Parenting beat: Let the Kids Play
“Today’s kids want to spend their childhood in the real world,” report Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch & Jonathan Haidt at The Atlantic: “Let’s give it back to them.”
Thinking that “smartphones and social-media platforms are addicting” the nation’s youth “misses a key part of the story.”
In a national survey, most children said “they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult.”
“Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard.”
But this overprotective parenting is just hysteria, and “kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise — a gap that devices now fill.”
Wake up: “Even this generation of digital natives still longs for what most of their parents had: time with friends, in person, without adults.”
Schools watch: Chicago’s Ill Omens for Mamdani
“To evaluate the merits” of Zohran Mamdani’s vows such as “ending mayoral control of city schools” and “hiring ‘thousands more teachers,’” just “look 800 miles west,” argue Santiago Vidal Valvo & Esme Vroom at City Journal.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “embraced a union-first approach to education.”
His school board extended a “no-closure pledge” — stopping shutdowns of underperforming schools — and hiked spending to “nearly double the national average.”
The “alarming” results: Only “one in three elementary school students can read at grade level, and barely one in five is proficient in math.”
Chicago’s lesson is clear: “Allowing unions to drive education policy” produces “failing schools — and thousands of children failing to reach their potential.”
Gaza experts: Israel Must Control Aid to End Hamas
“Israel is not starving Gaza,” explain Erez Winner & Gadi Taub at Tablet, despite much “mendacious propaganda.”
Since March, it has tried to counter Hamas’ strategy of “increasing its own population’s suffering” by “breaking its control of the aid entering the strip.”
This requires evacuating civilians from “discrete areas” and laying “siege” “until all combatants surrendered and gave up the hostages they held”; Israel failed to “execute this plan,” instead “sending aid to pockets” still under Hamas control, where “almost 90% of aid trucks” are looted.
“To recover momentum” and “achieve its war aims” (including the “utter and total destruction” of Hamas), Israel must “gain control over the aid supply.”
Fed monitor: Powell’s Tariff Double Standard
Federal Reserve boss Jerome Powell and his colleagues are “obsessed with the inflationary effects” of tariffs as “they never have been with any other taxes,” huffs Donald L. Luskin at The Wall Street Journal.
In Powell’s pressers since President Trump’s election, “the word ‘tariff’ was mentioned 158 times.”
“Never mentioned”: a Democratic prez’s tax hikes would’ve also fed inflation. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will lower taxes, which can offset the tariffs or “even cause deflation.” The “Fed has never mentioned this.”
Powell thinks high interest rates can combat tariff-sparked inflation, but how would such rates keep companies from passing on tariff costs?
“How does it help” to “slow economic activity” that’s possibly already “slowed and distorted by tariffs?”
Eye on politics: Kamala ’28 Imploding
Kamala Harris’ 2028 “putative presidential campaign failed so badly in getting anything right,” snarks Keith Naughton at The Hill.
“Harris and her team have squandered” her advantages — high Dem approval, universal name recognition, the ability to blame Joe Biden for her ’24 loss — “in record time.”
Dithering over a run for California governor was “her way of preparing to announce basically nothing.”
On her book tour, she’s already “whiffed on a series of softball questions” and been “at her word salad worst.”
Yet the real proof she’s “not ready for prime time was her presidential campaign,” tapping Minnesota idiot Tim Walz to be her veep and failing to break with Biden.
Now Team Biden has “threatened to sink her if she dares criticize them.”
Wow: “The Harris disaster is history in the making.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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