nearly 11:00 PM (Sox blew a 4-0 lead in the top of the ninth and lost 8-4).

Not one person stopped and asked me where my mother or father was or why I appeared to be alone. Not one person called the cops. Not one person called Family Services.

Where has that world gone?

[Marshall Gill]

In the early 70's my younger sister and I used to race our tricycles, unsupervised, on a residential street. I was 5 and she would have been 3 or 4.

Back then the term used to describe my mother would have been "over protective" too!

We are doomed as a society.

[Libertymike]

Please excuse my intrusiveness, but where was your native habitat?

Back in those days, big city parents may have been more protective than their suburban and exurban counterparts.

[Marshall Gill]

Oklahoma City. There are not really any places here that I would consider urban. The city is only 110 years old so it is quite spread out and almost completely what I would call suburban.

[mattcid]

The Medevac 'copter sends a mixed message...

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