Lenore Skenazy wrote a piece for the April 4 edition of the New York Sun about letting her 9-year-old son find his way home from downtown NYC using the subway system. Many people were upset with her.
Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”
Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.
Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating – for us and for them.
Link
Graham Clark, the 17-year-old Florida boy accused of pulling off the big Twitter hack, pled not guilty to charges on Tuesday. During the security breach, top accounts including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk were taken over to push a bitcoin scam.
In this footage, a supercomputer’s CPU cores — nearly 900 of them — are neatly lined up in the Task Manager. The Doom logo appears, generated by code that targets each core. Then Doom itself plays, each “pixel” generated by thrashing a core with just the right amount of busy work. Max Holt: Finally got […]
The UK government today ordered domestic companies to stop buying equipment from Chinese vendor Huawei and to stop using its kit entirely by 2027. Huawei is suspected to be an arm of the Chinese government, breaking into western markets (and maybe its networks) by selling impossibly cheap equipment. The UK only recently approved more Huawei […]
Creating a fantasy world for a video or role-playing game is tough enough. In addition to all the game framework and functionality that goes into a build of any size, creators invariably sweat over the most minute details of every weapon, outfit, or other distinctive objects in their game. Even if your game is set […]
We get it. You don’t have to go to the office anymore. That’s no excuse for letting your grooming go positively feral. We’re not saying you need to be GQ cover model-ready every Monday through Friday. But at least put in some effort to keep yourself relatively trimmed, clean, and on point. Even if you […]
With everybody cooped up inside right now, it’s no surprise that many houses are starting to get a little bit…well, funky. Yeah…they smell. With everybody running around and sweating and working and cooking and everything else, odors get trapped inside your home. And don’t even get us started on what happens when litter boxes and […]
