In Chesapeake, VA, trick-or-treaters over 12 face fines of $25-100 and up to six months in jail (under-12s who trick-or-treat after 8PM face fines of $10-100 and up to 30 days in jail).

Peters, Pennsylvania Police Chief Harry Fruch has ordered his police force to investigate middle school students who are taking and sharing naked pictures of themselves.

"If the photograph was taken by the individual, male or female between the ages of 12 and under 18, she's as much a guilty party as the person who received it. — Read the rest

After years of documenting instances in which parents and kids are terrorized by law enforcement and child welfare authorities because the kids were allowed to be on their own in public places, the Free Range Kids movement has gotten some justice: a new Federal law gives its official okey-doke to parents who let their kids get to school on their own.

Doug Dunlop's 11 year old, Lego-obsessed son is a frequent customer at the Lego store in Calgary's Chinook Mall, where he spends his odd-job savings on new materials — until this week, when the Lego store management had the mall's security take him into custody.

The Meitiv kids of Maryland, whose parents free-range them, were picked up by the cops yesterday and kept in the back of a patrol car for three hours. This happened once before in January and the parents are getting tired of it.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv have two kids, age six and ten. They let them walk home together from the park. Someone saw the kids walking without an adult chaperone and called the cops.

From Reason:

At the door the police officer asked to see my husband's ID, but did not explain why.

It's the safest night of the year for your kids: no kid has ever been poisoned by a stranger, and the 31st usually has fewer assaults on children than other days of the year (but more kids do get hit by cars!). — Read the rest

Lenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy points out a new and disturbing artifact from the weird parallel world of bubble-wrapped-kids: a post warning you that the treacly "My family" minivan stickers are an invitation to canny predators who are after YOUR KIDS. — Read the rest

Kayona Hagen-Tietz, a ninth grader at Como Park High School in St Paul, MN, says she developed frostbite when she was made to stand in -5F weather wearing nothing but a wet bathing suit. She had been in swim class when the fire-bell rang, and evacuated in nothing but her wet swimsuit. — Read the rest

If you live near Pennsylvania's Lackawanna State Forest and want your kids to learn to use knives responsibly — an important skill, endangered by scaremongering and helicopter parenting — you can take them to Sharp Kids, a half-day workshop on knife use for kids aged 8-12. — Read the rest

An 11-year-old girl was sent home from a week-long summer-camp on the Isle of Wight for smuggling in a chocolate bar; a fact that her teachers discovered after they opened a sealed letter addressed to her mother and read it. Her mother, who is unemployed and cares full-time for her autistic son, had to drive 160 miles through the night to pick up the child. — Read the rest

Writing in The Atlantic, Amy Schiller documents how Mattel has spent the past 15 years transforming the expensive, highly detailed American Girl dolls from a source of radical inspiration that signposted moments in the history of the struggles for justice and equality in the US, into posh upper-middle-class girls who raise money for bake sales. — Read the rest

A reader of Free Range Kids is in danger of having his six-year-old daughter taken into protective services custody because he let her walk a few blocks to the post office in their Ohio town. The kid, Emily, asked for a little independence, and was given permission to take some unsupervised, short walks. — Read the rest

Maryland State Senator J.B. Jennings (R) has introduced Senate Bill 1058, The Reasonable School Discipline Act of 2013, which is aimed at ending the incredibly stupid "zero tolerance" policies that result in kids being suspended or expelled for pointing a stick at another kid and saying "bang!" — Read the rest

Emily is six, and her dad wants her to be independent. The local law, not so much. When he let her cross the street on her own, a cop picked her up and detained her and her dad for half an hour, before admitting that it wasn't illegal to let a six year old cross the street. — Read the rest

A school in Pennsylvania went into full-on lockdown when some children who were making a video about the immune system, which involved some sort of play-fighting with an umbrella, were mistaken for gun-toting lunatics. There is a balance between disaster preparedness and "when in trouble, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout," and this isn't it. — Read the rest

An Australian firefighter named Johnny McGirr was told to move seats on his Virgin Airlines because he'd been seated next to two unaccompanied boys. The airline's policy is reportedly that men may not be seated next to children traveling without adults, though women may be. — Read the rest

Writing in Boston Magazine, Katherine Ozment recounts how she went from hovering over her kids to keep them from harm to adopting a hands-off regime that let them take risks and play on their own. I had dinner last night with my writing-collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum and he said he saw his duty as a parent as "preventing damage," not "preventing pain" — pain (emotional and physical) teaches us a lot, and parents need to allow some measure of it in their kids' lives to help them learn important lessons, but a parent also should intervene to prevent pain from giving rise to damage. — Read the rest

Here's an ingenious heuristic for evaluating the livability of a neighborhood: can a kid get to a store on her own, buy a popsicle, and get home again before it melts? It comes from a Vancouver, BC planning official's presentation at the 2003 New Partners for Smart Growth conference in New Orleans. — Read the rest

A woman in Pocatello, Idaho spotted an "older white man" taking pictures of "children" at a park, so she ran up to him and screamed at him until he left, and then called the police, who duly issued an alert asking the public for information about this mysterious stranger. — Read the rest