Lenore Skenazy is a newspaper columnist and the author of Free-Range Kids, known for being publicly labeled “The World’s Worst Mom” after allowing her young son to navigate the New York City subway alone. She appeared on The Bob Zadek Show in 2014 and again in 2018, discussing overprotective parenting, the criminalization of parental judgment, and public sex offender registries.
The subway ride
Skenazy told Bob Zadek that the episode took place six years before the 2014 interview. Her son, then nine, asked whether his parents would take him somewhere he had never been and let him find his own way home on the subway. She and her husband discussed it and agreed, reasoning that he was familiar with the subways, could read a map, could speak the language, and that the system was safe and crowded. On a Sunday she took him to Bloomingdale’s, left him at the store, and told him that day was the day he would find his own way home. He did Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Skenazy said she was a newspaper columnist by trade, and that a few weeks later, casting about for a topic, she asked her editor whether she should write about her son taking the subway by himself. The editor said it sounded like a nice local story. Six years on, she said, the episode had produced two trips to Australia, a television show, a blog, and a book. She described it as the trip heard ‘round the world, because she was immediately put on television talk shows, from The Today Show on down, to explain why she had let her son do something perceived as dangerous. Her stated position was that had she believed it dangerous she would not have allowed it, because she did not want her son in danger Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Zadek framed the decision as an exercise of parental judgment and wisdom — knowing the environment, the child, and his training — aimed at helping a son grow, mature, and become self-sufficient. Skenazy agreed with the word “soon.” Asked whether she was pilloried in much of the media, she said that was fair, adding that many people were on her side, since otherwise she would be a nut without standing Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Safety, busybodies, and the criminalization of parenting
Skenazy argued that the underlying safety premise had shifted. She said danger had declined — perhaps not below the level of the 1950s, but back to the crime rate of 1963 in America — so that a parent of a young child today, if that parent grew up in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s, has children who are safer than the parent was when the parent’s own parents let them out. What she said she did not expect was that, because so many people believe a child out of sight is in danger, busybodies now report children waiting in cars, walking to school, or coming home from the library. In her account, cell phones have deputized the “good Samaritans” of America, police are obligated to respond, and some officers treat any child outside as endangered and the parent as negligent Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Zadek put the point in his own terms: parents are taught or brainwashed about leaving children alone, while the rest of society acts as nannies and bad Samaritans, and the conduct is becoming criminalized. Skenazy said she had many stories of the criminalization of parenting. She offered the case of a New Jersey mother who left an eighteen-month-old asleep in the car while running an errand in an upscale neighborhood, returning within five to ten minutes; a mall cop saw the child and alerted police, who arrested her. Skenazy said the mother was found guilty of negligence, took the case to an appellate court, and that all three judges ruled unanimously against her, writing that they did not have to list all the horrors that could have attended the child while the mother was away. Skenazy said she had never heard of a child being stolen from a car while a parent was shopping, and credited Andrea Peyser of the New York Post with numbers showing a person is more in danger walking across a parking lot than waiting in a car, and that more children have died in parking lots and driveways than while waiting in cars Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Her practical advice was that a passerby who sees a child in a car at a workplace parking lot should alert the authorities, but that someone who sees a child waiting in front of a drugstore or pizza stand should wait ten or fifteen minutes for the parent before doing anything else. To be a good Samaritan merely by tattling on a parent for doing what one’s own parents did, she said, is crazy Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Worst-first thinking and the media
Zadek recalled growing up in Queens without a sense of predators, afraid chiefly of the Fordham Baldies — a gang of tough kids, called rocks or hoods in those days, who shaved their heads, lived on Fordham Road in the Bronx, and were said to come to Queens to prey on Queens kids. He asked Skenazy whether children were being adversely affected. She said children are resilient and can be resilient even under helicoptering, which she defined as a modern word for overprotection, and that she does not blame parents for being afraid Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Her reason was media supply. She cited the case of Maddie McCann, a British child of three or four taken from a hotel room in Portugal while her parents vacationed there, and said camera crews were sent for months because the story fit the template American television stations are hungry for: a rich white girl abducted, which will teach the parents a lesson. She noted that the Jaycee Dugard story happened twenty years earlier and three thousand miles away, and that the perpetrator was found, yet the constant availability of such stories makes it feel as though they are happening around the clock. She said she could make a case that children are being crippled but does not believe it — that children go off to college or get a job and rise to the occasion, perhaps later than earlier generations did. What she said is wasted is childhood itself, spent as Rapunzel in a tower of safety, with every second micromanaged for fear a child will be snatched or fall behind in lacrosse, macramé, or Chinese Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Zadek played a clip of a newscaster saying of a child who walked alone to a playground that he could have been hit by a car, bitten by a dog, or picked up by a pedophile. Skenazy called this worst-first thinking: coming up with the worst-case scenario first and proceeding as if it were likely. Under that method, she said, nothing is safe — a child could fall down the stairs, scald himself, or gouge an eye out with a grapefruit spoon. She observed that the number one way children die in America is as passengers in cars, yet parents do not refuse to drive a child to the dentist for fear of a drunk driver or a Mack truck. Danger, she said, is everywhere, but credibility is given only to danger that occurs when children are not directly supervised by a parent Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Zadek, identifying himself as an attorney, framed the question for listeners as who should raise a child: the parent or a tort lawyer, arguing that fear of litigation drives the whole apparatus Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).
Sex offender registries and Let Grow
In the 2018 episode, Zadek introduced Skenazy as the person who had done more than any other to call attention to and perhaps reverse the topic at hand, and said her journey from “World’s Worst Mom” had brought her to leading the attack on sex offender registries. He stated that the show was not a defense of sex offenders but an attack on the registry, and described the subject as the exploitation by government of scare tactics, in which an existential threat, manufactured or real, is used to compromise liberty — comparing it to curfews and the setting aside of rights during a hurricane or natural disaster. He introduced her as President of Let Grow and founder of Free-Range Kids A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018).
Skenazy embraced the framing, saying she was typing as he spoke because it was the perfect slogan — not in favor of sex offenders or sex offenses, but against the public registry — and thanked him for devoting an hour to a topic she called not that popular A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018).
Across episodes
The two episodes show a shift in emphasis rather than a change of position. In 2014 Skenazy’s subject was the criminalization of ordinary parenting and the media’s role in inflating risk, argued through the subway episode, the New Jersey mall arrest, and worst-first thinking. In 2018 Zadek reintroduced her as having moved from that moniker to leading the attack on sex offender registries, and framed the registry as an instance of government exploiting scare tactics to compromise civil liberties; Skenazy supplied the slogan distinguishing opposition to the registry from support for offenders. The 2014 episode carries the development of the parenting argument; the 2018 excerpts show the later framing and its civil-liberties vocabulary, with Zadek advancing the framing and Skenazy adopting it.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any litigation beyond the New Jersey appellate ruling as Skenazy recounts it, nor the name of any statute, bill, or case. They do not give the founding date or principles of Let Grow beyond Skenazy’s title as its president, nor the details of her work on registries beyond the slogan she offers. The 2014 excerpts break off at several points — mid-question at the subway segment, at the criminalization segment, and at the loss-of-independence segment — and the 2018 excerpts end as Zadek is about to revisit how Skenazy became “The World’s Worst Mom,” so the registry argument itself is not developed in the material available.
Episodes
3 appearances, 2014–2023.
- Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014) — Overprotection and the helicopter parenting phenomenon. Author of Free-Range Kids
- A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018) — Modern culture of fear and sex offender registries. President of Let Grow
- Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023) — Overparenting and the movement for childhood independence. President of Let Grow