Moving Day!

We are excited to announce the launch of our new site, the ProgressiveKid Reader, a thematic online experience for progressive kids, parents, and teachers. We’re migrating everything from On a Ledge to the Reader where you can expect the same quality writing and deep thinking with the added benefits of

more top-notch contributors including professionals [...]

Beware the Chocolate Monsters: Keep Slave Labor Out of Halloween

According to Global Exchange, such child slaves and laborers experience the hazards of using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides with no protection. Enslaved children typically work over 12 hours a day harvesting cocoa beans and have no idea what chocolate tastes like.

Stand Up for Your Rites

We green, free thinkers who dream of a radically transformed society sometimes feel a little like we’re blazing trails in the dark. Ongoing rituals that are full of meaning for people who care about life and the planet can sustain us during difficult times and during times of doubt and fear.

Beyond Climate Change 101

As with all meaningful change, there is no simple fix for our climate change crisis. There is no pill, band aid, 12-step formula, or “expert’s” advice to heal Earth or its life forms. There is no “clean” nuclear power that will preserve our current luxuries without risking even more environmental disaster, no green product that will redeem generations of overconsumption, no fluorescent light bulb that will reverse the excess of our industrialized systems, no recycling process that can restore forests, no zoo or seed bank that can preserve our world’s biodiversity, no replacement planet we can relocate to. For worse and for better we are stuck here with our mess and our weakness, our solutions and our strength.

Trust Your Kids: Raise Them Cage-Free!

Parents are a jumpy bunch these days. Even before I had my daughter I was troubled by the prevailing attitude among parents that the world has become a place too dangerous to let kids be kids anymore. Popular opinion seems to be that it is now too risky to let children do time-tested things like play outside unsupervised, climb a tree, explore on a bike, or walk to school alone, all things I and my friends enjoyed as kids. Once I became a mother I began to witness first-hand the stifling paranoia among other parents about their kids’ safety and to see the effect it was having on kids.

My Dog Doesn’t Match My Carpet

Yet these mothers’ actions are crimes nonetheless. Most obviously they are crimes against the helpless animals whose lives they can preserve or destroy in one stroke. But their crimes also offend their own children by modeling lack of respect and compassion for other living things and nature itself.

My Dog Doesn’t Match My Carpet

Yet these mothers’ actions are crimes nonetheless. Most obviously they are crimes against the helpless animals whose lives they can preserve or destroy in one stroke. But their crimes also offend their own children by modeling lack of respect and compassion for other living things and nature itself.

Mystery Unclogged Part II

Peer down into the depths of one of your drains. You are looking at your future. Whatever goes down that drain is going to come back at you sooner or later in some way.

Mystery Unclogged Part I

Spoiler alert: If you have maintained any illusions that your drains are magical tubes that “disappear” inconveniences, I’m about to ruin them for you. Look away! Flush and run!

Jump: Deep-Water Parenting

It was a happy moment of triumph, but part of me knew I was crazy to think so. What was wrong with those kids who leaped into twenty-five-foot-deep water without a moment’s thought? And why would I want my daughter to jump, and in jumping move that much farther away from me?