So, why not free range kids?

The nanny state seems to move in strange, contradictory, and unpredictable ways owing to it’s tendency to operate in accordance with the desires of the various lobby groups contained in its makeup. On one hand they want to ban intensive farming, while on the other we are ordered to cage raise our kids and never allow them unsupervised actions or thought.

The term, “Free Range Kids” is from a US group that advocates a winding back of the petty regulations and ‘nanny knows best’ thinking that dominates child raising there. They are not advocating neglect, nor something like the Feral Kid from Mad Max, although any responsible parent would be proud of the little fella’s self reliance:


Terry O'Gorman, is having a bit to say about the increasing tendency for police to prosecute parents for technical breaches of laws intended for dealing with more serious problems:

Australian Council for Civil Liberties president Terry O'Gorman challenged prosecutors to drop charges against well-meaning parents who might technically breach child-neglect laws by letting their kids walk to school, or stay in the car while they duck into a corner store.

"The nanny state should have some limits," he said. "The law needs to be there, but it's a ham-fisted and mindless way in which it is being enforced by various police around the country. Surely parents should be left to exercise their own discretion as to whether an eight-year-old can walk 50m along a footpath to the shop.”

Mr O'Gorman, a prominent criminal lawyer, said the states had enacted laws designed to punish parents who left children in cars while they played the pokies in pubs. But he was concerned about a spate of recent cases in which parents had been charged or threatened with prosecution for leaving their children in the car for 10 minutes outside a shop. …

"Police need to use common sense; they are supposed to use discretion when they lay charges.”

Mr O'Gorman said he did not want to comment on a case, revealed in The Australian this week, in which a senior public servant had been arrested for allegedly leaving his school-aged son home alone, playing video games, for half an hour. …

Most of us are able to have fun reminiscences of the sort of things we got up to when we got out from under the watchful eyes of parents. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were envied by those of us who dared to dream. Old Nanny State and her minions would be hysterical at the thought, which makes you wonder whether they ever did anything interesting when, or if they had a childhood.

Wowsers, neurotics, busy bodies, and associated killjoys have come to understand that if their ideas are rejected by the public because of ‘apathy’, disinterest, or that the ideas themselves are just plain silly, there is one organization that will agree with them and inflict their views on all of us; parliament. This saves them all of that drab, tedious, and mostly unrewarding effort to actually convince people to adopt their ideas voluntarily.