Excellent articles on our overwrought "thinking of the children"

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-alone http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/overestimating.html An essay by a mom who let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone: 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.

Looks like a busy weekend ahead. Getting interviewed for www.digitaltrends.com in the morning, followed by a lunch meeting about the Southern Gerontological Society conference Kittymel and I are helping to arrange, followed by Bioneers in the evening.

Saturday opens with the grand opening of the AIA-Decatur campus, followed by more Bioneers.

Sunday has a munch for those mean little children who won't let me play with them anymore. Sniff sniff sniff ...