Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom
2014-12-06 · Guest: Lenore Skenazy (Author of Free-Range Kids) · 52:24
Overprotection and the helicopter parenting phenomenon
Bob Zadek interviews Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, about the modern culture of overprotection and the “helicopter parenting” phenomenon. They discuss the legal and social consequences of allowing children independence, the role of media in inflating fears, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency in the next generation.
Topics: Free-range parenting, helicopter parenting, child safety, government overreach, tort law, risk assessment, media sensationalism, Free-Range Kids Project
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek — Host
- Lenore Skenazy — Author of Free-Range Kids
- Caller (Michael) — Listener from San Francisco
- Caller (Joe) — Listener from Walnut Creek
- Caller (Leroy) — Listener from San Francisco
Introduction: A Medical Miracle [00:09]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. Every Sunday at 9:00 AM, we are the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. Thanks so much for listening.
I don’t share much about my private life with my listeners. Today is going to be an exception. I am generally acknowledged to be a medical miracle. I grew up—I was, in the words of Robert Klein in his wonderful comic album, Child of the ’50s—I was and am a child of the ’50s. Somehow, I survived all of the following: I drank water from a garden hose, not from a bottle. My parents allowed me to, indeed encouraged me to, ride a bicycle without a helmet. My parents would send me out of the house alone. I wasn’t permitted to be outside by myself all day; I was required to be, as I was thrown out the door early in the morning to play, and I played the entire day and came home when it was dark. I talked to strangers, I think, constantly. I rode buses and subways. I walked to school, rode my bike to school. I walked to the bowling alley. I walked everywhere as a kid.
And I survived. Today, if my parents would have raised me in that manner, they would be in jail and I would be in Child Protective Services. What in the world is going to happen? How have we gotten to the point that bureaucrats now raise children with parents just being the obedient servants of governmental bureaucrats, the cops, and Child Protective Services? I have observed and worried about this issue forever. Today, I’m pleased to provide you with the answer.
My guest today is Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is an—and I rarely use superlatives on this show, today has to be an exception—I’m proud to say that Lenore is generally acknowledged to be the “World’s Worst Mom.” With great pride and anticipation, I welcome to my show the World’s Worst Mom. Lenore, thank you so much for joining us.
Lenore Skenazy: Thank you, Bob. And I’m glad that you survived your childhood. Amazing, huh?
The Subway Ride Heard ‘Round the World [03:40]
Bob Zadek: Was I being unfair in labeling you the World’s Worst Mom, or is that now the moniker that is associated with you? And how in the world did you get to be—were there finals? Was there a Super Bowl for bad momming and you won? How did you get to be—you sound like a nice person—how did you get to be the World’s Worst Mom?
Lenore Skenazy: Well, it’s a simple story, and it took place six years ago at this point. My son, who was then nine, started asking my husband and me here in New York City if we would let him—if we’d take him someplace he had never been before and let him find his own way home on the subway. Because that’s how we get around here; we don’t have a car, we live in the city.
And so we talked about it, my husband and I, and we decided, you know, he’s familiar with the subways, he can read a map, he can speak the language. We’re on the subways all the time—I was just on one today. It’s safe. There’s tons of people on there. It’s very safe. So we said yes. And one sunny Sunday, I took him to Bloomingdale’s, one of the fanciest stores in New York and certainly one of the best zip codes. And that’s when I left him at the store and I said, “Okay, today’s the day you’re going to find your own way home.” And he did.
And I’m a newspaper columnist by trade. And so a few weeks after that, when I had nothing to say and I didn’t know what to write about, I said, “I don’t know, should I write about this thing, you know, Izzy taking the subway by himself?” And my editor said, “Sure, it sounds like a nice local story.” And here it is six years later, you know, two trips to Australia, a television show, a blog, a book. It was the trip heard ‘round the world because I was immediately thrown onto all these television talk shows, from The Today Show on down, to explain why I had let my son do anything on his own, especially something that was perceived as dangerous.
And I said, “Well, if I really thought it was dangerous, I wouldn’t have let him do it because I don’t want my son to be in danger. I love my son. I have an older son, too. I love them both very much. I hope they outlive me. But I just didn’t imagine him in harm’s way.” And that turns out to be the mistake I made in the eyes of much of America—is that you are always supposed to imagine that your child is in harm’s way if they’re going outside, if they’re walking to school, if they’re riding their bike, if they’re drinking from the garden hose, as you said. You’re supposed to see this through the lens of danger and think, you know, is he going to get picked up by a kidnapper? Is he going to get hit by a truck? Is he going to get cancer? And you’re supposed to say yes, yes, yes to all of them and prevent your child from doing anything.
The Criminalization of Parenting [06:40]
Bob Zadek: And so, but you exercised—as a loving mom, you exercised your parental judgment, your wisdom, knowing the environment, your child, yourself, and how he was trained. And you did what any parent in the world would do: you took steps to help your son grow and mature and to become, most importantly, self-sufficient. Because after all, that’s what the world will require of him sooner or later.
Lenore Skenazy: Exactly soon, yes.
Bob Zadek: And for that, you were—is it fair to say pilloried in a lot of the media?
Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, I’d say that’s fair. I mean, there are a lot of people obviously who are on our side, too, otherwise I would just be some nut without any standing. But what has changed in these past six years is that at the beginning, I felt like it was me and people like me were exhorting everybody to realize that, look, times have changed in terms of danger. It’s actually less dangerous—maybe not less dangerous than the ’50s, but it’s back to the crime rate of 1963 in America. So if you are a parent today of a young child growing up, and if you grew up anytime in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, your children today are safer than you were when your parents let you out.
So I’ve been trying to convince people about the safety issue for these last six years. But what has crept up on me, and I didn’t expect, is that now, because so many people believe that anytime your child is out of your sight they’re in danger, now you have to worry about busybodies seeing your kid waiting in the car for five minutes, or walking to school, or getting home from the library, and whipping out their cell phone—because cell phones have deputized all the “good Samaritans” in America—and they call and they say, “I just saw a child by himself.” And then the police are obligated to come running. And sometimes the police believe that any child outside is in danger, and so they think that the parent, far from exercising judgment, has been negligent. “Why would anybody let their kid out in times like these?” they think. And then the parents have to deal with that.
Bob Zadek: And so you make a very important point in that not only are parents taught—if that’s not too strong a word—about leaving their children alone, “brainwashed” perhaps would be better, but the rest of society is out there as all of these nannies looking around for—to be, as you said, good Samaritans. But of course, they’re being bad Samaritans, if there’s such a thing.
Lenore Skenazy: I think there is, actually, yes.
Bob Zadek: For a child who is, perish forbid, alone and outside of the direct parental control of the parent. And that is now becoming criminalized. So not only are we becoming annoying nannies and busybodies, people who have no life except by dialing 911—that is your whole life—other than that, we are actually criminalizing it. And you have lots of horror stories, don’t you, about the criminalization of parenting?
Lenore Skenazy: Yes, I have lots of them. You can hear anyone you want. You know, it’s like dial one for the story about the mom who let her kid play at the park; dial two for the mom who let her kid walk to the park; dial three for all the parents who write to me on a regular basis who let their kid wait in the car.
Maybe here’s a good one. I’ll tell you one that’s close by me in New Jersey. Mom is going to the mall, she has to get something. Her 18-month-old is asleep in the back. It’s an upscale neighborhood. She parks the car, she decides she’ll run the errand without him because it’s a pain to take a kid out. And you know what? Even saying “it’s a pain” is already—I’m criminalized because “Why did you have them if you don’t want to help them every single second and have them with you every single second?”
So she gets back—everybody agrees—to the car within five to ten minutes. But in that five to ten minutes, a mall cop has seen the child in the car and has alerted the police. And the police arrive and they arrest her.
Bob Zadek: They arrest the mom?
Lenore Skenazy: They arrest the mom. She’s found guilty of negligence. And then she takes it to the appellate court. And the appellate court rules—guess what?
Bob Zadek: They rule against her.
Lenore Skenazy: They all three rule unanimously against her because, quote, “We don’t have to list all the horrors that could have attended the child while the mother was away.” So they don’t even have to start putting down on paper, because they would look too stupid, all the horrible things. Well, let’s see, there’s a mall cop there. Could somebody have taken the child? I guess if you have people prowling the malls, avoiding the mall cops, smashing in windows to take 18-month-olds that they didn’t know were going to be there that day. But the chances of that happening are so rare that I have never heard of a child being stolen from a car while the parent was shopping.
The child could have died from being dehydrated. Well, okay, but then we would all have to be dying when we’re dehydrated in a traffic jam, because we’ve all waited in cars for five to ten minutes without it moving.
Bob Zadek: And the gestation period for dehydration is longer than three minutes.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, it is. It’s longer than five to ten minutes. And we all know for a fact that a five-to-ten-minute errand was not considered an endangerment in any earlier era. And in fact, I have to give kudos to Andrea Peyser of the New York Post who did the numbers. And the numbers show that you’re actually more in danger walking across a parking lot than waiting in a car. More children have died in parking lots and driveways than have died while waiting in cars.
So the problem is that you hear that children die waiting in cars, and you don’t hear anymore than that—that it takes hours and hours, it’s generally parents who forgot them all day at work. And so if you see a child in a car at the IBM parking lot in Row X, yes, call, you know, alert the authorities, put it over the loudspeaker. But if you see a child waiting in a car in front of the drugstore or the pizza stand, wait there for a few minutes if you’re very concerned. Wait there, and if the parent doesn’t come back in ten or fifteen minutes and you’ve done your good Samaritan deed of waiting, you know, then try to find them or do something else. But to be a good Samaritan just by tattling on a parent who’s doing something that your parents did with you is crazy.
The Loss of Independence [12:08]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, and I’m spending a wonderful hour talking with Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is the host of Free-Range Kids, a wonderful website and blog. Lenore has been called the World’s Worst Mom because she let her son, her self-sufficient son, actually find his way home on public transportation from Bloomingdale’s to her home in Queens. And for that, she has been criticized in the media, although also, in fairness, supported as well.
The issue is what is happening to the generation of youngsters who are brought up in what I certainly consider to be an overprotective environment. After all, these youngsters who are overprotected today, there will be a time they will be out in the world and asked to function without a helmet. And what will happen to them as they go to work in their 30s without their helmet? Will they be cowering in a corner in the fetal position, or have they—will they somehow be trained how to function as an independent adult?
And I guess, Lenore, part of it is that the media is so full of these headline exclamation point stories that people believe that the population of the United States is 99% predators.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, right, I know. And I feel so bad because one of the terrible side effects of this, or ripple effects, is that nowadays when there’s a parent or an adult who wants to interact with children, it’s looked upon with suspicion. “Why would a man want to be around a child? Eww.” You know, the idea of like a kindly Geppetto-type person being in our children’s lives is gone.
And there’s so many background checks now. Gosh, my friend, a mom, went to her son’s school to take him on—this is in Dallas—to participate as a chaperone on the field trip to a public art museum. And they couldn’t find her background check on file. And she said, “Well, you guys know me. I volunteer every week at the library here, and of course, you’ve had me on file before, so something just must be lost.” And they said, “Well, we can’t find it now and you can’t go.” And she’s like, “Keep looking. I volunteer every week. You know who I am. Plus, we’re taking the children to a public place. Are you going to background check everybody at the art museum, the Dallas Art Museum today?” And finally, they found it. But had they not found it, this woman would have been denied the opportunity to help out at the school, which to me is the apotheosis of what’s crazy. We think that we’re helping kids, and we’re driving the parents away from the schools, and we’re treating everybody as a suspected pedophile.
I got another great story like that. One mom—this wasn’t written to me, somebody just sent me the listserv item that had gone back and forth in their local Facebook page. This mom had come to her daughter’s—right this time of year—Christmas party, her kindergarten Christmas party. And they couldn’t find her background check on file. And she said, “Oh, it hasn’t gone through yet.” And they said, “Well, you can’t come in.” And she said, “Are you kidding? To the kindergarten party? Is there anyone I can talk to?” And finally, they called in, you know, the principal and the teacher, and they finally decided that yes, she could attend the party if she stood at the back of the classroom and did not interact with any child except her own.
You laugh, but like the idea of treating every human being as a predator, as somebody who’s only interacting to gain the trust of other children so that they can defile them at a later date—that’s a pretty repulsive way to think of people. And it doesn’t keep children safer because all you’re doing is teaching them to distrust everyone. So you’re teaching them to have no distinguishing abilities.
And really, when I try to teach kids and parents about how to keep your children safe, because everybody’s so afraid of strangers, I teach them what the Boy Scouts now teach. And I’d be happy to repeat it for your listeners. It’s a very simple way of teaching kids what to do. Can I teach them? It’s the Three Rs: Recognize, Resist, and Report.
Tell your kids that they can recognize anybody who touches them where their bathing suit covers—they shouldn’t do that. Anybody who makes them uncomfortable, they should recognize that. That’s wrong. They shouldn’t do that. No adult should do that. So, Recognize.
Resist. Resist means, you know, yell, kick, punch, say no. Predators, like everybody else, prefer low-hanging fruit, you know, somebody compliant. So if your child isn’t compliant, the odds are already tipped in his or her favor.
And finally, Report. God forbid something bad happens, tell your kid that whatever happens to them that makes them feel weird, or somebody told them not to tell, tell and you won’t be mad at them. Okay? So you’re trying to keep the lines of communication open with your kid by letting them know that you’re not going to blame them, nothing bad is going to happen, and no other adult should be keeping secrets with them. And so you’ve taken away the predator’s main asset, which is privacy. And so those three things are going to keep your kid a lot safer than saying, “Don’t walk to school, there’s predators,” “Don’t go on that field trip, the other parents might be predators,” “I’m going to be with you on the Boy Scout trip, there might be predators.” Everything turns into mom or dad is hero and everybody else is predator. It’s a crazy way to live.
The Fordham Baldies [17:38]
Bob Zadek: And you talk about predators. The strange thing is, when I was growing up in the ’50s, as far as I knew, it was a world without predators. I didn’t know there were such things, and neither did my parents, for that matter. We were not trained to be especially afraid, just to be intelligently alert and exercise, as the Boy Scouts say, judgment.
You know, when I was growing up in Queens, by the way, which is where you live, the one thing I grew in fear of—there was one external force I was afraid of. There was, growing up in Queens, we were all told to be careful of the Fordham Baldies. The Fordham Baldies were allegedly a gang of tough kids—they were called “rocks” in those days, or “hoods”—who shaved their heads and who lived in Fordham, on Fordham Road in the Bronx. But they would come to Queens to prey upon us loser Queens kids. And every once in a while, one of my friends would say, “I saw one. I actually saw a Fordham Baldie.” That was as close as I came to fear of the outside world. And somehow I survived.
Now, 800-345-5639, if you have a stirring survival story of how you actually made it through life before there were helmets and bottled water and childproof caps on medicine chests, and before there was food labeling on the jars and on the cans, and when you ate lots of sugar and sugary beverages—if you survived all of that, 800-345-5639, and you’ll bring a tear to all of my listeners.
Now, Lenore, it’s one thing—and we’ll discuss more of these stories—but in your opinion, and in the opinion of those with whom you share these views with, what is happening? Is this simply something which is annoying, or do you think the children are being adversely affected by this?
Lenore Skenazy: Well, here’s the thing. I think that kids are pretty resilient, and ironically, I think they can even be resilient when it comes to any kind of helicoptering. Because first of all, I don’t blame parents—
Bob Zadek: Explain “helicoptering.” The audience may not be familiar with the phrase “helicopter parent.”
Lenore Skenazy: Oh, sure. Helicoptering is just a modern-day word for overprotection. But what I meant to say is that I don’t blame parents today for being afraid, because you turn on the television and there’s the story of a kidnapping here, a kidnapping there. I mean, we’ll send camera crews around the world to get these stories. We sent a camera crew for months to Portugal when Maddie McCann was taken from her hotel room there. And that—that wasn’t even American; it was a British kid, age three or four, and her parents were vacationing in Portugal and the kid was taken from the hotel room. And it’s a name that a lot of people know because it fits the perfect template of the story that the American television stations are hungry for: a rich white girl who was abducted, and that’ll teach the parents a lesson.
So it starts feeling, because 24/7 you can turn on the TV and see a horrible story like this, that it’s happening 24/7. You know, we’re not able to quite distinguish the fact that, wait a minute, that Jaycee Dugard story happened 20 years ago. And wait a minute, that was 3,000 miles away. And wait a minute, they actually found the guy. So it feels to us that we’re under siege. So I don’t blame parents for being overprotective.
And while, you know, I could make a case, a stirring and believable case, saying that we’re really crippling our children, in fact, I don’t think we are. I think that in the end, kids go off to college or they get a job and, you know, they rise to the occasion. It just might be later than we did.
What I think we’re wasting, and what I think is so sad, is that we’re wasting their childhood as if they need to be Rapunzel, as if they must be in this tower of safety with us always there. And they only get one chance to be kids. And I think most of us who are your age or a little younger even remember very fondly getting on our bikes and riding around the neighborhood and having our friends and building forts and creating games and playing outside. And to take that away from children out of the misguided belief that if they are on their own they will either be snatched, or if they’re not in a program they won’t be getting enough training at some skill—whether it’s lacrosse or macramé or Chinese—that somehow they will fall behind so that they have to have every second micromanaged. That’s all—they’re all based on a mistaken belief that our kids can’t handle free time or freedom for one reason or another, either that they’ll be hurt or that they’ll fall behind. And in fact, they’re going to be fine.
So I hate making parents feel guilty about what they’re doing out of fear, because I feel like they’re not crippling their children. If you love your children and feed your children, you’re not crippling them. But on the other hand, you’re not giving them the joy that you had as a child. Why not? You’re giving them everything else. Why would you take that one wonderful thing out of their life, which is independence?
Bob Zadek: And I guess as we go to break, the question to me—I’m of course, when I’m not on the radio, I’m doing law, I’m an attorney. And I guess as we go to break, the question I pose to our listeners out there is who would you rather raise a child: the parent or a tort lawyer? Because in reality, children are being raised by tort lawyers because it is, as we’ll discuss after the break, the fear of litigation which drives all of this. So we have tort lawyers who now in law school no doubt take a course in good parenting, and therefore they get to set all of the rules. Would you rather have your child raised by a Lenore, a mom, or by a tort lawyer? That is the question we are dealing with today. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Lenore Skenazy. We are talking about the need for children to be given back their independence to discover the world on their own, of course not in a reckless way, but at least free of the excessive protective nature that society is imposing upon the children. 800-345-5639. We’ll be back in 60 real short seconds.
Worst-First Thinking [25:00]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show. I’m your host, Bob Zadek. Every Sunday at 9:00 AM, thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Lenore Skenazy. We are talking about Lenore’s blog, her website, Free-Range Kids. Lenore pays a lot of attention to how we are raising our children in a somewhat overprotective manner and what that says about society today. Lenore, thanks so much for joining me.
We talked about the media’s role in all of this, and I’m going to play a really short clip. The media was discussed—in this clip we’re going to play, Raymond, it’s the “bad things that can happen” clip. In this clip that I’m going to play, we have some newscaster who is reporting the story of a woman who let her child walk to the playground by alone, the playground being a few blocks from the home, something that I did every day of my life growing up. And this is the reaction of the media in defending the reckless nature of it. Raymond, that short clip, “some things can happen.”
Newscaster: On the other hand, he could have been hit by a car, he could have been bitten by a dog, he could have been picked up by a pedophile.
Bob Zadek: Could you imagine, Lenore? He could have been bitten by a dog.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, could have been chased by an alligator, hit by a truck, oh my god, what about the alien probe? Right. It’s just what you said. If you sit around and say, “Okay, have your disaster fantasy and imagine all the things that could have happened,” that’s true the second you take off the handcuffs off a child and don’t handcuff the child to the faucet in the kitchen and let the child walk around the house.
Let me explain what they were doing. Here’s—I keep trying to decide if I should write a whole book about this or not—but what they were engaged in is what I call “worst-first thinking.” Coming up with the worst-case scenario first—he could have been picked up by a pedophile or bitten by a dog—and proceeding as if it’s likely to happen, therefore he should never be outside.
When you do worst-first thinking, nothing is safe. Why would you keep them in a house? What if he fell down the stairs? What if he scalded himself with boiling water? What if he hit himself on the cabinet? You know, what if he gouged his eye out with a grapefruit spoon? I mean, you know, there’s all these horrible things that could happen. And as long as you’re going to give credibility to things that very, very, very rarely happen but could, nothing becomes safe.
And so worst-first thinking is what we are allowing ourselves to do anytime a child is not directly supervised by a parent. And it’s really obvious that it has nothing to do with reality, because the worst thing that could happen—the way the most kids die, I mean like the number one way kids die in America is as passengers in cars. And yet, before you put your kid in the car, you don’t think, “Oh, I couldn’t live with myself if we got hit by a Mack truck and what if there’s a drunk driver and it’s just not worth it, I’m not going to take him to the dentist, I would never be able to stand looking at myself in the mirror if something terrible happened to my child today.” We don’t do that. And yet, it makes as much sense to do that as it does to say that child who was walking outside could have been hit by a car or eaten by a dog.
I mean, really, if you want to look for danger, it is absolutely everywhere. But we’ve decided to look for danger only when children are not directly supervised by their parents. That’s the only danger that we give credibility to. If you’re driving in a car and your mom’s in the front seat, even though that’s the number one way for you to die, that gets a pass because you’re with your mom.
Listener Call: Michael from San Francisco [28:37]
Bob Zadek: Lenore, I think we have a childhood survivor on the phone. We have a caller, Michael from San Francisco. Michael, welcome to the show this morning.
Caller (Michael): Hello, good morning.
Bob Zadek: Are you a survivor of childhood?
Caller (Michael): Yeah, in a way. I turned on the radio this morning and I just couldn’t believe the subject matter. This woman is—she’s very self-assured and she knows exactly that she’s completely correct. It’s inarguable, the subject matter. We were kids, we had a gang, and we used to just take off from San Francisco here in Glen Park, and we’d go down to Fisherman’s Wharf, we’d hitchhike, we’d go down to the—we went anywhere we wanted to. And we were in the park in the canyon every night and nobody ever said a word to us about this stuff.
It’s a question of controlling the public and having your parents softened up to where they assist the government in enforcing more control upon your life. These people today are just—I don’t know what to say, maybe they’re half alive at the most. But this lady, you’re a wonderful lady. I wish I had you in my life.
Lenore Skenazy: You do! You have me for the next half hour.
Caller (Michael): No, there’s a lot of things that I would like to argue and I don’t have the means or the ability to do so. This country is so far gone and I have a love for it that’s—I can’t even talk about it, I’ll start crying. But I woke up today and the both of you made my day for me. I really appreciate it.
Bob Zadek: Michael, thank you so much. You know, you’re exactly right. In my view—and I should mention big warning label, I am not a parent—but my observation is there is an abdication of responsibility. The more that government takes over, parents, in my observation, tend to believe they don’t have to be the parent because the government is there to fill the void.
Lenore Skenazy: Exactly. I think of it the other way, Bob. I think of it the other way. I hear a lot from parents who want to be able to let their kids wait in the car, and now they’re afraid. What if somebody sees the kid and calls the police, and then the police call Child Protective Services?
Bob Zadek: Yeah, the fear tactics through the media, yes. That’s exactly right.
Lenore Skenazy: And so I don’t really blame the parents. You know, if there’s a law—I mean, you’re in California. California allows a child to wait in the car zero minutes. And I was talking the other day—I spoke at a—you know, I have to give a plug for my book and my blog, which are Free-Range Kids, freerangekids.com. And I give a lot of speeches around the country to parenting groups and to companies.
And I was speaking out in California—oh no, yeah, I was speaking in Silicon Valley. And actually, I’ll tell you about the project I did there because it will give you a lot of hope. But afterwards, I was speaking with one of the teachers who is at this grammar school, and she said that even she—she was one of the people who brought me out to the school, she loves the idea of free-range kids—but that day she was going to have her three children with her who were ten, eight, and six. And no six-year-old is allowed to be in a car unless there is somebody at least 12 years old watching them.
And she was a nervous wreck because she had the kids with her, and she had already ordered the food that she was going to pick up at the—I can’t remember, like the pizza place or whatever—on her way home. And she thought, “And what if the six-year-old falls asleep? Then I’m going to have to wake her, and then I’m going to have to drag her in with me, and the eight-year-old too, because they can’t be in a car with anybody less than 12 years old.” And so suddenly I’m going to have to get all three kids out of the car to pick up the food that will be waiting for me at this restaurant.
But the law out there says no. And if she had been in the restaurant and somebody sees that her kids are with them—or you know, are by themselves, quote-unquote, even though there’s three of them—and calls 911, then she could be in trouble. And so that’s not a parent who is willingly going along with a crazy law; that’s a parent who feels trapped by a law that was passed probably on the heels of some tragedy of some small child being strapped in a car and parent forgetting them and the child dying, which is a tragedy. But to vilify the parents who let their children wait in the car for a short errand is not going to bring back the child who was forgotten in a car all day.
The Nanny State and the “Cinderella Law” [33:00]
Bob Zadek: And what’s really happened is, while this topic today is not particularly libertarian, it does have a bit of a political flavor to it in that the government is interjecting itself in that it knows better than the parent the proper way to raise a child.
Lenore Skenazy: So let me tell you what’s happening. I write for the libertarian site reason.com now, which I just love. And what I see coming down the pike is what’s happening over in Great Britain. Right now there’s a law in Parliament that’s working its way through called the “Cinderella Law,” which sounds like it’s going to help those poor Cinderellas who are stuck in the corner, you know, sweeping the cinders and not meeting the prince.
But in fact, it is expanding the definition of child cruelty, which used to mean starving or beating or molesting a child, to now include psychologically harming the child. And that is very worrisome to me because you might think that I’m psychologically harming my child by saying, “Yeah, I trust you to walk to school,” or by saying, “Yeah, I trust you to stay at home.” And I might think that you’re psychologically harming a child by not letting them wait at home. I don’t want people to be second-guessing the effect of a particular parenting decision—any parenting decision—and having the government be allowed to decide, “Oh, that will create a permanently crippled the child because they were left at home and they probably felt abandoned.” I left my kid at home and they felt proud because I was saying, “You’re nine years old, you can stay here and watch Harry Potter while I go run some errands.”
So that’s a creeping government intrusion that I find very disturbing. And worse, in Scotland, when a child is born, in the next five years they’re phasing in this thing called a “named person,” which is a person will be assigned to each child to make sure that they are treated right by their parents. And you can be sure that like the way I treat my kids, the way you treat your kids, the way any of us treat our kids is different. Whenever you go over to somebody else’s house, you think, “I would never do that. Oh, I wouldn’t serve them Fritos. Oh, I wouldn’t have soup for breakfast. Oh, I wouldn’t use a plastic bottle when you could use a glass bottle.” I mean, nobody thinks that anybody else is doing it perfectly right.
But to have somebody looking over your shoulder—it’s basically the government as mother-in-law—telling you everything that you’re doing wrong, and then they have the power to take the child away from you if they think you’re not doing it right. So that’s when government intrusion is terrifying to me because nobody will think anybody else is doing it right. But until now, all we could do is shake our heads. And if there was something egregious—a child who really was burned, harmed, beaten—I would say hooray, I’m so glad that there is a mechanism to get those children out of harm’s way. But that mechanism already exists, so I don’t think we have to expand it.
Listener Call: Joe from Walnut Creek [35:49]
Bob Zadek: I think we have another childhood survivor on the phone. Joe from Walnut Creek on line two. Joe, welcome to the show this morning.
Caller (Joe): Hey, thanks. Great conversation. Yeah, a couple things I wanted to add. First of all, getting back to your guest’s talk about the Boy Scouts. You know, one thing that the Boy Scouts did implement was something called “three-up leadership” where an adult can’t talk to a kid; there has to be either the second kid or second adult present. So that’s number one, I think it’s a pretty simple thing.
But you know, I’m a dad of a high schooler and a middle schooler. And in elementary school, they would teach the kids that if someone came around, there’s a whole kind of song about “stranger danger.” You know, “Oh, if you don’t know someone, call stranger danger,” right? And then to walk into the school—and our kids went to a really small, very, you know, everyone knew each other elementary school—you had to check into the office, you needed a pass, blah, blah, blah.
And this just happened this year, and this is the craziest thing. So my son’s on a sports team and they sent out a thing like, “Hey, we can’t afford to use the buses, so what parents want to drive?” And instead of filling out all the paperwork you had to fill out, you now need to go through a third-party company that does the background check and, quote-unquote, “approves” you so you can drive your own kid to a freaking sports game. And there’s a company that that’s their business, and it takes them weeks to get—and everyone who uses it has complained. It’s like, are you kidding? Now there’s not even a community relationship; it’s some third-party .com company somewhere that I have to give my personal information to. Who is this company? You know, it’s crazy.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, that is crazy. And it’s always “follow the money,” too. Somebody got a contract, and all they have to do is scare you. And right before the break, you were talking about tort law—like what if somebody sues your school because a kid was in a car and the car was in an accident or the man, you know, made a pass? Or what—that’s the end of your whole school. So by getting this program and officially tracking the parents, then you can say that you did everything possible. But if you don’t, don’t come running to us when you’re sued. And it is the fear of something bad and the fear of a lawsuit, too, that are the two driving forces.
Bob Zadek: And back to your point about California—I mean, things are out of control here in California. You know, it’s nanny state to the max. And like nobody’s going to stand up and be like, “Oh, you know, I’m not going to support that law because then that means I don’t want to protect children.” So it’s like this creeping kind of crazy liberalism. Look, it can be summed up—Hillary Clinton said it best: “It takes a bureaucrat to raise a child.”
Hillary Clinton and the Village [38:44]
Lenore Skenazy: No, you know what? Hillary Clinton—you won’t believe it—I read a book that I love called Free to Learn by a psychologist named Peter Gray. He wrote the psychology textbook that’s used in every college, basically. And then he turned his attention to play. And at the very beginning of the book, he describes different people’s play histories. And one of the histories is of a woman who remembers in her childhood playing outside from dawn to dusk. They would have like several blocks’ worth of kids playing a capture the flag game, and there were rules that were ironed out, you know, in long negotiations, and they were pretty arcane, and they just loved this. And she would spend hours doing it.
And that person who was having that happy memory is Hillary Clinton. And I think it’s so interesting because her childhood of negotiating and playing and, you know, organizing large groups of people against other large groups of people is obviously what she does in her adulthood. And the idea of a village raising a child is not a bad one. I mean, I think that that’s one of the things that was happening in the ’50s that we don’t see today.
And I think part of the fear is the tort lawyers. If I saw your kid beating up my kid, I could go outside and scream at him. You know, or I could go and send him home, and I’d call you too and say, “You know, take care of him, he was beating up my kid.” Now we’re so afraid of anybody’s reactions to anything—the extreme sensitivity on the part of the children and the parents—that we are afraid to do that. And I think it’s that fear that keeps us from being the village and makes us drive our kids to school because they might be bullied on the way or they might be hurt or somebody else might not like what they’re doing. And so we just—we keep them close to our side because one of the fears is that somebody else will find us wrong and turn us in. So I don’t think it’s just bureaucracy.
Bob Zadek: You know, thank you for saying that. Because in fact, in growing up in Queens, I lived on a block. There were 38 houses on the block. And we had enough kids on the block, on my block alone, to field an entire football game, not just a team but a game. And everybody knew where every child was. People sat outside, and the socialization was overwhelming. Putting aside the fact that young girls and young boys played together—there was no distinction between girls’ games and boys’ games. If you were good, you got to play.
Lenore Skenazy: And probably different ages played together, too, which is something that is really missing from our childhoods now, too, because everything is, “Well, this is the pee-wee league and it’s for six-to-seven-year-olds,” and “This is the medium league for eight-to-nine-year-olds.” And so kids don’t get the experience of being a leader, you know, or of like pitching softer to the sixth grader and then, you know, pitching harder to the senior. That’s all the things that develop empathy, right? When you’re thinking about how can I keep everybody engaged in the game, how can I keep the game going? You learn so much just by being around other kids of different ages and probably of different genders. And instead, everything is so segregated.
The Free-Range Kids Project [41:59]
Lenore Skenazy: But before we go, because I see the time is going out, I wanted to tell you that there is a light on the horizon. And when I was at that Silicon Valley school and subsequently at several other actually private schools, I started getting the schools to do what I call a “Free-Range Kids Project.” And it’s been pretty transformative. Can I tell you what it is?
Bob Zadek: Oh, by all means.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay. Free-Range Kids Project started here in New York City. A sixth-grade teacher read the story about my son Izzy taking the subway by himself and thought, “Gee, I’d like my kids to do that too.” Sixth grade, they’re 11 years old. And so what she did is she said to the kids—social studies teacher with 120 kids throughout the day—“Go home and tell your parents one thing that you think you’re ready to do that for one reason or another you haven’t done yet. And whether that’s make dinner, walk the dog, walk yourself to school, take a bus ride, whatever.”
And so the kids did that. And then she invited me in—she’d never met me—to come and read their little essays that they had written or watch the little videos they made. And I’ve done that now for six years. And it finally dawned on me that this wonderful project where the kids did start doing things—you know, one of them made a little raft, and a lot of them walked themselves to school, and one of them made a cake for her mom and got all the ingredients by herself at the grocery, something she’d never done before.
As wonderful as this was for the kids, I wondered what the impact was on the parents. So when I was out in this Silicon Valley grammar school and they agreed to do it, I had the parents fill out surveys before and after. And it was so fantastic what they wrote about afterwards. Because parents who had been afraid—like one set of parents, they’d been afraid to let their kid ride his bike to school. Silicon Valley, this was in Menlo Park. Yeah, Menlo Park, which is where Facebook is. Their fifth grader had been begging them all year, “Please let me ride my bike to school, please,” and the parents said no and they were too worried.
But then they heard my speech, which does have a way of having some kind of impact. And then they read the little materials that I wrote, too. And the materials that I wrote to explain the project to parents have this quote that’s not by me but that is very powerful and it says, you know, “All the worry in the world does not prevent death; it prevents life.”
And after the parents read this—this particular set of parents, the father was more nervous than the mother in this case—they decided, okay, they weren’t going to let him ride the bike to school because it’s so busy and crazy and there’s a large street he has to cross and there’s so much traffic during the week. But they would let him ride his bike to his friend’s house, which is nearby, on a Saturday.
So finally, this is a fifth grader, right? He’s 10 years old, 10 or 11. They let him go, and he comes back. And once he gets back—this happens every single time—they realize, “Oh my god, that wasn’t such a big deal. Look, he’s happy, he’s flushed, he’s hungry, he’s proud, we’re proud. Look at our son rode…” You know, you start wanting to brag about him doing it as opposed to bragging about not letting him do it.
And so that was on a Saturday. And Tuesday morning, the husband looked to the mom before school and said, “You know what? Why don’t we just let him ride his bike to school?” And he did. He’s been doing it ever since. And over and over again, these are the stories I heard people tell. You know, “I was so scared to let him go and he came back and I realized, oh, now he can go get me a Coke. Oh, now you can go run an errand for us. Oh, now you can go get your sister from school.” It happens every time. It just requires letting them go once and having your kids come home happy and proud. And the pride and joy that you feel when you see your kid home and they’ve done something that you remember doing, it chases out the fear. The fear actually, like the Grinch’s heart, there’s no space for the fear when the joy floods in. And all it takes is convincing parents to do this once.
It’s so fast. I have a television show that’s coming out in January on Discovery, I think it is, called World’s Worst Mom. And it’s the same thing. I just take the kids away from the parents for an afternoon and I send them, “Okay, you’re walking to the mall today,” “Okay, you’re having a little carnival,” “Okay, you’re playing in the woods.” And when they come home, the parents—the parents who were so scared that they would never let the kid ride a bike, they wouldn’t… I had a mom who fed her 10-year-old still in his mouth. I had a mom who would let her eight-year-old take a skateboard but he had to stand on it on the grass and couldn’t move. Parents as nervous as that all change to the point where afterwards, I printed out the emails from them because I thought everyone would think we had scripted the show because it looked so easy and how could people change so fast? They change fast. All you need to do is the Free-Range Kids Project and your kids will change.
Listener Call: Leroy from San Francisco [46:16]
Bob Zadek: We have another caller. We have time for one more caller. Is it Leroy from San Francisco?
Caller (Leroy): Hi. I just wanted to say that freedom is yours just that you are alive. It inherently belongs to you and no one has a right. So in regards to the subject matter today, I would say to this lady, get in line because already they’re taking control of people’s animals. I just experienced it a short time ago. And this woman’s animals were put in this playhouse or whatever you call it. And so she went to fetch them because the person that brought them there thought they were abandoned. They would not give the animals back to her, and they talked to her as though they own these animals that they have the right to control them. Eventually, she only got one animal back. So the subject matter that you’re talking about, I would say get in line because this is a period of concentrated corruption that started back in 1978. And we’re losing everything: our freedom, our country. We are being governed by wicked, evil people who lie to us every day. And something has to be done in a very big way. And if that isn’t taken care of, these small things will never—they just pile up. And that’s the way that they have it. That’s the way that they want it.
Bob Zadek: Leroy, you have found the answer. The answer is listen to my show every Sunday from 9:00 to 10:00 and we will find the light. Thank you so much for calling and for being a listener.
Lenore Skenazy: Thank you, Leroy. I do see an incredible parallel with the way we treat animals and the way we treat children. If you try to adopt an animal from many of the no-kill shelters now, you have to be background checked. You have to have a visit from a person to make sure that you’re good enough. I got forwarded to me the rules for one person who was trying to adopt a dog. And it was that you have to have a fenced-in yard, and the fence has to be taller than six feet, and there has to be a light on all the time at night because if the dog goes out there, they should be seen. And you should also always have one parent home during the day so the dog doesn’t get lonely. This is the same idea: that you have to have your eyes on your pets and your children every single second, and they must be fenced in and they must be lit, otherwise they are in danger. So I totally understand what he’s saying, that the way we’re treating pets as if they could never survive without constant care and the way we’re treating children is the same.
Conclusion: Banning Cartwheels [48:31]
Bob Zadek: This mentality, of course, permeates the operation of the school system. Raymond, we have time for the Weber Middle School soundbite, please.
Newscaster: Weber Middle School, which was in Long Island, banned in 2011 balls—except for the only exception was a Nerf ball. They with a big gulp, they said maybe nobody will die from a Nerf ball unless they of course try to ingest it. So this is what’s happening in schools. They banned cartwheels.
Bob Zadek: When I look at—I have home movies of growing up from 1947 to 1955. Every frame of those movies is my parents go to jail. Every frame. If those movies got out, yes, there’s—you know, you were talking before the break about tort reform. Part of it is the fear that—I mean, like Richland, Washington, just got rid of a bunch of swings.
Bob Zadek: Lenore, please, some listeners have called; they’d like you to repeat your website.
Lenore Skenazy: Oh, of course, with pleasure. My website is freerangekids.com—just like free-range chickens, freerangekids.com. And my Twitter feed is @freerangekids, and my book is Free-Range Kids. So basically, if you find Free-Range Kids, you’ll find me.
Bob Zadek: And you have done such important—I must say, such important work in raising the consciousness. This is an issue that when you grow up in a certain environment—the environment today of zero tolerance, words that I abhor—
Lenore Skenazy: Yes, those are bad words.
Bob Zadek: You sort of get desensitized to it, and you don’t realize there’s another way to approach life. And what you have done in the most common-sense and direct manner is remind us there is another way to raise children and to approach life. And it’s not foolhardy, it’s not dangerous. I don’t embrace anything that I consider dangerous or reckless or risky. It’s just old-fashioned. It’s basically trusting your kids and trusting your community and trusting yourself that you’ve raised smart enough kids that they’ll be okay.
In every frame of my home movies from 1947 to 1955, I am packing heat. I either have a water pistol, a BB gun, a cap pistol, an air—you would think I’m the worst antisocial person in the world.
Lenore Skenazy: Well, you did become a lawyer.
Bob Zadek: The point is well taken. Lenore, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us this morning. I can tell by the number of callers you really have touched a nerve and reminded people about another way to approach life. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. This is Bob Zadek saying thanks again to Lenore Skenazy, host of the Free-Range Kids website. Be sure to check it out; it’s a great website with great anecdotes. This is Bob Zadek saying thanks so much for listening and so long for now.