No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Out of Parenting - Hardcover

Captain Mommy \’kap-t?n mäm-ee\ n. idiom Mother who encounters and resists the excessive intrusion into family life, most often through the use of overly expansive definitions of the state’s role in protecting children. Example: Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement is the first Captain Mommy.
Captain Daddy \’kap-t?n däd-ee\ n. idiom Male version of a Captain Mommy.
"I'd like to let my kids walk to school, but..."

But what?

You're the parent! They're your kids! You want to give them the freedom you loved to walk, explore, stay home, go out, or even, once in a while, to get lost or goof up. To do things on their own.

But...

As Captain Mommy knows all too well, it's no longer straightforward.

For the first five years after I founded the Free-Range Kids movement, parents who wanted to let their kids walk to school would end that sentence with, "But I don't want them to get kidnapped." Fair enough...even though the chances of that happening are so outlandishly small, that if for some reason you actually WANTED your child to be kidnapped by a stranger, do you know how long you'd have to keep him outside, unsupervised, for that to be statistically likely to happen?

About 750,000 years. (And after the first 100,000 you really couldn't even call him a "kid" anymore.) But that's for another book.

from the Foreword by Lenore Skenazy

Abby W. Schachter is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, Acculturated, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and Reason, among other publications. She blogs at captainmommy.com. She lives in Pittsburgh with her artist husband, Professor Ben Schachter, and their four children.