"America's Worst Mom" takes Wally for a walk

What if she's going to tie him with weights and throw him out into the middle of the lake? Are there sharks? Is that quicksand? Has the water been sanitized? 

Here's Wally last weekend with "Free-Range generalissimo" and "America's Worst Mom" Lenore Skenazy. We were by this little lake and she was explaining that if Wally  were to jump on the lily pads they probably wouldn't hold him up. Plus he might hurt the lily pads. 

Lenore has a show on TLC showing pretty much everywhere but here in the U.S. where it's most desperately needed. How could the media show it? They want us to be terrified of all the hidden dangers that lurk around every corner (even though it's safer now than it was in the 70s, and safer for kids by far than in most areas of the world). Forget refusing to let your kids walk around the neighborhood by themselves at 6 or stay home alone at 10 like you did. You have to start overprotecting them way before that. Judging from Babies r' Us, just learning how to walk, for example, must be one of the most extreme sports known to man. As Lenore said in an interview with Salon: "Kids have been toddling — it’s a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood — ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you’re supposed to think that it’s too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy."

In person she's just like you'd expect from her blog and vlog and book and TV show which is sweet and funny, sarcastic, quick-witted, and a little bit neurotic, too. She's definitely not one of those Brazilian-style --let the kid find out a fire's hot by touching it-- type moms. (Okay, "Brazilian mom" is a bit of a generalization. I am basing this on Alex's mom.) In fact, she worries a fair amount, especially around real dangers like water and car accidents. I told her I did too, and yet I agree with almost everything she says in her book and on her blog, that we have got to stop acting like our kids might be in danger at any moment from milk that's not organic, plastic that's not BPA-free, a slide that goes too fast, a friendly neighbor offering a (possibly poisoned?) cookie, or a photograph of their soccer team that appears online (What is it with the fear of photography these days? Aren't the kids themselves visible in public, assuming no one carts them around with paper bags over their heads or whatever Michael Jackson did? So what is the presumed risk with an image captured on film?) That just goes to show how far the country has shifted, she says, that we are now in the laid-back camp of parenting, less anxious about most of this stuff than the rest of the people we know. That in itself is absolutely laughable.