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- [00:01]
A
The reason I get so hyper about this topic is that you can't have a culture that is making its decisions, its laws, and even its incarcerations based on a lie, which is that a kid going into the store is going to die, a kid playing at the park with a bunch of other people around during the day is going to be kidnapped, or a child walking home from a store is likely not to make it, and therefore it's such a horrible mother. We got to teach her a lesson in jail.
- [00:33]
B
And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. In my childhood, it was perfectly normal for me to walk to school when I was 7 or 8, to sort of roam around Munich when I was growing up there when I was 12, 13 years old. Today, it is increasingly rare for children to be afforded that amount of autonomy. The amount of free play they have with other people their age has plummeted. Sometimes parents who allow their kids to walk to town a mile away in a safe rural area to buy something and come back might even find the cops at their door arresting them when they make their way home. Well, to talk about the trend towards helicopter parenting, why it is so dangerous when kids can't develop autonomy, when they can't fend for themselves out in the world and go and have some unstructured time with their friends and what we can do about all of that, I invited Lenore Skenazy. Lenore is the author of Free Range Kids, as well as a founder, along with our podcast friend, Jonathan Haidt, of Let Grow, an organization that advocates for giving children a more empowered childhood. In the last part of the conversation, we also talk about the broader implications of all of these changes. How have these kids that are never given autonomy, that can never fend for themselves transformed universities and workplaces? And how can those places respond to. Listen to that part of the conversation. Please support this podcast. Please become a paying subscriber. Please go to yashamonk.substack.com. Welcome to the podcast. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a long time, actually, because I've been following your work. You, you were really at the forefront of calling attention to the strange phenomenon in parenting in the United States and increasing in other countries as well, which is that of helicopter parenting, that of parents who are always hovering over their children. And some of this is enforced by legal norms. Sometimes you get parents getting into serious legal troubles, you know, with a risk of a children being removed. We risk sometimes going to jail for letting the children take a little bit of risk. Tell us about what some of the shocking stories are and how that shows a sort of broader transformation in not just the choice that parents are making, but the broader culture and legal regime that we live in.
- [03:28]
A
Wow, that's a big one. But yes, let's dive in. First of all, the one word you used is the key word, which is letting your children take a little bit of risk. The minute you mention children and risk, you're in dangerous territory and people are mad at you because there is somehow this belief that there is a way to give, to take all risk out of children's lives. If we just watch everything they eat, see, do, read, hear, lick, and excuse me. And when there is a belief that you can prevent everything bad from happening, you sort of get frozen with fear and you see everything through the lens of how could this hurt a child? And I call it worst first thinking. It hasn't become a popular phrase, but let's try it out again. And that's coming up with the worst case scenario first and proceeding as if it's likely to happen. When you have that, you have people who see a child outside without an adult next to them, preferably Velcroed to them, and sometimes they call 911 because they think that any child outside is automatically not in just danger, but in great danger. And not only just great danger, but great danger of being kidnapped by a stranger and either trafficked or eaten. And so the Good Samaritan actually thinks they are doing something good. I don't think they're just there to ruin the parent's life, but that is what subsequently happens. So I'll just tell you a couple of recent stories of cases like that. The one that a lot of people have heard of because it happened just a few months ago, was a mom in Georgia, rural Georgia. She has four kids. She's taken one of them to the doctor, and the other one doesn't want to come with. So she says, okay, you can stay home. And the grandfather lives with them. He's in a wheelchair, but he lives there, too. And so the mom takes off with kid number one and kid number two, who is either 10 or about to turn 10, I can't recall, doesn't tell his grandpa. And guess what he does. First time anyone in the history of the world has ever done this. He decides to leave without telling grandpa and walk to town, which is about a mile away. There's a Dollar General. There's a gas station he knows. His friend's grandma works at the gas station.
- [05:30]
B
He.
- [05:31]
A
He says hi to her. I Guess he shops at the Dollar General. He's walking back, somebody sees him, stops him, and actually talks to him and says, who are you? You know, I'm this kid. What are you doing? I'm walking around. Okay. Does your mom know where you are? No. Really? She doesn't. I'm calling the cops. So even though she saw that the kid was fine and it's rural Georgia and he's 10, she calls the cops screech over, which shows you that they're not busy fighting crime. They have nothing to do. They run over, they get the kid. What are you doing? Does your parent know? Call the mom. Mom, guess what? Your kid is outside. Oh, really? You didn't know that? No, I didn. I thought he was staying at home. Well, that's your fault. Click. So the cops take the kid home, and a few hours later, around dinner time, they knock on the door, and it's. I can't remember. It's two cops or three. There's body cam footage of this. And Are you the mom of this kid? Yes. You didn't know where he was? Yes. Okay. And they put her hands behind her back, and they click on the handcuffs in front of three of her four kids, throw her in the cop car, take her to prison, you know, get the thumbprint, the. The mugshot, throw her in jail, and all of this because she simply didn't know where her child was for a short amount of time. And that was considered in itself bad parenting, because the idea is that you should always know what your kid is doing every single second.
- [06:45]
B
And not just bad parenting, but criminal parenting. Right. It's not just if a cop was like, well, you know, make sure next time you look after your kid and you know where he is or whatever else it is, literally take you to jail. Bad parenting in their mind, due to jail parenting.
- [07:00]
A
Yeah, I got another story also from Georgia that just happened a couple weeks ago. Anyways, long story short, she gets a lawyer who knows to call me, and I wrote a piece about it, and it became international news, which is great. And I think that she will end up with the charges dropped. But in the meantime, the cops called Child Protective Services, who came and visited the mom when she was back home. And they came up with a safety plan for her that included always letting the children know exactly where she was, always knowing exactly where the kids are, and installing in front of the caseworker a tracking app so she would be able to track her son at all times. And that's the government deciding that any untracked child, any child who grows up without constant surveillance is in danger. And a parent is neglectful because they're not thinking the same way. And so she refused to sign it. And that is still up in the air. You know, what's going to happen to her for not having signed this safety plan. But as the lawyer pointed out, it's not making the kid safer. Cause the kid was already safe. The kid is safe at home, the kid is safe when he walks to town. And also, there's nothing that literally makes you safer simply because you're being tracked. It just means you're being tracked. It doesn't mean that a mother could stop from 30 miles away, you know, somebody from running her kid over, kidnapping. So it's, it's this weird sort of kabuki of protection that is being forced upon parents as if it's real and as if you're not. And if you don't go along with the idea that your child is in constant danger and you must know where they are at all times, you're wrong. Even though those are both not true.
- [08:38]
B
And so give us a little bit of a sense of how recent this is and why this has changed. You know, I didn't grow up in the United States. I certainly know that I, you know, would go to school on my own when I was living in rural Germany when I was, you know, 8, 9 years old. You know, would bike to school when I was 9, 10, 11, 12 years old in a small town and then would roam very freely around Munich, which is, you know, reasonably safe, but major city from the age of 12. And I obviously would tell my mom the vague plans I had for the day. But if some friend said, hey, let's run to the store, let's go play soccer or whatever, she would often not know where I was at 13 or 14 years old and I didn't have a cell phone. And you know, I was a good kid and I would come home normally more or less at the time. But we established, I'm sure I was sometimes late, but she certainly didn't know exactly where I was in the city and that was normal. I'm actually struck now when I spend some time in Berlin, for example, I sometimes think, oh wow, look, there's an 8 year old on the street or a couple of 8 year olds and they're riding their bicycles, so they're going off somewhere and they're unaccompanied. And in Berlin, which is probably the most dangerous German city, it's still a pretty safe place. That's perfectly normal. 30, 40 years ago, was that normal in the United States? If I'd grown up here, I was born in 1982, would that have been my life as well? And if so, why is it that has changed so quickly over the course of this particular time period?
- [10:00]
A
Well, there's a couple of questions in that. One is how did parenting change? And then two is how did the whole thing of getting reported to the cops, the reporting to the cops, I think changed more recently because we have phones. And now if you've been told that any child who's unsupervised is in danger and you have a way to, quote, unquote, make them safe by calling the cops, you do. If a, you know, if this had been an era before you had a cell phone, if you saw a kid outside, you might say, are you okay? And then you'd go home and by the time you were home, you would have forgotten it. You wouldn't call the cops and say, go look on Route 7, is there a kid still out there? Please arrest the mom. And so part of it is just the availability of instantly contacting the authorities. But why do the authorities think that this is automatically a case for them? Why don't they just say, is the kid okay? Yeah, he seems fine. Well, is he, you know, not bleeding, not crying, not scared, not being chased by a guy with a knife or a gun? No, no, no, no, no. Okay, well then they're fine. And the, so the assumption, the thing that has changed over the course of these 40 years is the idea that kids doing anything on their own is dangerous and foolhardy. And that changed much more gradually. That started, I'd say, to change in the 80s here in America with a couple of things. One is the growth of cable television and the birth of the 24 hour news cycle. We didn't have that before. And so you just have a little bit of news and so nothing was perseverated on like a missing child. The broadcasting rules changed in the 80s. They'd been the same since the invention of radio. But in the 80s all bets were off and you could show much more gruesome images, much more graphic things. Like, I had a friend who's a TV historian who said, there's not one episode of Law and Order that could have been shown before the broadcast code changed. And then you had the kids on the milk cartons and while you weren't here, I bet you've heard about them, have you?
- [11:54]
B
I have heard about the kids in the milk cartons. I Have? Yes.
- [11:57]
A
So those were kids whose pictures were placed on milk cartons under the phrase have you seen me or missing? And it was poignant and it was devastating to see all these children, a new one each week, collect all 52. But they never had the asterisk next to their name, which would have said, yes, I'm missing. I was taken in a custodial dispute between my divorced parents, or I ran away because, you know, my uncle was messing with me. And so it began to feel as anodyne as eating your cereal or drinking your milk. There was another missing kid and there was no, no explanation that these kids were not taken by strangers. And that's when we got all the ads about stranger Danger and McGruff the crime dog and television shows, you know, America's Most Wanted, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the kids who was TAKEN There were two very high profile kidnappings in 79 and 82, 82 was Adam Walsh. His dad was John Walsh. And John Walsh started America's Most Wanted and went around the country saying that 50,000 kids are murdered every year, which is off by a factor of 50,000. It's about 100, which is horrible. But it felt like there was no way you could let your kid out the door in the morning and really realistically expect to see them in the evening if you weren't careful. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [13:42]
B
One of the strange things here is that there's a little bit of a collective action problem, right? And part of it, of course, is that sort of if it's not normalized that you let your kids be outside, then it somehow marks you out as a horrible parent. Whereas if you live in a culture where it is understand, understood that that is normal, then that's fine. Part of it is even that if there's a very small number of people who are highly motivated to, in fact, prey on kids, they may still be able to find kids, right? If it's their life's mission to somehow lure a kid away from a parent in some kind of context, they may very well succeed, even if all the precautions are taken. But if you are a parent to a kid who obviously cares particularly about your kid, and you live in a Culture where kids are generally allowed to roam freely, the risk to any one individual kid is much, much lower because people understand that there's kids in public space. They understand that those kids might look out for each other. You as an adult might look out for the kids that you know you're sharing public space with. Whereas if you live in a, in a city where no other parent leads their kids out and your 9 year old kid is the only kid who is walking around the city on their own, then the risk to that particular kid may in fact also be higher than it would be in that other scenario. But I see you shaking your head, what am I getting wrong in this?
- [14:57]
A
I'm shaking my head because the risk is so vanishingly small. There's not like one circumstance that, you know, really amps it up 1000% and one that decreases it. It is decreased almost to zero automatically because it is so extraordinarily rare. It is. The statistic I like to use is that if you wanted your kid to be kidnapped by a stranger in a law and order type stereotypical kidnapping, how long would you have to keep your kid outside for this to be statistically likely to happen? And I'll ask you that, how long?
- [15:28]
B
I know. A million years.
- [15:30]
A
You're like the only one who says that it is 750,000 years. So you're very close. But most people say, you know, some people say a day and some people say an hour, and some people say five minutes. And some people think five minutes at the grocery if you're in another aisle. The University of Michigan just did a study last year asking parents of 9 to 11 year olds whether they let their kids walk to the park with walk to a friend's house. And the majority said no, Let them play at the park with a friend. The majority said no. Trick or treat? No. And then my favorite one is they asked, would you let your child go to another aisle at the store when you're shopping? And 50% said no. Talking about kids who are 9 to 11 years old, half of American parents won't let their kids go to the canned food aisle. And so our perception of danger is so extraordinarily out of whack with reality that it's not that if I let my kid walk to school, well then there's somebody waiting for him. But if there were 10 kids walking to school, the guy would go someplace else. There mostly aren't strangers waiting to kidnap kids. And so to start taking precautions based on a perception of like one kid in danger, five kids Safe is already mistaking the safe for the unsafe.
- [16:51]
B
What are the costs of this? Presumably those come in different buckets. So one cost is just to the parents that you need to supervise the children so closely at all times. You're so stressed that if your kid wanders off into the next supermarket aisle, oh, my God, I've done something horrible, and thank God they're okay, and you go through a spike of adrenaline that you know it's not rationally justified. You know, part of it is that if your kid can't walk over to a friend's house a few hundred yards away, it means that a, you have to continue to supervise your kid. Your kid might be in a bad mood because they don't get to be with a kid, et cetera. So your life is going to be harder. You might have to drive your kid that way so you get interrupted in whatever you were doing. So there's costs in the parents, but presumably also costs to the kids. Which is to say that the kind of autonomy that I, and I assume you enjoyed when we were growing up also gave us social skills of maneuvering the world around us, allowed us to grow in a particular way that was conducive to our well being. We traded off some risk. It might have been a tiny risk, but some risk in being out and supervised on our own against growth opportunities that also provide other opportunities and perhaps protect us against other risks down the line. So tell us a little bit about why you think this is such an important issue. What is it that's lost in this current world?
- [18:06]
A
Well, thank you for that. There's so many things I want to say, but I'll start with a study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2023 or 2024, and it had a really long headline, but it was basically as children's independence and free play time have gone down over the decades, not just since COVID not just since phones, but over the decades. 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you know, childhood became more supervised. Their anxiety and depression have gone up. And as you know, that's, you know, it's a public health crisis at the moment, or so it's defined by the Surgeon General as, you know, kids are more depressed and anxious than ever. Well, guess what? Two years after the Surgeon General put out that report, he put out another report saying parents are more depressed and anxious than ever. And I think that it's not coincidence. I think that they're both spending so much time watching and being watched that nobody is growing in full. I Mean, the parents aren't growing in trust of their kid because they only see their kid with them. They're only okay if the kid is supervised. And the kid always has somebody else leaning and saying, here, let me do that for you, or try it this way, or no, don't do that, or watch out or it's time to go. And so neither of them have the breathing room to become happier people. Happier, more confident, more competent, especially kids. I just had somebody explain this to me. I've been talking about the same thing for so many years. But she put it so bluntly, and that was that. Independence leads to competence, right? You gotta figure out how to get yourself home. If you're lost, you gotta figure out how to fix your bike chain. So independence leads to competence and competence leads to confidence. So when we worry about kids being so anxious and depressed, it's because they have no idea how much they're capable of doing. And meanwhile, parents, as you say, excuse me, are there. There are schools that will not allow a child to get off at the bus, off the school bus, at the bus stop, unless there's a parent there to walk them home. And it could be that they're walking two blocks home. It could be they're walking two houses home, but the bus driver is not allowed to let the kid off. And so the mom just has to, I don't know, quit her job, you know, to be outside at the bus stop Monday through Friday from 3 to 3:30 or 3:45, if the bus is running really late. And so it really has recalibrated childhood and parenthood. And I think, you know, we hear about how stressed parents are, and it's sort of like a rueful laugh, like, of course I gotta be with them. And of course I'm going to another party this weekend and I'm gonna eat more cake and pizza because I'm never allowed to drop off the kid at a party. And if I do, I'm considered irresponsible and my kid is considered a burden on everybody else's. And then I have to drive them home. And when we're talking about actual danger, the ironic thing is that your kid is in more danger in that car ride than anything else we've discussed today. Cause that's the way kids die, is as passengers in cars. And we don't obsess about, like, oh, I want to drive my kid to the dust, to the dentist, you know, or to cheerleading practice. But what if something happens? I could never forgive myself. The odds are bad, but they're not, you know, they're not awful. There's just a, the only thing that we've really demonized is a parent who thinks that their kid is gonna be okay without them there.
- [21:19]
B
Yeah, that's an important point. That it's a fundamental structure of risk, that there are low probability, terrible outcome risks in life all of the time. Right. I mean, if I'm running late to meet a friend for lunch, I'll cross a red light. And at some level it is completely irrational, right? I can see in some ways I get the safetiest position, right? You should never crest the road on a red light. What could possibly be worth the risk of dying just because you don't want to have a social embarrassment of being an extra 30 seconds late to meeting your friend? But that's not how we lead our life. Some risks, we normalize. We know that it's dangerous to cross the street on a red light. Certainly don't do it in the middle of a very, very busy four carat roadway. But I look left and right and say if I don't see any cars, I may as well cross, right? And then there's other areas in which we say, well, that is a risk where if something happened, I would never forgive myself. And it really does seem to depend on that background set of social norms about which risk has been normalized and which risk hasn't been normalized. We understand that there's a risk in driving somewhere, but we think driving is such a normal human activity, we take precautions. You know, we, we have seat belts, we have invested in the safety of the cars, which are much better at protecting passengers. Better in a car accident today than 30. All of that is good, right? Not against safety in general, but we understand that it'd be really irrational to say I'm never going to enter a car because of the risk of dying. It's important to be able to get around and be mobile, et cetera. But then somehow when it comes to kids, we say, no, no, no. This is the area in which that safety is the approach in which that precautionary principle in which that eliminate all potential risk of a bad outcome takes priority. And we're not normalizing, we have to denormalize the idea that you let your kid roam around. And I guess it takes a anthropologist or sociologist to try and figure out why in some areas we are willing to deal with those low likelihood extreme outcome risks in an everyday way. And in other areas we say, no, no, no, no, no, no. If you're running that risk, you're a monster.
- [23:28]
A
So there was an interesting study done by, I'm not sure if they were sociologists or psychologists at the University of California, Irvine. One of the women, I can't remember everybody's name, but one of the researchers was a woman named Barbara Sarneca. And she and her colleagues devised this fun, I'd say, brilliant study. It presented the same case to five separate groups of people. All demographically, the people were all the same. One group was, the story was that a kid was waiting in a car for half an hour without their parent there. But they told group A that the mom wasn't there because she was just putting a book in the library slot, you know, the book return slot. And she had, she passed out for half an hour, okay, so she meant to be right back in the car moments later, but she passed out. They told group two, the mom had to go and do some work for her job. Group three that she was exercising for volunteering. I don't know what 3 and 4 were, but 5 was she was going to meet her lover for half an hour. And then they asked these, each group separately, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much danger was that child in for that half hour? And it wasn't this perfectly calibrated, but it did say this, which is that the first group where the mom was passed out, they thought the kid was at a 5. And the second group, the mom is working, it's a six. And by the time they're asking group E, you know, how about when she's going to the lover? They were, oh my God, that kid is in so much danger. What kind of crazy mom. And what they were showing is that we think we're judging danger, but we're actually judging parents. And the more we disapprove of a parent, the more danger we confabulate their child having been in. And because now we think that any child is in danger anytime their parent isn't with them, we always think that the parent is immoral. Because what kind of parent leaves their kid in danger? Another example I was going to give you of a mom who was arrested was another story I broke. Big story out in South Carolina. Mom, single mom, working her shift at McDonald's during summer break. Her name's Deborah Harrell. Normally the kid would come with her, her 9 year old daughter, and sit at McDonald's and play on her laptop while the mom worked. But then their laptop got stolen and so the kids said, could I please go to the park instead? You know, it's not too far from here. My friends are there. They serve breakfast and lunch. There's sprinklers. Can I please go there? And the mom said, okay, that sounds good. So the kid goes there. Day one, day two, day three. A lady comes up and says, little girl. Yes? Where is your mother? It's like, well, she's working. Where? At McDonald's. You want to call her? I have a phone. We can call her. No, I don't want to call her. Lady calls the police. Mom gets thrown in jail for a couple of days. Kid is taken away from her for 17 days. And the reason was that the mom had abandoned the child and anything terrible could have happened. I wouldn't call that abandonment. I'd call that my childhood. My mom letting me play at the park during the summer when I was young. And also anything could have happened. But with a bunch of other kids and adults, you really have to imagine a Liam Neeson movie. Somebody coming in with a ski mask, taking the one kid that they figured out doesn't have their mom there and driving off and nobody sees them or stops them or. It's so impossible. It's so, you know, like a billion to one odds. And yet the footage of the interrogation of the mom was released to the public. And you see this man going, so you thought she'd be okay? It's like, yeah, I thought she'd be okay. You didn't think about, you know, a sexual predator coming and taking her and having his way? It's like, no, I didn't think that. So if you're almost not catastrophizing, if you're not fantasizing a movie plot threat, then you're bad. And somehow that makes your child in danger. So it's just this weird moment we're in, and I was just on another podcast with a woman who's very popular, probably a different demographic than yours.
- [27:21]
B
Don't presume my audience, Lenore.
- [27:23]
A
25 to 35 year old women, moms. And she had said boldly, I think that she said, what age do you think a kid can go into the grocery store and like, get a loaf of bread and pay for it and come back out again if the mom is waiting just outside the grocery. And she said, I think five. And she was raked over the coals. And once again it's like, well, what do you think is happening in that grocery? And the time it takes to buy a loaf of bread? So the reason I get so hyper about this topic is that you can't have a culture that is making its decisions, its laws, and even its incarcerations based on a lie, which is that a kid going into the store is going to die, a kid playing at the park with a bunch of other people around during the day is going to be kidnapped, or a child walking home from a store is likely not to make it, and therefore it's such a horrible mother, we got to teach her a lesson in jail.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah. And I feel like there's these two levels of trying to calculate the acceptability of risk in which people have a lot of resistance in engaging in trade offs. Right. So the first is there's a great example from allergies. I'm not a medical expert, but my understanding of this is that parents understandably are concerned about the children growing up in a reasonably clean environment and want to, you know, keep a clean home and get a little bit nervous when the kid is, you know, on the ground in the park eating dog poop or whatever. But it turns out that one of the reasons why the incidence of allergies has gone up a lot, at least according to some researchers, is in fact because children now often grow up in too sanitized an environment. So even though in that moment there probably is some real risk to the kid consuming dirt and perhaps coming, you know, in contact with some kind of bacteria that might make it sick for a few days of perhaps eating something which is disgusting and somehow perhaps bad for itself in the long run, it in fact is very good for the kid to do that because it reduces this other kind of danger. Right. And presumably there's a kind of equivalent here where like, yes, there's some risk. I know you get nervous when I say that, like there's some risk to a five year old being on their own in the store. Right. Maybe very remote risk. There's like some risk. Right. But also the kid is building the skills so that if it's actually in a dangerous situation, if some challenging thing should actually happen to them, they have the resources and their wherewithal and the experience to deal with that. So there's a kind of trade off between some calculated risk you're exposing them to in situation A and the development of all the skills that are going to allow these kids to not run risks late in life to manage the risk that life's going to throw in them in one way or another, in a better way. Having the thing where the trade off becomes even harder is when it comes to. But what about the interest of the parent? Right?
- [30:22]
A
Yeah. Oh, you're not. Oh my God, how dare you mention the interest of the parent. What are you, some kind of baby hating, you know, monster?
- [30:29]
B
Yeah, exactly. And perhaps a parent is just like having a nice time connecting with a spouse, which by the way, is good for the kid because it's good when parents don't get divorced and they still have some, you know, let's see if we can out of it. And they're just like enjoying having some time in a busy schedule to connect with their spouse and to watch a movie together or whatever. And they could interrupt that and drive their kid to a friend's house and engage in small talk with the other kids. Parents who also don't particularly want to be engaging in that small talk. Or they could just say, yeah, sure, walk for one block to see your good friend little Timmy. Right? And perhaps there's a genuine trade off where, you know, but, but that too is part of parenting, right? It's a problem if there's no amount of self concern of parents. There's obviously a deep amount of concern they should have over kids, right? And prioritize the interests of the kids in all kinds of contexts. But sometimes the parent also needs to say, hey, it's in my interest to have this downtime to be able to connect with my. But be able to work, to put food on the table and it's fine to trade that off against some tiny risk to their kid.
- [31:33]
A
So first of all, I keep using the word risk and I would use normal life, like letting your kid have a normal life. Walk home from school, play at the park, you know, go to a friend's house, go on an overnight. Those things are no more risky, I would say, than eating solid food or walking down the steps in the morning or having a dog that you could trip over. I mean there's. We just can't keep calling them risks when they're just everyday life.
- [31:56]
B
To me, I see why in a kind of. Not exactly. I think you're being intellectually honest. Been a kind of piao, you said, well, that's not risk because there's all of these risks. I think to me the more natural way to put that is that risk is part of life. There's no way to completely eliminate risk. Right. Again, walking down the street is risk. Letting your kids play sports is risk. I mean, you can have all kinds of injuries from sports, right? Driving in a car, this is no way of eliminating risk whatsoever. So to me it's more natural to acknowledge there's some small amount of risk involved in all of this. But there's some small amount of risk involved in taking a shower, involved in anything you do.
- [32:34]
A
Right, right, right. That's why whenever we say risk with going outside or walking to school, we just have to keep then saying it with everything else or eating your solid food in the morning or, you know, having a loose brick in your driveway, whatever. So we agree, risk is part of life. Tiny risks in this ever safer world. So the idea of self concern, well, that's why this study of the, you know, the kid is waiting in the car for half an hour was so apoplectic. The people who heard that the mom was going off to the lover, let's imagine she was going off to have a tryst with her husband. My baby takes the morning train, that kind of thing. I have a feeling it would still be pinging at 10, maybe a little less. But the idea is once again a mother put, you know, made a rational choice that her kid was going to be okay and then did something that she wanted to do. There's a case like this in New Jersey about 10 years ago. Mom left her kid in the car, he was asleep. She didn't want to drag him into the mall. She comes out, he's fine. But of course, somebody has called 911 to say there's a kid in the car. And you know what? I do want people to call 911. If you see a kid in the car at some place like the IBM parking lot where it's so clear that the person has forgotten the kid in the car and gone into work. But if you see a kid, I mean, I've dealt with parents who've had the cops called on them when they were. They parked in front of the dry cleaners. There's plate glass windows, they're waving to their kid from the dry cleaners and still they come out. And the lie is that anything terrible could have happened to your kid in that short amount of time, that's not happening. So. God, what was I saying? So this mom left her kid in the car. She was returning something, she came back to the car and she was found guilty of whatever, child abuse or neglect. And then it went up to the appeals court and they found her guilty again. Three judges and they said, we don't even have to list all the. They called them terribles or horribles. They made an adjective into a noun. All the horribles that could have happened to this kid. And then finally it went to the Supreme Court in New Jersey, which, God bless them, they said, just because we can imagine terrible things Happening doesn't mean they're likely. And we cannot judge a mom having put her child in danger when the dangers are in our imagination. And so they reversed the ruling. But here was a mom going about her day returning something which is not an immediate need. Nothing's going to burn down if you don't return the shirt to, you know, to Macy's on time. But it was considered evil. And so there's something about parents thinking about anyway, Marge Simpson, there's. In the Simpsons, there's always the mob. Will no one think of the children? You sort of get points if you can come up with any way that somebody hasn't thought hard enough about something bad that could happen to kids. And that's the highest morality at the moment, is not just thinking about kids, actual safety, but thinking about the hypothetical worst thing that could happen to them. And why weren't you thinking of that? I was. I'm good. You chose to think about your own needs, you horrible person. Which is why parents are so stressed and depressed, because the job has. It takes up literally every second and every inch of the day.
- [35:46]
B
Yeah. And this is my broader frustration with today's parenting culture that, you know, I still see in some places, like in Italy and other parts of Southern Europe, an ability to integrate your child into your life more broadly, where I think you end up spending a lot of time with your children, but they're not always at the very center of attention, and they're not always the number one priority. Right. Like, you go to a dinner party, you take your kid along, and hopefully there's some other kids and they can play with each other. And if not, then your kid gets a little bit bored and falls asleep on the couch, but that's okay. And I think that has benefits for the child because the child doesn't always feel like they're at the center of attention, and therefore, you know, learn the social skills that are required to integrate into human society, where you're not always at the very center of attention and everybody's concerned either. And, of course, it's much better for the parents who I think have a much better time with their children because they don't get so exhausted. Whereas in the United States is this idea that, you know, when you're spending time with your children, they have to be at the very, very, very center of your focus. But as a result, you then need all of this time where you're hiring babysitters or, you know, whatever, because, my God, you need some time away because you're going crazy. Right. And this just seems like an equilibrium which is really bad for both sides.
- [37:03]
A
Right? So I have a friend, Chris Byrne was known as the toy guy, who explained this to me really well. And it's not that the kids and the parents are always together. It's that there used to be in the olden days. And I remember these olden days that there were three different worlds. And there was the kid world, which was, you know, full of candy and bike rides and playing. And then there was the adult world, which was so boring to us because the parents were discussing politics and who was having an operation and business. And then there was Family World. And Family World was at dinner, right. Or on vacation. But it wasn't every single second of the day that the kid was not in school. And by the way, schools beam all the information out to parents all the time, throughout the day, too. So they know exactly what the kid got on their Spanish test. And if they're in preschool, they know if they ate all their orange segments or all their nuggets. So. So the three worlds got mashed together. And the result is, once again, these depressed kids because they have no autonomy, no agency. And the depressed parents cause they're always with their kids. And Wendy Mogul said it best. She wrote the Blessings of a Skin Knee. And she wrote that when you look at anything close up, you see the flaws, right? And now we're so close to our kids that we see everything they're doing that's unsafe or mean or slow or suboptimal. And so then we jump in to fix it, at which point they don't fix it. And so they are sitting back. They're sort of the passengers in their lives, and the parents are taking control. So the real trick is to the word you use, which is rebalance it, right? That the kids aren't at the center of the world because the kids aren't always in our world. They're separate some of the time. They're literally physically separate. And the parents are separate, too. And so Let Grow, which is, as you see, in my name, I'm president of Let Grow, which is the nonprofit that promotes childhood independence. And it Grew out of Free Range Kids, which is the book I wrote. And Let Grow has two initiatives that are free for schools or for individuals, but they work well for schools because of the collective action problem. You're getting everybody to do something at the same time. And they address the exact problem of kids being always with parents and of kids not learning how to deal with each other because they're always being watched over or coddled or assisted. So the first one is we say, have schools give kids the Let Grow experience, which is a homework assignment, one sentence long. It says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents permission, but without your parents. And you know, Jonathan Haidt is one of the co founders of Let Grow with me. And he's talking about, like, you gotta get everybody doing something at the same time so that there's no shame or fear. And so if everybody has to suddenly send their kids out to do something, I'm talking to you. What are you having? I'm having my kid go get the groceries. I'm having my kid get a haircut. Oh, mine's going to guitar lessons. Can mine go with yours? Because guitar is next to, you know, judo. And so everybody is letting their kids go for the first time. Cause they never knew that they could. And they were worried about being shamed if they did, but now they must. It's a homework assignment for their kid. And their kids go and they zoom around. And either they go and they get their hair cut or they ditch that and actually go and adopt a puppy. Whether it's good or bad, whether it's successful or not, it doesn't matter. The kid has been away. And either they come back with. Actually, one parent did send her kid to get a haircut and came back with a mohawk. Okay, that's agency. Either they come back and it's perfect and you're proud, or they come back and they got lost, or they forgot to get the change, or they bought the wrong kind of bread and that doesn't matter either. And then you're released into realizing things don't have to be perfect and they're going to be okay. Kids are living in this very tightly knit place where you're taught that, you know, any wrong move and your grades will go down and you won't get into the good high school and you won't get into the college and you'll be living in the gutter or somebody else will get that brass ring. And in this case, you just. It allows everybody to breathe. It's like, that was fun or that was hard, but I did it, or I screwed up, but it wasn't the end of the world. You just need some time apart. That's like my whole message is parents have to realize that kids are okay when they're not supervised every single second. And that's what does it. And all the kids in the school are doing this and they're comparing Notes and the parents are comparing notes and you've broken this collective action problem. The other Let Grow initiative, very simple. Keep the schools open for no phones, mixed age, loose parts, free play. By that I mean the play like you probably did as a kid, without anybody organizing it, which is that there's some balls, there's a bunch of kids, they're different ages, nobody's telling them what to do. You know, some of you are going to have a soccer game and some of you are going to play jump rope and some of you are going to draw with chalk and some of you are going to throw rocks against the ground. And it doesn't really matter because then you'll find your friend and you'll find out that nobody wants to play with you if you're a jerk. Or it's more fun if we throw two rocks at once. And suddenly all these social emotional skills that we're worried that kids don't have start to flourish because all children throughout all of human history did this. They hung out in a gang of different age kids and made things happen. That's it. That's my commercial for Let Grow's free programs as endorsed by Jonathan Haidt in the Anxious generation.
- [42:17]
B
Excellent. And those are really good initiatives because as you're saying, it is important to get the collective action right. It is much easier to make this step when you're not used to it, to letting your kid go, run an errand and so on. If a bunch of other parents are doing that as well, if a community has an awareness of it, what if that fails? What if you're trying to persuade your school to adopt this program? You get together with some neighborhood parents and they all are horrified and they say, oh no, no, no, no, we would never want to do that. And you're on your own. One of the things that I think is so challenging about parenting is that if you are an individual, you can kind of chart your own way, right? If your political opinions are different from those of most of your neighbors, who cares? You pick out the neighbors who have similar opinions to you. You hang out together. The fact that your next neighbor may have a different political opinion really doesn't matter unless there's some very strange circumstance, right? If you want to be able to swear in your home, you swear, that's fine. If you think it's fine for your kids to swear as well, well, that's more complicated because if they swear at school and as a result, suddenly the best friend's parents say they're no longer allowed to Play with your kid, because this is so shocking. Well, then you've imposed a real cost on your kid who's losing their best friend. So suddenly you can't swear in your own kitchen, Right? With these kinds of things, if you think, hey, I live in a community that's super safety ish, I tell them about Jonathan Haidt's endorsement of this. I play them the podcast of, you know, Skenazy. It's not, it's not working. It's not helping. Right? I'm not getting them on board of the same thing. What can you do as an individual parent? What can you do in your own life to incorporate those moments of free play versus empowering tasks, even if your community is not with you?
- [43:59]
A
Well, that's why we do love schools doing it. Actually, I just heard of a church that's doing it as part of its faith initiative. It's like, don't just trust yourself, trust God. Let your kids do things. One neighborhood I gave a talk in, I don't know, a couple months ago in Piedmont, California, started doing a very cool thing, which is they send out a note. They have a group that's anti phones. And the antiphone group sent out an email to all the parents saying, hey, let's do this free Play Friday things. It's also in the anxious generation, but the Free Play Friday is like, just send your kids to these two parks and don't stay with them. And that way all the parents who don't want to do it are not doing it, but the parents who are have permission and have a little bit of buy in from other people. If you're the only person in the entire neighborhood who wants your kids to walk to the store, then you have them do it with their siblings. We have a little card. I don't have it with me, but it's, you know, a teeny little card like this that kids can carry that says, I'm not lost or neglected. My parents know I'm out here. You know, if you don't believe me, here's their phone number. And really, I've heard of places where like a parent sends her kids to walk to school and then another parent down the block. This happened with my own kid. Why am I telling a hypothetical story? I was letting Izzy, my son, walk home from P.S. 116 in Manhattan, and his best friend was Chris, who was a year older and bigger. But his mom said, well, I'll let Chris walk home if he can walk with Izzy. And so a little bit of breaking the ice, just normalizes it for other parents. I think that parents are in this collective action trap. I once talked to a dad who said that every morning takes his kid to the bus stop. She's seven, and he waits with her there. And I said, why? And he said, I don't know. It was just something that had become so de rigueur that he did it on automatic pilot. And sometimes it just requires. One of the things I suggest, and in my book is if you're standing there with your kid at the bus stop and there's three other parents with five other kids, say, I'll watch them. All right? Just remind parents that we're in this together. I mean, people are, you know, maybe a little weirded out, but maybe a little relieved that they can get to work early or stop at Starbucks now because they don't have to wait for the bus. So I think asserting your own trust in your neighborhood, in your kids, in your parenting in the local park, can go a long way to getting other people who just to realize, like, oh, that's right, you know, I moved to this neighborhood because it's safe. I'm gonna let my kids wait with the other kids at the bus stop. That doesn't seem like a crazy thing to do anymore. Once you sort of are sort of jolted into reality, what would you say
- [46:46]
B
to somebody who listens to all of this and who's intellectually convinced by this, but who's not in the habit of giving their kids that freedom and who feels torn, right? Who is like, look, Lino convinced me. I think it's important for my child to develop that kind of autonomy. I think it would make my own life better. And they're about to do it, and then something makes them fall back, they panic, and they think, but what if, you know, what if the risk is higher than she said? What if some, you know, the risk is really low, but something. Some of the horrible thing happened to me. What if there's no external risk, but the cops will be called and I'll have to answer to them and CPS is going to be on my back. Right. For the people who perhaps rationally say, look, absolutely, I want to go do this, and have trouble getting themselves there because it's such an emotive issue, what would you say to them?
- [47:37]
A
Oh, a bunch of things. First of all, I'm so sorry that this is our era that is undermining all of our trust in ourselves and our neighbors and our parenting and our kids. That's just an evil miasma to be breathing in Every day. But I would say a couple things. One is that there was a study done, a pilot study of independence as therapy for kids with a diagnosis of anxiety. And it was. I would recommend talking to him on your podcast. It's Camilo Ortiz. He's a psychology professor at Long Island University. And it was a five week study. First week he just meets with the parents. They tell him, oh, my kid is so anxious, he won't go upstairs or downstairs in our house without us. He's 10. Or my kid is so anxious she won't sleep in her own bed ever. And then the next week. And he says, but independence is good. Okay, next week he meets with the kid and the parents, and rather than saying, as he normally would as a cognitive behavioral therapist, you're afraid to go upstairs without your dad, how about tonight, you go up there for five minutes, I'll give you a watch, a timer, and then you'll see how that feels. And then next week we're gonna do. He doesn't mention any of the deficits. He doesn't mention the fear. He says, you're 10. I'll bet there's some stuff you wanna do on your own. And then the kid turns out to have. I mean, all these anxious kids had things they wanna do on their own that were quirky. They wanted to play chess at the park with a kid, they want. With a, with one of the adults there. They wanted to ride the Long island railroad, walk home from school, sell bracelets at school, just all these different things. And the parents had to say yes, because it's therapy, right? The therapist is saying, this is important. And when they did that and the kids went on their own, it literally, they had to do one thing every other day for four weeks. And after that, the kids said, the kids whose anxiety level, they said they'd been worried. Most of the time, it went to being worried a little bit of the time. To recognize the crucial psychological importance of, of independence, how it changed your kid and how it changes you. Because now you see a different kid and their confidence increases your confidence and your confidence in them increases theirs. That should be a little bit of wind under the wings of an anxious parent to realize like this is something that's not just a good idea, or maybe it will save me some time, but it's a psychologically crucial foundation of childhood that we have denied kids. And kids are really suffering. So that should be one argument that moves the needle a little, that it is imperative that kids recognize that they can do things on their own. And the second thing is we are changing the laws. We've changed the laws in nine states so far and two or more are about to get their governor's signature that they passed the legislature. And our law, our reasonable childhood independence law, says that neglect is when you put a kid in serious obvious danger. Not anytime you take your eyes off them. It's not serious obvious danger to let your kid walk to school unless it's in a, you know, dmz, you know, shooting neighborhood or you know what a serious obvious danger is versus a. I can imagine something bad. And so Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Connecticut, Montana, and now Georgia. Georgia, in the wake of that mom getting arrested for her kid walking to town, have all adopted our law. And Florida and Missouri or possibly Indiana, but I think it's Missouri are about to the governor just has to sign it and it will become law. And so if you're interested in having that law in your state, if you go to letgrow.org and you click on state laws, you can fill out a little form and you know, we're working on another five states for the next year. It sometimes takes their states where it's gone down in flames, but nine states is not bad and really 11.
- [51:28]
B
So thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Lino and I take the focus beyond childhood and ask what happens to these kids who never get a chance to figure out how to deal with a squabble between themselves, who never have had unstructured times once they reach college and once they reach the workplace, how have they started to transform the culture of our societies as a whole? And how can those institutions react in an appropriate way? To listen to this part of the conversation, please support the podcast. Please go to yashamunk.substack.com Become a paying subscriber. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like, Rate the show on itunes, Tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.