Selects: How Free Range Parenting Works

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode: Selects: How Free Range Parenting Works

Date: February 21, 2026
Hosts: Josh Clark & Charles W. "Chuck" Bryant
Original Episode Air Date: April 2019 (Selects rerun)

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Overview

This episode explores the concept of free range parenting—a parenting philosophy advocating for giving children more independence and unsupervised play, reminiscent of how previous generations were raised. The hosts, Josh and Chuck, examine how free range parenting emerged, the societal factors that have made it controversial (and sometimes even illegal), its benefits and risks, and the cultural trends driving helicopter parenting. The discussion is rooted in personal anecdotes, sociological analysis, and a close look at crime statistics and psychology research related to childhood independence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Personal Context & Privilege

• Parenting Disclaimer (03:05):
  • Hosts clarify they're not prescribing how anyone should parent.
  • They acknowledge the privilege inherent in being able to choose free range parenting.
  • Chuck: “To be able to entertain the idea of free range parenting comes from a place of extreme privilege.” (03:16)
• Josh’s Amendment (03:45):
  • Notes that some parents may practice free range parenting by necessity, not choice.
  • The privilege is in having the choice to do so, not just the act itself.

2. Childhood Then vs. Now

• Nostalgic Upbringing (05:20–09:00):
  • Both hosts describe their own unsupervised childhoods: riding bikes, exploring woods, returning at sunset.
  • Emphasize that freedom came alongside rules and structure, not permissive neglect.
  • Josh: “We actually had plenty of rules and structure. We were just also given a lot of freedom to do things… including geographic freedom.” (08:24)
• Changing Times (10:57):
  • Shift towards heavily scheduled, supervised childhoods.
  • Modern parents often structure children’s lives down to “the minute.”
  • The rise of free range parenting as a formal movement is in response to this pendulum swing.

3. Origins of the Free Range Parenting Movement

• Lenore Skenazy’s Story (17:04):
  • Skenazy, a journalist, wrote about letting her 9-year-old ride the NYC subway alone.
  • Sparked national debate and led her to launch a blog, “Free Range Kids.”
  • Chuck: “She got a lot of blowback from this... there were people that said it was neglect and abuse.” (17:46)
• Social Burden (18:24):
  • Free range parents face significant social judgment, especially from more protective “helicopter” parents.

4. Roots of Parental Fear & the Culture of Risk

• Media Influence and Major Crimes (22:23–27:34):
  • Cases like Etan Patz and Adam Walsh in the late ’70s and early ’80s, plus the advent of 24-hour cable news (CNN, 1980), intensified public fear.
  • Media saturation makes rare tragedies appear ubiquitous.
  • Josh: “It’s really in the best interests of news networks like CNN to feed people that (fear)...” (25:30)
• Other Contributors (27:34):
  • Rise of “expert culture,” constant advice-giving, and fear of litigation.
  • Chuck: “We live in what [Skenazy] dubs an expert society... everywhere you turn there’s another expert telling you how you’re doing it wrong.”

5. Statistics: How Dangerous Is the World, Really?

• Stranger Danger Debunked (33:07–35:31):
  • Only 1% of 27,000 missing children cases are non-family abductions (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children).
  • Of child murders (age <5, 1980–2008): 63% parents, 23% male acquaintances, only 3% by strangers.
  • Josh: “...the chances of that [stranger abduction] are so small, it’s actually not worth limiting your kid’s freedom because of that outlier possibility.” (34:48)
• Hosts Stress Perspective:
  • They’re not minimizing the pain for affected families, but advocate proportionality in policy and personal response.

6. The Case for Free Play

• Benefits Outlined (38:33):
  • Cites American Academy of Pediatrics: ‘Free play’ is crucial for developing social, emotional, cognitive, and self-regulation skills.
  • Contributes to overall adaptability, problem-solving, and ‘executive functioning’ for adulthood.
  • Chuck: “Nothing will teach a lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with their peers.” (42:38)
• Developmental Psychology (40:06):
  • Cites Peter Gray: Children in all human societies naturally gravitate towards free play.
  • Unsupervised play is fundamentally different from adult-directed activities.

7. Potential Downsides of Overprotection

• Impact on Mental Wellbeing (44:26):
  • Teens today report less internal control over their lives, correlating with higher anxiety and depression.
  • Hypothesize that decline in free play contributes to poorer mental health outcomes.
• Failure and ‘The Dignity of Risk’ (46:36):
  • Learning from failure and risk is essential to child development.
  • “Dignity of risk” means letting kids prove themselves through graded independence.

8. Socioeconomic and Legal Complications

• Privilege and Legal Jeopardy (50:49):
  • Lower-income families and people of color are more likely to be punished for practices akin to free range parenting—e.g., Deborah Harrell’s arrest for letting her daughter play in a park while she worked.
  • Chuck: “You are way more likely to get a visit from Child Protective Services if you are poor or if you are a person of color or minority.”
• State Responses & Legal Reform (48:14):
  • In 2018, Utah passed a law redefining neglect, supporting parents who want to give children limited independence.
  • Many other states still criminalize leaving children unsupervised, with ambiguous standards.

9. Tailoring Parenting to Context

• Practicality and Safety (53:06):
  • Free range freedom depends on the child, neighborhood, resources, and individual readiness.
  • Emphasize gradual, thoughtful introduction of independence.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On privilege:
  Chuck: “To be able to entertain the idea of free range parenting comes from a place of extreme privilege.” (03:16)
• On nostalgia and risk:
  Josh: “We were just also given a lot of freedom to do things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom.” (08:24)
• On societal fear:
  Josh: “We think it’s way more dangerous than it actually is because the statistics are inflated by hearing about this stuff all the time.” (27:34)
• On the legal paradox:
  Chuck: “It is very much a case of privilege to even be allowed to do this [free range parenting] without getting a visit from Child Protective Services.” (51:49)
• On developmental need for free play:
  Chuck: “Nothing will teach a lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with their peers.” (42:38)
• On gradual independence:
  Josh: “You slowly build your kid up for this... It’s very kind of thoughtful and protracted and planned, but not necessarily shared with the kid that it’s planned.” (46:36)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:05 – 04:25: Opening disclaimer about parenting advice and privilege
• 05:20 – 09:00: Anecdotes about unsupervised childhoods and changing norms
• 17:04 – 19:19: Lenore Skenazy’s subway story and rise of "Free Range Kids" movement
• 22:23 – 29:15: Media, fear, litigation, and the societal shift towards helicopter parenting
• 33:07 – 36:24: Statistical realities of child kidnappings and dangers
• 38:33 – 42:38: Psychological benefits of free, unsupervised play
• 44:26 – 46:36: Overprotection, mental health, and the “dignity of risk”
• 48:14 – 54:29: Laws, privilege, and legal jeopardy for free range parents
• 54:29 – 55:26: Concluding reflections: Context matters, cello jokes, and encouragement to research more

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Flow & Tone

The tone is relaxed, personal, and humorous—rooted in the hosts’ own experiences. The discussion is egalitarian and nonjudgmental; while the hosts voice a preference for free range parenting, they respect the spectrum of parenting choices and the realities of social privilege and legal barriers. The content balances anecdote, research findings, critical reflection, and ethical considerations.

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Summary

This episode is a nuanced look at free range parenting, blending nostalgia, social critique, and developmental science. Josh and Chuck chart the history of childhood independence, the fears that have altered parenting culture, and the potential perils of both overprotection and unsupervised freedom. The episode asks listeners to balance reason, context, empathy, and evidence in their parenting philosophy, while advocating for social and legal structures that trust parents’ judgment—especially when privilege and inequality underlie who is "allowed" to give kids their freedom.

Transcript

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[Josh Clark]

Hey, guys, Josh here. And for this week's Select, I chose our April 2019 episode on free Range Parenting. This was an episode that I initially approached with some preconceptions, and they turned out to be quite wrong. I was raised with quite a bit of freedom, and I assume that parents still kind of raise their kids in that manner, but it turns out that they don't. And even more to the point, that's basically illegal these days. Fortunately, there's a movement pushing back against that, and I'm all for it. See what you decide in this great episode of Stuff youf Should Know.

[Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff youf Should Know about kids.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I coa right off the bat here?

[Josh Clark]

I presumed you would.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, there's a couple of coas I want to issue. One, we are not telling anyone how to parent their children.

[Josh Clark]

Indeed.

[Chuck Bryant]

And two, we realize that the whole concept of free range parenting that will follow comes from a place of extreme privilege.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

To be able to entertain the idea of free range parenting comes from a place of extreme privilege.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, can I amend that, or should I wait until we talk about that part to kind of amend it?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, you can amend it.

[Josh Clark]

So to me, free range parenting, having the freedom to free range parent. What I saw, it ties in with parenting that's already being done by people who might not have a choice. Are you saying that the ability to choose whether you want a free range parent or not is privileged?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Yes. Agreed. I gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, we'll get into that. But we'll get into that at the end. But I just want to just go ahead and leave that off because it's a lot of privilege involved with being able to say, you know, that you want a free range parent.

[Josh Clark]

Are you going to. Are you going to land one way or another on it?

[Chuck Bryant]

On whether or not I support free range parenting?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, Emily and I don't title it or say, hey, I think we should do this as a style, but we, as it turns out, are sort of dabbling in free range parenting a bit. As much as you can for a three and a half year old.

[Josh Clark]

So you're listening to your instincts.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've never read a parenting book not knocking them, but I've never read one. We parent by instinct. And our daughter has always had a lot of room to free play and explore and figure stuff out on her own and fall down and get back up and all that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I'm reading between the lines. You guys haven't decided yet.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so ready? Free range parenting. Go.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So do you remember when we were kids, Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Back when we used to hang out when we were kids. Mm. And we would go ride bikes together at, like, sunrise. We had no idea where we were gonna go, but it might involve a swamp, could involve a glacier. There may have been, like, rail Riding hobos that we shared lunch with. Who knows what the day was going to bring, but we were up for all that and may or may not have engaged in any of that during that day. And then at the end of the day, around sunset, maybe a little later, depending on whether it was summer or not, we would ride our bikes back home, say, see you tomorrow, go to our respective houses, and then talk the night away on our soup cans that were connected by a rope. And that was our childhood. Right. We turned out okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. I have talked about my childhood some growing up, but, you know, I grew up in the woods, basically on, like, a couple of acres of land with a creek and forest, not in a subdivision, but on a street with, like, seven houses in the woods.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And my mother had a. We had this giant iron bell, probably about 18 inches across, mounted on a big, like, telephone pole.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Kind of right beside our driveway. And she would. At the. You know, when it was dinner time in the evening, she would go pull that bell, and you could hear it from, like, a mile away, this. The bell tolling. And that's when Scott and I were like, all right, you know, it's time to go eat after having been out all day long with zero supervision. And I had a great mom. Like, she wasn't neglectful. This is just how it was done.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Were you a latchkey kid? I know your mom was a teacher, but did she stay at home with you?

[Chuck Bryant]

She didn't go back to teaching. She quit teaching to raise kids and then started up again when I was like, I feel like 8th or 9th grade or something like that.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Yeah. My mom took off until I was, like, six, seven, I guess, like kindergarten. No, maybe she's still around in kindergarten. I guess about first grade when I was. When I started school, and she was like, okay, I'm going back to nursing. And then after that point, I was a latchkey kid for, like, the rest of my life. But I had, like, older sisters who would be home around the time I would. And. But I had, like, my own key to my house that was just a couple blocks away from my school. And I would walk myself or ride my bike myself, and then I would be home by myself, and if my sister was doing something else for a couple hours until either my mom or my dad showed up. And I think I turned out pretty well, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

I didn't know that I even had a house key ever.

[Josh Clark]

Well, you guys probably didn't lock your doors. If your mom rang a bell on the telephone pole to call you in for dinner?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I don't think we locked our door.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, but you had free range, literally, of your house, your yard, the woods around you.

[Chuck Bryant]

But.

[Josh Clark]

But here's a really big caveat. From what I've seen. I think a lot of people who are like, who aren't familiar necessarily free range parenting assume that we could have done anything we wanted and gotten away with it because we had overly permissive parents. That's not the case for me. And I would dare say that wasn't the case for you as well. That we actually had plenty of rules and structure. We were just also given a lot of freedom to. To do things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. Yeah. So that is what I thought all kids had up to this time. And I knew that there was like such things as piano and Mandarin lessons or Mandarin classes, that kind of stuff. Like things that kids were taking more and more and they were really busy and stressed out and they had like iPhones at age 7, that kind of thing. But I still thought that this happened. And I was really shocked, about as shocked as I've ever been in researching an episode of Stuff youf Should Know to find that that is not the case. That not only does has this been kind of squeezed out by other activities, it's actually become criminalized behavior by society at large among the parents who are raising children today. I was blown away to find this out. I really legitimately didn't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, and getting back to the activities, you know, I played some soccer in high school and then I did like church sports, which there's not a lot of. I mean, I think we did like maybe one basketball practice a week, so it wasn't like everyday practice and stuff like that. I never took lessons of any kind. Like, I taught myself guitar and all that stuff. So, like, I don't think I literally ever had a structured post school activity in my life.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Did you say church sports?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I played church softball and basketball.

[Josh Clark]

Did, like, everybody win every game?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it was actually fiercely competitive.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, okay. I'm just kidding.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, no, no, it was. It was. It was legit. Like, we had a pretty good basketball team and the league was pretty impressive too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But, yeah, I never signed. I never had a single class. Like, the idea of my mom having been like, all right, I'm gonna take you to your violin lesson. And then on the weekends we have gymnastics and whatever else people are doing these days was just. It just. We didn't do that. She was just like, Go play.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So there has been, and we'll talk about all the reasons why, but there has been a movement away from the kind of childhood we had, a very pronounced one. If you look at, you know, culture is a pendulum swinging one way or another, it has swung very far, the opposite way to where kids lives are structured down to the minute, where they have actual calendars and schedules that they have to keep up with because they have so many things going on. And there has come about in reaction to that, an antithesis, basically. And it is nothing more than letting kids grow up the way that you and I did. And it has become so novel in the face of the world and the culture that we have in raising kids in the United States now that it has its own name. It's a movement. They have to go to court to defend themselves. It's so weird. But really, if you strip it down and look at it, all they're doing is raising their kids the way you and I and Jerry, I'm sure, was raised.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah, I mean, to a certain degree, but the whole idea. And it's not just like, I want you to grow up the way I did. What it really is is an argument that says, you know what? Kids will grow up healthier and happier if they have freedom to play and they have freedom to fail and freedom to get in a playground scrap and to work it out with another kid on their own and figure things out for themselves. They will end up better people because of this. It's not, oh, I'm lazy or I have nostalgia for my childhood. And there's a lot of research into this now or some research that says, no, what we're doing is trying to make better future adults by not hovering over my child, scheduling them to death. And, you know, every time they fall, run over, pick themselves up and, like, and, you know, rock them to sleep, you know, if they get a boo boo.

[Josh Clark]

Right, So I sound so judgy.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't mean that.

[Josh Clark]

Well, let's. Let's just take a second. Let's take a break real quick and, like, collect ourselves, and then we'll come back and we'll really get into what free range parenting is.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, now, when you're on the road, driving in your truck, why not learn

[Josh Clark]

a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right.

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[Chuck Bryant]

learning things with shock and Josh stuff you should know.

[Josh Clark]

Okay Chuck, so I think you demonstrated something that has made free range parenting very unpalatable to a lot of parents who don't raise their kids that way and that it seems to be a reaction almost an in your face to some people reaction or judgment of that helicopter style parenting where you're always kind of around your kid. They're their entire life is very structured and supervised including playtime and that free range parenting is meant to be a reaction to that and in some ways it is a reaction to that. But it also stands on its own. And if you step back and look at it and look at free range parenting. Not as a reaction to helicopter parenting, but as its own thing, its own philosophy for how to raise a kid. And you strip away, like, the judginess and all that stuff. It holds up to me. And like you said, there's been a lot of. A lot more study recently. But the whole thing really started back in 2008 by a journalist. It wasn't a child psychologist, it wasn't a child development psychologist, it wasn't a child development child analyst, psychologist, none of those things. I made that last one up, by the way. It was a journalist named Lenore Skenazzi.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So she is a New York mom. And in 2008, she wrote a column for the New York sun called why I let my 9 year old ride the Subway Alone. She was in a store one day in Manhattan, and her son had been badgering her to be able to ride the subway and bus back home by himself. And finally one day she said, all right, great, let's do this. Here's a subway map, here's a subway card, here's 20 bucks. Here's some change for a payphone. Have at it. The kid made it home and she said he was, quote, ecstatic with independence.

[Josh Clark]

What a great quote.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And like, she got a lot of blowback from this. From, like, the judgment goes both ways. I mean, there were people that said it was neglect and abuse for her to do this and let her kid ride the subway alone.

[Josh Clark]

Oh. Oh, yes. Yeah. If you had to divide the two sides up and start weighing which one was a little judgier, you would definitely. Your hand would be much lower holding the helicopter parent side for sure. Yeah. If you're a free range kid proponent or you raise your kids following that, there's a whole burden, a whole social burden that you have in addition to the burden of raising your kids that you have to put up with. For sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And I should point out too real quick that it all depends upon your kid, too. I don't think there are any sweeping generalizations.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

My daughter has always been very, just instinctively kind of safe and smart about stuff. Other kids in her class are just like little wild banshees. And I would probably be a lot more worried if she was the kind of kid who has an instinct to jump out of a tree instead of back down very slowly out of a tree. So.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's all different depending on your kid,

[Josh Clark]

you know, or a kid who, like, can't seem to shake. Being totally fascinated with matches or knives or something like that. Yeah. I think that was a really good point. Like, you shouldn't sweep or generalize. But I think that's an even larger point too. People should be left to raise their children how they see fit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Given a certain amount of trust invested in the parents, that the parent isn't going to harm the kid or let harm come to the kid because it's their parent. Right, right. Okay. So this whole thing started with Lenore Skenazy, and like you said, she got a lot of blowback, but she also got a really positive response, too, and actually parlayed the whole thing from that New York sun article into a blog that she called Free Range Kids. So from what I understand, she coined the term free range Kids and started writing about this stuff. And at first, a lot of it was just like, it's. It's good, it's on its face. It's obvious that this is how you should raise a kid. You know, kids need play. They need to learn how to pick themselves back up when they fall down. And not only that, you're doing a disservice to your kid when you pick them up after they fall down, because they're not learning how to get back up themselves. And over time, it kind of went. As people became more and more enamored with her philosophy or this whole Free Range Kids idea, more child psychologists started weighing in, and the whole movement kind of took the shape. And they figured out that for a parent to kind of see the light as far as they were concerned, they had to first change the mindset about what kind of world they were raising a kid in. Because if you're a free range kid parent, you probably don't feel as threatened by the world in general as, say, a helicopter parent would. Ounce for ounce.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, when parents have experimented with this, the changes that they've seen in their kids have been pretty striking, if anecdotal. There's this one woman, Dana Blumberg. She's a school counselor in suburban Chicago. And we should also point out, depends on where you live as well. If you live in a very safe suburb or way out in the country, it's a little different than a kid, like in the middle of the city or something like that. But she gave her kid a lot of free range starting in the second grade and got some neighborhood parents involved in letting their kids do it. And they said, before you know it, they had this little, you know, little gang of kids kind of touring around the neighborhood on their own, and she's getting all these texts from these different parents saying like what a big change has happened in their own kid. One parent even said it was life changing for her daughter, gave her a new sense of confidence. And that's sort of what the free range thing can look like. But like you were saying, it all comes down to assuaging a parent's fear. The biggest fear, which is my child will get abducted or my child will get. There'll be a sexual predator to target my child or heaven forbid my child will get kidnapped and murdered.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Because you can understand and it's really tough to fault somebody who doesn't want their kid wandering around by themselves because they're afraid that something really bad is going to happen to their kid. So kind of the first step to, to adopting like a free range kid attitude is to adjusting how you see the world. And they think that with. There are several things like if you. It's really fascinating to me. I love cultural changes, especially when we can point to different things, seemingly unrelated things that all kind of converge and has changed the world in ways you never think of that seems to have happened to produce today's helicopter parents or at least to produce the level of fear, the climate of fear that the world is an inherently dangerous, brutal, sadistic place where children have no call to be wandering around themselves. That that is actually you can trace that back to a convergence of things that have happened starting in like the late 70s and early 80s. And in particular there were some high profile child murder cases basically that all kind of took place between 1979 and 1981. And those really changed a lot of parents minds about things.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. In New York, the very Sad story of 6 year old Eaton Patz disappeared and was later found out to have been murdered. John Walsh, very famously his son Adam, he's the one that does all the TV shows now. I think he's on the hunt on CNN now and really made this his life's work. But his son Adam disappeared and died in 1981. Obviously the Atlanta child murders from 79 to 81 and this all converged around the same time. Like you were talking about these, these strange things aligning cable news coming out. CNN was launched in 1980. So all of a sudden you have parents that are getting this kind of constant flow of fear from the news about their children.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Because so if a prior to cable news, 24 hour news, if something happened to a kid somewhere in some state, maybe if it were just particularly egregious or outrageous or everything was kind of set up in just the Right way it would capture the attention of the national media and you'd hear about it around the country, but that was really, really rare. And then second to that, the other place that you would hear about child abductions, child murders, horrific like accidents that befell a child would be locally, right? Like on your local news that maybe, maybe expanded to a region, maybe the state, but it was pretty localized. And so if statistically something like that happened fairly rarely, you weren't going to hear about it very often. And so in your mind it was a pretty rare thing and you weren't afraid of the world in general. But what a lot of commentators and a lot of, well, some of the people I ran across in research propose is that with cable news, that potential pool of horrible things that befell kids to talk about expanded to the entire nation. Not just local, not just regional or even state, but the whole nation. So now all the bad things happening to all the kids around the nation was potential news fodder. And so when you were watching cnn, it seemed like every other story was about a kid who had been abducted and killed or sexually assaulted or any number of horrible things. And there's really no way to put it other than that that kind of stuff keeps people glued to their televisions. And so it's really in the best interests of news networks like CNN to feed people that, because while you're glued to your television, you're also glued to the ads that they show too. And so from this model came a climate of fear that a lot of people point to is like, this is the source. And it's not just cnn. CNN gets pointed too, because it was the one that started it all, that was Ted Turner who came up with this and started the first 24 hour cable news network. But all cable news is guilty of this and became guilty of it pretty quickly because that's the model of cable news. And because cable news laid that foundation and showed like, oh, you got that kind of, you can really make some revenue. Nightly news tried its best to resist that kind of thing, but it kind of had to follow suit a little bit too. So it would become more sensational from the 80s onward as well. Not nearly anything like cable news, but compared to how it had been before, it was much more sensationalized because it was following that cable news model. And all that put together created the foundation of why people are just scared to death about the world, because we think that it's way more dangerous than it actually is because the statistics are inflated by hearing about this stuff. All the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And there's another couple of things that contributed that Skenazy has pointed out. One, we live in what she dubs an expert society. So again, on cable news or on social media, like everywhere you turn there's another expert coming out with a new book they're trying to sell, basically telling you how you're doing it wrong as a parent, how you should do it. And then the whole fact that we live in a very litigious society now. So what if I want to free range parent my kid and they go down and get their friend out of the house and they're riding bikes and one of them gets gets hurt? Like, are their parents going to sue me because my kid went and lured them into the mean streets?

[Josh Clark]

Right. Well, yeah, that was another thing that happened, chuck. In the 70s, the idea of negligence became really big and there was what's called like a tort revolution to where you went from, well, you know, your kid didn't know that the other kid's arm was going to get broken. So you can't get sued for that to. No, that was negligent and we're going to allow that. And more and more case law expanded to, to make people think like lawyers because of it too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Dude, when you were a kid, I mean that must have been a thing because did you ever have the lawsuit threat from another child? Yeah, that was such a thing, like, yeah, I'm going to kick your butt or whatever. It was like, oh yeah, well my dad's going to sue you for all the money you got.

[Josh Clark]

That's right, he's a dentist.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's so funny, man. To think back in the 70s, these children threatening lawsuits on one.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I'd forgotten about that for like ripping their shirt or something. Any number of things could generate a loss.

[Chuck Bryant]

But in the end, Skenazy says, and this is, I think a pretty relevant quote, she said all of this stuff combined has convinced parents that they have to be both omniscient and omnipotent because of fear and monitor every single move that your kid makes. So let's take a break and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit about the facts about whether or not your kids are really in danger out on the streets right after this. Well, now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn

[Josh Clark]

a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff you should know. All right.

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[Josh Clark]

All right Chuck, so like we were saying to to not be just scared to death because you're letting your kid, say, walk home from the park or something like that unsupervised. You have to go through a change in mindset. Like you have to stop seeing the world is a very, very scary place. And sometimes statistics can be actually kind of comforting. So the free range kids movement has really made one of its foundational support poles. And you'd think I would actually be getting better at this all this time. But no, I love it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sometimes to watch you stumble through something like that.

[Josh Clark]

Anyway, they talk a lot about statistics and crime statistics related to kids in particular. And when you look at them in the cold, hard light of the day, it doesn't seem like it's a very dangerous world after all.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. If you look at the numbers, the national center for Missing and Exploited Children says that just 1% of the 27,000 missing children cases are non family abductions. And that also includes like friends and acquaintances. So if you're talking about literally a stranger targeting your child and plucking them off a playground, it is exceedingly rare that that happens.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that. So 1% is non family. Right, right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But that also doesn't even break down like if it's a friend or an acquaintance of the family or something like that. So literal strangers snatching your kid rarely, rarely, rarely happens.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So even that, even including friends of the family, somebody who's not a direct family member but known to the kid, a non stranger, that's 270 kids that that happened to in 2017 out of 20. 27,000, I think, which is. That's awful for those kids that they were kidnapped. Right. That's another thing too, is when you throw out statistics like this, it's really easy to be like, see, that was it. But you don't want to do that because to those 270 families, that's all that matters. And that's really important to remember as well when we're kind of tossing out these statistics too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And not to make light of family abductions, which is 91% of abductions. Those are horrific and traumatic as well. We're just talking about the bare bones of like the fear that if I let my kid go to a park, a stranger's gonna pluck them.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Right. So even that, even if you look at it, it's 27,000 out of all the kids in the United States in 2017, 27,000 of them went missing in 2017. And the vast majority of them ran away. So if you're worried that your kid is going to get plucked by a stranger, specifically out of a park somewhere because you let them go to the park, what the free range parenting people are saying, if you look at the statistics, the chances of that are so small that it's actually not worth limiting your kids freedom of movement because of that outlier possibility. It just doesn't. It's just a disproportionate response to that risk is what they're saying.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. If you want to talk about the Worst thing that you can imagine, which is child murder. From 1980 to 2008, statistics about murders of children under five years old, 63% of the time the parents are the ones who did it, followed by 23%. So that's 86% total. 23% are male acquaintances. So like mom's boyfriend or something like that. 7% are other relatives. So only 3% of all murders of young children are strangers.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So again and again, jinx, we're addressing the fear of strangers doing something to your child, not making light of these other statistics.

[Josh Clark]

And there are parents out there who are like, good, that's enough. The fact that it happens to one kid makes me want to protect my child and make sure that they don't do that. Okay, you're the parent, you're raising your kid in that way. I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But again, what the free range kids people are saying is, is it really worth that? Like, what about that? I mean, is it really worth that kind of a response? And we'll get to that. Because you could say, like, if there were no negative aspects of completely ensconcing your kid in protection, then the free range kid advocates wouldn't have anything. They could be like, okay, well whatever, that's what you're doing with your kid. But there's suspicions that actually is detrimental to the development of a kid, protecting them from everything at all costs. And I think that's one of the big other foundational platform post tenants of the free range kids thing. That one was for showing off.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so building on that, like you were saying, there has to be like, in order to get a parent on board with a free range parenting lifestyle. It's not just I want to be lazy or I want to go back to my childhood. It's a parent who thinks there are actual benefits to doing so and that that outweighs the risk, like you were saying, of the 3% chance or the 1% or the 0.5% chance that something's gonna happen to my kid if they're on their own. There is evidence, and it's growing and growing evidence that all these efforts to schedule all these activities for your kid are overlooking one big fundamental element of raising a healthy, well adjusted child that seems to be getting lost more and more, which is something called free play. The American Academy of Pediatrics has a report out that said that free play promotes social. I'm sorry, social.

[Josh Clark]

I like it. It's the new way of saying it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Social, emotional, cognitive, language and self regulation skills that build executive Function and a pro social brain. And play is fundamentally important for learning 21st century skills like problem solving, collaboration and creativity and executive functioning, skills that are critical for adult success. Right.

[Josh Clark]

And they threw that last one in to be like, well, okay, maybe play's good, but it's not going to help them in life. And they're saying, yes, it will actually help them in life. And that by keeping them from playing, you're basically creating a little adult from the nursery. Which is interesting to me, Chuck, because prior to the 19th century, when you were a kid, starting around age five or something, you. You had a job. If it wasn't around, like your family's farm, maybe you were helping out with the wash that your mom took in. Who knows? But then you, like, there was no such thing as childhood, really. And then we moved away from that and we developed childhood. And now it seems like we're moving away from childhood now, and we're taking kids and they're not. They're not working on the farm. We're making them little CEOs and marketing directors and brand managers and stuff like that. But they're losing their childhood in that bargain is I think, what they're saying. And from play specifically, play helps, but it helps also, like, just in and of itself for its own sake, but it also helps eventually down the road, it's an investment that will pay off, I think, in terms that helicopter parents can understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There's another guy named Peter Gray. He's a developmental psychologist. He has a book called Free to Learn and founded a nonprofit, I believe, with, yeah, Skenazy, called Let Grow. Little play on words there. And he basically says that if you look back through human evolution, children, their education was through play with their peers. And if you look at societies and cultures in the world today that, I mean, how would you classify these cultures, traditional societies?

[Josh Clark]

I'm not sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe. But they say that children of these cultures that still play and explore freely, if they're left to do that, they will do so into their teen years. Like, that is their natural instinct is to be among their peers. Free playing, Right.

[Josh Clark]

And so, like, I think one of the problems that helicopter parents have with the idea of play is that, like, it's. It's a waste of time. The kid could be learning, like cello or, you know, doing math flashcards, or, like, creating a better foundation for a better future for themselves. And that if they're not doing that, they're falling behind. And so what Peter Gray and some of his ilk are saying is, like, no, no, no. Play helps develop a child in ways that no other thing you could possibly come up with or supervise or get them to do can. Because this is what we've done all this time and this is how we've built society, is letting little kids play and figure things out on their own. And he says that if there's a parent around, if it's supervised, if there's a parent even within like eyesight or earshot or, you know, there's a parent watching, it's going to be different. It has to be unsupervised, unstructured play so that the kids can be left to make up their own rules. Can, can be taught by the group that, you know, actually, no, that's not really fair or it's not really cool to take the ball and go home because you aren't winning. That's how you learn that stuff. And those are good things to learn. That makes you a more socially well adjusted kid than probably learning cello is going to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah, I mean, you can try and teach your kid by showing and by telling as much as you can as a parent, and that is all valuable. But nothing will teach a lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with their peers.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like I remember myself, you know, when I was a kid, like, the biggest lessons I learned were lessons that I learned among my peer group. You know, like tough, hard lessons that a lot of parents, I think, try and even shield their kid from because it's tough stuff sometimes. And you know, you don't want your kid to suffer traumas and things like that. But, and not to sound like a parent from the 1950s, but that stuff does help build your child's character. And I mean, I guess that sounds sort of old school. What it does is it helps them learn how to regulate their emotions and how to fit in with their peer group, which is in turn going to be eventually just society at large.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It's funny you say that that sounds kind of 50s, because this whole idea of like free range kids is kind of based on that philosophy of Dr. Spock, who was like one of the first experts, one of the first child experts that America ever really paid attention to. And he wrote a book in 1946 called the Common Sense Book of, Of Baby and Child. And he basically is saying all the stuff that free range kids parents say is like, let your kid play. Let your kid like learn through their own, their own way of exploring the world. Like, let them take risks, let them be themselves. Trust your instincts as a parent and so that's what free range parents seem to be kind of getting back to, is like the Dr. Spock School of thought. Benjamin Spock. Not the other Spock, not live long and prosper Spock. Did he have a first name?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I don't know, man. I didn't watch Star Trek.

[Josh Clark]

I didn't either. Just lay it on us. Million people who are going to send the email. We're waiting.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's something called the Internal External Locus of Control Scale. It's an odd name, but this is been around since the 1960s. It's a psychological indicator scale. And these days, since the 1960s, there's been a big shift in the scale and how teens report themselves and their internal control. And today teens report very little internal control over their own lives. And Gray believes, and I think he's really onto something here, that these high levels of anxiety and depression among kids these days has a lot to do with that. And he thinks it's directly related to the decline in free play over the last 40 or 50 years.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Which I want to say this is one psychologist's opinion. It makes a lot of sense to me and I'm sure it does to a lot of people. But this is not necessarily gospel truth or set in stone. The jury's still kind of out. But there is a lot of evidence out there that does seem like overprotecting your kid can stunt them emotionally or developmentally and then letting them go be themselves and learn things on their own and learn that they can pick themselves back up and still survive and failure is not the worst thing in the world, can actually help them develop. It's just like we routinely shoot holes in social psychology stuff all the time, and we do it gleefully. So I don't want to go the opposite way and just be like, but this one's wrong, because we agree with it. That's not necessarily the case, and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with it, but I tend to kind of favor that mentality, probably because it's how it was raised.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And like I said, it does sound like from the 1950s say that failure breeds character, but it really does is sort of a simplistic way to say it, but when you fail, you hopefully learn something and build on that. And that does build character.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Quite literally.

[Josh Clark]

One of the things they call that is the dignity of risk where you are showing your kid, I'm letting you go figure this out on your own. And another big misunderstanding with free range parents is that you just go from Zero. To walking, taking the subway in New York at the flip of a switch. That's not how it works. You slowly build your kid up for this. You know, the big thing that you write an article about. But there's, you know, dozens or scores or possibly hundreds of little interactions that you're having to kind of make sure that your kid is up for this when they're finally. When you decide they're finally ready to. And it's not just like flipping a switch. It's very kind of thoughtful and protracted and planned, but not necessarily shared with the kid that it's planned. Paying out of trust so that the kid can show you, yeah, I'm ready for this. I know what to do. I'm not just gonna, like, ball up on this on the ground in the subway and start crying until someone calls 911 and the cops come get me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah. And I'm sure when she sent her kid on the subway home that very first time, it wasn't just like, all right, here's the stuff. See you later. I'm sure there was a very serious talk, like, all right, dude, I trust you. I'm letting you do this. I know you know, the way we're gonna give this a shot. If I see you on the news in the middle of Times Square, like, you're gonna be in big trouble. I'm sure there was a lot of thought and talk that went into that, and you know what I'm saying?

[Josh Clark]

Yes, totally.

[Chuck Bryant]

And kids get that stuff, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. For sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Kids are smarter than people give them credit for a lot of times. I think it's interesting when it comes to the law because it's such a new thing in Utah. Last year, in 2018, it became the first state to pass what was called a free range parenting law, where it basically was just sort of redefining what child neglect was. And in Utah, I thought it was going to go the other way when I was reading this, but it actually went the way of sort of encouraging or being behind free range parenting, the new definition. A parent cannot be accused of neglect just because their kid is going to a store by themself that's down the street or playing outside alone or biking to school on their own or at home without a parent there if they're a minor, which is pretty interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I thought so too. But most free range parents are like, well, we don't want to live in Utah. So hopefully our states will all come up with similar laws that. That decriminalize free range parenting. Because in a lot of states, things like latchkey kids are illegal. Like you can have your kid taken from you if they are a latchkey kid under a certain age. I think in Washington, you have to be 14 to be left at home alone. Like, you could lose your kid. And so there's a real problem with trying free range parenting because part of this helicopter parenting society is also helicopter villaging. But rather than picking up the phone and calling the parents whose kids you see wandering alone down the street like you used to would have done, now people just call, pick up the phone and call the cops. And then the cops respond and they take the kid to Child Protective services and the parent has to go down and explain that they will never do this again and they're very, very sorry or else child Protective services will take their kid from them. Because most states rule on what's called the best interests of the child, which is subjective, is completely not based in any actual case law necessarily. It's just, does the Child Protective services person think that the kid is smart enough to walk from the playground to the house? No. Okay, well, we're taking your kid maybe permanently. And so it's really risky to raise your kid this way because people will call the cops if they see your kid walking down the street. And real trouble. Your parentship of your kid is in jeopardy at that moment, which has got to be one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a parent.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this is where we get back to the place of like, this is a privilege has a lot to do with this because when it comes to the law and children and Child Protective Services, you are way more likely to get a visit from Child Protective Services if you are poor or if you are a person of color or minority. Like, they may write an article about you in the local magazine praising you if you're like a white suburban parent of middle or upper middle class for letting your kid free range around. But in the case of like Deborah Harrell In 2014 in South Carolina, she wasn't like, oh, I want to be a free range parent. She's like, I am a working mom and I work at McDonald's and I'm finishing a shift and my nine year old daughter is playing at a park nearby until I'm done. And they sent her to jail for a night and took her daughter for two weeks away from her.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 17 days.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So it is very much a case of privilege to even be allowed to do this without getting a visit from Child Protective Services.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So Skenazy and some of the other free range parents say, right, this is why we need laws that are much more common sense and decriminalize this kind of behavior and put the trust back in parents to know that their kids are smart enough or if they think their kids aren't smart enough to be trusted with that kind of stuff. They wouldn't let them do that. They argue that this would benefit everybody, whether. No matter, you know, whether you're a minority or whatever socioeconomic status you have, which is true. It's a pretty sensible. It's sensible. But I think that kind of underscores the larger problem, which is some people don't have the choice to get childcare. If the school suddenly cancels class. You just can't afford it. What are you gonna do? And then your work says, well, you can't bring them here. This is work. What can you do? Hopefully you've raised your kid to a point where you can trust to go play, you know, next door at the playground or something like that. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to end up in trouble with the authorities. So it's a sticky situation that we're in, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is. And you know, again, it depends on your kid. It depends on where you live. Like in my brother's neighborhood, if I lived there, I would let my kid go out and do what she wanted when she was like seven. It's just so safe, and kids are everywhere on their own, doing stuff very much like it was when we were kids. At my house, I live next to a super scary, busy street. Like, I would never let her out of the front of my house, but even at three and a half, we let her go in the backyard by herself and do stuff all the time.

[Josh Clark]

Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, just this past weekend, I. She was out in the backyard and with the dogs, and I went out about a half an hour later, and she was walking through the garden with a watering can singing we will rock you. And I was like, all right, everything's fine. But again, she's in my enclosed backyard. I wasn't sweating it. I would never just open the front door and be like, go, have fun. Memorial drive's right there. Cars are going 60 miles an hour.

[Josh Clark]

But that's the point. It's all context. You would have had to have worked up to that point. She would have had to have shown you that she was able to be trusted with that busy street. And maybe she'd be 16 before you would. But that's the point. It's Context, you know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know, again, just do the best you can. It's hard. There are a thousand ways to do it, and everybody thinks their way is the right way.

[Josh Clark]

That's right. Also, just before we sign off, I want to say I didn't mean to pick on kids who take cello lessons. Cello is, by the way, my favorite stringed instrument, which means it was the one that was easiest called the mind. That's why I kept bringing up the cello. So all of you out there learning cello, hats off to you, because that's my fave string instrument.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. What if. What if Yo Yo Ma had just been free playing?

[Josh Clark]

Right? But I'll bet Yo Yo Ma did free play. I'll bet he did both. And if he didn't, I'll bet he regrets it. If you want to know more about free range kids, well, just go on the Internet and start reading, because there's a lot about it. And since I said that. Oh, also, there's a pretty good article on how stuff works. You can read, too. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I'm going to call this desert flooding. Hey, guys, Listen to the podcast this morning on Desert Survival. I live here in Phoenix, Arizona, and have for 19 years. And the flash flood issue is real. Even in metro Phoenix. They have a stupid motorist law here. And that's capitalized and in quotes. She said. And she said after. And during your heavy rains, a lot of washes fill with running water. A lot of the washes have been paved. Barriers will be put up when they flood, even if the water is only a few inches deep. But there is always someone who decides that their SUV or truck is hefty enough to get through. And their rescue is always on the nightly news because they have to pay for it. They actually have to pay for the cost of their rescue. Sometimes these daredevils don't fare too well. Actually, lives have been lost in less than a foot of moving water in a watch.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I believe that. I've heard six inches.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And Teresa Henberry closes by saying this. I do so enjoy your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Nice. Thank you, Teresa. We do so enjoy your emails, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, I like the way she put that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. If you want to be like Teresa and impress us with your verbal or written dexterity, we love that kind of stuff. You can go to stuffyouchouchou.com and you can look us up on the social links. You can also send us a podcast like Teresa did to stuff [e-mail]

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[Josh Clark]

only eggs I have in my fridge.

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