Lenore Skenazy schools overprotective parents on how to let go in her new Discovery Life show, “World’s Worst Mom.” Photo: Discovery Life
- Lenore Skenazy, the New York mom who was publicly shamed for letting her 9-year-old ride the subway alone, scored a TV show on the Discovery Life channel called “World’s Worst Mom” in which she teaches overprotective parents to let their kids become independent, by say, letting them cut up their own food, as the 10-year-old in episode one was not allowed to do. The season began Thursday, but’s impossible to find a full episode online. Here are two clips for now.
- Skenazy’s show may be a win for the free-range parenting movement, but we’ve got a long way to go till the police stop interfering with personal child-rearing decisions. Hanna Rosin at Slate uncovers even more unsettling news about the recent investigation of a Maryland couple who let their kids walk home alone, like the fact that when the police sent the father upstairs to retrieve his ID, they “called out that if he came down with anything else in his hand, ‘shots would be fired.'” As if that isn’t insane enough, this was in earshot of their kids.
- “According to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization, there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some form of legally protected, partially paid time off for working women who’ve just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S.,” reports Bloomberg Businessweek, in their recent cover story on the sad state of our country’s maternity leave policies.
- If you could not bear to click on the most-emailed story in the New York Times for past few weeks, “To Fall in Love, Do This,” you’ll enjoy The New Yorker’s spoof.
