Remember when kids were free to be kids?

This Sunday, Lenore Skenazy — aka the “World’s Worst Mom” — returns to the show to discuss the latest trends in coddling vs. free range parenting.

26 min readFeb 8, 2020

My home movies from Queens, New York circa 1947 show me and my best friend Susan playing with cap pistols, water pistols, a ping pong ball gun, a Red Ryder B B gun, toy tin soldiers, a boy scout knife, and a toy machine gun with blinking red lights.

Yet not one of my friends died of gunshot wounds. In fact most of us are afraid of guns.

Maybe zero tolerance is not that necessary. Perhaps some of the societal measures we are taking to protect children are even backfiring.

We hear non-stop coverage of school shootings and child predators while the threat of Childhood Lack of Resilience Syndrome (CLORS) goes virtually unreported.

Symptoms of CLORS include easily bruised feelings, obesity, depression, lack of curiosity, and fear of exposure to new ideas once the child leaves home for college. Professor Jonathan Haidt (founder of Heterodox Academy and a co-founder with Lenore Skenazy of LetGrow.org) has observed many patients in the advanced stages and found the condition notoriously difficult to cure.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Lenore Skenazy has been offering the equivalent of a CLORS vaccine since her national debut as “World’s Worst Mom” in 2008 when she wrote an article titled, Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone, (New York Post, April 1, 2008).

Since then, she’s been leading the Free Range Kids movement — defending victims of a false hysteria that presumes all strangers “guilty until proven innocent,” despite falling crime rates. She last joined me to discuss her LetGrow initiative — helping parents let go of their helicoptering, and letting kids grow into functioning adults.

I welcomed Lenore back to the show to review the latest threats our kids’ freedom to be kids — from the War on Recess to reading logs.

Mark my words — the “War on Recess” will fare just like every other government “War on [fill-in-the-blank].”

As this article in Harvard Health Publishing confirms, kids need sunshine, risk, and socialization to become functioning adults.

Lastly, we discuss Utah’s new law that protects parents from the charge of neglect when they let their kids play outside by themselves. Ahh, the sweet smell of Federalism!

Follow her latest project at LetGrow.com, and tune in live to the show of ideas — not attitude.

Get my guide to the administrative state when you subscribe to the email list.

Transcript:

Bob Zadek: 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 appreciate and understand that our species has survived because of the hard work of this morning’s guest. We all know from 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, away from predators, and then you take that mammal and you release it back into the wild, it will die because it is not equipped to survive.

Well in America, perhaps in the Western world, and 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 environment. They are in that protective environment from birth until they 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. If our lessons from high school biology are correct, the species will die.

This morning’s guest will save us. She has been working hard and long to preserve the species. With that. I welcome the third time on my show, Lenore Skenazy. Lenore 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 LetGrow.org. 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: Wow. 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. The next publication.

Lenore Skenazy: I want to be in the textbooks in California and in Texas cause half the time they don’t see the same stuff.

Bob Zadek: I did a whole show on the Texas textbook commissioner, which is an elective office. 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.

The World’s Worst Mom

Bob Zadek: How did you go from being a journalist to becoming the world’s worst mom. What is that history have to do with letting grow and free range kids?

Lenore Skenazy: So, many years ago at this point, my nine year old son was asking me and my husband, if we would take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home by the subway. This is 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. That’s how we get around. Safety in numbers. We believe in the people here. We believe in the subway, and we believe in our son. We 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 cross town bus and coming into our apartment, levitating with pride and joy, feeling so happy and capable.

I wrote a column Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone (New York Sun, April 1, 2008).

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, and defending the decision to take my eyes off my son and let him go into a subterranean world without a cell phone.

I started the blog Free Range Kids because I’m pro helmet and car seat and seatbelt and mouth guard and extra layers and bring a bottle of water, I am safety conscious, but I don’t think our kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. That’s very controversial, and that got me labeled “America’s Worst Mom” because nobody takes their eyes off their kids anymore. Even though I’m sure, Bob, that your mom let you do some things on your own when you were nine.

Excessive Parenting and Control: A Loss of Freedom to Be A Kid

Bob Zadek: My parents would be still doing hard time in prison for what they let me do. Fortunately they didn’t go to prison. It was a different time. The premise of Let Grow, and Free Range Kids, is that we are collectively making a mistake in child rearing that is damaging our children and that presents a collective existential threat to society at the risk of being overly dramatic.

Your observation at 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 have to give a little sympathy to the parents who are growing up in this era too because they don’t want to be hurting her kids. Nobody does anything deliberately to stunt or hurt our kids or to keep them back. 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, and physically. Parents are surrounded by admonitions to never take our eyes off our kids, watch their every move, 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 Parent’s Magazine, the Bible of the parenting world.

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. The article is 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 play 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 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 that we must be there every second, watching, waiting, intervening, helping, assisting, trophy-giving, loving, encouraging, high fiving, saving the children from extremely normal and extremely benign circumstances. And that’s why schools sometimes won’t let kids walk home. You know, there was a lady who brought to us from Kentucky who said that her fifth grader, and all the kids up through fifth grade, wasn’t allowed to even get off the bus, the school bus at the bus stop, unless there was an adult there to escort them home.

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, which could be two houses or two blocks. There’s no recognition that this is a safe, normal thing to do. The hurt feelings from Paris magazine, the child walking home a block in the afternoon in Kentucky, and in general 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 parents are swimming in. That’s the culture that is forcing us to raise our kids with a lot of excess intervention and protection that is leaving them unprepared for the Sturm and Drang ahead.

Bob Zadek: 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: I love the idea actually that there is some oversight group that can save children who are being severely beaten, pimped up, starved, given drugs, and abandoned. I’m glad that somebody is looking out for that. I don’t think an investigation should be trip-wired by simply, you know, letting your kids 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. 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 whether they are allowed to let their kid walk home from the park?

Parents know their kids best and are doing the best they can. Sometimes your husband’s car breaks down. You got to go get him from the train and now you’re leaving your seven year old or eight year old at home. Does that prove that you are a terrible parent and that you’re negligent or does it prove that this is life? You’re raising kids? 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 something went really wrong.

I’ll tell you two stories. This lady told me that when she was a kid she and her friend had their bikes and they were riding down these very slick hills with pine needles. It was really fun. One time she was going down this hill and going faster and faster and it is really exciting. She grabbed the handlebars to break and the entire handlebars went off the bike.

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. She was all scratched up and shaken obviously, but fine. 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 when she remembered her memory, another guy in the audience said, I remember I was playing mumbly peg once, which is where you throw the knife into the ground and to try to get it to stick and stand up. And if you do, great. But in fact, it stuck into one of his friend’s feet, not a horrible tragedy or trauma but bleeding.

And so he and his buddy had to gather around the friend and shuffle him to the bathroom, clean off the little wound, put a bandaid on it, hide the bloody towels, whatever it is. I asked them and the whole audience, because a lot of people that shared stories, did you tell your parents? And everybody laughed and shook their heads 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.

We’re taking away the very building blocks of humanity like you were talking about. 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. 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 all the vitamins out of a food. You 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 work proud that they had handled that and they would have been humiliated if their parents had said, “honey, let me handle that. Oh, let me fix this. You can’t do it.” No, they could do it. And we are taking those opportunities away from our kids at their peril and ours.

Social Changes to Parenting Attitudes

Bob Zadek: 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 is telling parents you are inherently not competent to make those intensely personal judgements about how to raise your children. We are taking that right, taking their 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 are not competent, and for the parents, you’re not competent.” It goes right upstream so that the only competence left is the government. Children aren’t competent and parents aren’t competent. What kind of world are we coming to? Can you give us some guidance? Can you attribute this to any event or circumstances in society? How did we get here?

Lenore Skenazy: Oh yes. And first of all, I don’t think it’s just government telling parents that they’re incompetent, it’s the expert culture as well. It’s the 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 little electronic socks that you put on your baby.

It gives you a readout on your phone of their temperature, their movement, their blood oxygen level. You need this if your child is in neonatal intensive care, but you don’t need to know all that if your child is healthy dismissed from the hospital. So you have a whole society that is not just telling you that you are incompetent and your child’s incompetent, it is telling them that your child is in danger. 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 play date read the readout on your iPhone of your kid’s blood oxygen level as they’re sleeping, that your child is in danger. 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. I have a feeling it’s like the matrix, there seems to be an overweening overarching system that keeps people in their place. 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 gripsAmerican parents the most is of a white, middle or upper middle class child stolen by a stranger. 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. The media is there to make money.

If this gets more viewers than anything else, then they’ll just keep giving it to us, which is why you have law and order on all the time on television and why the news just keeps getting worse and worse even though crime has been on a 25 year decline. In polls people think the crime is going up when actually crime is at historic lows. Luckily in many places in America they are as safe as the 50s or the 60s. So the media is certainly to blame. Also the litigious culture has us thinking of things only in terms of risk and we never see the upside of risk.

There’s danger, which is bad. Hazard is bad, but risk is something that’s inherent in everything. And the idea that your kid walks to school and that’s risky, but if you drive them to school, you’ve eliminated the risk is not true. 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 the marketplace contributes as well by selling us stuff by claiming that your child is going to get hurt unless they use X or Y.

The Danger of Governmental Parenting

Bob Zadek: What we have is an economic system that sees an opportunity, so they sell safety once the parents are conditioned that there is danger at every turn. That’s a marketplace to business. Thus, so many products are available to parents and with the encouragement of the parents to buy it. I made reference to the government, and you appropriately corrected me and said broader than just the government. I want our audience to understand how much government, 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. When we come back from break, I want you to help us understand all of the spies that the government has created to keep an eye on parents without us being aware of it. Government has created spies to keep an eye on parents without us really being aware of it.

The establishment has set up a pretty gosh darn efficient in a scary way system of bringing parental child behavior to the attention of the authorities. Tell us a bit about that system, involving nurses, teachers, doctors, hospitals, how it all works and the good and bad of the system.

Lenore Skenazy: Sure. The assumption is that whenever you see a kid alone or whenever a kid is brought into a doctor’s office or a hospital, they may have been beaten by the parents. The assumption when you see a kid outside is, “where’s their mom?” That is what it boils down to. You might’ve read about this story. There was a single mom in South Carolina named Deborah Harrell. She had a nine year old daughter and the mom worked at McDonald’s.

It is the summer, there’s no school obviously. 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 is a really popular park, so popular that they actually serve breakfast and lunch there. There’s a million kids, parents, summer workers, and sprinklers. And so the mom agrees. She let the girl go there, the girl has a phone, and the girl plays there day one, day two, and day three some lady says, “Little girl, where is your mother?”

And she says, “Oh, my mom’s working.” She tells the lady she works at McDonald’s.

Rather than calling the mom to make sure everything’s fine or being a real good samaritan and watching the girl, the lady calls 9-1-1. The cops come and take the girl away and put the mom in jail for not supervising her child. The videotape of the interrogation is available. I wrote about this at Reason.com and if you look up Debra Harell, you’ll see the interrogation, which is like, “You thought you could let your kid stay outside? Don’t you realize your job is to love your child?”

The Fragile Generation

Children One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping…

reason.com

“I do love her I was just giving her some outside time!”

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 decision. I don’t even think that the girl would have been better off if she had been 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 mom takes her eyes off her off her kid. And fortunately there was a human cry across the country at this treatment of the mother.

Eventually all charges were dropped and her daughter was returned to her. But why should any parent have to worry about being second guessed when they are making a decision based on their own rational judgment? So the bar for what is considered abuse and neglect has been lowered dramatically.

Bob Zadek: The decision should be with the parent, not with the police.

Lenore Skenazy: Right. Because the parents know their child the best. Some people say to me sometimes like I wouldn’t let my 12 year old go to the park, but I would let my seven year old. Because they know the kids. So, let your seven year old and don’t let your 12 year old. But that’s up to you. 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 gone 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 calls 9-1-1 and says there’s a child out here, doesn’t mean that that instigates an investigation. This is not up to the government or another mom to decide how this other mom is raising her family. Simple as that.

Bob Zadek: It is a question of the government inviting itself into the most intimate relationship of parent and child. It scares me so much because 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.”

It is such a vote of no-confidence for American’s ability to collectively be good parents 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. We wouldn’t have gotten this far as a species if parents were terrible at it because he would have died off. You often mention to your audiences about how it is quite natural for children to know how to be children and parents and how to be parents in every species, not just humans. So for the government to invite themselves to this party is wrong-headed not data-driven and a profound violation of Liberty.

Lenore Skenazy: The data-driven part is so interesting because just because somebody else sees this kid outside and thinks that is too young doesn’t mean it is too young. It doesn’t mean that the child is in danger. And yet we’re allowed to treat it as if this was an incident.

I would 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. It’s like, and then? That was the incident, they were walking home. I have a bunch of examples of this. It also starts in the mindset that we were talking about earlier. One is the idea that all children are vulnerable to everything all the time. You have to call when you see a child outside because why isn’t there a minder with them?

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. Fear is like another thing that’s keeping parents crazed. There are no stories of this 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 Deborah Harrell story was giving was the worst of the worst.

But the point is that 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 for letting your child play outside and play on the front lawn. As awful as it is to get investigated and it’s a travesty, don’t start worrying that the second you do that your kids will be taken away and you’ll never see them again. That’s almost fear from our side. But I do want laws.

I do want laws that guarantee parents the right to make decent, loving, rational common sense decisions without having to second guess themselves that somebody else might mistake this for a crime and start an investigation. In Utah, there was a law passed now it’s two years ago in 2018 called the “Free range parenting law.” It says that it is not letting your kid play outside, walk to school, come home with a latch key. Wait briefly in a car when it’s not too hot or too cold. If that’s the complaint that somebody calls 911 with we will not go and investigate because this is not, these are not crimes.

We’re hoping that more States pass a law like that. The 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 allows for similar laws to be passed in other States.

The Battle for Recess: Children’s Revolution

Bob Zadek: The American revolution was fought in part over the complaint, “no taxation without representation.” 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 and at the risk of forming a battle cry for young children tell us, because it’s such an 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, where if there’s snow on the ground, children aren’t allowed to go outside, or if it’s too cold in Texas, the children aren’t allowed to go outside, and in Alaska they weren’t allowed to go outside if it was 30 degrees or something. It goes back to the whole idea that kids are so vulnerable that they can’t handle the atmosphere. 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 your brother with two fingers. Otherwise you’re going to get too rough and people will get hurt.

There are places where there’s no tag because nobody should be hit. I just want to go a step further than that and say that when we get to the point where we start thinking the 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 in seventh grade who barely sound like they’re doing what I’d say 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. 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 would tend to tend to go into a store filled with strangers without my mom. So a store is written as like a group of strangers that just oppose the place you go to buy stuff.

I was hesitant to try baking because I didn’t want to set anything on fire. I was a little hesitant to use a sharp knife as my parents had never let me before. So that’s a boy of 12 or 13 years old who hasn’t been allowed to cut his own meat. 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 rome the world and climb a tree, etc. you are not allowing kids to develop the wherewithal to deal with anything.

If you are scared of 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, these kids are always thinking of the worst case scenario. You’ve really warped these children’s view of what they’re capable of and what the world is about. They will think they can’t do anything and that the world is really difficult and dangerous. And that is not healthy and not fair to the kids.

So the kids were writing these essays because they were doing a let grow project at the school. 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. So the let grow project, which you can find that let grow.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.

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, “Oh, it’s for homework. I guess I got to say yes,” and the kid goes and runs an errand to the store or goes to the park or makes the cake, you know, 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’s the only thing that changes the culture back to normal. 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’s the key. Talking about this, railing at the issues, being, sorry at 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 school and a whole whole district full of kids doing things on their own. It recalibrates everything. So that’s the only answer that I found in 12 years.

Bob Zadek: The question that flashes into my brain is, from which generation is the Navy SEALs going to get their new recruits, who from kids who are at 14 are afraid to use a sharp knife? Is that who’s going to protect us? Oh my goodness, we’re doomed. So we are performing this profound disservice to children. We are abusing them in a way without playing to any word games by depriving them of survival tools. They don’t have ability to survive. It is evidenced now in the colleges where children must be protected by trigger warnings in college, and they can’t have their feelings hurt. They cannot hear a point of view that are opposite from theirs.

“The question that flashes into my brain is, from which generation is the Navy SEALs going to get their new recruits, who from kids who are at 14 are afraid to use a sharp knife?”

How to Help Let Grow

Bob Zadek: We are depriving the children of Liberty in the truest sense of the word. Benjamin Franklin, his warning to us, says that “those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety,” from Benjamin Franklin. What resources are available to parents and how can our listeners help your organization?

Lenore Skenazy: Our goal is to make kids antifragile. If you go to letgrow.org you’ll find the let grow project, that you can 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. You can look at free-range law and you will find 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.

Related Shows:

A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom
Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom, December 7, 2014
Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List, May 8, 2016
Environmentalism- The Libertarian Way, with Dr. Mary Ruwart, July 24, 2011