Article from Reason by Lenore Skenazy.

A mother in Woodinville, Washington, posted an advertisement on behalf of her 9-year-old daughter, Sarah, who was willing to do housework—laundry, dishes, etc.—for neighborhood moms who needed help. Six hours later, the cops showed up to make sure Sarah wasn’t being abused or worked to death.

That’s according to Christina Behar, Sarah’s mom, who wrote me a letter about the incident.

“Apparently the ad generated multiple phone calls from paranoid neighbors thinking I was using my child as a slave,” wrote Behar.

This should spark some discussion of what we lose when we treat kids as incompetent or endangered, even though they’re quite ready to take on some responsibility in “the real world.” As that New York Times piece on the relentless demands of modern parenting made clear, many of us, wealthy or not, spend a whole lot of time and cash on our kids’ extracurricular “enrichment.” Let’s remember that making some money, dealing with some challenges, and assuming some responsibility are enriching childhood activities, too.

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: BeenAroundAWhile at English Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons