When Lenore Skenazy was sacked from The New York Daily News in 2006 after 14 years, little did she know that such a swift blow to her ego was arguably the best thing that could have happened to her, at least from a professional standpoint.
While others might have become discouraged, broken-hearted and at war with their former employer, this Chicago native never looked back and simply trudged forward with another chapter in her life.
As Skenazy tells me, if it wasn’t for her abrupt firing, she would have never landed at The New York Sun where she wrote a column: ``Why I let my 9 year old ride the subway alone" ``So in a roundabout way, it's all been good’’ Skenazy said.
It was in this widely talked about column, on April 1, 2008 that she coined the phrase ``Free range kids", a novel piece of writing which triggered heaps of controversy from readers (accusing her of child abuse) in which she took the audacious step of letting her nine year old son take the subway home alone. Up to her ears in fending off disapproval from enraged readers, the controversial column caught the attention of a number of networks, including Fox News, The Today Show and MSNBC.
The column sparked such a fierce debate that it led to her launching a Free-Range Kids blog and eventually a book, Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.
The New York Sun closed in 2008, but Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids blog carries on.
Skenazy is now host of the ``World's Worst Mom'', a Reality TV show, by Discovery International TV show, while continuing to twitter away at Free Range Kids.
As if that weren’t enough, Skenazy managed to squeeze in yet another book, this one a trivia book: Who's The Blonde that Married What's-His-Name, a fun twist on short-term memory loss.
A Yale graduate, Skenazy lives in Queens with her husband and two sons, and continues to write a nationally syndicated column for Creators Syndicate, which appears in more than a 100 newspapers.
-Bill Lucey
June 26, 2012
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