1KHO 527: The Age of the Trophy Child | Carl Honore, Under Pressure

Summary

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast - Episode 1KHO 527: The Age of the Trophy Child | Carl Honore, Under Pressure

Release Date: July 17, 2025
Host: Ginny Urich, Founder of 1000 Hours Outside
Guest: Carl Honore, Author of Under Pressure and In Praise of Slowness

---

Introduction to Carl Honore and His Work

Ginny Urich welcomes Carl Honore, an esteemed author known for his insightful works on time management, parenting, aging, and the slow movement. Honore's books, Under Pressure and In Praise of Slowness, have remained relevant decades after their publication, providing timeless guidance on navigating modern life's frenetic pace. Urich highlights Honore’s consistent theme across his work: the relationship with time and its impact on various aspects of life.

The Culture of Hyper-Parenting and the "Trophy Child"

Honore delves into the core subject of Under Pressure, addressing the intense pressures surrounding modern parenting. He introduces the concept of the "trophy child," a term he uses to describe children who are over-scheduled with extracurricular activities and academic pursuits in an attempt to mold them into high achievers.

Carl Honore [03:01]: "Children need slowness. They need to back off. They need the time to explore the world on their own terms."

Honore criticizes the excessive involvement parents have in their children's lives, likening it to turning parenting into a "competitive sport" or "product development." He cites examples such as Baby Einstein DVDs, baby sports clinics, and endless tutoring as manifestations of this hyper-parenting culture.

The Impact of Social Media on Parenting Pressures

Honore discusses how the advent of social media has amplified parenting pressures, creating a scenario where parents feel compelled to keep up with an ever-expanding "Joneses." This relentless comparison fosters anxiety and a race against the clock, detracting from genuine, unstructured childhood experiences.

Carl Honore [03:01]: "We have a very neurotic and unhealthy relationship with time. We see time as the enemy. Time is money."

Slow Parenting: A Path to More Balanced Childhoods

Honore advocates for "slow parenting," a philosophy that emphasizes patience, allowing children to grow at their own pace, and reducing the over-scheduling that currently dominates many children's lives. He emphasizes that slow parenting doesn't follow a strict paradigm but rather involves a thoughtful, individualized approach to each child's unique needs.

Carl Honore [06:37]: "It's about stepping back and saying, you know what? There's a whole different way of thinking about parenting, about childhood, about family life that's so much more nourishing."

Academic Obsession and the Shift Towards Slow Education

Addressing the obsession with academic achievement, Honore critiques the current educational systems' focus on metrics and grades. He explains how this approach leads to teaching to the test, stifling creativity and deep learning.

Carl Honore [19:49]: "Children only learning to get a good mark in the test. They're being tutored within an inch of their lives to score well in the test."

However, Honore notes a global movement towards "slow education," with countries like Singapore recalibrating their systems to balance academic pressures with creativity and critical thinking.

Carl Honore [20:32]: "There's a real drive to bring slowness back into the classroom, the school experience across the board, because slow works."

Embracing Boredom and Unstructured Play

Honore emphasizes the importance of allowing children to experience boredom, which he views as a catalyst for creativity, imagination, and emotional regulation. He contrasts this with the modern tendency to immediately intervene with gadgets or structured activities whenever a child expresses boredom.

Carl Honore [23:57]: "In those moments of unstructured time, of not knowing what's coming next, of boredom... children learn how to think, create, use their imagination."

Parental Ego and its Effects on Children

Honore explores the concept of the parental ego, where parents project their own desires and achievements onto their children. This dynamic can lead to children feeling pressured to meet unrealistic expectations, ultimately hindering their personal growth and happiness.

Carl Honore [11:44]: "Our children's accomplishments start to feel like our own. We're putting our child out into the world for the wrong reasons."

Patience in a Hurry-Up Culture

Honore discusses the cultural shift towards perpetual hurry and its detrimental effects on both parents and children. He advocates for cultivating patience as a means to foster a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Carl Honore [33:12]: "We need a bit of me time here as a culture to say, you know what? What are we going to do now?"

He references the pandemic as an inadvertent pause that allowed many people to experience the benefits of slowing down, suggesting that such moments can inspire a broader cultural shift towards a slower, more intentional way of living.

The Value of Nature and Unstructured Outdoor Play

Honore underscores the unparalleled benefits of nature in childhood development. He cites research indicating that unstructured outdoor play leads to better brain development compared to artificially enriched environments.

Carl Honore [41:11]: "No amount of enrichment ever produced rats with better brains than those that were raised in nature."

Honore advocates for returning to nature as the original and most effective "classroom" for children, highlighting the importance of outdoor adventures and free play in fostering healthy, creative, and resilient individuals.

Conclusion: The Slow Revolution and Its Future

Honore concludes by expressing optimism about the ongoing slow revolution, driven in part by younger generations who are increasingly rejecting the fast-paced, high-pressure norms imposed by previous generations. He envisions a future where families embrace slowness as a superpower, enabling more meaningful connections and healthier childhoods.

Carl Honore [39:50]: "The machines can do it. Let them do it. The rest of the slow stuff, we're going to double down on that as human beings."

Additional Resources and Works by Carl Honore

Honore shares information about his other works, including:

• The Slow Fix: Solving complex problems without short-term quick fixes.
• Making the Most of Our Longer Lives: Embracing aging as an adventure.
• Slower: 50 tips for slowing down in a fast world.
• 30 Days to Slow: A workbook for implementing slowness.
• Slow Adventures (U.S.) / The Journey, Not the Destination (Others): A children's book on slow travel.

He also mentions his digital courses, TED Talks, and a TV show, Frantic Family Rescue, which provides strategies for parents to adopt a slower, more intentional approach to family life.

---

Key Takeaways:

• Hyper-Parenting: Over-scheduling and excessive involvement hinder children's natural development.
• Slow Parenting: Emphasizes patience, unstructured play, and allowing children to grow at their own pace.
• Social Media Pressures: Amplifies the desire to compare and compete, increasing parental anxiety.
• Slow Education: Move towards balanced educational systems that value creativity over mere testing.
• Embracing Boredom: Essential for fostering creativity and emotional resilience in children.
• Parental Ego: Projecting personal aspirations onto children can undermine their individual growth.
• Nature's Role: Unstructured outdoor play is crucial for healthy brain development and overall well-being.

Carl Honore’s profound insights challenge the prevailing norms of modern parenting and education, advocating for a more mindful, slower-paced approach that prioritizes the genuine needs and natural growth of children.

Transcript

[Carl Honore]

Member week is here at Lowe's. Don't miss your chance to get up to 40% off hundreds of items like paint tools, home essentials and more. Shop our exclusive deals happening in store and online now through July 18th. Not a rewards member. Join for free today and get ready to save more Lowes. We help you save loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details@lowe's.com Terms subject to change.

[Ginny Urich]

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I have two fantastic books that are a couple decades old, but they are just, I mean, so pertinent still. The author, Carl Honore, is here. You've written a lot of books, Carl.

[Unnamed Host]

Welcome.

[Carl Honore]

Thank you very much. I'm thrilled to be here with you.

[Ginny Urich]

Okay, so the book that I have here are Under Pressure, which is so interesting. This is from the early 2000s, the new movement inspiring us to slow down, trust our instincts, and enjoy the ride. Rescuing our children from the culture of hyper parenting. Is this still so pertinent, Carl? And then a book in praise of slowness, Challenging the Cult of Speed. And you have so much work that you've done since then. Can you give us a little background of how you. It's really interesting to me because you have written books on all sorts of different subjects. You talk about aging, you talk about travel, but a lot of it is dealing with just the permission to slow down.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah. I think if you're looking for a through line in my work, it's to do with time. Right. Whether it's aging and longevity, whether it's parenting and family life and children, whether it's the workplace and how to fire up a company or be more successful as an entrepreneur. All of this stuff comes down to how we relate to time itself and we generally across our cultures. I'm speaking to you from the uk it's the same in the US we have a very neurotic and unhealthy relationship with time. We see time as the enemy. Time is money. Right. You've got to go faster and faster, cram more and more into less and less time. That's not the way to use time. Right. That actually ends up backfiring on us. It's bad for us as adults, as parents. It's particularly bad for children because it turns every moment of the day into a race against the clock.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah. And that is how it feels. So the book that we're going to focus on today is called Under Pressure. And you've gotten A lot of books, so we'll talk about of those so people know where they can get them. But kicking it off with under pressure, I mean, it really does feel like there is a lot of pressure in parenting today. And one of the things that you talk about, and I just think it's. It's such a tricky thing to step out of. You talk about how this is the age of the trophy child, that we have this urge to upgrade our children. You talk about even to the point where some people are injecting growth hormones to try and get their kids to be taller for sports. I mean, it has gone really far, far to the extreme. But you say that deep down most of us know that all of this hyper managing is absurd. The trouble is it's really easy to get caught up in the frenzy. So you're talking about steering our kids to the top and that it's kind of like embedded in our DNA and we have to fight against it. How do we fight against that?

[Carl Honore]

Well, you're absolutely right there. What this all starts from is a very natural and even noble instinct, which is to do the best for your children. We all have that. That's a good thing. The trouble is that in the modern world, it gets warped out of all proportions. So it's become an instinct to give your children the best of everything and at the same time make them the best at everything. Which turns parenting into a cross between a competitive sport and product development. Right. So children come out of the womb and they just hit the ground running. It's Baby Einstein DVDs, baby sign language classes, Baby Ghost pro sports clinics, Mandarin lessons in the Moses basket, and then endless extracurriculars and tutoring school. So they children have schedules that will give a CEO heartburn. This doesn't work. Children need slowness. They need to back off. They need the time to explore the world on their own terms. And I think a lot of us as parents, we start off with that good instinct, but just the world we live in, which is so loud and competitive and nowadays so performative. Right. A lot of this. You use the phrase trophy child. Back when I first began investigating parenting because I was a parent. Well, I still am a parent, but my children were younger then was kind of as social media was coming onto the scene. Social media has ratcheted up this whole pressure on parenting beyond belief. Because in the old days you would be, you know, you'd go to the school gate or if you go to the soccer game, or if you'd see other parents, you'd Go see their children and stuff. And you'd think, oh, goodness me, that family's doing this. And you'd feel, oh, gotta keep up with the Joneses. Now with social media, you could be feeling the pressure to keep up with 8 billion other Joneses, right? Constantly flashing their best selves, curated pictures of their perfect lives and their perfect families into your pocket every second of the day, which our brains are just not built to cope with. We're just overwhelmed by it. So we either shut down or we go with it. We think, oh, no, I've got to play this game too. Those are the options that a lot of people feel they only have. The third option is the one that I advocate, which is to step back and say, you know what? There's a whole different way of thinking about parenting, about childhood, about family life that's so much more nourishing, so much better for children and so much more fun as a parent, right? It stops parenting being a full time job in the same, you know, that crushes us and like some awful, you know, side hustle in the gig economy and turns it into a joy, right? It becomes the thing that you love doing with your children rather than you feel you've got to do. Because if you miss one little step, because this is part of the culture of now, is there's this tyrannical idea that there's only one version of success for children. There's one path, the alpha track. And if you stray ever so slightly from the alpha track, your kid is doomed to a life of sleeping under bridges and maybe heroin addiction, which is ridiculous. There's a million tracks into adulthood. But I think when the panic starts to blow and the sound and fury cranks up, when you're sitting around the table with your partner in the evening freaking out about your kids, you can only see two tracks. You see the alpha track, you think, oh my, we got to do everything, get on that alpha track. You don't see that there are a million, million other ways for a child to grow up, evolve, flourish, and find the best life for them. And I'm really all about sort of taking that moment to slow down as parents, to step back from the tsunami of noise and distraction and performance on social media and ask yourself, what kind of parent do I want to be? Who is my child? You know, I need to listen to my child, to feel them, to be able to supply and create the right childhood that's going to work best for them. And because this is not a one size fits all recipe, I talk about slow Parenting. But there's no paradigm for slow parenting. You pull off the shelf and plug it in, and tomorrow you're a slow parent. Right. It's much more complicated, but more fun, I think, than that.

[Ginny Urich]

Ah, that. Does these books really encourage you to slow down, especially in a day and age of pressure? And you talk about it's just so much meddling. There's so much meddling, and it's forging a new kind of childhood. You wrote this. If you think the corporate world is competitive, you should try being a mother today. There is so much competition. And actually, someone had used the phrase big mother. Like, okay. I was like, this is really interesting. So, you know, we talk about big tech and big pharma and big food, and they felt like big mother. Like they were constantly having to meddle, constantly having to oversee. And you talk about your own childhood. You say this. When I was 10, my mother would usher me out the door in the morning and not expect to see me home again until lunch or dinner time. Not expect to see me. You say, today. That would be a dereliction of duty. So we've really swung from one to the next, which is like one that's like, hey, get out of here. To big mother. You know, the one that, like, knows where you're at all the time and what are all your extracurricular activities. So one of the things that you talk about in this book is really philosophical. What is childhood for?

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, that is ultimately the question. My view of what childhood is for is for each child to find the thing that works best for them. There's so much pressure now. Like, you talk about big mom and stuff. I heard a phrase the other day, you know, big man on campus. There was this at the local school here. There's this idea that every year has a big mom on campus, right? So there's this already. There's this kind of pecking order of alpha moms and stuff, which I'm not even a mom myself. Never was. I was a dad. And just hearing that phrase, big mom on campus makes me feel a little bit inadequate and worried. And this is, I guess, part of the culture, the language we use, the expression. And it's just coming at us from. From all angles. I mean, people often think, okay, we've got to give great. Put it this way, not every child is destined for greatness. And that's a hard thing to hear in a world where we feel like, yeah, my kids, you know, all that sort of stuff. Right? But every child can find a life and design a life. That is great for them.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah.

[Carl Honore]

That is a very different thing than putting them on that single track to what you think in the back of your mind you've picked up via osmosis from the culture around you constitutes a great life. And I think we need to step away from that and give back childhood its due, which is to say, okay, back off. Give children the space to work out who they are. I think of childhood or parenting as not project management or product development, certainly not a competitive sport. It's far more, look, let me take your hand, and together, let's go and find out who you are. It's a journey of discovery, childhood and parenting. I think in our mechanistic show me the numbers, we want metrics culture. We flip that on its head and we immediately. Our kid is born, and we immediately are already thinking, okay, by 21, I want him or her to be in this college with these qualifications, with this kind of sports on their resume. And then we strain every sinew of our body, spend every spare dollar, invest every free minute to drag them from the womb to this place where we think they need to be. I'm saying the total opposite. I'm saying, back off, let things breathe, work out who you are, who your family is, who your kid is, and forge that path together. It's a journey of discovery. And that's so much more joyous, so much more fun, and ultimately so much more productive for a kid than saying, okay, here you are, you got 21 years. There's your destination, there's your goal. Let's get you there. That's kind of my take.

[Ginny Urich]

Well, it's interesting, too, because what you talk about is, all right, so you take these two approaches which have really. This pendulum has swung. One approach was, go outside, I'll see you at the next meal. I don't know where you're going to be and see you later. To this other big mother approach, where you know everything that's going on, that you say that you know the child is born and you say, I want this. And by the time you're 21, you're going to be there. What you point out is that this new style, which is newer, this meddling style, it's backfiring, it's actually not working.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, well, that's the horrible irony of this, is that if you think how much time, energy, bandwidth, money we are investing in our children now, we should be witnessing the emergence of the happiest, healthiest, most luminous generation that ever walked the face of the earth. We all know that's not what's happening out there. Just look at the news, take a glance at the headlines. What we're looking at is a generation of kids who are struggle, who have, you know, rampant mental health problems, who are struggling socially, who are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, who are having, you know, record levels of obesity. Right. These are all of these very clear metrics are going completely in the wrong direction. Maybe it has something to do with the way we're parenting and the way we're approaching family life. I think that's what people call a no brainer at this stage.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah, it's backfiring. We're giving this message that childhood is too precious to be left to children and children are too precious to be left alone. And it is not working. One of the things that you talk about, which I think is really a deep issue is you say our children's accomplishments start to feel like our own. Can you talk about the parental ego?

[Carl Honore]

Yeah. Now I don't think this is a modern invention. I think parents have always been invested in their children and, and you can go throughout history and find all kinds of wild examples of parents getting way over invested in their own kids achievements. But there's something that's gone mainstream about this now where we put our children out into the world and we feel like they're mini me in a sense. They're out there as little ambassadors for our own egos and it becomes crippling. Right. Because you're putting your child out into the world for the wrong reasons. You're thinking, well, how is this going to play on social media? How is this going to look in the local neighborhood at the next parent teacher association? Am I going to hold my head up high when I cross paths with big mom on campus next week? That kind of thing. Right. Those are not the priorities you should be having. When you're thinking what lights up your child and helps him or her find the path that's going to lead them to the best life for them as an adult. It's the opposite. Right. It's saying pull your own ego back and say let your child go out into the world and try everything. Right. I mean people sometimes hear about slow parenting and think, well, that means, well, you're just going to stay home, you're not going to do anything. No, I think you go out there, you try all sorts of stuff. But then you also help children learn that immensely powerful lesson that's going to serve them well all the way through their lives. Which is triage. Right. Is, is Saying, okay, I've tried seven extracurricular activities. You know, I like them all. I can't do, you know, doing them all, it just turns me into a hamster on a wheel. The two that really light me up, that I'm going to want to get up out of bed on a Saturday morning and go do that I'm going to carry on doing. Once I've left the family home and I'm a 20 something or a 40, even 50 something, those are the things I'm going to double down on. So just getting your kids. I think a big part of slow parenting is exposing children to everything, which I think is wonderful. The world is this glorious, almost endless buffet smorgasbord of things to do and activities that didn't even exist when I was a kid. Right. It's great, but you can only do so much. Right. Less is more. So you have to help teach them at the same time to zero in on the things that really float their boat and go in on those. And those will be the things that they're still doing 40 years from now. Right?

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah. And that's why you have to know your own child and you have to do it your own way. You talk about how there's so much pressure to do what everybody else is doing and I do like that you say some kids really thrive on being busy and they thrive on a busy schedule. So it has to be individual for you. I think like you said, a lot of times we do look down on, you're doing too much, you're doing too much. But some kids, that might really be what lights them up. And if you're able to facilitate that without it derailing your family, then that, that's a good thing. They're off doing things, they're making relationships, they're learning new skills. So I like that you give the permission to that for that. But the whole message is there are many paths to adulthood. It's like that's what you got to keep reminding yourself there's many paths to adulthood. And this is about your own individual child. As I talk with parents all over the country, one thing keeps coming up. How do we protect our kids, stay connected and still give them the independence they need to grow? We want to say yes, you can, more often to build their confidence and give them freedom and reclaim some of that childhood magic, but without handing over a smartphone. That is why I always recommend Cosmo, a very unique tech company that is run by wonderful family focused leaders like Russell York, who you've heard multiple times.

[Unnamed Host]

On this very show, Cosmo makes a.

[Ginny Urich]

Safe smartwatch for kids called the Junior Track and their brand new Junior Track 5 is better than ever with upgraded GPS, real time location tracking, calling, messaging and more. It is designed with families in mind. There's no social media, no Internet and you approve every contact. It's step by step independence for kids.

[Unnamed Host]

And confidence for parents.

[Ginny Urich]

As a mom of five and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, I know how powerful it is when kids can explore, go on outdoor adventures and build real world confidence while you still have peace of mind. Cosmo is a common sense way to make that happen. Right now Cosmo is running an amazing back to school deal plus free shipping and a risk free 30 day guarantee and free head to cosmotogether.com 1kho to grab one today. That's cosmotogether.com the number one kho for an incredible deal today.

[Unnamed Host]

Let's have some real talk life insurance talk. You probably have some through work, right? But here's the thing. If you're laid off or change jobs, that coverage can disappear overnight. And even if you've got your own policy, are you sure you're not paying too much for too little? That's right. I'm heading to Select Quote. They've been doing this for over 40 years, helping more than 2 million people secure over $700 billion in coverage. Their mission is simple. They shop, you save. In just 15 minutes. A licensed select Quote agent compares policies from top rated carriers to find the right one for your health and your budget. And they do it for free. Need coverage fast. Some of their partners offer same day policies up to $2 million with no medical examination. And if you have pre existing conditions like high blood pressure or diabetes, they work with providers who get that too. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. So take care of your future while it's simple and affordable. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than [e-mail] 1000 hours save more than 50% on term life [e-mail] 1000 hours today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com 1000 hours hey friends, Ginny here from 1000 Hours Outside. And with summer in full swing, I always get the itch to refresh my closet. But I don't want to waste money on trendy pieces I'll only wear once. That's why I love Quince. Their clothes are timeless, feel amazing, and somehow cost half of what you'd expect for that kind of quality. We're talking 100% European linen tops starting at just $30. Washable silk dresses and skirts and ultra soft cotton sweaters perfect for war weather layering. I found myself reaching for my quince pieces again and again. Quince works directly with top artisans and skips the middlemen. So you get luxury without the markup. And everything is made in ethical, responsible factories using premium materials. In fact, I'm heading to Virginia to speak at an outdoor event in July. I'm really looking forward to it, but I know it's going to be hot. So the 100% European linen sleeveless swing dress has got my name on it. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quints. Go to quince.com outside for free shipping on your order. And, and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C.com outside to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com outside.

[Ginny Urich]

I mean, you talk about, you give some examples about this man. One of them was this man who wants his kids to be tennis stars. You know, it's like even that, like, I want my child. You're kind of like going down the wrong path. So he wants his kids to be really good at tennis and he wants them to win. And he drugs the other players like the other kids. He puts stuff in their water bottles that makes them sleepy. So then he ended up going to jail. You talked about this other mom who says she stays up late at night, like into the night. What's on her mind is how that her son can have the most badges in his boy Scout troop. So I mean, these are things to really be aware of because you say it's, it's like in our DNA, these accomplishments start to feel like our own. We're yearning to get the most out of our children and there's a lot of fear there that our kids are gonna be left behind. So the book really helps to calm a lot of those fears and remind you that there are many paths to adulthood and we don't have to treat our children like their projects. It's a, it's a really big deal. I mean, it continues to be an issue. The book came out, I think in 2004.

[Carl Honore]

2008. I think 2008.

[Ginny Urich]

In Praise of Slowness came out in 2004. Is that right?

[Carl Honore]

Yeah.

[Ginny Urich]

So 2004, 2008. I mean, these are really remarkable books still for this day and age, we need these reminders. The academics is a big thing too. Can you talk about the obsession with academic achievement. I mean, it's definitely here in the United States. It's. I think it's all people focus on.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah. And again, it's coming back to what I said earlier is that when we become obsessed with metrics and numbers and measuring things, the tail starts wagging the dog. And we see that in school systems across the world. That is the obsession with Marx has deepened. We've moved further away from what education is all about. Right. It becomes a race to get the highest marks. Right. So then you're just teaching to the test. Teachers are then teaching to the test. The curriculum bends to the test. Children are only learning to get a good mark in the test. Right. They're being tutored to within an inch of their lives to score well in the test. And the research right across the globe shows that this doesn't actually pay off certainly in the long run. Right. They just don't remember stuff very well.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah, they don't work.

[Carl Honore]

It doesn't work. You may get a little surface dopamine squirt or a little gold star. You may get the odd exam and some people will get really good marks. But you're going to be sacrificing so much that's precious about education along the way. Right. All the slow stuff, taking the time to let your mind wander and daydream to tap into that, what psychologists call slow thinking, that deep reflection, that creativity, all of that happens slowly. It doesn't happen when you're rushing to get the next mark in the next grade and pass the next test with flying colors. So one of the things that's happened since I wrote Under Pressure, I was writing about the beginnings of it at the time, is that there's just been a huge worldwide move to what people call slow education. And so school systems around the globe have wrecked it. They've woken up and smelt the coffee and they realized that there's just been way too much effort, way too much time invested in marks. And they're changing, right. They're getting a better balance. Of course, sometimes you need to measure things and that's helpful. But if you. If you get so obsessed with measuring, the thing that gets measured becomes more important than anything else, and everything else falls by the wayside. So even a country like Singapore, which is often held up as an avatar of high pressure education, very successful system, kids get great grades. They go on and do. Singapore realized that they were putting way too much emphasis on the kind of traditional academic grading system and marks, and they recalibrated. They brought in Some, they went with what some of them there called a kind of slow revolution. And they began introducing much more debate and time for reflection and much less emphasis on marks and grades. Also trying to roll back the whole obsession, the juggernaut of the tutoring industry just trying to get some balance because they realized that Singapore kids were coming out and looked great. On paper, they had unbelievable scores. But they would get to the workplace and they needed people to tell them what to do. They weren't especially creative. And this is something you've seen a lot across Asian countries, but I think you see a similar problem and blowback in Western countries as. Which is why, as I say, across the planet now, you see a real drive to bring slowness back into the classroom, the school experience across the board, because slow works, right? It works at home, it works at school, it works in sports. You just need some slowness. Now, I'm not an extremist of slowness. I say this all the time. I love speed, right? Faster is often better. All of us know that. But not always. And the key to this slow revolution that I talk about is finding the right speed. So, sure, sometimes you're going to go fast, sometimes you're going to be busy. But you don't want to be in turbo mode all the time. You want to be in tortoise mode. Sometimes you want to be playing with those different gears you're shifting in and out of fast and slow, in and out of busy. And sometimes, you know, bringing back the art of doing absolutely nothing at all, right? That was a pretty glorious thing that existed all the way through human history until probably the last generation, and especially with smartphones, which now we wander everywhere, kids included, with these weapons of mass distraction in our pockets, right? And it just means that we can never enjoy those moments of slight restlessness. You're not quite sure what's coming next, you know, we're also terrified of boredom nowadays. But throughout history, when a child said, I'm bored, you know, your mom or dad would say, well, too bad. Go outside and play or find a friend. Or they would use that eternal expression, use your imagination, right? It was the kid's problem, in other words, the boredom. Today, if a kid says they're bored, what happens? Mom and dad freak out and think, oh, no, I'm failing as a parent. My kid's bored. Where's the iPad? Maybe we need another extracurricular in the schedule. But no, what you need to do in that moment is back off, slow down, and let the boredom happen. Because it's Precisely. In those moments of unstructured time, of not knowing what's coming next, of boredom, moments free of test targets and timetables. It's in those moments that children learn how to think, create, use their imagination, get along with their peers, regulate their emotions, work out who they are rather than what everybody else wants to do. It's how they learn how to grow up. It's how they grow up. It's the cornerstone of childhood development. So I think we. A big part of embracing this slow parenting revolution is getting comfortable again with the idea of boredom.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah, it's interesting because I guess if you. If you had a childhood where you were out in the neighborhood, kids still got bored, but they just wouldn't tell the mom because the mom wasn't there. The mom was back in the home. And we have, you know, friends over. Sometimes we're not in a neighborhood, so the kids aren't out running the neighborhood. But, you know, we'll have friends over and actually surprised how often, especially my youngest will come with her friend and come find me and say, we're bored. But it wouldn't have existed if they're out in the neighborhood because they would just find something to do. They wouldn't trek all the way home and go, we're bored and all this.

[Carl Honore]

They would have to be pretty bored to do that. Yeah.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah. I think part of the issue is that the parent is experiencing the brunt end of that more than they did in the past.

[Carl Honore]

And.

[Ginny Urich]

And then you feel like, oh, I should figure it out or I should solve the problem, or it makes me feel uncomfortable because they're uncomfortable and what can I do for them? And especially when kids are together, you can just say, well, you'll figure something out. More so even than they're. When they're by themselves. I mean, they run off and they figure it out, and you don't see them again for several hours. But it is interesting to think about how when the culture accepted kids just being out in the neighborhood and that was the norm, no parent was having to navigate the I'm bored complaint.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, you put your finger on something really important there. And what's shifted in what just modern life and parenting and family life is proximity. Right now, kids, because they're raised in captivity, they're not out roaming in the neighborhood or outside. They are very close physically to their parents. So the first reflex when a child feels bored is to say it out loud, and who's going to hear the parent? Right. So as you say, you're more. You're you're on the front line now in a way that parents weren't in the past, whereas. Yeah. And then when in my childhood we'd be away from our parents, you'd get bored. You probably. Would you even say it. I don't know. You just would fight. If you fall back on your own devices, which is really what you want children to be doing as they're growing up, is falling back on their own devices so that they can work out how to move through the world and get along, manage their emotions, get along with their people, all that stuff. Right? And dealing with a little bit of boredom here and there is the way to go. But of course, as you say, if everybody's under the same roof, nobody's outside, then the temptation, the pressure even, is to intervene, right. To get right in there and say, oh, no, boredom, we can't have that, you know, because we all feel uncomfortable with it. But I guess I would say, you know, take a deep breath, let it happen. Right. You know, because once you get through boredom, on the other side of boredom is so much good stuff, right. So much good stuff for children. You just have to kind of, especially as a parent to. I was going to say take the unpopularity hit, but that's probably the wrong expression. Just kind of ride with the punches at the beginning and. And then children do. Once they, the first two or three times, had to come up with their own fun and diversion to deal with the boredom, then those muscles that have maybe atrophied from disuse in the past start to get a little bit more limber, bit more strength in them, and they're going to get less bored less often, and you'll notice that it kind of begins to taper away from you. It's often at the beginning that it can be awkward and maybe even at the start. I would recommend, if you're coming to a situation where you've always stepped in as a mom or dad, whatever, parent, and dealt with the boredom instantly, and you're now going to try an experiment over the week, next week and summer holidays, right? You're just going to step back for a week and you feel uncomfortable. Maybe the first two or three times it happens, maybe you step up and offer something that can maybe help with the boredom. And I don't mean like a screen, the very opposite. I would say, you know, get some, I don't know, some art material out, get a rope outside or take a ball and a piece of stick out and get playing and then get out of the way and let Them get on with just. Just to help kind of kickstart that play instinct that's there dormant in every kid. And I think you will notice, and I've been doing this long enough to say it with confidence, that with time and not that much time. Right. Because these instinct is very deep seated in kids. It will come back and you won't have to step up anymore. You'll just say, well, they probably won't even come to you and say they're bored. If they're outside, they'll just do it.

[Ginny Urich]

Right, Right.

[Carl Honore]

Which is the ultimate win. Right.

[Ginny Urich]

It was interesting especially because it just happened where my youngest came with her friend and they were like, we're bored. And I was like, why your friend is here? But then it made me really think. There's always been ebbs and flows of play, even as adults. You know, you get engaged with something, you really like it, and then it ends and you have that transition period where you're like, well, what's the next thing? And you have to figure that out. And so a lot it happens at the beginning. It can happen in the middle of a several hour chunk where kids are playing together, where they, you know, they're transitioning out of something and have to figure out the next thing to do. You talk a lot then about how micromanaging, especially in this day and age, it does not behoove our children. So you talk about that. You know, there's micromanaging obviously happening at school. There's micromanaging happening through homework. There can be micromanaging happening through some extracurriculars, especially if they take up all day, every day in their adult led. But you say micromanaged children can end up struggling to stand on their own two feet. A lot of kids now seem to be speaking from a script. So even from that perspective, like you talk about imagination, but also this part of learning how to chart their own course, like that comes from times that are not adult led.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, I mean, that is really what children need. I mean, among other things is that time and space. There's a wonderful quote from Virginia Woolf who talked about the great cathedral space of childhood. And there's that feeling. It kind of echoes your. Your phrase there, the 10,000 hours outside. It's that kind of feeling of capaciousness, of wide horizons, of huge headroom. Right. That big openness. I come from, I live in London, but I grew up on the Canadian prairies. Right. So those feelings of the big open skies and the possibilities and all the things that you can play around with in your mind all the dreams you can have, all the plans you can toy around with and projects you can forge. It's having that space and time to go in deep to yourself and to look out up and around and forward into the future. And if you're, as a child just racing from pillar to post from, you know, if you get up in the morning and the first thing your parent does is essentially hand you a schedule, and it doesn't end until you go to bed at night, right? You've got no space. You've got no space for that great cathedral space of childhood, right? To do that thinking, to do that reflection, to do that connection with yourself, that cultivating of your. Of you, right? Because let's face it, that's what childhood, a big part of childhood is. It's allowing a child the space and the time to water their own garden, you know, to cultivate their own self. And I think we see this coming out the other end. I travel around the world, do a lot of work in schools and with parents and stuff. And I hear this from a lot of university lecturers and professors and so on in first year, that the kids who come in in first year really struggle, you know, struggle with mental health problems. And a lot of it is that they just come off these childhoods where every single moment of their day was structured, controlled, managed, photographed, filmed, measured, you know, and then suddenly, for the first time in their lives, they're off the leash. And if you haven't got any practice with that, and you maybe even haven't had time to think about what you wanted to do with your university career, you just thought, okay, I'll be a doctor, or everybody thinks I should be a lawyer. I'll study law. And so you see, like, very high numbers of people changing their course in their first year, moving to a different degree and stuff, because they haven't had the time as children to get to know themselves. And so they find themselves having to do all that work in a hurry sometimes in year 12 of college, right? Which seems to me a wasted opportunity when really, when children. Well, the one thing children do have a lot of is time, right? If we would only just allow them to sink into it.

[Ginny Urich]

One of the things that you talk about that I've not read in other books, Carl, and it goes in line with a lot of what you write, so, like, in Praise of Slowness, Challenging the Cult of Speed. This is an interesting part of it. You talk about patience and how this is actually, you know. So, okay, I think people can understand. You know, I see myself and my kid. You know, I want them to. I didn't win the tennis thing and I want my kid to. This is my second shot through my child. You know, you see how you can kind of fall into that trap. But one of the things that you talk about is this overall cultural shift toward rush and hurry and that we just don't have patience for the slowness that childhood needs. You wrote, to let kids develop on their own timeline demands patience, a rare commodity in our hurry up culture. Can you talk about the hurry up culture and how we can combat that?

[Carl Honore]

Sure. Well, that's part of the kind of macro. My take on the world is that we live in a culture where the virus of hurry has infected every corner of our lives. So for many of us, every moment of the day has become a dash to the finish line. It may have started in the workplace, but let's be honest, it's slipped out and come right back home with us. So that people are up at night in bed doing work emails, they're scrolling through social media endlessly. When they're stuck in traffic, it's just like there's this constant nonstop barrage of doing things. So we've become human doings instead of human beings. Now it's important to do things, but it's also important just sometimes to be just simply to be in the moment, to be with another person, to be with yourself. Right. And a big part of what I'm always advocating and writing about is trying to get back to that balance, you know? Yeah, sure, you gotta swing for the fences sometimes. You gotta really dig in and whatever phrase you like best, hustle, da da da da. But you also need the other side of the equation, which is the slowness is the quiet, the serenity, the tranquility, the being in nature, the being outside. If we're talking about children, all that sort of stuff. And I do think we're kind of coming to the end or approaching the end of this fast forward speedaholic culture. It seems to me that I think the first or the most recent big wake up call was the pandemic, because what was that with the lockdowns and so on? I know it was different in the US and different states and stuff, but for a lot of the world, it was a global workshop in slowness. Yeah, it's just like things stopped because they just had to. And of course, a lot of people had a really dreadful time during the pandemic. Of course, that it was a tragedy for everybody in lots of ways. But a lot of people at the same time experienced a slowdown for the first time, maybe ever in their lives. And they thought, you know what? This is kind of nice. You know, I'm not rushing constantly. My family is not stressed out because we've got 50 things to do today. I quite like not commuting five days a week. You know, all these things. So I think that was a little taster people got of what this slow revolution could look like. Now, I think, generally speaking, the world pinged back after the pandemic and got back into fast mode, but the memory, I think the folk memory is still there. And now we're sort of bumping up against the limits. It feels to me with AI threatening to do everything at superhuman speed. I think we've got to the stage now where we really have to have a conversation with ourselves, right? We need a bit of me time here as a culture to say, you know what? What are we going to do now? Are we going to just get faster and faster? Are we going to let AI, Are we going to try and keep up with the algorithms? Or are we going to split the two in half and say, okay, the machines can do this stuff really well and really fast. Let them do it. The rest of the slow stuff, we're going to double down on that as human beings. And that's what creativity, it's empathy, it's feeling, it's teamwork, it's community, it's love. It's the stuff that makes us human. It's the stuff that goes into a childhood worthy of the name. It's all slow. And I'm really feeling the tectonic plate shifting even, I would say, in the last couple of years now around this subject, that there's a real feeling. I mean, just the other day, I was looking on, look at me, I'm on TikTok, right? You know, I'm there, too. I'm on social media. And one of the hashtags trending on TikTok at the time was snail girl, right? So it was a whole kind of, you know, millions of young women just saying, you know what? I've had enough of this. I don't want every single second of my day to be me running like a crazy person on a treadmill, right? I want to slow things down sometimes. I want to go for a walk with my partner. I want to sit with my friend and just have a conversation without being distracted by our phones. And so I think, because sometimes people think, oh, slowing down is for older people. No way. This slow movement is a lot of it, I would say, is driven by young people. And I look to that younger generation with real hope because they are the ones who are looking at my generation and saying, you know what you guys didn't get? You guys messed it up, right? You guys are so fast. You pushed all this speed on us. Look at the world is falling apart. Like financial markets, the climate, all kinds of things are going horribly wrong. A lot of that is driven by too much speed in the system. We would like to do something different here. We don't want to sacrifice our health, our dreams, our soul on the altar of what, I don't know, like a fast career that's going to get me fired at 55 with one year pay, you know, or a pension pot that's going to evaporate next week, you know. So I think there's a real deep seismic shift going on in the culture around speed. And it's happening in all walks of life. And I do think that families and parents are in some ways spearheading it because it's harder to do the slow thing at work. It's essential there. But there's so much more inertia and so much more prejudice at work. I think at home, people are more and more getting it. That slowness is a superpower, right, for any family. And I think you're seeing that more and more now playing out.

[Ginny Urich]

Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[Carl Honore]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts into time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.

[Ginny Urich]

And breathe.

[Carl Honore]

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.

[Ginny Urich]

The discount they gave me on my first order.

[Carl Honore]

Oh, sorry. Namaste.

[Ginny Urich]

Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Carl Honore]

It's summer time to enjoy long days, lazy nights, and great food. Because Uber Eats has deals all summer long. So when hunger strikes, don't sweat it. Delicious deals are just a tap away on Uber Eats. Enjoy all your favorite grocery items delivered straight to you. Get ice cream, soda and snacks from your favorite stores like Wegmans and cvs. And make the most of every moment. Now that sounds like a good summer. Order now on UberEats Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. Seattle for details.

[Ginny Urich]

I like how you frame that because there's the part about fear and there's a part about living vicariously through our kids. But this is a different way to look at it, which is, can I be patient? Can I be patient and allow my child to grow at their own pace in their own way? And you talk about doubling down on the slow stuff, which is interesting. It's really interesting because that actually is what the computers can't do.

[Carl Honore]

Yes.

[Ginny Urich]

So if we want to talk about what differentiates us as humans, computers can't go slow. Their speed is fast. And we're not going to ever compete with how fast the computers are and are getting. And so to go a different direction, which is slow. I mean, no computer's going slow. They're going faster and faster. All this quantum computing stuff, it's really interesting. You have this quote in your book. I thought this was so powerful. You wrote this, Carl, like any social change, forging a new form of childhood and adulthood will be driven by millions of small acts of defiance. Whenever anyone chooses to let a child be herself, the cultural scales tilt slightly and it becomes easier for others to follow suit. I mean, that's really powerful. Small acts of defiance to go slower, to be a little bit more patient. And then you talk so much in here about play. I want to hit this one sentence because I just think, actually this is a key for anyone listening. This is what we're talking about. This is one sentence in the part about play. No amount of enrichment ever produced rats with better brains than those that were raised in nature. Yeah, I love that. I was like, here's the thing where enrichment, enrichment, enrichment, extracurricular exercise. Like, no. Do you know all they did was put these rats in nature and that was the best enrichment. It grew the biggest brains. I thought even just at one point is so powerful.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, well, that's. That's so telling, isn't it? I mean, nature is the original classroom and she will not be improved upon.

[Ginny Urich]

Right, yeah.

[Carl Honore]

Deluding ourselves if we think we can create a better version of nature's classroom in a lab or a classroom or our own homes. We can't. Right. Nature is right there outside our doors waiting for us. She is there, open arms, waiting for us to just Let our children go out there and enrich their brains and be children. If only we would allow ourselves to take that step. But of course, for all these reasons we've been discussing, people find that difficult. Difficult leap to make.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah. And one of the things, the reason that you say the chief drawback, the chief drawback of play is that to an adult eye is it looks too much like slacking. This goes back to our original conversation topic, though, which is like, maybe the adults shouldn't be seeing it so much. You know, that's kind of the point. I think in a lot of these hunter gatherer cultures, it's like the kids were just off playing, they're off playing. The adults have some work to do. They have things they need to get done. And so it's not under the eye of big mother. The kids are just doing their own thing. And so maybe part of the problem is the fact that because of proximity, we're seeing too much of it and it seems like nothing.

[Carl Honore]

And.

[Ginny Urich]

And so we're like, well, they should be playing Minecraft because then they're going to be building these worlds or they should be doing this other productive thing. I'm going to manage it all. And yet you really, in this book, talk so much about the value of play.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah. You've brought that point up again. I think it's so powerful, the one of proximity. Right. That so much of this is driven by the fact that parents and children are just in each other's orbit. They're in each other's space, they're each other's faces all the time. Right. So you do see things. And as parent, you're naturally going to. You're going to react to them. Which is why when parents say, well, how can I start to step back? Very often, for me, a first step is just to say, put some space between you and your child. Right. You can start small by being in a different room or letting them outside, you know, in a closed garden or backyard or whatever it is, before you graduate to letting them play freely in the playground, down the street or whatever. Or if you happen to be a parent who needs or wants to go along to watch your kids play. Extracurriculars, experiment with every second time you go, going for a coffee and not standing on the sidelines, you know, hovering, watching, you know, seeing your kids getting. Getting enough attention from the coach or being ignored by her teammates, you know, all that stuff that's going to make you think, oh, no, my kids. And then you're going to be sort of, you know, all over your kid in the car at the back, it's like, is your coach, you know? You know, you just won't. You won't know because you'll be having a coffee, right? Or you'll be thinking about your own stuff or maybe just slowing down yourself and coming back a little bit calmer, a little bit more present when your kid comes off the field. And it's interesting, when you talk to kids, often, they will say they love having their parents there, but in the right kind of dosage, yeah, sure. Every kid wants to look up and especially if they scored a big goal and see mum or dad on sidelines looking really pleased. Of course we do. I'm sports kid. I was. I. You know, I understand that. But there's also that danger of the too much thing, right. Of feeling smothered. And sometimes as a. As a child, and I remember this, even myself thinking, you just feel a little freer if you're not looking over your shoulder and thinking, oh, what? What, what is this? You know, because you feel like you're. Again, it's that performance thing we were talking about that children then find themselves performing their own childhood because parents are right there in the front row taking notes.

[Ginny Urich]

Yes, taking notes. And actually, I just talked to these two men who wrote a book called the Away Game, and they said that one of the biggest reasons that kids quit sports is because of the ride home.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah.

[Ginny Urich]

So the parent is too invested. And then the ride home, you know that you said you. You talked about this in your book Under Pressure.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah.

[Ginny Urich]

The father attends all her matches, the delivers a sermon on the flaws in her game on the way home and pins up the scores on the refrigerator at home. You talk about this other family where they're giving the kid $5 for every goal he earns, and then he's not passing to any of the other players. The coach is like, what the heck is going on with this kid now? He's a ball hog. And he's like, well, my dad gives me five bucks if I score this goal, so. And also that the parents are cheering. Not. Not cheering. Cheering is fine. I can't stand when the parents are, like, yelling advice from the stand. I'm like, there is a coach. Your kid probably can't hear you. It's really loud. You're talking about these certain places where they call it silent Saturdays and silent Sundays where the parents aren't allowed to do that. I was like, yes, that is the answer. But. But all of these things relate to this pendulum swing because you talk about how when you were a kid you played all sorts of sports and there weren't parents around. You say we had to agree to the rules, we had to choose the teams, we had to referee. We, we didn't have uniforms. There's no adults telling people what to do even with all sorts of sports, hockey, football, soccer, basketball, tennis, no grownup in sight. So you get a picture for what is the kid learning through that type of play when it's not managed by an adult. And then you talked about this. I thought this was really key. We're in this rapidly changing culture. And so Madeline Levine talks about this and I think. Did she endorse this book? Yes. That was a cr. That's so cool. I'm such a huge fan of Dr. Madeline Levine. So she's got on the back of my copy like a whole quote at the very top of the back of under pressure. But she talks about how when we're afraid, we tend to double down on these old ways. We're afraid. So the. We've got this changing future. And obviously pressure and scrutiny can make kids less creative. You talk about this in the book, but one of the things you say is key is that kids need to be. People need to be ambitious. You have to be ambitious. That's really one of the markers of is someone going to be successful or not? It doesn't matter. If you go to a name brand college, that's your phrase you use. I like that phrase. And you even say at these name brand colleges, often the professors are researching, they're not spending as much time on the actual teaching. But there's this pressure and basically there's research that showed it was ambition that mattered more than the name on the college. And I, if I were to think of my own life, about times when I've had internal motivation and I'm ambitious and I want to go after something, the only thing that squashes it is being micromanaged.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, yeah. I mean that this is what we, I think as parents want to aspire to bring about or cultivate our children is to light a fire in them. To help them light, find the thing that really lights their fire and to keep that fire burning. And the quickest way to smother that fire is too much competition. It's too much pressure. It's over managing, it's meddling. It's all those things, things you need to back off and let that fire catch and build. And ambition. I mean, sometimes I think people think again when they hear about slow. They sometimes Think, oh, that sounds like a slacker charter and it's lazy and nobody's ambitious. No, ambition is gold, right? Ambition is jam, right? It's the fuel you put in your furnace that drives you forward at every age. To get up in the morning, to get up for the week, to plan for the future, to do stuff that's going to move you and the people around you. You need that ambition. But in order to find the right sort of ambition, you need the slow part, right? First of all, you need the slow thing to reflect and think about what it is. Where do you want to put this ambition? What's going to be meaningful for me to strive for? And then once you've found that you need the people around you, that is especially your parents and family, to give you the space to make mistakes, to pivot if you need to maybe change your mind, maybe. This is another thing I think sometimes happens in families is a kid has a really strong love for something and then they lose it, right? And that's not natural, right. You go off and you think, well, I would rather do this. But suddenly they're locked in, right? They're associated in their parents minds with, she's a volleyball player, right? They've been introducing her as a volleyball player at dinner parties for several years and suddenly she wants to give up volleyball and take up tennis. And once you get to that stage where you're worrying about how you're going to be branding your child, then I think that's a sign that you've got the priorities are out of shape, right? The real priority should be what lights up the child, where her or his ambition lies. And that again is about that taking that step back as a parent and letting the slowness happen, the time, the reflection and letting people just do things on their own terms for the right reasons.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah, I mean, it really matters in this day and age with the changing future. You talk so much in this book about play. There are so many topics that are pertinent to right now. Like you talk about, do we really need any electronic toys at all? The danger is that children might become addicted to the imaginative input of others. So talking about what choice, what toys do we need? We really want toys that do less so the child can do more. You talk about myopia, you talk about risk taking and how we have all of these children that, you know, they don't want to fail and so they're scared about what people will think and so they don't even try. Maybe if I slack off, I can use that as my excuse for not failing. And these are really, really big topics. And so then you talk about you've traveled these different places and some of the places where they're doing outdoor preschool or outdoor school, and you're like, they pee in the woods and they don't even wash their hands. Like some kids are living like that and they're doing okay. And in fact, a lot of kids at the forest schools are not getting sick quite as much. Can you talk about the messaging that we're sending to our kids when we micromanage? Because you talked about this statistic where they asked all these kids, like, what's the main message that you're getting from childhood? And the kids are saying, you know, they're 10ish years old, and they're saying, well, the main message that I get from the culture around me, from the adults, from the parents, is that I need to stay safe.

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, that's. Well, we've talked a lot about the kind of achievement obsession, but yeah, let's talk about the safety thing as well. That's another feature of modern parenting is a kind of rumbling paranoia about the world. You know, parents and I know how this works, right? I mean, a lot of it's driven by the media, right? This sort of wild over coverage of bad things that happen to kids, right. Anything bad that happens to a child gets just tons of headline coverage and often becomes a national story and so on. And it reinforces this idea that you open up your front door and right away your child is stepping into a cesspool of pedophiles and drunk drivers and, you know, sex traders and things when statistically that's not the case at all. Kids, you know, the world is safer now in a lot of ways than it's ever been before. But for a lot of parents, it doesn't feel that way. So the natural instinct then is just to just batten down the hatches, right? Close in, raise them in captivity. Not that they take any risks, but the paradox, of course, is by not letting children take reasonable small risks incrementally, as they grow older, they never learn how to take risks, right? So when they finally get off the leash, they're jumping off balconies at 18 years old on spring break, trying to get in the pool after three beers. They don't know how to manage risk in the same sort of way. Plus, when you constantly tell people that the world is terrifying, but that may explain why there's so much anxiety around, right? You know?

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah.

[Carl Honore]

And the world. And I'm not Pollyanna.

[Ginny Urich]

Right.

[Carl Honore]

I mean, the world is, of course, terrifying in some ways. Right. And there's some awful, awful, dark, evil things happening out there. I'm not trying to diminish any of that. But there's also a lot of light, Right. There's a lot of space for the beautiful things that childhood has always involved. Just playing, you know, playing outside, being outside with friends, playing freely, doing those games, making up your own rules, all that stuff. Most parents are in a position to give their children more of that than they are currently. I believe in most countries, going to vary from family to family, circumstance to circumstance, day to day even. But I think most parents, if they just took a little time and sat back and said, you know what? Where can we carve out more of A, the slow activity and B, letting our kids take a little bit of risk and a little bit more, and then next month a little bit more. You know, I think that it's there for the taking. And actually, I love that you brought up the four schools and so on, because I ended the book with that, on that that was the final chapter, was looking at the outdoor play and so on. Largely because having spent, you know, more than a year traveling around the world and researching and meeting families and digging into what parenting looks like in the 21st century, the thing I found most uplifting was those kids in those four schools, right. Just the way they spoke and played and their bravery and their kindness and their excitement about the world, they just. They just shone. They were like beacons of light. They seem to be all that is good about childhood in human form. And I just felt so inspired by them. I wanted to end with that kind of image because I think that, again, it's the old thing, right? Till we got into the modern world, that's what kids did. They just played outside. They had 10,000 hours outside. They probably had more than 10,000 hours. Right?

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah.

[Carl Honore]

So let's get back to some of that. Right? Let's get back to as much of it as we can. And I think we can get back to it more than we think that we can. That's something to hold on to here.

[Ginny Urich]

Yeah. And you saw it firsthand. That's what's so interesting. You talk about how you see the side that's not working. Everybody can clearly see this is not working. You know, this micromanaging, so much pressure, so much academics, so much tutoring. I think you said in China, people spend a third of their income on tutoring and academics like this isn't working. It's not producing children that are uber children that are trophy children. They're just. Just anxious and depressed. And you talked about how there's a paradox, that the safer you are, the more anxious you end up feeling about even tiny risks. And Michael Easter talks about that. He wrote a book called the Comfort Crisis. And he says that, you know, your brain is constantly kind of creating problems. And it's like, well, if. So if you have less problems, you think then you'd have no problems. But it's like, no. Your brain takes the smaller things then and equates them with problems. Yes. So, you know, if you have no. You seemingly have no risks in your life, then even the small things might give you anxiety. But then on the other hand, here you say, well, what is working? It's these kids that are just peeing in the woods without washing their hands and are running around in the forest without much. Without huge things of curriculum and without standardized tests and back to the rats. I mean, nothing ever produced bigger brains than those that were raised in nature. So you really can see it firsthand. It is a phenomenal book. It is called Under Pressure. And you talk about the commercialization, the consumerist world. I thought this was really deep. Giving a child the best of everything, which is how you start the book. You start the book about talking about how we want to do everything for our children. We want to clear all their obstacles, we want to fight all their battles. We want to. To do everything. We put them on a pedestal. But giving a child the best of everything robs them of the chance to learn how to make the best of what they have. Wow. And what a life lesson. I mean, haven't we all been there where you're like. I mean, I remember growing up and I'm like, I wish I had all those clothes that that person has. And I don't. What do you learn? You learn to make the best of it. What a huge, huge, huge life skill. What a phenomenal book. You even talk about the birthday parties. You talked about how the curriculum isn't safe anymore. That, like, there's commercialism going into the curriculum. This book is called Under Pressure. Highly recommend it. Rescuing our Children from the Culture of Hyper Parenting. I also have in praise of Slowness, Challenging the Cult of Speed. Carl, can you tell people your TED Talks? The other books that you have, what are the other things that they can find?

[Carl Honore]

Yeah, well, I've got a couple of TED Talks. One is about slowness, and more recently is about longevity and reframing and revamping and rethinking aging for the 21st century. I mean, I've done courses. I made a TV show called Frantic Family Rescue in Australia, which is about helping parents get off that treadmill and slow down. So that's online, the place you can find all of my stuff, digital courses, books, video. More than you would ever want to know about me is a single link, which is my full name, Carl Honore. So H O N O R E Carl with a C. Carleonore.info Everything is there, all in one place. Knock yourself out.

[Ginny Urich]

Tell us about your books.

[Carl Honore]

Well, we've talked about In Praise with Slowness. We've talked about Under Pressure. I wrote a book also called the Slow Fix, which is about how to solve complex problems everywhere from the workplace to the home without falling for short term quick fixes. Then my book, Making the Most of Our Longer Lives is all about that. It's based on the whole kind of my second TED Talk, how do we embrace aging as an adventure and age better and all that kind of stuff? So that's Boulder. And then actually my most recent book is I've Got a couple of tips books as well. One's called slower, which has 50 tips for slowing down in a fast world. And I've got a workbook which is called 30 days to slow. In a way, my most exciting recent output is a book called in the United States it's called Slow Adventures. And in the rest of the English speaking world it's called it's the Journey, not the Destination. And it's all about slow travel. First children's book. A lot of fun to write. I didn't do the illustrations. You'll be happy to hear. I'm certainly happy to hear very good illustrators from the United States. As it happens. I think they're from Wisconsin. You said you were from Wisconsin, right?

[Ginny Urich]

No, you said Michigan, but not far.

[Carl Honore]

I think they're from Wisconsin and similar. Yeah, a couple who live in sort of small rural area. And we just found they're just beautiful pictures. And it's all about the art of slow travel family. So there's 40 journeys, 10 by bike, 10 by boat, 10 on foot and 10 in on train, all around the world. Each story, each journey gets two pages with my text and pictures and stuff. And it's just a. It's a lovely way to sit down with a child and say, you know, where should we go this evening? Right? Should we go to the Great Wall of China? Or should we walk the trail, the Inca Trail in Peru? Or should we float down the Nile and just kind of the idea of, you know, traveling around the world on a magic carpet of words, I think is a beautiful thing these days. Just to fire up that creativity and get children thinking about that big cathedral space. The world's a huge place to explore, and you want to explore it slowly, right? You know, if you. It's. It's like Mae west, the famous actress that also great philosopher, once said, she said, anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. And that's maybe a good thing to end on.

[Ginny Urich]

It is. It's so good. Carl. Thank you so much. I want to tell people that you are recording this right now from London in a heat wave. And it's so hot.

[Carl Honore]

I am just burning. I am burning up here. If you see sweat patches on my.

[Ginny Urich]

Shirt, I so appreciate it. These books, pertinent when you wrote them, still so pertinent today. I got so much out of them. Thank you so much for being here.

[Carl Honore]

You're an ace Uber interviewer. That was amazing. That was so good. And you did. Did your homework. You were on it, right? So it was an honor to chat with you. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, mom and dad.

[Ginny Urich]

I'm growing at an alarming rate, and.

[Carl Honore]

Clothes you buy me this year will be very small very soon. But at least your wallet doesn't have.

[Ginny Urich]

To be my fashion victim.

[Carl Honore]

With low prices for school at Amazon. Hope that helps Amazon spend less, smile more.