Remember when kids were free to be kids?
2023-03-27 · Guest: Lenore Skenazy (President of Let Grow) · 52:47
Overparenting and the movement for childhood independence
Bob Zadek interviews Lenore Skenazy, the founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and president of Let Grow, about the detrimental effects of overparenting and the “culture of fear” surrounding childhood independence. They discuss how societal pressures, media sensationalism, and legal overreach have stunted children’s development, leading to increased fragility in young adults. The conversation explores practical solutions, including the “Let Grow” project in schools and Utah’s landmark “Free-Range Parenting” law, which protects parents’ rights to allow their children reasonable independence.
Topics: Free-range parenting, child development, overprotection, Let Grow, Free-Range Kids, parenting laws, resilience, anti-fragility, helicopter parenting, childhood independence
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Lenore Skenazy: President of Let Grow and founder of Free-Range Kids
Introduction and the “World’s Worst Mom” [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show of ideas, never ever, not once, the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening on this beautiful winter Super Bowl Sunday.
50,000 years from now, when biologists and scientists look back at the marvel of how the species of human beings have survived, how they made it through whatever happened between now and 50,000 years from now, they will have—if their records are accurate—they will appreciate and understand that our species has survived because of the hard work of this morning’s guest.
We all know from our watching the Nature Channel, high school biology and the like, that if you take a species from the wild and it is born and raised domestically in a protective environment, protected from predators and the like, and then you take that mammal, that animal, and you release it back into the wild, it will die because it’s not equipped to survive. Well, in America, perhaps in the Western world, perhaps in the entire world, we are dooming the human race. We are taking our young children, the heirs of our species, and we are raising them in a protective, totally safe—or as total as we can make it—environment. And they are in that protective environment from birth until they perhaps graduate college. And then what do we do? We release them into the world, totally ill-equipped to deal with the unprotected environment of the world. And if our lessons from high school biology are correct, they—the species—will die.
This morning’s guest will save us, and she has been working hard and long to preserve the species. With that, I welcome for the third time on my show, Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is, historically as she will explain, she has many titles well-earned. In her first title, she hit the public eye a long time ago when she clawed her way to the top and found herself being crowned as the “World’s Worst Mom.” So she has had a life of achievement starting with becoming the World’s Worst Mom. She has taken that status and grown with it. She is now President of Let Grow—we will learn about Let Grow, which is saving the species—and she is also founder of Free-Range Kids. With that introduction, Lenore, welcome to the show this morning.
Lenore Skenazy: Well, what a modest little introduction. Here I am, saving the species from annihilation, and most people haven’t heard of me. Pretty good.
Bob Zadek: That’s right. You’re going to be in the textbooks in the next publication.
Lenore Skenazy: I’m waiting, I’m waiting. And I also want to be in the textbooks in California and in Texas, because half the time they don’t see the same stuff.
Bob Zadek: Do you know, I did a whole show many, many years ago on when something caught my eye, which was in Texas, the Texas Textbook Commissioner is an elective office, if you can believe it. So imagine in Texas running for the office of Textbook Commissioner. What would be your platform? It’s impossible. But okay, that’s for another show.
Now help our friends out there understand how you went from journalist in a now-defunct but very interesting local to the New York metropolitan area newspaper to become World’s Worst Mom, and what does that history have to do with Let Grow and Free-Range Kids?
Lenore Skenazy: Oh boy. Okay. Well, we’ve got half an hour ahead of us for that part. Let’s see. So, many years ago at this point, our nine-year-old son was asking me and my husband—who is never America’s Worst Dad, somehow nobody cares—if we would take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home by the subway. This was his dearest desire. He wanted to take the subway by himself.
And so we decided to let him, because in New York, where we live, we’re on the subway all the time. It’s how we get around. Safety in numbers, we believe in the people here, we believe in the subway, we believe in our son—still do. Took him to Bloomingdale’s one sunny Sunday and left him. I left him there and yes, indeed, he found his way home taking the subway and then taking a crosstown bus and coming into our apartment levitating with pride or joy. Just like the ecstasy of doing something for the first time, feeling just so happy and capable.
And we felt great for him too. And I wrote a column, “Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.” And two days after the column appeared, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR, because this crosses a lot of political lines, defending myself, defending the decision to take my eyes off my son and let him go into a subterranean world without a cell phone. And so I started that weekend the blog Free-Range Kids to say that, look, I love safety. I’m pro-helmet and car seat and seatbelt and mouth guard and extra layers and bring a bottle of water. You know, I’m just very rational and safety-conscious. But I said that I don’t think our kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. And that’s very controversial. And that got me labeled America’s Worst Mom, because who takes her eyes off her kids at age nine anymore? Nobody anymore. Even though I’m sure, Bob, that your mom let you do some things on your own when you were nine, correct?
Bob Zadek: My parents would be still doing hard time in prison for what they let me do. So fortunately, they didn’t go to prison. It was a different time.
The Culture of Overprotection [02:57]
Bob Zadek: So your premise of Let Grow, which we’ll discuss during the hour quite a bit, and Free-Range Kids, is that we are collectively making a mistake in child-rearing, and we are making a mistake that is damaging our children, that is ultimately collectively presents a collective existential threat to society, at the risk of being overly dramatic.
Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, it’s hyperbole, Bob. 50,000 years depends on one woman pacing her apartment in Queens, New York. Okay, great.
Bob Zadek: Every morning I light a candle and thank God for Lenore Skenazy saving the species. So you’re appreciated at least by me.
So tell us, so your observation is, and your Let Grow and Free-Range Kids, is that we are too protective of our children. Is that a fair one-sentence summary?
Lenore Skenazy: It is, although we’ve got to give a little sympathy to the parents who are growing up in this era too, because they don’t want to be hurting their kids. Nobody does anything deliberately, or most of us don’t, to stunt or hurt our kids or to keep them back or to mar their chances of survival. That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do.
But we are surrounded by a culture that is so obsessed with fear, and especially the fear that something will happen to children. They will be hurt emotionally, socially, physically, some way, that we parents are surrounded by admonitions to never take our eyes off our kids, watch their every move, check in on every grade, make sure that that pimple isn’t cancer. Everything is written in these overwrought terms.
And the example that I like to give is of Parents Magazine, which is the Bible of the parenting world, right? How should they raise a kid? Well, let me read Parents. It’s the most popular parenting magazine in America. And they had an article a couple of years ago called “The Playdate Playbook,” as if adults need instructions on how to let their kids have fun. But you know, we really have been so conditioned to look to the experts that there’s the article.
And the article was written as a series of sort of Dear Abby type questions. And one question was, “My child is old enough to stay home alone, and sometimes she does. But now she has a playdate over. Can I leave the two of them playing while I go and run and come back from the dry cleaners?” And Parents Magazine said, “Absolutely not. You want to be there to jump in because what if there’s a squabble? You don’t want anyone’s feelings to get hurt.”
And I consider that sentence—“you don’t want anyone’s feelings to get hurt”—to be the Rosetta Stone of our culture, because it explains everything. The expert culture, the people that are telling us how to raise our kids, have become so convinced that our kids can’t handle anything, even an argument with a friend, that they are telling us parents we must be there every second, watching, waiting, intervening, helping, assisting, trophy-giving, loving, cuddling, encouraging, high-fiving, saving the children from extremely normal, extremely benign circumstances.
And that’s why schools sometimes won’t let kids walk home. There was a lady who wrote to us from Kentucky who said that her fifth grader—all the kids up through fifth grade—weren’t allowed to even get off the school bus at the bus stop unless there was an adult there to escort them home. And if there wasn’t an adult there three times, Child Protective Services would be called. So this is rewriting the walk home from the bus stop—it could be two houses or two blocks, it’s Kentucky—as if it’s walking through a firing squad in Nam. I mean, there’s just no recognition that this is a safe, normal thing to do. And it’s rewriting the hurt feelings from Parents Magazine, the child walking home a block in the afternoon in Kentucky. The culture is obsessed with the idea that if anything bad happens to a kid, it could have been prevented and it should have been prevented by an adult because they can’t handle anything. And that’s the culture that I feel bad that parents are swimming in. And that’s the culture that you’re talking about is forcing us to raise our kids, whether we want to or not, with a lot of excess intervention and protection that is leaving them unprepared, as you said, for the Sturm und Drang ahead.
The Necessity of Risk and Resilience [06:24]
Bob Zadek: It seems to me, even though as a libertarian I abhor the growth in government, I recommend we have one more governmental agency. We need Child Protective Services to protect us from Child Protective Services.
Lenore Skenazy: You know, Child Protective Services—people think I’m down on them too. I love the idea, actually, that there is some oversight group that can save children who are being severely beaten, pimped out, starved, given drugs, abandoned. I mean, you know, I’m glad that somebody is looking out for that. I don’t think an investigation should be trip-wired by simply letting your kid wait in the car while you pay for the gas, or walk to school, or play outside in the park, or walk home from the park.
And you know, I do from time to time hear of stories like that, and they have such a chilling effect once again on the poor parents who don’t know, “Well, am I allowed to let my kids walk home from the park? I think they’re ready. I grew up in this same neighborhood. The crime rate is the same as when I was growing up. Why can’t I let my kids do that?” There should be a presumption that parents know their kids best and are doing the best they can. Sometimes your husband’s car breaks down, you’ve got to go get him from the train, and now you’re leaving your seven-year-old with the eight-year-old at home. Does that prove that you’re a terrible parent and that you’re negligent? Or does it prove that this is life? You’re raising kids, it’s just things are going to happen and things don’t have to be perfect for things to be fine.
And in fact, sometimes when I give lectures, I ask the audience to remember a time when they were a kid, when they were just by themselves as kids, when something went really wrong. And I’ll tell you one of the stories, which is that—I’ll tell you two stories. One is that this lady told me that when she was a kid, she and her friend had their bikes and they were riding them down these very slick hills that were slick with pine needles, wherever she was growing up. Anyway, so she remembered they were doing this, it was really fun, and they just had to stop short before they would end up in the street. And one time she was going down this hill and it’s going faster and faster and it’s really exciting and she grabs the handlebars to brake, the handlebar brakes, and the entire handlebars come off the bike. And it’s like a cartoon. I mean, the bike is going down and her handlebars are above it. And she had a split second like, “Oh my God!” and she threw herself off the bike and into the bushes. You know, and she was all scratched up, shaken obviously, but fine. And after that, they fixed the handlebars and of course they proceeded to keep doing it for the rest of the day because it was still fun.
And then when she remembered her memory, another guy in the audience said, “Wait, I remember I was playing Mumbly-peg once,” which for the record, Lenore Skenazy thinks is a terrible idea. Mumbly-peg is dumb. But anyway, they were playing it. It’s where you throw the knife into the ground and you try to get it to stick and stand up. And if you do, great. But in fact, this one stuck into one of his friend’s feet. And you know, not a horrible tragedy or trauma, but bleeding. And so he and his buddies had to gather around the friend and shuffle him, without “Oh, everybody’s fine here, we’re just going upstairs,” clump, clump, clump, clump into the bathroom, clean off the little wound, put a Band-Aid on it, hide the bloody towels, whatever it is.
And I asked them and the whole audience, because a lot of people had shared stories, I said, “Did you tell your parents?” And everybody laughed and shook their head like, “No.” And I asked why not. And the answer in that crowd and in any crowd that I’ve asked since then is simply that they did not want their parents to take their freedom away. And that’s such an enormous thing to recognize, that the drive for kids is to grow up and be able to handle things and to see that they’re going to be okay and to have the world as their oyster. And to take those experiences away because we’re afraid—“What if their handlebars come off? What if a kid gets hurt?”—you know, we’re taking away the very building blocks of humanity. Like you were talking about, it’s hyperbole, 50,000 years from now everybody’s going to need to have missed this particular era in human development. But kids do need to take some risks and to be afraid and to have an argument and to feel angry or frustrated or confused or lonely or lost, because those add up to the layers of you that mean the next time you’re a little bit more prepared and the next time you’re a little bit more prepared. I remember this before, my body remembers, a muscle memory of handling something, as opposed to having somebody come in and handle it for you, which leaves you with nothing. It’s like taking out all the vitamins out of a fruit. You just need those experiences to grow up and be ready for the world and be part of the world. And to take them away, to have the experts taking them away, to have the school taking them away because we’re afraid that kids are going to get hurt, it’s like forgetting what humanity is about, which is being resilient and learning how to deal with life and going forth with the confidence and the joy. Those people telling me what went wrong when they were playing were proud that they had handled it. And they would have been humiliated if their parent had said, “Honey, let me handle that. Oh, let me fix this. You can’t do it.” No, they could do it. And we’re taking those opportunities away from our kids at their peril and ours.
Market and Media Driven Fear [08:44]
Bob Zadek: Now, it seems—and implicit in what you said, and it came through quite a number of times in what you last said—implicit in that is that society once again is telling parents, “You are inherently not competent to make those intensely personal judgments about how to raise your children, and therefore we are taking that right, taking that responsibility away from you.” So not only are the children not knowing how to be children and how to evolve, the parents are not allowed to learn how to be parents and to exercise that judgment. So the lesson is for the children: “You’re not competent,” and government telling the parents: “You’re not competent.” So the only competence left is government. Children are incompetent and parents are incompetent. What kind of world are we coming to?
Now, you have studied this, you have railed against this so effectively. Can you give us some guidance, since you referred back to Bob and Lenore and our generation? So this is relatively new. Can you attribute this to any events or circumstances in society? How did we get here?
Lenore Skenazy: Oh yeah. And first of all, I don’t think it’s just government telling parents that they’re incompetent. It’s that entire expert culture. There’s an entire section of the bookstore that’ll be the parenting guide, and should you let them cry it out? Should you not cry? Here’s how you feed them or don’t feed them. It’s back to—it’s the expert culture as well. It’s a litigious culture that is making us scared because we start thinking of everything in terms of risk and how would this look in a court of law.
It’s the marketplace which sells items like—oh God, there’s this one like little electronic sock that you put on your baby when they—your healthy baby when they come home from—I’m going to say prison. That’s not—they don’t. When they come home from the hospital. And it gives you a readout on your phone of their temperature, their movement, their blood oxygen level, and their pulse. And you know, you need this if your child is in neonatal intensive care, but you don’t need to know all that or worry about all that if your child is healthy and dismissed from the hospital.
And so you have a whole society that’s not just telling you that you’re incompetent and your child’s incompetent, telling you that your child is in danger. And if you’re not watching them every single second of the day, whether it’s to jump in if there’s a squabble on the playdate or read the readout on your iPhone of your kid’s blood oxygen level as they’re sleeping, that your child is in danger and if you’re not paying enough attention, something bad will happen and it’s all your fault. So it’s a whole lot of societal influences that are driving parents crazy with fear, who then feel that they have to hover and intervene 24/7. So it’s sort of—it’s like the Matrix. I didn’t see the Matrix and someday I will, but I have a feeling it’s like the Matrix, which seems to be an overweening, overarching system that keeps people in their place.
The reason, the way I think we got here is still a little murky to me, but there are a bunch of factors. One is the media is so much more pervasive, there’s so much more competition in the media, and the story that grips at least American parents the most is of a white middle or upper-middle-class child stolen by a stranger and that’s it. That’s the story. And so if they can come up with a way to replay that, the media will, because it will keep us gripped and it will give them our eyeballs. And the media is there not to inform us, the media is there to make money. And if this gets more viewers than anything else, well then they’ll just keep giving it to us, which is why you have Law & Order on 24/7 on television and why the news just keeps getting worse and worse, even though crime has been on a 25-year decline. Crime peaked in ‘93 and has been going down since then. So most people, when you ask them in a Gallup or a Roper poll, say they think that crime is going up when actually crime is at historic lows. Not that it feels that way, I understand it doesn’t feel that way, but you know, luckily in many places in America, they are as safe as the ’50s or the ’60s.
So the media is certainly to blame. And as I was saying, the litigious culture gets us thinking of things only in terms of risk. We never see the upside of risk. Risk used to be—you know, there’s danger, which is bad, there’s hazards, bad, but risk is something that’s inherent in everything. And the idea that your kid walks to school, that’s risky, but if you drive them to school, you’ve eliminated the risk, is not true. You know, there’s a tiny risk either way of getting hit by a car or being in the car and getting hit by a car. And yet every time a choice is between keeping your eyes on your kids or giving them some independence or freedom, the walk to school is rewritten as a risk and the drive to school because you’re with the child is rewritten as fine. It really is the idea that parents must be there always with their kids, either electronically or in person.
And then like I said, you have the marketplace just selling us stuff because they say your kid is going to get hurt unless they use X or Y. There’s baby knee pads, there’s a helmet you can put on your kid for just walking. I mean, there’s just a lot of pressure to think of your kid as almost about to die unless you buy something or do something or read something or make something or get something.
Legal Consequences for Free-Range Parents [12:41]
Bob Zadek: So what we have is we have the economic system, businesses who see an opportunity and they can sell safety once the parents are conditioned that there is danger at every turn. That’s a marketplace to business, thus so many products available to parents and with the encouraging of the parents to buy it.
And as we go to break, I made reference to government, you appropriately corrected me and said broader than just government. But when we come back from break, I want our audience to understand how much government, and specifically and frighteningly the criminal justice system, has become involved in the job of parenting and how so many incredibly everyday and innocent activities that just reflect good or maybe not so good but good-faith judgment by parents end up with children being put into foster care, parents being accused of a crime, and lives being damaged severely.
Also when we come back from break, I want you, Lenore, to help us understand all of the posses, all of the spies that government has created to keep an eye on parents without us really being aware of it. So we are being watched by lots of folks just to make sure nothing bad happens to children. It’s kind of scary stuff. When we come back from break, this is Bob Zadek spending a wonderful morning talking with my friend Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is President of Let Grow and founder of Free-Range Kids. She was in 2008 World’s Worst Mom. Congratulations to Lenore. She has written Free-Range Kids, still available on Amazon. Lots more to follow when we come back after 30 incredibly short seconds.
[Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. This morning we are speaking with Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is President of Let Grow—more about that in a moment—and founder of Free-Range Kids. She is a published author, Free-Range Kids is her book, available on Amazon. Her organization is, as I said, Let Grow.
Now Lenore, before we went to break, I mentioned that the system of government and the criminal justice system, the system of protecting children from danger, the children protective environment establishment, has set up a pretty gosh-darn efficient, in a scary way, system of bringing parental-child behavior to the attention of—the scary word is—the authorities. So tell us a bit about that system involving nurses, teachers, doctors, hospitals and the like, and how it all works and the good, if any, and the bad of that system.
Lenore Skenazy: Sure. So the assumption is that whenever you see a kid alone, or whenever a kid is brought into a doctor’s office or a hospital, the hospital is worried that perhaps the injury is because the parents beat the child or literally hurt the kid deliberately. And the assumption when you see a kid outside is, “Wait a minute, where’s their mom?” is really what it boils down to.
So let me talk about the kids being outside first and then we can talk about the mandated reporters throughout the system, okay? This story you might have read about, it was about five years ago. There was a single mom in South Carolina named Debra Harrell, and she has a nine-year-old daughter. And the mom worked at McDonald’s. And so it’s the summer, there’s no school obviously. And the daughter would go with her mom to the McDonald’s and just play on the computer all day on a laptop. But then their laptop got stolen, their home was burglarized. And so the daughter said, “Mom, can I go instead to the park?” You know, it’s a really popular park, so popular that they actually serve breakfast and lunch there. There’s a million kids, parents, summer workers, almost like a camp. And there’s sprinklers. And it’s South Carolina and it’s hot. And so the mom thought, “Sure.” And so she let the girl go there. Girl has a phone. And the girl plays there day one, day two, day three.
Some lady says, “Little girl, where is your mother?” And she said, “Oh, my mom’s working.” “Working? Where?” “Oh, she’s at McDonald’s not too far away.” “Really? Well…” And rather than calling the mom to make sure everything’s fine, or being a real Good Samaritan and watching the girl because you realize, “Oh, her mom’s working, I’m not, you know, this is a girl in my community, let me make sure she’s fine,” the lady called 911. And the cops came and they took the girl away and they put the mom in jail for not supervising her child.
And the videotape of the interrogation is available. I wrote about this at Reason.com. And if you look up Debra Harrell, you’ll see the interrogation, which is like, “So you thought you could let your kid just play outside?” And the mom is saying, “Yes.” Like, “Don’t you realize your job is to love your kid?” She’s like, “I do love her. I was just giving her some outside fun.” It’s like, “So you thought she’d be safe?” It’s like, “She was safe.” But the entire decision by the mom was seen through the eyes of “no decent mother ever lets their child have any moment unsupervised.”
And it’s so crazy because this was a totally safe and loving decision based on particular circumstances. And I think it was a great parenting decision. I don’t even think that the girl would have been better off if she had been, you know, home with an expensive nanny. I think going outside and playing with your friends at age nine in the summer in the sprinklers is a great parenting decision. But the child was taken from the mom and kept from her for 17 days in foster care because the assumption is that no decent mother takes her eyes off her kid.
And fortunately, there was a hue and cry across the country at this treatment of the mother, and eventually all charges were dropped, her daughter was returned to her. But why should any parent have to worry about being second-guessed when they are making a decision either because they think, “Oh, it’d be really good for my kid to start playing with friends and she’ll get all these wonderful social-emotional skills,” or, you know, the babysitter couldn’t come or I can’t afford a babysitter and therefore this is my contingency plan and it’s still darn good? So we really have to make sure that the bar for what is considered abuse or neglect is actually abuse or neglect as opposed to making a wise, statistically safe, common-sense everyday parenting decision.
Bob Zadek: And the decision should be with the parent, not with the police.
Lenore Skenazy: Right, because the parents know their child the best, right? The parents know, you know—some people say to me sometimes, “I wouldn’t let my 12-year-old go to the park, but I’d sure let my seven-year-old,” because they know the kid. And so, okay, let your seven-year-old and don’t let your 12-year-old, but that’s up to you. And absent any evidence of actual neglect, like “I don’t care if they live or die, I’m leaving them in an empty apartment with only heroin for dinner,” you know, that’s different from letting a nine-year-old do something that nine-year-olds have done throughout the world, throughout human history, and even in my lifetime, which is go to the park on a sunny summer day and play without their mom there.
So we really have to make sure that the law recognizes that just because somebody, you know, calls 911 and says there’s a child out here, doesn’t mean that that instigates an investigation. It’s like, “Okay, does the child look like she’s in distress? No. Does she look—is she in tatters? No. Is she, you know, banging her head against the pavement? No. Okay, then why are you calling?” You know, call me if there’s something literally off about this scenario other than the fact that you wouldn’t let your nine-year-old play in the park by yourself. Okay, don’t. But this is not up to the government or you to decide how this other mom is raising her family. Simple as that.
The Let Grow Project and Legislative Solutions [16:45]
Bob Zadek: And it’s a question of the government inviting itself into the most intimate relationship of parent and child. And it scares me so much because it seems to me—I don’t want to get overly dramatic, but this is what my brain does—it seems to me it’s one step away from just saying, “Okay, parent, your job is to pay for the food and clothing of your children, but other than that, you have nothing directly to do with your child. We will educate your child, we will establish the rules of child development, and you are just our assistant on the job.” And it is such a vote of no confidence for Americans’ ability to be collectively good parents with, by the way, as you said before, with no data to support this decision. It’s not as if we have a wave of ignorance and parental neglect. Parents have known how to raise children since children were invented. And we wouldn’t have gotten this far as a species if parents were terrible at it, because we would have died off.
And you often mention to your audiences about how almost—it’s quite natural for children to know how to be children and parents to know how to be parents in every species, not just humans. So for government to invite themselves to this party is wrong-headed, not data-driven, and a profound violation of liberty.
Lenore Skenazy: Yes, it is. The data-driven part is so interesting because it’s like just because somebody else sees this kid outside and thinks, “That’s too young,” doesn’t mean it is too young, doesn’t mean that the child is in danger. And yet we’re allowed to treat it as if this was an incident. I always say that my favorite word is “incident” because it always proves that nothing really did happen. You know, “There was an incident of a child walking home.” And then? Well, that was the incident. They were walking home.
So, you know, I have a bunch of examples of this. It also starts in the mindset that we were talking about earlier of the—there’s two things going on. One is the idea that all children are vulnerable to everything all the time, so of course you have to call when you see a child outside because why isn’t there a minder with them, you know, to keep away the—not just the predators, but also what if there’s a squabble? You need to be there to jump in. And that mom wasn’t there to jump in. Because you know, you don’t always have to be there to jump in.
So I forgot my other extremely profound point. But I want to talk about what happened. First of all, I don’t want to scare people too much that people are always watching your every parenting move and ready to call 911 on you, because the fear now has almost overgrown—the fear is like another thing that’s keeping parents so crazed. And the fact of the matter is, I hear all these stories, so I’m a sort of repository of them, and there are almost none—there are none for like just letting the kid walk home from the park or play in the park where the child has literally been placed into foster care for any length of time. The Debra Harrell story I was giving was, you know, sort of the worst of the worst.
But the point is you don’t want to have anybody coming to investigate you at all, just for making a decent parenting decision. The vast majority of these cases are dropped and the government thinks no harm, no foul. Well, the harm is that you came into the house at all and interviewed the kids and interviewed the parents and looked in their cabinets and made them feel inadequate and terrified that you could take away the kids. But in fact, for letting your child play outside, play on the front lawn—as awful as it is to get investigated and it’s a travesty—don’t actually start worrying that the second you do that your kids will be taken away and you’ll never see them again, because that’s, you know, that’s almost fear from our side. I don’t want people to worry about that.
But I do want laws. I do want laws that guarantee parents the right to make decent, loving, rational decisions, common-sense everyday decisions, without having to second-guess themselves that somebody else might mistake this for a crime and instigate an investigation.
So in Utah, there was a law passed now it’s in two years ago, 2018, that said—it’s called the Free-Range Parenting Law—and it says that letting your kid play outside, walk to school, you know, come home with a latchkey, wait briefly in a car when it’s not too hot or too cold, these—if that’s the complaint that somebody calls 911 with—we will not go and investigate because this is not—these are not crimes. These are not evidence of abuse or neglect. It’s just simply everyday life. So I’ve heard from parents in Utah say how grateful they are to know that they just don’t have to think twice about letting their kids do things that they think are good for them. “Yeah, I want my kid to walk home from school. I want my kid to go and play with her friends in the park without me there.” And they don’t have to worry about it. And we’re hoping that more states pass a law like that, called sometimes the Reasonable Childhood Independence Law or the Free-Range Kids and Parents Law. But it’s a law that says it is not neglect to give your kids some unsupervised time in the absence of any other terrible thing, right? If there’s nothing else going on, that’s not a crime. So I’m hoping Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, is trying to—is hopeful that those laws will be passed in other states soon.
Bob Zadek: It’s a question of the government inviting itself into the most intimate relationship of parent and child. And it scares me so much because it seems to me—I don’t want to get overly dramatic, but this is what my brain does—it seems to me it’s one step away from just saying, “Okay, parent, your job is to pay for the food and clothing of your children, but other than that, you have nothing directly to do with your child. We will educate your child, we will establish the rules of child development, and you are just our assistant on the job.” And it is such a vote of no confidence for Americans’ ability to be collectively good parents with, by the way, as you said before, with no data to support this decision. It’s not as if we have a wave of ignorance and parental neglect. Parents have known how to raise children since children were invented. And we wouldn’t have gotten this far as a species if parents were terrible at it, because we would have died off.
And you often mention to your audiences about how almost—it’s quite natural for children to know how to be children and parents to know how to be parents in every species, not just humans. So for government to invite themselves to this party is wrong-headed, not data-driven, and a profound violation of liberty.
Lenore Skenazy: Yes, it is. The data-driven part is so interesting because it’s like just because somebody else sees this kid outside and thinks, “That’s too young,” doesn’t mean it is too young, doesn’t mean that the child is in danger. And yet we’re allowed to treat it as if this was an incident. I always say that my favorite word is “incident” because it always proves that nothing really did happen. You know, “There was an incident of a child walking home.” And then? Well, that was the incident. They were walking home.
So, you know, I have a bunch of examples of this. It also starts in the mindset that we were talking about earlier of the—there’s two things going on. One is the idea that all children are vulnerable to everything all the time, so of course you have to call when you see a child outside because why isn’t there a minder with them, you know, to keep away the—not just the predators, but also what if there’s a squabble? You need to be there to jump in. And that mom wasn’t there to jump in. Because you know, you don’t always have to be there to jump in.
So I forgot my other extremely profound point. But I want to talk about what happened. First of all, I don’t want to scare people too much that people are always watching your every parenting move and ready to call 911 on you, because the fear now has almost overgrown—the fear is like another thing that’s keeping parents so crazed. And the fact of the matter is, I hear all these stories, so I’m a sort of repository of them, and there are almost none—there are none for like just letting the kid walk home from the park or play in the park where the child has literally been placed into foster care for any length of time. The Debra Harrell story I was giving was, you know, sort of the worst of the worst.
But the point is you don’t want to have anybody coming to investigate you at all, just for making a decent parenting decision. The vast majority of these cases are dropped and the government thinks no harm, no foul. Well, the harm is that you came into the house at all and interviewed the kids and interviewed the parents and looked in their cabinets and made them feel inadequate and terrified that you could take away the kids. But in fact, for letting your child play outside, play on the front lawn—as awful as it is to get investigated and it’s a travesty—don’t actually start worrying that the second you do that your kids will be taken away and you’ll never see them again, because that’s, you know, that’s almost fear from our side. I don’t want people to worry about that.
But I do want laws. I do want laws that guarantee parents the right to make decent, loving, rational decisions, common-sense everyday decisions, without having to second-guess themselves that somebody else might mistake this for a crime and instigate an investigation.
So in Utah, there was a law passed now it’s in two years ago, 2018, that said—it’s called the Free-Range Parenting Law—and it says that letting your kid play outside, walk to school, you know, come home with a latchkey, wait briefly in a car when it’s not too hot or too cold, these—if that’s the complaint that somebody calls 911 with—we will not go and investigate because this is not—these are not crimes. These are not evidence of abuse or neglect. It’s just simply everyday life. So I’ve heard from parents in Utah say how grateful they are to know that they just don’t have to think twice about letting their kids do things that they think are good for them. “Yeah, I want my kid to walk home from school. I want my kid to go and play with her friends in the park without me there.” And they don’t have to worry about it. And we’re hoping that more states pass a law like that, called sometimes the Reasonable Childhood Independence Law or the Free-Range Kids and Parents Law. But it’s a law that says it is not neglect to give your kids some unsupervised time in the absence of any other terrible thing, right? If there’s nothing else going on, that’s not a crime. So I’m hoping Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, is trying to—is hopeful that those laws will be passed in other states soon.
Bob Zadek: We’ll take callers in a moment, but before we do, the American Revolution was fought in part over the complaint “no taxation without representation.” And that is having the right to vote on your own taxation was such an inherently important right that we went to war with Great Britain and won over it. Now, the equivalent if you’re a kid of “no taxation without representation” is “don’t take away my recess.” If kids could bear arms and get muskets out of the barn, they would do so if you try to take away their recess without representation. You have written amusingly and passionately about what’s going on with recess. So at the risk of fomenting dissent and having the American children dust off their muskets, at the risk of forming a battle cry for young children, tell us, because it’s such a interesting story, what’s happening with recess and the weather. It’s a great story.
Lenore Skenazy: Oh my goodness. There are states across America or school districts where if there’s snow on the ground, children aren’t allowed to go outside. If it’s too hot in Texas, there was a school a mom wrote to me, if it goes—no, in Texas it was if it’s cold, if it goes below 60 degrees in Texas, the children aren’t allowed to go outside. And in Alaska, they weren’t allowed to go outside if it was, I don’t know, 30 degrees or something that I think it is permanently in Alaska. There was just some very—it goes back to the whole idea we were talking about originally, the idea that kids are so vulnerable that they can’t handle, you know, the atmosphere even. They can’t handle heat, they can’t handle cold, they can’t handle snow. There are places where you can go out in the snow but you can’t touch the snow. You can play tag but you can only touch each other with two fingers because otherwise you’re going to get too rough and people will get hurt. There’s places where there’s no tag because nobody should be “it.”
But I just wanted to go a step further than that and say that when we get to the point where we start thinking that kids need all this supervision and that any free time means that they will be on their own and therefore vulnerable and incompetent and in danger, what we’re hearing now is kids even as old as seventh grade who barely sound like they’re doing what I’d say kindergartners or first graders would have done a generation ago. And I’m just going to read you a couple of statements from kids. These were seventh graders in a well-off suburb that were asked, “What would you like to do if you could do something on your own but you’re a little scared to do so far?” And I’m just going to whip through a couple pages I’m reading from in front of me.
One girl, Samantha, says, “I was hesitant to try walking my dog alone because I was scared he would get loose.” These are kids who are 12 and 13 years old. “I was afraid to climb a tree because I was scared I was going to fall and break a bone.” Here’s another kid: “I was hesitant to go into a store filled with strangers without my mom.” So a store is written as like a group of strangers as opposed to a place you go to buy stuff. “I was hesitant to try baking because I didn’t want to set anything on fire.” And then one—let me see if this is a boy—Avery, I don’t know if that’s a boy or a girl, wrote, “I was a little hesitant to use a sharp knife as my parents had never let me be before.” So that’s a boy 12 or 13 years old who hasn’t been allowed to cut his own meat.
And this is, to go back to the beginning of our segment together, you were talking about what happens if kids are kept in captivity like pets and never allowed to sort of roam the world and climb a tree and, you know, get used to what it means to fall off your bike and get home because there’s no mom to call or no mom next to you to drive you back home. You’re really not allowing kids to develop the wherewithal to deal with almost anything. I mean, by the time you’re 12 or 13 and you’re scared of, you know, scrambling eggs because you think you’re going to burn down the house, or to walk your dog because instead of seeing it as a normal thing to do, you’re thinking of the worst-case scenario—it’s going to get off the leash and then it’s going to run into traffic and then it’s going to get hit by a car and I’m going to get stolen by a stranger—I mean, you’ve really warped these children’s view of what they’re capable of and what the world is about. And they think they can’t do anything, and they think the world is really difficult and dangerous, and that is not healthy. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to raise your kids in captivity and keep them stunted like a bonsai tree simply because you’ve been told the outside world is too much for them and they can’t handle anything.
So the kids were writing these essays because they were part of the Let Grow project at the school. And so Let Grow is the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids. It was founded by me and Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, and a couple other people—thank God for all of them—who felt that, you know, why are kids so fragile by the time they get to college and the workplace? It must be because they’re being raised without any of the experiences that make you, you know, strong and competent.
And so the Let Grow project, which you can find at LetGrow.org if you click on schools, is a homework assignment that teachers give their kids from K through 8 that says, “Go home and do something on your own without your parents.” And we love this project because it’s the only thing that changes the entire equation. Because once the kid says, “Mom, I have to do something by myself,” and the mom goes, “Ugh, it’s for homework, I guess I gotta say yes,” and the kid goes and runs an errand to the store or goes to the park or makes the cake and puts it in the oven and the place doesn’t explode and everybody’s eating the cake or the kid came back with the bread for dinner and everybody’s so proud that the kid did this and the kid is so proud that the parents trusted him and he got to go outside and do something on their own, that’s the only thing that changes the culture back to normal, what I would call normal. Because the parents are so ecstatic seeing their kid blossom and the kid is so ecstatic that the parents trusted him and he got to go outside and do something on their own, that that’s the key. Talking about this, railing at the issues, being sorry for what has happened to childhood, those things don’t change it. The only thing that changes it is the personal experience, especially times a whole classroom full and a whole school full and a whole district full of kids doing things on their own. It recalibrates everything. So that’s the only answer that I’ve found in 12 years, as you know, Bob, since you talked to me at the very beginning of this journey, that works: shoving parents into—making parents let go of their kids, making kids get off the couch and go outside on their own, and that flips the switch. Everything gets turned back on, childhood returns to normal.
Long-term Consequences and the “Bonsai Tree” Effect [18:52]
Bob Zadek: When you describe how overprotected our children are, the question that flashes into my brain is: from which generation is the Navy SEALs going to get their new recruits? From kids who at 14 are afraid to use a sharp knife? Is that who’s going to protect us? Oh my god, we’re doomed.
So we are performing this profound disservice to children. We are abusing them in a way, without playing too many word games, by depriving the children of survival tools. They don’t have ability to survive. And it’s evidence now in the colleges when your colleague Jonathan Haidt, who’s been on my show a couple of times, when we talk about how children must be protected—trigger warnings in college, they can’t have their feelings hurt, they can’t hear points of view that are opposite from theirs. So the generation you are describing, we see the result in the colleges. And is the next generation into the workplace, into society, when they demand protection from having their feelings hurt? That’s what we are doing to Americans and to American children. And we are depriving the children of liberty in the truest sense of the word, just to make them allegedly safer.
And I just want to read quickly an appropriate, wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin, his warning to us: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” From Benjamin Franklin.
Now, apologies to our callers, we didn’t have time for callers. But Lenore, tell us about Let Grow, what resources are available to parents, and how can our listeners help your organization?
Lenore Skenazy: Oh, fantastic. So Let Grow, as I said, was founded by me and Jon Haidt with the idea of making kids anti-fragile. And so if you go to LetGrow.org (L-E-T-G-R-O-W.org), you’ll find the Let Grow project that you can just forward to any teacher, principal, or superintendent. You’ll find the idea for a Let Grow Play Club, which is the idea of keeping schools open for free play, mixed ages, off their tech devices before or after school so kids just get used to playing with each other and solving their own disputes again. You’ll find if you click on the thing that says “Free-Range Law,” you’ll find model legislation there as well as a lot of very compelling reasons to ask your city council or your state lawmakers to consider passing a law that says neglect is not just letting your kids have some independence, neglect is actually harming them in a way that everybody would agree was blatant disregard for the child’s actual safety. And then there’s a community going on at Let Grow. We have a blog where people write about…
Bob Zadek: We have ten seconds, Lenore.
Lenore Skenazy: Okay, so just go to LetGrow.org and thank you, Bob, for fighting for liberty. Simple as that.
Bob Zadek: Oh, thank you so much, Lenore, for a wonderful hour together. So long to all my friends out there, I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a good Sunday afternoon.