"I got off at the city center and walked to Helsinki’s main library, which looks like a ship made of carrot cake. It is called Oodi...."

"On the ground floor of the library was a cinema, a cafeteria serving beet lasagna and carrot soup and 22 children playing games of chess.... [T]he second floor... featured a 3-D printing station, a laser cutter, a large-format printer, an engraving machine, conference rooms... rocking chairs... electric and acoustic guitars — nice ones — to borrow, as well as a drum kit and multiple zithers. A podcast studio, an electronic-music studio, classrooms.... In the course of a text conversation with a friend... I rambled about my sorrow at watching the Finnish children rove and play, and told her about how mothers of all ages gathered spontaneously in the library to chat or rest or idly massage their feet. I explained that one of these mothers had placed her baby, a child of no more than 9 months, in a highchair at a library cafe table and handed him a vegetable purée to consider, then left for 20 minutes to fetch books. When she came back we exchanged smiles.... We talked about children and libraries and the relative safety of our nations. 'Every few years there’s a crisis where a baby is stolen but then it is returned or found 15 minutes later,' she said...."

From "My Miserable Week in the 'Happiest Country on Earth'/For eight years running, Finland has topped the World Happiness Report — but what exactly does it measure?" (NYT).

Here, I found this:

That video says a lot about why Finns may be the happiest people in the world. That man is warmly pleased with small things. The chess boards are credited with "keeping people smart and educated," the ceiling calls to mind the ceiling in a particular Rolls Royce you might remember.

"A mom in Georgia is speaking out about being arrested for reckless conduct after her then-10-year-old son was found walking alone."

 ABC News reports.

During the arrest, [Brittany] Patterson...said to one of the deputies, "Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal for a kid to walk to the store."

But the deputy replied, "It is when they're 10 years old."... 

Authorities said they would drop the charge against Patterson if she signs a safety plan that involves the use of a GPS tracker on her son's phone but... "I just felt like I couldn't sign that and that in doing so, would be agreeing that there was something unsafe about my home or something unsafe about my parental decisions and I just don't believe that," Patterson said.

"Locke makes the very good point that 'most children’s constitutions are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering and tenderness.'"

"That lovely seventeenth century word ‘cockering’ means ‘to indulge or spoil.' Locke goes on to recommend that children are not too warmly wrapped up in winter, in order that they learn to endure the cold, in the manner of the Spartans. He also reckons that the shoes of children should be made deliberately leaky in order to toughen up the feet. Certainly my third son Henry, more ignored than the other two, has tough feet, and spent whole summers shoeless. Henry maintained when nine years old that ‘shoes were prisons for the feet.'... Our youngest, Henry, was born in the house with two lovely midwives, and he has grown into a solid, healthy lad. He spent his first eight years roaming the fields and rocky coves, and even from an early age he was a fast runner and a confident climber.... Henry would disappear for hours with his friend Gilbert doing God knows what in the fields. The key here was lack of parental supervision. When parents supervise, they are at some level imposing their own ideology or fantasy of country life or wild life on to their children. That’s why I have always recoiled from those adventure holidays and back-to-nature holidays for children. children. There is some damn theory or other underpinning the whole thing, like a Steineresque philosophy. They remind me of the Hitler Youth. This is what D. H. Lawrence is getting at when he says that children should be left with a lazy woman who can’t be bothered with them. Leave them alone!"

From "Why Ignoring Your Children Will Make Everyone Happier: Or, What to Neglect When You're Neglecting," Tom Hodgkinson.

Locke is the philosopher John Locke. The quote is from "Some Thoughts Concerning Education" (1690).

"Cockering" — do you like that word? Can you use it? Maybe not. The OED calls it "Now English regional."  The historical examples include this from the King James version of the Bible (1611): "Cocker thy childe, and hee shall make thee afraid." And let me give you this quote too:

1682 T. Shadwell Lancashire-witches i. 7 Dost thou think, because thy foolish Mother has Cocker d thee with morning Cawdles and afternoons Luncheons, thou art fit to make Love?

I presumed that "cawdle" was an old spelling of "cuddle," but no, it's an alternative spelling of "caudle," which is "A warm drink consisting of thin gruel, mixed with wine or ale, sweetened and spiced, given chiefly to sick people."

As for "Steineresque philosophy," there's nothing else in the book about it. I googled and guess it refers to this person — Rudolf Steiner — whose ideas are listed as "Anthroposophy, anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture, eurythmy, spiritual science, Waldorf education, holism in science."  He died in 1925 and wasn't connected to the Hitler Youth. Indeed: "In 1921, Adolf Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including accusations that he was a tool of the Jews... In 1922 a lecture Steiner was giving in Munich was disrupted when stink bombs were let off and the lights switched out, while people rushed the stage apparently attempting to attack Steiner, who exited safely through a back door.... The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich led Steiner to give up his residence in Berlin..."

"Mike is a deep believer in the idea that 'kids have to find their own balance of power.'"

"He wants his boys to create their own society governed by its own rules. He consciously transformed his family’s house into a kid hangout, spreading the word that local children were welcome to play in the yard anytime, even when the family wasn’t home. Discontented with the expensive, highly structured summer camps typical of the area, Mike started one of his own: Camp Yale, named after his street, where the kids make their own games and get to roam the neighborhood."

From "The Anti-Helicopter Parent’s Plea: Let Kids Play!/A Silicon Valley dad decided to test his theories about parenting by turning his yard into a playground where children can take physicalrisks without supervision. Not all of his neighbors were thrilled" by Melanie Thernstrom in the NYT Magazine.

What about lawsuits?

Mike tells me that people sometimes ask him if he is afraid of lawsuits in the event of an injury on his property. He would never let fear of being sued dictate how he lives his life, he says.

What about second-degree manslaughter, I asked: an accident enabled by negligence, if, say, another child — or even one of his own — broke his neck leaping from the playhouse onto the trampoline. (Unenclosed trampolines are a staple of personal-injury law; an estimated 85,000 children under 14 were hurt on trampolines last year.) Does he ever worry about that?

He flashed me a look, then snorted with laughter.

I guess for an adult, living without fear of lawsuits is like, for a child, climbing up on a playhouse roof and jumping off onto a trampoline. Are you going to live or not? 

"You can easily debunk the vast majority of the evidence that was presented in the case, I would say all of the evidence."

Said Adam Sirois, the lone holdout after 18 days of deliberation in the Etan Patz murder case. "There was no real firm, corroborating evidence" for the confession by the defendant Pedro Hernandez," he said, quoted in a decently detailed NYT article.

There were originally 3 jurors who wanted to acquit, but in the end, it was down to Sirois. The other jurors were, we're told, put great weight on something that doesn't seem to have much value as corroboration:

On [the final day of deliberation] the jurors found themselves focusing again on what many had considered one of the most damning bits of evidence against Mr. Hernandez: that he had provided physical details of a passageway on Thompson Street where he said he had dumped Etan’s body....

There was a videotape of Hernandez leading the police down that passageway:

For some jurors, the tape was proof Mr. Hernandez was telling the truth. “The cops can’t implant that in his head,” Joan M. Brooks said. “Pedro was leading the walk.”

But Etan's body was never found. Hernandez just seemed to know about a particular alleyway.

Defense lawyers argued that the confession, which he repeated later to a prosecutor, was a fiction made up under police pressure by a man with a low I.Q. and a personality disorder clouding his ability to tell fact from fantasy...

Mr. Sirois acknowledged he was more skeptical than other jurors of the police handling of the interview that led to the confession, noting most of it was not recorded and that the police misrepresented some of Mr. Hernandez’s actual words in their written account of his statement. He also found compelling the expert testimony that Mr. Hernandez was susceptible to making a false confession.

The NYT has a second article "The Legacy of Etan Patz: Wary Children Who Became Watchful Parents." That connects the old Patz-related parental wariness to the present-day rebels of the "free-range children" movement. In fact, yesterday happened to be "Take Our Children to the Park ... and Let Them Walk Home by Themselves" Day.

"How have we gotten so crazy that what was just a normal childhood a generation ago is considered radical?"

Asks Danielle Meitiv, a prominent mother in the "free range children movement," quoted in a WaPo article titled "'Free-range' flap in Maryland fans flames of national debate on parenting." Answering Meitiv's question, WaPo says:

Sociologists date an increasing perception of dangerousness to some highly publicized child abductions in the 1970s and ’80s, including 6-year-old Etan Patz, who was headed to a bus stop in New York City.

That terrifying disappearance, now the focus of a jury trial, led to the creation of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the faces of missing children showing up on milk cartons across the country....

“Most of what gets reported to CPS does not get substantiated” because the evidence is uncertain, [said David Finkelhor, who directs the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire], noting that the substantiation rates are around 25 percent to 30 percent, depending on the kind of maltreatment. “So the question is, do these cases involve families where there is some need, or is this just an overreach on the part of the state?”