Let's Give Halloween Back to Kids

Halloween used to be a very cool night for kids, writes Lenore Skenazy. Now it's "the day when America market-tests parental paranoia." Poisoned candy, stranger danger, suffocating costumes? All nonsense propagated by marketers who discovered "that parents are willing to be warned about anything, no matter how preposterous, and then they're willing to be sold whatever solutions the market can come up with," she writes at the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of trick-or-treating on their own, kids go to lame indoor parties supervised by grown-ups—just another example of the "adult-supervised everything" world they live in. "We can kill off Halloween, or we can accept that it isn't dangerous and give it back to the kids," writes Skenazy. "Then maybe we can start giving them back the rest of their childhoods, too." (More Halloween stories.)