Timesonline.co.uk | Children who have everything, except freedom to play outside

How to balance parents' fears of 'stranger danger' against the apparent good it does for children to have opportunities for wholly unsupervised play and the friendships that result? According to a survey report out of the Children's Society's Good Childhood Enquiry, paranoid parents with the resources to do so increasingly wrap their children in cotton-wool, whilst lamenting their 'need' to do so. This seems to have significant implications for the definition of childhood itself, and reminds me of the conclusion to Steven J. Mintz's book Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Belknap Press, 2004).

NYTimes.com | When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?

We know that the age of compulsory school attendance varies from country to country (and, within the USA, from state to state), and to some degree the age decision has been arbitrary or else based upon logistical and economic concerns on the part of the schools. This article discusses the matter of age of kindergarten entry in the US, where kindergarten is a non-compulsory but extremely popular and pretty much universal form of state-sector educational provision. As pre-kindergarten provision expands, old debates amongst parents and educators as to when a child should start kindergarten are being revisited.

NYTimes article by Elizabeth Weil
Published: June 3, 2007