March 14, 2025 • 43 mins
Are we protecting our kids or holding them back? In this episode, Justin talks with Lenore Skenazy about the unintended consequences of overprotection and why kids need to experience risk to build confidence, resilience, and essential life skills. From eliminating stairs in homes to constant parental surveillance, we examine how fear-based parenting is shaping modern childhood—and what we can do to change it.
KEY POINTS:
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The growing trend of designing homes for maximum parental surveillance and risk elimination.
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Why removing all risks from a child’s life can have long-term negative effects on their mental health and independence.
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The difference between reasonable safety precautions (e.g., seat belts, helmets) and excessive protection that stifles growth.
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How parental fear contributes to anxiety, depression, and dependence in kids.
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Practical ways to introduce independence and calculated risk into children’s lives.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
"Fear doesn’t prevent death, but it prevents life."
KEY INSIGHTS FOR PARENTS:
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Removing every possible risk doesn't make kids safer—it makes them less capable.
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Letting children navigate small risks (like climbing stairs, using a knife, or walking to school) helps them build real-world skills.
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Worrying can feel like an action, but it doesn’t change reality—teaching skills and fostering independence does.
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Kids don’t need a risk-free life; they need a chance to learn, adapt, and grow.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
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Let Grow – Free resources for fostering childhood independence.
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Supervision Not Required podcast – A new podcast on raising confident, capable kids.
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:
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Identify one small area where you can give your child more independence.
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Teach them practical skills rather than avoiding potential risks.
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Shift your mindset from "How do I eliminate all risks?" to "How do I prepare my child to handle them?"
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Connect with other parents who value childhood independence to build confidence in your approach.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is the Happy Families Podcast. Thanks so much for
being a part of these in depth podcast discussions. My
name is doctor Justin Colson. I'm a dad to six
kids and the author of six books about raising happy families.
And on this episode we're having a conversation with Lenor Scanes.
She's the president of Let Grow, a not for profit
organization that promotes childhood independence and resilience, and also the
(00:30):
founder of the Free Range Kids movement. Leno was also branded,
quite famously the World's worst mum. Let's start at the
peak Lenor Scanazi moment where you've got a nine year
old son. It's probably what was it about ten or
twelve years ago? Now, oh wow, okay, so yep, So
(00:51):
you've got a nine year old son and you say, mate,
why don't you catch the subway home?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, that's not what I say. First of all, we
don't see meat. But more importantly, our son was asking
us if we would take him someplace he'd never been
before and let him find his own way home on
the subway, which is how we get around in New
York City all the time. And this was not something
that our older son had asked us when he was
nine so it was something that we really had to
think about, my husband and I before we said yes.
(01:20):
But then finally we did say, okay, we'll do this.
We'll let you take the subway by yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It's kind of independent, really, isn't it. A nine year
old aunt usually saying give me a challenge. Let's just
let's just drop me somewhere in the city and let
me try to get home. So has he always been
an independent minded kind of kid.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I would say he is. But I think that we're
sort of right and wrong on whether kids have always
or don't ask this kind of thing. I think that
a generation or two before this, it wouldn't have been
a conversation because it would have happened naturally. You know,
kids would have been either getting on their bikes if
they were in the suburbs, or riding the bus or
subway if they were in the city, you know, to
get to a music lesson, to get to school, to
(01:57):
get to grandma's house, to get to a know, an
empty lot and start a baseball game and hang out
there all day. And so even the fact that he
had to ask, as opposed to this just being a
normal thing that kids just do on their own is
indicative of it being, you know, a more sort of
mother may I kind of era than it was before. So, yeah,
(02:17):
he was asking him that was unusual, but I don't
think his independence would have been unusual in any other generation.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
When you had the conversation with your husband and then
decided that we're comfortable with this, we'll give it a go.
We'll take you into the city and we'll go home,
and then we'll see you at home in a couple
of hours. Hopefully.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
What we said that's a bigger you're making it into
a bigger deal because we were in the city, right
We lived in Manhattan at the time, and we were
sending him. You know, we just took the subway up
to this beautiful, fancy department store, which is why it
was someplace he had never been before because we don't
usually shot there. And then all he had to do
was come back down on the subway about four or
five stops, and then we don't live right near there,
(03:00):
so he had to take another little bus across town.
All together, it might have taken an hour if that.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
When you went through this conversation and actually got to
the point where you're like, okay, let's do this. What
reservations did you have? At what point were you thinking?
Are we crazy? Is this normal? A generation to go
it would have been fine, but it's a different world. Now,
what are we thinking? What sort of concerns did you
have beforehand?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
We had the concern that we wanted to make sure
that he knew what he was doing. And so even
though we are on the subways all the time, and now,
some kids love certain things, like there are kids who
love cars or dolls or whatever, he loved the subway,
loves you know, we'd love public transportation, but we wanted
to make sure he understood that. You know that you're
reading the map and the green line, which is the
line that he was going to have to take. That's
the four, five, and six train. For anybody who's been
(03:44):
to New York City, that that was the train you
would have to take, and you know this is the
stock you get off on. And then of course we're
always on that extremely slow bus, so he knew that
he would have to wait for the bus at the
bus stop. I don't recall telling him this that time,
but I've always told my kids that you can talk
to strain, you can't go off with strangers. So if
you need help from somebody, certainly you can ask a
(04:05):
question of somebody, but you can't get into somebody's car.
You can't go off with somebody. And other than that,
we prepared him with a couple of things. We gave
him a subway map twenty dollars, just in case you
needed something went really terribly wrong and he needed to
take a cab or something quarters because even twelve years
ago there were still some payphones in the subway, and
(04:27):
and a metro card, which is the card that you
slide through the entryway to get into the trains to
pay your fare. And so I'd say that we didn't
think we were crazy because we were preparing him, and
because it wasn't something that he was saying, no, Mom,
I don't want to do this. This was his idea
and something that we had all discussed and decided he
was ready for. You know, I'm a reporter by trade.
(04:49):
I spent years and years at the New York Daily News,
which is if you've seen the Superman movies, it's actually
they call it the Daily Planet, but they shoot the
movies the Daily News, which is where I worked, And
so as a tabloid reporter. I was steeped in the city.
You know, I went everywhere on stories hither and Yon,
and I had a very i'd say realistic view of
(05:12):
the city based on being very much part of it.
And that's very different from I think the way the
story obviously resonated around the world because if you watch
you know, TV shows, especially Law and Order Geez set
in New York City, you think there's a murder every second,
and there are always children, and they're always raped beforehand,
(05:33):
and they're always cut into pieces. And in fact, the
crime rate, the crime rate right now is crazy because
of COVID, but for since the nineties, the crime rate
has been going down, down, down, down, down. So given
all that, I didn't think we were crazy, And in fact,
there are a lot of things that I wouldn't let
my nine year old do, and that I'm sorry that
my twenty two year old does. I absolutely I am
(05:54):
terrified of cars, but I guess he has to drive.
But taking the subway did not strike me as crazy.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Every now and again, also kids off to play in
the park, or I'll tell them to go for a
walk around the block, or jump on their bikes and
ride to school or whatever it might be. And as
they leave the driveway, my heart goes with them, and
I think to myself, I know what the crime statistics are. Loosely,
I know that I live in a pretty safe area.
I know all of these things. But there's this part
(06:20):
of me that just seizes up and thinks, what have
you just done. You've sent the ten year old on
a bike ride with a twelve year old. What's going
to happen? Now? It's a challenging thing. And then you know,
maybe the six year old says, can I go too?
And I think to myself, well, can I send a
six year old in the care of a ten and
a twelve year old? And at this point the answer
is no, because she's six. But it's a really, really,
(06:42):
really big challenge to kind of encounter and work through
these things, even when you know rationally that it should
be just fine.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I've just said the last This weekend, my kids were
visiting me and they're now twenty two and twenty four,
and when they were driving home together, I was like,
both my kids are in the carriage. Oh no, oh no,
which is just normal. But here's what we're talking about.
You're saying is it rational or irrational to worry this way,
to calculate the odds as we're doing. I'd say that
(07:13):
there's no way to be a parent without being worried,
or at least I haven't figured that out yet. But
what I think is different from our about our generation.
I'm actually I'm older than you, so about your generation,
and then our parents are grandparents or anybody before that,
is that when my mom let me walk to school,
(07:34):
and it was age five, and she didn't do it
because she was a free range mom or a crazy person.
She was doing it because everybody let their kids walk
to school at age five in the suburb where I
was growing up outside of Chicago. She was a nervous mom.
You know, she was a regular mom. But back then
you let kids do that, and when you let the
children go, you weren't sitting there going, oh my god,
I hope she makes it. It's going to be about
(07:56):
a six minute walk, and she's only five, and she's
so well and the world is such a terrible place
and if anything terable happened to her, I couldn't live
with myself. Forget it. I'm gonna go get her and
drive her myself and that simply wasn't the catechism Back then,
you didn't have to go through what about you know?
And then name you know? What about you know? Elizabeth Smart?
What about you know? Maddie McCann. You weren't thinking that
(08:20):
a normal mom, a normal good mom, should be thinking
about the murder of their child every time the child
was out of their sight, or the death on the
bike on the walk on you know. So that is new,
and it feels normal because we it is normal to worry.
But I feel like these new extravagant worries are super
(08:42):
imposed on us by a culture that I've seen up close,
in part because of the question that was asked to me.
You know, I let my son ride the subway. Okay,
most interviewers at the very beginning, and I'd say the
very beginning. For the first four years, I would say,
we're saying, okay, you know, he had a good time,
you're proud, he's elated, he feels grown up. Great, that's
(09:03):
all great, But what if he hadn't come home? Framing
it in the negative? I never had a good answer.
How would I have felt? Funny? You should ask, I'd
feel great because I don't have to feed another kid.
I mean, there was like no normal answer that you
could give to that question other than this is how
I'd feel. And in a way, this is what they
(09:25):
were trying to make me feel. They were trying to
take a positive story and turn it back into the
story that television loves, which is he never came home.
So the fact that he did come home, Okay, let's
ignore that and think about how terrible a mom she
would have been if that had happened. And why wasn't
she thinking that way? You're always supposed to be thinking
in this extremely dark, dystopian way about your kid if
(09:50):
they're beyond your sight, and that's what's new, And I
feel like it's superimposed by questions like that. When an
interview would say, well, how would you have felt, it's like,
you know how I feel. I would feel lower than hell. Okay,
but why are we talking about it? Why? You know,
why can't we celebrate when a kid does something normal
that I'd say, you know, most nine year olds could
(10:12):
do if they felt like it. Worry is normal, but
us worrying when the kid goes around the block worrying.
I would say, even if a six year old is
with a ten and a twelve year old who love
him or her and care about them. That's new.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What I'm interested in is this, You've been doing some
work with let grow dot org with one of the
best thinkers in the world of psychology, Jonathan Hate and
actually two of the.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Best thinkers in the world of psychology, Jonathan Height, and
also Peter Gray, doctor Peter Gray.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Now you're just showing off genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well,
I just want to talk about John at the moment
because his research is what has fascinated me the most,
because Peter really focuses on the play aspect of life,
and John has always focused so much more on the
I guess, on the social psychology and the data and trends.
And what I'm really curious about is what as you've
worked as a trio, what have you discovered in the data,
(11:04):
what's the data showing in terms of this, Well, is
there a trend? And everybody's you know, getting so excited
about the outlaws the unusual stories.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
First of all, I do think there's something. I'm happy
you mentioned the outliers and the unusual stories because I
feel like they are driving so much of our regular
life based on the saddest, worst, most anomalous, unpredictable stories
that if there was some way we could get rid
of the story of one horrible accident or one horrible crime,
(11:37):
or one horrible shooting, I think we would all be
at a much better set point rather than using those terrible,
outlying stories as the norm from which we decide how
we should live our lives. But the thing that son,
Jonathan Heyde is a big fan of free range kids,
and he's raising his free range kids, and I feel
(11:58):
great about that. But he came to me a couple
of years ago, and his hypothesis was that young adults,
and by young adults re meets college age and a
little bit beyond were becoming fragile. And as it turns out,
doctor Peter Gray had noticed this too. That you know,
(12:19):
I think it's great when kids go for you know,
the psychological services they need. And believe me, I live
in New York, I'm a Jew, I'm a woman. I've
been to as much therapy as anybody could posibly have
because of these demographics. So I love therapy. However, it
seems like at this point on the college campuses, and
I'm talking about before COVID because COVID is just so
(12:39):
weird that the colleges could not keep up with the
number of kids who were seeking therapy and who seemed
to be falling apart and not falling apart after a
breakup with a girlfriend or a boyfriend or something very large,
but often after a bee like a not a bee
like this, like a bee, or after an argument with
(13:02):
the roommate, after a mouse in the dorm. And John
and Peter were thinking, where is this fragility coming from?
Why do the kids think they need to talk to
either counselor or they have to talk to their dean
because they're so worried about their grades, or they're calling
their parents as they walk across the campus because they
(13:22):
feel afraid to walk without talking to somebody while they're
crossing the campus. This seemed new, and it seems sad.
You know, here it is this blossoming time of your life,
and yet a lot of kids were very, very anxious
and depressed. And if you're asking about the data, the
data are that anxiety and depression among young people has
(13:44):
been going up for the last several decades. And I
you talk about it, but so suicide. So it's not
just you know, choosing to call more things depressed or
kids saying I'm depressed because there's a certain social cachet
to it. It really does seemed to be weighing on
the kids. And so John came to me and said,
(14:05):
I think this is starting younger. You seem to be
the only person. I'm not the only person who is
trying to fight the over protection that seems to be
undermining kids. And let's work together and start a nonprofit
that tries to overthrow the over protection that is not
helping kids, it's hurting kids. And so I said, no,
(14:27):
I didn't want to start a nonprofit. I'm a journalist
by trade. I liked just being a lone wolf on
my free range track. But a couple of years later
he persuaded me. And also by then, I've found somebody
who actually knows about how to start a business. And
so together the three of us plus Daniel Stuckman, who
used to be the chairman of Fire, which fights for
free speech on campus, also worrying that there was a
(14:50):
trend on campus where kids were saying that if somebody
came to speak whom they didn't like or whom they
disagreed with, rather than saying why'd they invite this jerk?
Or rather than reading up on that person's work and
then coming and raising your hand at you know, in
the Q and a time and you know, offering a
piercing critique and the question to boot. Instead they were saying,
(15:11):
don't let them come on campus. They I'm not safe
if this speaker is coming to campus. And we're not
talking about a rabble rousing, you know, machette wielding speaker.
We're talking about a speaker with a difference of opinion
or often in a different political party. And so Daniel
was worried that free speech was going to die because
(15:33):
if it seems like it's actually hurting somebody, actually physically
harming someone, how could you fight for it. How can
a president of a college say no, we're going to
have that person come speak anyway if the students feel
like that is literally putting them in danger. So there's
this idea of the sort of through line too. All
(15:54):
this is seeing a normal situation that everybody has doubt
in the past, whether it's a speaker you don't like
or a walk to get your cricket magazine, and instead
of seeing it as just something that either is okay
or maybe even good. It was all seen through the
lens of risk and danger. And so we've started let
(16:15):
Grow with the desire to start so young with kids,
getting them used to being part of the world, being challenged,
standing up for themselves, having fun, being curious, following their interests,
organizing a game without some adult deciding whether you're in
or out and moves on what team, just doing some
(16:35):
of these age old things that seem to be since
time immemorial part of childhood, giving them back to children
and making parents feel that it's a good idea, that
it's not crazy dangerous, and that actually you're doing something
that you know. Not only does let Grow approve a bit,
but these extremely vaunted social psychologists and other psyche moral
(16:57):
psychologists think it's good for your kids. So we want
to to renormalize the idea of giving kids back some independence.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
There are so many things that I want to pull
out of there, and time is going to get the
better of us because there's still so much that I
want to talk to you about. Maybe I've just made
three notes as I've listened to everything that you've said,
and I'm going to ignore the rest of it. Not
because it's not brilliant to discuss, but simply because timeline
allows us to discuss all of that. The first thing
(17:24):
that I want to highlight is something that you prompted
in my memory. As you talk about the trends and
the data. I've been looking into perfectionism recently, and my sense, yeah,
my sense is that perfectionism is following the same trend
and is probably linked here. The idea with perfectionism is
that I either expect a lot of myself or I
(17:44):
feel like everybody else expects a lot of me. And
it seems that the most complex and debilitating form of perfectionism.
There is another form as well, by the way, and
that's when you expect perfection of those outside you. So
there are three forms of it, but the one that
seems to be most debilitating is the one where we
have an expectation that everybody around us expects so much
(18:06):
of us and we can't possibly live up to it.
And what I'm hearing as I think about John and
Greg Lukenof's book The Coddling of the American Mind, and
I think about the things that you've just talked about,
is there seems to be this desire on the part
of parents to create a perfect world for their children,
a world where their children don't have to take risks
(18:26):
and always do feel safe, because if we can create
that instagram worthy perfect world, and I know that, I
guess I'm relying on tropes and stereotypes a little bit
as I summarize a whole lot of things here. Parents
feel like they can control everything to give their kids
the best outcomes, and aligned with that, the data doesn't
just show the points that you've made around safetyism, I guess,
(18:52):
but the data also shows that what we would call
autonomy supportive parenting, That is parenting along the lines of
what you've just discidribed with your son when he called
that subway tryin as a nine year old. That is,
you sit down and you put the scaffolding in, You
do the pre work, You make sure that they're going
to be okay, and say, all right, it's your life.
If you go, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Now, I just have to jump in. There's som much
to say. First of all, you can never say you're
going to be fine, because that's that is the idea
of control, I mean, the illusion that we can control
for every variable. It leads to bureaucracy pickup.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yes, yes, and.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I think it leads to extreme nervousness on the part
of parents because there's no there's no acknowledgment that like,
we can't control everything. We aren't God. You know, we
think we are. We have the phones, we can track them,
we can see who they texted, we can you know,
there's cameras everywhere. But in fact we're not in complete control.
And you know, if you think you are, you will
(19:49):
never be able to let go at all because you
will think if anything bad happens, there will be no grace.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So it's really no, it's more it's more about not
saying you be fun. It's more about saying I feel
like we've done everything we can to help you to
have a good experience. I hope you'll be fine, but
if you won't, we'll do what we need to, or
you'll do what you need to to make it fun eventually.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Well, first of all, part of it is, yes, trusting
that your kid can roll with some punches. Yeah, I mean,
part of it is that we're told that the kids
are as fragile, so we treat them as gradual and
it becomes this sort of princess and the pe you
know exercise where we keep making things safer and better
until they expect too much more. But back to perfectionism,
you know you're mentioning. It makes me want to actually
(20:32):
research it more because I think it is like a
third almost disability that we are imposing upon kids. And
I say this because there's this one seventh grade teacher
I just love who did the Lecro project, which is
sending kids home with the homework assignment. You must do
something on your own without your parents that you haven't
done before. You know, walk the dog, make dinner, you know,
(20:53):
run an errand babysit whatever. She was talking about. One
of the reasons she decided to do the project with
her class is that she'd never seen a group of
kids and this was a year ago as nervous as
the seventh grader she had. And one of the one
of the sort of ways she explained to me what
was going on is she'll say, I'll say, okay, take
(21:16):
out your paper and you know, put your name on it.
We're going to have a quiz. And they would be like,
we put her name in the right hand side or
the left hand side, and it's like the left hand side, Yeah,
but just the last name, you know, do you need
the date on it? And and to me that that
bespeaks perfectionism or a fear, and fear is at the
bottom of it. It's like if I do one thing wrong,
(21:38):
if I get a bad grade, if I disappoint the teacher,
if I look stupid. The thing that she kept saying
that the kids kept saying to her is I don't
want to get out of my comfort zone. And the
comfort zone is extremely narrow, to the point where she
said that one kid came to her class it was
actually an extra class at lunchtime, a little late kid
(21:58):
didn't have time to get her lunch. So the teacher said, okay,
just go get your lunch and you know, well, you
know when you come back, you'll just jump right in.
And the kids said, by myself. And so that struck
me as like you've developed so little self confidence that
you don't think you can handle anything, whether it's you know,
(22:19):
what if you put your name on the paper wrong,
what if you're walking by yourself to the cafeteria and
it's scary or lonely. This is your school. You're seventh grader,
you're thirteen years old, you know, in some countries you'd
be dragooned into the army by then, which I also
think is a bad idea, but to raise these kids.
And so then she had them write down what they
would like to do for their you know, what was
their thing that they were hesitant to do, but they
(22:41):
wanted to do for theirlet Grow project. And the answers were,
I want to walk my dog, but what if he
gets off the leash. I want to go and run
an errand, but the store is filled with strangers. I
want to use a knife, but I'm afraid of cutting
off my fingers. So everything was was so terrifying to them,
the simplest things, And parents have kept them from walking
(23:03):
to school because it might be dangerous. And don't use
the knife, you might hurt yourself, and I'll run the
errand with you. You don't know this, you know, you
don't know where the stuff is in the store. You've
never made change for yourself, you don't know how to
talk to the cashier. Well, of course they don't know
how to do anything if you've done them for them
the whole time, and you've created the very ineptitude that
you're worried about them having and in the in the
(23:25):
absence of doing anything on your own and succeeding, in
the absence of taking that long walk and getting the
cricket magazine because you say for it, you walk to it.
It was too far and you did it anyway. Without
that Jenga piece, kids are falling apart. And all I'm
saying is, let's remember that there's no such thing as
I want a zero risk childhood for my kid. It's like,
(23:47):
when you're taking away all that risk, you're raising the
risk of depression, anxiety, perfectionism, despair because all you've raised
is a person who looks like a person, but there's
nothing inside. It hasn't been knitted together by life. You
have to take a step back for your kids to
step up. That's it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I love your passion. I'm thinking so many again, so
many thoughts. Let me uh, let me, let me go
back a quick step. You know why kids love kids
books because they're always about the kids. The parents. The
parents are vanished. Where are the parents? The kids are
(24:24):
living their lives and they're they're exploring the woods, or
they're climbing the trees, they're having their adventures and.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
The and then yes, there's so.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Much joy to be had when the parents run around.
I've heard you talk about the difference between risk and risky, right, risk.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Is inherent and everything. I mean, boy, I don't watch them,
but a friend who watches the home improvement shows, you know,
I wish I had a better looking pass. Obviously, I
don't watch the home improvement shows look at this place,
but those who do tell me that they keep hearing
a couple of things, parents that are saying that they
seems like it's a normal desire. Right now, there's parents saying,
(25:03):
I don't want any walls in the you know, I
want to be able to have a clear sight line
to my kids at all times. It's like those poor kids,
you know, sometimes you just want to get away from
your mom and sneak the comic book. You know.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Oh, it's like social media, right. The kids have discovered
that parents are always watching what they're doing because social
media is risky. And let's face it, there is risk
in anything that happens online and everything, but the kids.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
There's also risk in not doing it and being the
only one who doesn't have a you know, a way
of communicating and planning. But I wanted to say, the
idea of risk and risky and so so the parents
want to get rid of the site, you know, any
any blocks to sitelines and then a lot of times
and I haven't seen these, so this is heresay. They
don't want a house with stairs. And what's interesting about
(25:47):
that is that of course they're afraid of their kids
falling down the stairs. How do you learn not to
fall down the stairs? Got to you gotta climb some
The stairstairs are not like a weird part of life
that you could avoid like oysters, you know, or or
esque argo or something. It does like why I'm only
thinking about shelled fish, I don't know. But the point
is that stairs, like the actual contours of the earth
(26:10):
are sort of like stairs. There are hills, there are mountains,
there are valleys, there are streams, there are rocks, there
are trees. The idea that you should have a completely flat,
no stairs, no you know, blockades between you and the
child effort is like setting a prison. I mean, you're
trying to create a panopticon where you see the child
(26:30):
all the time, you can be in control all the time,
and parents are unashamedly asking for that on these home
improvement shows. Which I feel is why we feel so
scared as parents. If this is the norm to the
point where it's like houses are being built to accommodate
these parents, then you start feeling like it is normal
(26:52):
to worry about your kid walking up and down the stairs,
walking out the door, ever, riding a bike, doing anything
on their own. And that just keeps reinforcing the idea
that you should be you know, always seeing, all knowing
and hovering, which then leads to us doing that and
leads to the things you were talking about before, the
depression of the anxiety. So there's no no risk because
(27:13):
if you're taking out the risk of climbing the stairs,
you're instilling the risk of like stairs, ah, which you
don't want either.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
There's a difference, though, between excepting that there is risk
in heron in law and actively pursuing risky things.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, risky things, yuck, franky, you know, I'm just as
I mean, I believe in Look, put on your seat belt.
Seat belt does not change your experience at all. Right,
You're still in the car going where you're going, getting
there at the exact same time. Put on a helmet,
you still get to ride your bike. Put on a mouthguard,
you'll keep all your teeth while you're playing soccer, rugby, football, whatever.
(27:51):
But those are risks that can be mitigated. And I'd
say that certainly in the case of a car, they're
real risks. The number one way kids die is as
car pass. But to rewrite using a sharp knife as
a risk because there is a teeny tiny risk, not
even a teeny tiny risk, there's a somewhat risk that
you might nick yourself. But I keep wanting to do
(28:11):
a video and nobody wants to do this with me
where it shows like you're worried about your kids chopping
off their finger. Let's see how much it takes. And
I'm not willing to do this video, but I think
it would take a lot of chopping, you know, with
a serrated knife that you're using for your cucumbers, to
actually chop off that finger. And so to call that
risky when it's simply a risk, and in the meantime,
your kids are getting adept at making a meal, being confident,
(28:34):
being trusted, being part of the economy of the house
as opposed to just the king. I think that you
can't say that that's only a risk. It's a risk
in not letting.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Your kid use a knife in a recent podcast, and
by the way, so let grow has You've got a
brand new podcast that you've been doing, and I'm I'm
already caught up on it. The name of the podcast
is Supervision Not Require Love This. And in one of
your more recent episodes, you said, and I quote fear
it doesn't prevent this, but life.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it prevents life. Yeah, And I wish I could
take credit for it, but it's probably from a fortune
cookie or something. I mean, I heard it elsewhere, but
it's so true. I Mean, sometimes it feels like worrying
is a substitute for doing or for anything else. It's like, oh,
I'm doing something great, I'm worried, and believe me, I'm
a worrier. So I know that that's a major time
(29:30):
suck and also a joy suck. But worrying doesn't change things. Yeah,
if you're gonna, if you're gonna worry about your kids
and you are, teach them the things that we've just
been talking about. Teach them to cross the streets safely,
teach them that they can talk to strangers, they can't
go walk with strangers. Teach them never to get into
anybody's car. Teach them to look both ways, actually three times.
When you're at the corner're supposed to look left, right,
(29:50):
left again. I don't remember why, but I learned it
in kindergarten and then I just read it again recently,
so it must be true. You know, teach them the
things that parents have always taught their kids. It's about life.
But until recently, it wasn't that we assumed that we
were going to be with them every second. And then
the way they don't even have to learn anything because
we're always going to be with them or watching them,
(30:12):
and that's it. Assume that it's safer for your kids
to gain some independence and to have some you know,
not horrible experiences, but a couple of you know, things
that were thwarted, some disappointments, some frustration. My kid got
a trophy for eighth place in bowling out of nine leagues.
(30:34):
I'm insulted on his behalf. Are you thinking that he
can't tell that, you know, he's second to last out
of nine teams. I mean he can handle. He can
handle the frustration, and if he wants to get good
at bowling, well, now he knows he's got a long
way to go, so he can either practice or accept
the fact. But the idea of pretending like there's there
should be no frustration ever, and you still got a trophy,
(30:55):
that's an insult to the human spirit.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I have a couple of questions before or I get
to my final five that we whizz through very quickly
to learn a bit more about it.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
But I know you sent me the final five before,
and I don't know the answer, so we'll probably actually
have to creep through them very slowly. As I said,
I guess myself, but we'll.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
See how we go. So a couple of quick ones
just to just to try to I guess, distill and
break down into really simple steps what we're dealing with
when it comes to this idea of letting our kids grow,
you know, let grow dot org a free range parenting
our kids. In that podcast that just made me laugh
out loud, you use the line we want to give
(31:33):
our kids freedom, and then you said not so much
freedom that they're hitchhiking to the crack house, but we
want to give them freedom. So how do we how
to parents who are really wrestling with some of the
things that we've talked about today identify where do they start.
How do they get to the point where they say, Okay,
I will let my child walk or ride to school,
(31:55):
or I will give them this freedom in this way
or that way. How do they do that? I know
that Let's got some resources to help with this, but
what guidance would you give?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Well? Yeah, first, I do have to put in a
plug for our Let Grow project because it's free, and
so is the elect Grow Independence Kid. Pretty Much everything
that we do is free. And the reason I'm mentioning
it is because it is very hard to be the
only parent who is doing something that goes a little
bit against the grain. If nobody is letting their kid
ride their bike, you know, more than two blocks, and
(32:27):
you say, I think you can go all the way
to the you know, to the drug store, not the
drug store, the pharmacy, you know, the candy store whatever,
oh my god, candy. If you're saying that your kid
can do something and other parents aren't, it is harder
to do. And so when schools do the Let Grow
project where all the teachers are sending all the kids
home with the assignment they have to do something on
(32:48):
their own, then you're not the only one. And in fact,
then your kid and your neighbor's kid can go together
to the park or together to the store. So the
reason I recommend the Lectro project, and it's corollary for
distance learning time the Elecro Independence kid, is because you
don't feel alone, and that is a much easier way
(33:08):
to go because you are changing the norms together. Right.
We've heard from towns that have done this project that afterwards,
like the principal went around like two weeks after her
school had done the Lecro project and she saw two
kids on bikes, a kid on a roller skate, and
a kid on skateboard in just her little ride home,
and she said she'd never seen kids outside on their
own before. So it changes the norms. It's much easier
(33:31):
to be brave when everybody else is bringing brave to
the point where it doesn't even feel brave anymore. It
just feels normal. Just like we were talking about at
the beginning of this our discussion, when your mother would
let you walk home at age seven and get yourself
a snack and walk back to school. She didn't have
to be an evil and evil brave. She was just
part of the norm, and so were you. So it's
easier when you do it together. But I would say
(33:55):
this if you you know, if you want to do it,
do it with a friend. You don't have to do
it with entire school. Send your kids to do something
together without you. And the thing that is so reinforcing
and makes it so easy is the first time you
do it. Because the first time you do it and
your kid comes home and they walk through the door
(34:16):
and they've taken the subway or they got you the milk.
There's that great commercial that you guys have, I think
either New Zealand or Australia about the kid who goes
and gets the milk for the first time, or when
they've done anything on their own and they come in
and they're so proud. You will be out of your
mind with pride and diddy, and that's reinforcing to yourself.
(34:37):
You know, this delicious feeling of seeing your kid blossoming
really helps you take the next step. Really, the first
time is hard, and after that it just keeps getting
better because it feels normal and you're proud.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
So obviously a quick reminder this needs to be developmentally appropriate.
We're not suggesting that we let the two year old
go and click the milk on their own, or even
the four year old. They need to be big enough
to handle them selves in a reasonable fashion. But we
can just ease off on the pressure list.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Actually, I'm sorry I should have jumped in one second
and said do the things that we were talking about
before too. If you're sending your kid off, you'll feel
better if you teach them how to cross the street
and you walk across with a couple of times, and
then you say when would you go and you say, yes,
that's right, and then you let them do it. Once
you see that your kids are not you know, they're
not kittens, they're humans, and they will get some information
(35:27):
into them and absorb it, that will give you a
lot more calm to Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
The practice runs and the appropriate scaffolding and necessary so
that you can see that each child does have the
developmental capacity to pull this off on their own. Last
question for you before we dive into these five how
can we promote free range parenting?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Well, this independence kit that I'm recommending, the Let Grow
Independence Kit, is the same thing. I mean, there's certainly
a lot of things that they can still do by themselves.
They can go outside, they can be making dinner for you.
They can be in charge of their own homework, they
can be finding new interests. You can give them freedom
sometimes to play video games, and you know, not worry
(36:07):
so much about that.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
You just imagine, imagine.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
That, Imagine that. You know. The thing is that when
they're home and when you're home, there's just too many
hours in the day to entertain or educate them yourself
the whole time. So I'd say, you know, we just
did a giant survey of sixteen hundred kids and sixteen
hundred adults in the States here, and we ask the kids,
(36:30):
what are you learning anything new? Just for fun, you know,
not for school, just on your own, And the answers
were just outrageously charming. I'm learning about fuses, I'm braiding hair,
I'm studying gangsters. I learned that my sister has a boyfriend.
There are just all these interesting things that once they
(36:50):
were bored, you don't have to cure their boredom all
the time, because they will migrate to something that interests them.
And when they do, that's edu. You know, if they're
studying everything about cars or everything about worms, reading up
on it, watching videos, maybe doing a podcast or whatever.
Fake thing on it. That's education. So everybody who's worried
(37:11):
about their kids filling their time, and everybody who's worried
about are their kids getting enough education, When they find
something that turns them on and they pursue it, that's
that's focused. That's research. That's frustration tolerance because you've got
to learn how to do it better and better and better.
And that's education. So don't be so concerned about the
schooling maybe going down a little bit.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Yeah, so good, Okay, thank you. So five questions to
wrap up. Every single person on this podcast gets the
five questions and the first.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
One technical difficulties.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Repid fire really easy. If we ask your two boys
now age twenty two and twenty four, what their favorite
thing to do with you is, what would they say?
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Lick the ball? You know, I make a lot of brownies.
They still fight over who gets.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
The ball when they're around the brownies and the beta
have the same issue. When I go back to mom
and dads as well, what's been your trickiest parenting moment?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Every parenting moment? Can I just go with that? You
know everything about the car. We discussed this before. Do
you have to drive in the rain? I literally didn't
want my son, the twenty two year old, to drive
back up to college and the rain. I was overruled,
and I'm really glad I was overruled by husband and
son saying are you kidding? Aren't you the three range mom?
(38:28):
That always works.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I love that you struggle with it, just like anyone
else with with your issues. You know, everyone's got their triggers,
and for you, that's the thing, and I just love
the fact that you're you're actually struggling with it. Question
number three. If you could spend an hour with your
boys at any age at all, Let's say, you know,
tomorrow afternoon they wander into the living room three o'clock
and they're at that magical age that you're envisioning right now.
(38:52):
What age would you pick them? Why would you pick
that age?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Okay, I'm going to say it's I'm going to pick
like this weekend because they were visiting us, the both
of them together, which I really see, especially during COVID.
And I'm saying that in part because I think nostalgia
is my bet mair And if I start wallowing in
like I can't even look this is like me being crazy.
I hate looking at pictures of when they were like
(39:16):
six and eight. It just makes me so sad because
I will never see that moment again. And I don't
think I'm the only one I would like to tear
from your listener's, viewers or whatever. I think there's something
too painful about nostalgia. So I'm just going to say, oh,
I wish it was yesterday. We took a funny picture
in front of we bought a lousy new car. I
mean it runs, but it's really ugly, and we took
(39:37):
a picture in from the car.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Okay. Interesting. Well, even if you could be really happy
right now and say that this is what you want
to focus on, what are you looking forward to as
a mom?
Speaker 2 (39:50):
You should realize, like the crazy person you're talking to,
am I looking forward to anything? I look forward to, Like, oh,
one of the suns is coming back to visit us
again on Wednesday. You know, I really you know, people
think that I'm this daredevil and this non worrier. If
I imagine them getting married, I shut myself down and say,
(40:11):
you know, don't jinx it. So I'm just looking forward
to I think Wednesday tonight is Sunday. For the record,
I'm looking for Wednesday. Okay, okay, wait, night Monday. I'm
looking forward to two days from now. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Sure, well, you never know what, you never know what
might happen. They say that we teach the most what
we need to learn, or we teach best what we
most need.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
To that's so funny. Oh that's so interesting. We hate
most and others what we eat most in ourselves. It's like,
why is is so grave? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Interesting? Okay, last question for you, if you could go
back to yourself, and now I know that there's no
there's no nostalgia in this one. Okay, this is this
is the advice question. If you could go back to
you when you were a brand new mum having one
of those really tough moments with your children where things
just aren't working out right and you've got no experience
this parent thing at all. What advice would you give
(41:02):
to yourself if you could go all the way back
to the beginning twenty odd years.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah. I think it would be about perspective. And actually
this is one that I'm stealing from Wendy Mogul who
wrote The Blessing of the Skin Knee, and she said
it's normal to think that other kids are better than
yours because you don't see them all the time, and
(41:26):
if you look at anything close up, you will see
the flaws. And so to not envy my friends when
they were having a perfect day with their kids or
what looked like a perfect day, and I was like,
you know, glum thing along and they were crying and
I or you know, hitting each other. It's just good
to remember that nobody really has the perfect kid or
(41:48):
the perfect answer, and that's that's reassuring to this day.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yeah, I think that'll bring a lot of peace to
a lot of parents listening to that, Lon, This has
been such a delightful conversation. I've I've learned well, I've
enjoyed your energy and your passion for free ranging. If
people want to learn more about you, whether they want
to grab your books, so they want to get hold
of the resource. So you've talked about what's the best
way for them to do that. What would you like
people to know more than anything right now so they
could get more in fun.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
So first of all, come to let grow dot org.
Oh my god, we have so many articles, we have principles,
we have videos. If you want to talk to your
fellow parents who are sort of working their way through this.
We're on Facebook at both let Grow easy Enough, Let
Grow Org, I guess or. We also have a page
called No More Helicopter Parenting. And believe me, I don't
(42:35):
blame helicopter parents, because as you heard, I'm part helicopter
and so it's just it was just for SEO purposes
to make it easy to find search engines. But at
No More Helicopter Parenting, it's just parents asking each other questions.
I can't get my kid off the couch. You know,
I'm worried about you know, something terrible happening. You know.
Can you reassure me? It's just a conversation. And then
(42:56):
my book is Free Range Kids, but I just got
a contract that I signed, which means i'd better start
writing it to update it. So I'm adding a chapter
on anxiety, and a chapter on probably on technology, people
are very concerned about that, and then one for schools
for school teachers and administrators.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, what a great conversation diving into the early years
of the free range Kids movement with Lenor SKANESI, Leno,
I would love it if you would come back and
tell us more about Let Grow. You're not for profit.
Organization about promoting childhood independence and resilience, and maybe a
bit more about free range kids as well. The Happy
Families podcast is produced by Justin Ruland for Bridge Media.
(43:34):
We hope you have a great weekend. More information and
more resources though to make your family happier. You'll find
them at happy families dot com dot au
This is the Happy Families Podcast. Thanks so much for
being a part of these in depth podcast discussions. My
name is doctor Justin Colson. I'm a dad to six
kids and the author of six books about raising happy families.
And on this episode we're having a conversation with Lenor Scanes.
She's the president of Let Grow, a not for profit
organization that promotes childhood independence and resilience, and also the
(00:30):
founder of the Free Range Kids movement. Leno was also branded,
quite famously the World's worst mum. Let's start at the
peak Lenor Scanazi moment where you've got a nine year
old son. It's probably what was it about ten or
twelve years ago? Now, oh wow, okay, so yep, So
(00:51):
you've got a nine year old son and you say, mate,
why don't you catch the subway home?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Yeah, that's not what I say. First of all, we
don't see meat. But more importantly, our son was asking
us if we would take him someplace he'd never been
before and let him find his own way home on
the subway, which is how we get around in New
York City all the time. And this was not something
that our older son had asked us when he was
nine so it was something that we really had to
think about, my husband and I before we said yes.
(01:20):
But then finally we did say, okay, we'll do this.
We'll let you take the subway by yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
It's kind of independent, really, isn't it. A nine year
old aunt usually saying give me a challenge. Let's just
let's just drop me somewhere in the city and let
me try to get home. So has he always been
an independent minded kind of kid.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I would say he is. But I think that we're
sort of right and wrong on whether kids have always
or don't ask this kind of thing. I think that
a generation or two before this, it wouldn't have been
a conversation because it would have happened naturally. You know,
kids would have been either getting on their bikes if
they were in the suburbs, or riding the bus or
subway if they were in the city, you know, to
get to a music lesson, to get to school, to
(01:57):
get to grandma's house, to get to a know, an
empty lot and start a baseball game and hang out
there all day. And so even the fact that he
had to ask, as opposed to this just being a
normal thing that kids just do on their own is
indicative of it being, you know, a more sort of
mother may I kind of era than it was before. So, yeah,
(02:17):
he was asking him that was unusual, but I don't
think his independence would have been unusual in any other generation.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
When you had the conversation with your husband and then
decided that we're comfortable with this, we'll give it a go.
We'll take you into the city and we'll go home,
and then we'll see you at home in a couple
of hours. Hopefully.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
What we said that's a bigger you're making it into
a bigger deal because we were in the city, right
We lived in Manhattan at the time, and we were
sending him. You know, we just took the subway up
to this beautiful, fancy department store, which is why it
was someplace he had never been before because we don't
usually shot there. And then all he had to do
was come back down on the subway about four or
five stops, and then we don't live right near there,
(03:00):
so he had to take another little bus across town.
All together, it might have taken an hour if that.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
When you went through this conversation and actually got to
the point where you're like, okay, let's do this. What
reservations did you have? At what point were you thinking?
Are we crazy? Is this normal? A generation to go
it would have been fine, but it's a different world. Now,
what are we thinking? What sort of concerns did you
have beforehand?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
We had the concern that we wanted to make sure
that he knew what he was doing. And so even
though we are on the subways all the time, and now,
some kids love certain things, like there are kids who
love cars or dolls or whatever, he loved the subway,
loves you know, we'd love public transportation, but we wanted
to make sure he understood that. You know that you're
reading the map and the green line, which is the
line that he was going to have to take. That's
the four, five, and six train. For anybody who's been
(03:44):
to New York City, that that was the train you
would have to take, and you know this is the
stock you get off on. And then of course we're
always on that extremely slow bus, so he knew that
he would have to wait for the bus at the
bus stop. I don't recall telling him this that time,
but I've always told my kids that you can talk
to strain, you can't go off with strangers. So if
you need help from somebody, certainly you can ask a
(04:05):
question of somebody, but you can't get into somebody's car.
You can't go off with somebody. And other than that,
we prepared him with a couple of things. We gave
him a subway map twenty dollars, just in case you
needed something went really terribly wrong and he needed to
take a cab or something quarters because even twelve years
ago there were still some payphones in the subway, and
(04:27):
and a metro card, which is the card that you
slide through the entryway to get into the trains to
pay your fare. And so I'd say that we didn't
think we were crazy because we were preparing him, and
because it wasn't something that he was saying, no, Mom,
I don't want to do this. This was his idea
and something that we had all discussed and decided he
was ready for. You know, I'm a reporter by trade.
(04:49):
I spent years and years at the New York Daily News,
which is if you've seen the Superman movies, it's actually
they call it the Daily Planet, but they shoot the
movies the Daily News, which is where I worked, And
so as a tabloid reporter. I was steeped in the city.
You know, I went everywhere on stories hither and Yon,
and I had a very i'd say realistic view of
(05:12):
the city based on being very much part of it.
And that's very different from I think the way the
story obviously resonated around the world because if you watch
you know, TV shows, especially Law and Order Geez set
in New York City, you think there's a murder every second,
and there are always children, and they're always raped beforehand,
(05:33):
and they're always cut into pieces. And in fact, the
crime rate, the crime rate right now is crazy because
of COVID, but for since the nineties, the crime rate
has been going down, down, down, down, down. So given
all that, I didn't think we were crazy, And in fact,
there are a lot of things that I wouldn't let
my nine year old do, and that I'm sorry that
my twenty two year old does. I absolutely I am
(05:54):
terrified of cars, but I guess he has to drive.
But taking the subway did not strike me as crazy.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Every now and again, also kids off to play in
the park, or I'll tell them to go for a
walk around the block, or jump on their bikes and
ride to school or whatever it might be. And as
they leave the driveway, my heart goes with them, and
I think to myself, I know what the crime statistics are. Loosely,
I know that I live in a pretty safe area.
I know all of these things. But there's this part
(06:20):
of me that just seizes up and thinks, what have
you just done. You've sent the ten year old on
a bike ride with a twelve year old. What's going
to happen? Now? It's a challenging thing. And then you know,
maybe the six year old says, can I go too?
And I think to myself, well, can I send a
six year old in the care of a ten and
a twelve year old? And at this point the answer
is no, because she's six. But it's a really, really,
(06:42):
really big challenge to kind of encounter and work through
these things, even when you know rationally that it should
be just fine.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I've just said the last This weekend, my kids were
visiting me and they're now twenty two and twenty four,
and when they were driving home together, I was like,
both my kids are in the carriage. Oh no, oh no,
which is just normal. But here's what we're talking about.
You're saying is it rational or irrational to worry this way,
to calculate the odds as we're doing. I'd say that
(07:13):
there's no way to be a parent without being worried,
or at least I haven't figured that out yet. But
what I think is different from our about our generation.
I'm actually I'm older than you, so about your generation,
and then our parents are grandparents or anybody before that,
is that when my mom let me walk to school,
(07:34):
and it was age five, and she didn't do it
because she was a free range mom or a crazy person.
She was doing it because everybody let their kids walk
to school at age five in the suburb where I
was growing up outside of Chicago. She was a nervous mom.
You know, she was a regular mom. But back then
you let kids do that, and when you let the
children go, you weren't sitting there going, oh my god,
I hope she makes it. It's going to be about
(07:56):
a six minute walk, and she's only five, and she's
so well and the world is such a terrible place
and if anything terable happened to her, I couldn't live
with myself. Forget it. I'm gonna go get her and
drive her myself and that simply wasn't the catechism Back then,
you didn't have to go through what about you know?
And then name you know? What about you know? Elizabeth Smart?
What about you know? Maddie McCann. You weren't thinking that
(08:20):
a normal mom, a normal good mom, should be thinking
about the murder of their child every time the child
was out of their sight, or the death on the
bike on the walk on you know. So that is new,
and it feels normal because we it is normal to worry.
But I feel like these new extravagant worries are super
(08:42):
imposed on us by a culture that I've seen up close,
in part because of the question that was asked to me.
You know, I let my son ride the subway. Okay,
most interviewers at the very beginning, and I'd say the
very beginning. For the first four years, I would say,
we're saying, okay, you know, he had a good time,
you're proud, he's elated, he feels grown up. Great, that's
(09:03):
all great, But what if he hadn't come home? Framing
it in the negative? I never had a good answer.
How would I have felt? Funny? You should ask, I'd
feel great because I don't have to feed another kid.
I mean, there was like no normal answer that you
could give to that question other than this is how
I'd feel. And in a way, this is what they
(09:25):
were trying to make me feel. They were trying to
take a positive story and turn it back into the
story that television loves, which is he never came home.
So the fact that he did come home, Okay, let's
ignore that and think about how terrible a mom she
would have been if that had happened. And why wasn't
she thinking that way? You're always supposed to be thinking
in this extremely dark, dystopian way about your kid if
(09:50):
they're beyond your sight, and that's what's new, And I
feel like it's superimposed by questions like that. When an
interview would say, well, how would you have felt, it's like,
you know how I feel. I would feel lower than hell. Okay,
but why are we talking about it? Why? You know,
why can't we celebrate when a kid does something normal
that I'd say, you know, most nine year olds could
(10:12):
do if they felt like it. Worry is normal, but
us worrying when the kid goes around the block worrying.
I would say, even if a six year old is
with a ten and a twelve year old who love
him or her and care about them. That's new.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What I'm interested in is this, You've been doing some
work with let grow dot org with one of the
best thinkers in the world of psychology, Jonathan Hate and
actually two of the.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Best thinkers in the world of psychology, Jonathan Height, and
also Peter Gray, doctor Peter Gray.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Now you're just showing off genius. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well,
I just want to talk about John at the moment
because his research is what has fascinated me the most,
because Peter really focuses on the play aspect of life,
and John has always focused so much more on the
I guess, on the social psychology and the data and trends.
And what I'm really curious about is what as you've
worked as a trio, what have you discovered in the data,
(11:04):
what's the data showing in terms of this, Well, is
there a trend? And everybody's you know, getting so excited
about the outlaws the unusual stories.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
First of all, I do think there's something. I'm happy
you mentioned the outliers and the unusual stories because I
feel like they are driving so much of our regular
life based on the saddest, worst, most anomalous, unpredictable stories
that if there was some way we could get rid
of the story of one horrible accident or one horrible crime,
(11:37):
or one horrible shooting, I think we would all be
at a much better set point rather than using those terrible,
outlying stories as the norm from which we decide how
we should live our lives. But the thing that son,
Jonathan Heyde is a big fan of free range kids,
and he's raising his free range kids, and I feel
(11:58):
great about that. But he came to me a couple
of years ago, and his hypothesis was that young adults,
and by young adults re meets college age and a
little bit beyond were becoming fragile. And as it turns out,
doctor Peter Gray had noticed this too. That you know,
(12:19):
I think it's great when kids go for you know,
the psychological services they need. And believe me, I live
in New York, I'm a Jew, I'm a woman. I've
been to as much therapy as anybody could posibly have
because of these demographics. So I love therapy. However, it
seems like at this point on the college campuses, and
I'm talking about before COVID because COVID is just so
(12:39):
weird that the colleges could not keep up with the
number of kids who were seeking therapy and who seemed
to be falling apart and not falling apart after a
breakup with a girlfriend or a boyfriend or something very large,
but often after a bee like a not a bee
like this, like a bee, or after an argument with
(13:02):
the roommate, after a mouse in the dorm. And John
and Peter were thinking, where is this fragility coming from?
Why do the kids think they need to talk to
either counselor or they have to talk to their dean
because they're so worried about their grades, or they're calling
their parents as they walk across the campus because they
(13:22):
feel afraid to walk without talking to somebody while they're
crossing the campus. This seemed new, and it seems sad.
You know, here it is this blossoming time of your life,
and yet a lot of kids were very, very anxious
and depressed. And if you're asking about the data, the
data are that anxiety and depression among young people has
(13:44):
been going up for the last several decades. And I
you talk about it, but so suicide. So it's not
just you know, choosing to call more things depressed or
kids saying I'm depressed because there's a certain social cachet
to it. It really does seemed to be weighing on
the kids. And so John came to me and said,
(14:05):
I think this is starting younger. You seem to be
the only person. I'm not the only person who is
trying to fight the over protection that seems to be
undermining kids. And let's work together and start a nonprofit
that tries to overthrow the over protection that is not
helping kids, it's hurting kids. And so I said, no,
(14:27):
I didn't want to start a nonprofit. I'm a journalist
by trade. I liked just being a lone wolf on
my free range track. But a couple of years later
he persuaded me. And also by then, I've found somebody
who actually knows about how to start a business. And
so together the three of us plus Daniel Stuckman, who
used to be the chairman of Fire, which fights for
free speech on campus, also worrying that there was a
(14:50):
trend on campus where kids were saying that if somebody
came to speak whom they didn't like or whom they
disagreed with, rather than saying why'd they invite this jerk?
Or rather than reading up on that person's work and
then coming and raising your hand at you know, in
the Q and a time and you know, offering a
piercing critique and the question to boot. Instead they were saying,
(15:11):
don't let them come on campus. They I'm not safe
if this speaker is coming to campus. And we're not
talking about a rabble rousing, you know, machette wielding speaker.
We're talking about a speaker with a difference of opinion
or often in a different political party. And so Daniel
was worried that free speech was going to die because
(15:33):
if it seems like it's actually hurting somebody, actually physically
harming someone, how could you fight for it. How can
a president of a college say no, we're going to
have that person come speak anyway if the students feel
like that is literally putting them in danger. So there's
this idea of the sort of through line too. All
(15:54):
this is seeing a normal situation that everybody has doubt
in the past, whether it's a speaker you don't like
or a walk to get your cricket magazine, and instead
of seeing it as just something that either is okay
or maybe even good. It was all seen through the
lens of risk and danger. And so we've started let
(16:15):
Grow with the desire to start so young with kids,
getting them used to being part of the world, being challenged,
standing up for themselves, having fun, being curious, following their interests,
organizing a game without some adult deciding whether you're in
or out and moves on what team, just doing some
(16:35):
of these age old things that seem to be since
time immemorial part of childhood, giving them back to children
and making parents feel that it's a good idea, that
it's not crazy dangerous, and that actually you're doing something
that you know. Not only does let Grow approve a bit,
but these extremely vaunted social psychologists and other psyche moral
(16:57):
psychologists think it's good for your kids. So we want
to to renormalize the idea of giving kids back some independence.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
There are so many things that I want to pull
out of there, and time is going to get the
better of us because there's still so much that I
want to talk to you about. Maybe I've just made
three notes as I've listened to everything that you've said,
and I'm going to ignore the rest of it. Not
because it's not brilliant to discuss, but simply because timeline
allows us to discuss all of that. The first thing
(17:24):
that I want to highlight is something that you prompted
in my memory. As you talk about the trends and
the data. I've been looking into perfectionism recently, and my sense, yeah,
my sense is that perfectionism is following the same trend
and is probably linked here. The idea with perfectionism is
that I either expect a lot of myself or I
(17:44):
feel like everybody else expects a lot of me. And
it seems that the most complex and debilitating form of perfectionism.
There is another form as well, by the way, and
that's when you expect perfection of those outside you. So
there are three forms of it, but the one that
seems to be most debilitating is the one where we
have an expectation that everybody around us expects so much
(18:06):
of us and we can't possibly live up to it.
And what I'm hearing as I think about John and
Greg Lukenof's book The Coddling of the American Mind, and
I think about the things that you've just talked about,
is there seems to be this desire on the part
of parents to create a perfect world for their children,
a world where their children don't have to take risks
(18:26):
and always do feel safe, because if we can create
that instagram worthy perfect world, and I know that, I
guess I'm relying on tropes and stereotypes a little bit
as I summarize a whole lot of things here. Parents
feel like they can control everything to give their kids
the best outcomes, and aligned with that, the data doesn't
just show the points that you've made around safetyism, I guess,
(18:52):
but the data also shows that what we would call
autonomy supportive parenting, That is parenting along the lines of
what you've just discidribed with your son when he called
that subway tryin as a nine year old. That is,
you sit down and you put the scaffolding in, You
do the pre work, You make sure that they're going
to be okay, and say, all right, it's your life.
If you go, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Now, I just have to jump in. There's som much
to say. First of all, you can never say you're
going to be fine, because that's that is the idea
of control, I mean, the illusion that we can control
for every variable. It leads to bureaucracy pickup.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Yes, yes, and.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I think it leads to extreme nervousness on the part
of parents because there's no there's no acknowledgment that like,
we can't control everything. We aren't God. You know, we
think we are. We have the phones, we can track them,
we can see who they texted, we can you know,
there's cameras everywhere. But in fact we're not in complete control.
And you know, if you think you are, you will
(19:49):
never be able to let go at all because you
will think if anything bad happens, there will be no grace.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
So it's really no, it's more it's more about not
saying you be fun. It's more about saying I feel
like we've done everything we can to help you to
have a good experience. I hope you'll be fine, but
if you won't, we'll do what we need to, or
you'll do what you need to to make it fun eventually.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Well, first of all, part of it is, yes, trusting
that your kid can roll with some punches. Yeah, I mean,
part of it is that we're told that the kids
are as fragile, so we treat them as gradual and
it becomes this sort of princess and the pe you
know exercise where we keep making things safer and better
until they expect too much more. But back to perfectionism,
you know you're mentioning. It makes me want to actually
(20:32):
research it more because I think it is like a
third almost disability that we are imposing upon kids. And
I say this because there's this one seventh grade teacher
I just love who did the Lecro project, which is
sending kids home with the homework assignment. You must do
something on your own without your parents that you haven't
done before. You know, walk the dog, make dinner, you know,
(20:53):
run an errand babysit whatever. She was talking about. One
of the reasons she decided to do the project with
her class is that she'd never seen a group of
kids and this was a year ago as nervous as
the seventh grader she had. And one of the one
of the sort of ways she explained to me what
was going on is she'll say, I'll say, okay, take
(21:16):
out your paper and you know, put your name on it.
We're going to have a quiz. And they would be like,
we put her name in the right hand side or
the left hand side, and it's like the left hand side, Yeah,
but just the last name, you know, do you need
the date on it? And and to me that that
bespeaks perfectionism or a fear, and fear is at the
bottom of it. It's like if I do one thing wrong,
(21:38):
if I get a bad grade, if I disappoint the teacher,
if I look stupid. The thing that she kept saying
that the kids kept saying to her is I don't
want to get out of my comfort zone. And the
comfort zone is extremely narrow, to the point where she
said that one kid came to her class it was
actually an extra class at lunchtime, a little late kid
(21:58):
didn't have time to get her lunch. So the teacher said, okay,
just go get your lunch and you know, well, you
know when you come back, you'll just jump right in.
And the kids said, by myself. And so that struck
me as like you've developed so little self confidence that
you don't think you can handle anything, whether it's you know,
(22:19):
what if you put your name on the paper wrong,
what if you're walking by yourself to the cafeteria and
it's scary or lonely. This is your school. You're seventh grader,
you're thirteen years old, you know, in some countries you'd
be dragooned into the army by then, which I also
think is a bad idea, but to raise these kids.
And so then she had them write down what they
would like to do for their you know, what was
their thing that they were hesitant to do, but they
(22:41):
wanted to do for theirlet Grow project. And the answers were,
I want to walk my dog, but what if he
gets off the leash. I want to go and run
an errand, but the store is filled with strangers. I
want to use a knife, but I'm afraid of cutting
off my fingers. So everything was was so terrifying to them,
the simplest things, And parents have kept them from walking
(23:03):
to school because it might be dangerous. And don't use
the knife, you might hurt yourself, and I'll run the
errand with you. You don't know this, you know, you
don't know where the stuff is in the store. You've
never made change for yourself, you don't know how to
talk to the cashier. Well, of course they don't know
how to do anything if you've done them for them
the whole time, and you've created the very ineptitude that
you're worried about them having and in the in the
(23:25):
absence of doing anything on your own and succeeding, in
the absence of taking that long walk and getting the
cricket magazine because you say for it, you walk to it.
It was too far and you did it anyway. Without
that Jenga piece, kids are falling apart. And all I'm
saying is, let's remember that there's no such thing as
I want a zero risk childhood for my kid. It's like,
(23:47):
when you're taking away all that risk, you're raising the
risk of depression, anxiety, perfectionism, despair because all you've raised
is a person who looks like a person, but there's
nothing inside. It hasn't been knitted together by life. You
have to take a step back for your kids to
step up. That's it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
I love your passion. I'm thinking so many again, so
many thoughts. Let me uh, let me, let me go
back a quick step. You know why kids love kids
books because they're always about the kids. The parents. The
parents are vanished. Where are the parents? The kids are
(24:24):
living their lives and they're they're exploring the woods, or
they're climbing the trees, they're having their adventures and.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
The and then yes, there's so.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Much joy to be had when the parents run around.
I've heard you talk about the difference between risk and risky, right, risk.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Is inherent and everything. I mean, boy, I don't watch them,
but a friend who watches the home improvement shows, you know,
I wish I had a better looking pass. Obviously, I
don't watch the home improvement shows look at this place,
but those who do tell me that they keep hearing
a couple of things, parents that are saying that they
seems like it's a normal desire. Right now, there's parents saying,
(25:03):
I don't want any walls in the you know, I
want to be able to have a clear sight line
to my kids at all times. It's like those poor kids,
you know, sometimes you just want to get away from
your mom and sneak the comic book. You know.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Oh, it's like social media, right. The kids have discovered
that parents are always watching what they're doing because social
media is risky. And let's face it, there is risk
in anything that happens online and everything, but the kids.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
There's also risk in not doing it and being the
only one who doesn't have a you know, a way
of communicating and planning. But I wanted to say, the
idea of risk and risky and so so the parents
want to get rid of the site, you know, any
any blocks to sitelines and then a lot of times
and I haven't seen these, so this is heresay. They
don't want a house with stairs. And what's interesting about
(25:47):
that is that of course they're afraid of their kids
falling down the stairs. How do you learn not to
fall down the stairs? Got to you gotta climb some
The stairstairs are not like a weird part of life
that you could avoid like oysters, you know, or or
esque argo or something. It does like why I'm only
thinking about shelled fish, I don't know. But the point
is that stairs, like the actual contours of the earth
(26:10):
are sort of like stairs. There are hills, there are mountains,
there are valleys, there are streams, there are rocks, there
are trees. The idea that you should have a completely flat,
no stairs, no you know, blockades between you and the
child effort is like setting a prison. I mean, you're
trying to create a panopticon where you see the child
(26:30):
all the time, you can be in control all the time,
and parents are unashamedly asking for that on these home
improvement shows. Which I feel is why we feel so
scared as parents. If this is the norm to the
point where it's like houses are being built to accommodate
these parents, then you start feeling like it is normal
(26:52):
to worry about your kid walking up and down the stairs,
walking out the door, ever, riding a bike, doing anything
on their own. And that just keeps reinforcing the idea
that you should be you know, always seeing, all knowing
and hovering, which then leads to us doing that and
leads to the things you were talking about before, the
depression of the anxiety. So there's no no risk because
(27:13):
if you're taking out the risk of climbing the stairs,
you're instilling the risk of like stairs, ah, which you
don't want either.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
There's a difference, though, between excepting that there is risk
in heron in law and actively pursuing risky things.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Yeah, risky things, yuck, franky, you know, I'm just as
I mean, I believe in Look, put on your seat belt.
Seat belt does not change your experience at all. Right,
You're still in the car going where you're going, getting
there at the exact same time. Put on a helmet,
you still get to ride your bike. Put on a mouthguard,
you'll keep all your teeth while you're playing soccer, rugby, football, whatever.
(27:51):
But those are risks that can be mitigated. And I'd
say that certainly in the case of a car, they're
real risks. The number one way kids die is as
car pass. But to rewrite using a sharp knife as
a risk because there is a teeny tiny risk, not
even a teeny tiny risk, there's a somewhat risk that
you might nick yourself. But I keep wanting to do
(28:11):
a video and nobody wants to do this with me
where it shows like you're worried about your kids chopping
off their finger. Let's see how much it takes. And
I'm not willing to do this video, but I think
it would take a lot of chopping, you know, with
a serrated knife that you're using for your cucumbers, to
actually chop off that finger. And so to call that
risky when it's simply a risk, and in the meantime,
your kids are getting adept at making a meal, being confident,
(28:34):
being trusted, being part of the economy of the house
as opposed to just the king. I think that you
can't say that that's only a risk. It's a risk
in not letting.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
Your kid use a knife in a recent podcast, and
by the way, so let grow has You've got a
brand new podcast that you've been doing, and I'm I'm
already caught up on it. The name of the podcast
is Supervision Not Require Love This. And in one of
your more recent episodes, you said, and I quote fear
it doesn't prevent this, but life.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Yeah, it prevents life. Yeah, And I wish I could
take credit for it, but it's probably from a fortune
cookie or something. I mean, I heard it elsewhere, but
it's so true. I Mean, sometimes it feels like worrying
is a substitute for doing or for anything else. It's like, oh,
I'm doing something great, I'm worried, and believe me, I'm
a worrier. So I know that that's a major time
(29:30):
suck and also a joy suck. But worrying doesn't change things. Yeah,
if you're gonna, if you're gonna worry about your kids
and you are, teach them the things that we've just
been talking about. Teach them to cross the streets safely,
teach them that they can talk to strangers, they can't
go walk with strangers. Teach them never to get into
anybody's car. Teach them to look both ways, actually three times.
When you're at the corner're supposed to look left, right,
(29:50):
left again. I don't remember why, but I learned it
in kindergarten and then I just read it again recently,
so it must be true. You know, teach them the
things that parents have always taught their kids. It's about life.
But until recently, it wasn't that we assumed that we
were going to be with them every second. And then
the way they don't even have to learn anything because
we're always going to be with them or watching them,
(30:12):
and that's it. Assume that it's safer for your kids
to gain some independence and to have some you know,
not horrible experiences, but a couple of you know, things
that were thwarted, some disappointments, some frustration. My kid got
a trophy for eighth place in bowling out of nine leagues.
(30:34):
I'm insulted on his behalf. Are you thinking that he
can't tell that, you know, he's second to last out
of nine teams. I mean he can handle. He can
handle the frustration, and if he wants to get good
at bowling, well, now he knows he's got a long
way to go, so he can either practice or accept
the fact. But the idea of pretending like there's there
should be no frustration ever, and you still got a trophy,
(30:55):
that's an insult to the human spirit.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
I have a couple of questions before or I get
to my final five that we whizz through very quickly
to learn a bit more about it.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
But I know you sent me the final five before,
and I don't know the answer, so we'll probably actually
have to creep through them very slowly. As I said,
I guess myself, but we'll.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
See how we go. So a couple of quick ones
just to just to try to I guess, distill and
break down into really simple steps what we're dealing with
when it comes to this idea of letting our kids grow,
you know, let grow dot org a free range parenting
our kids. In that podcast that just made me laugh
out loud, you use the line we want to give
(31:33):
our kids freedom, and then you said not so much
freedom that they're hitchhiking to the crack house, but we
want to give them freedom. So how do we how
to parents who are really wrestling with some of the
things that we've talked about today identify where do they start.
How do they get to the point where they say, Okay,
I will let my child walk or ride to school,
(31:55):
or I will give them this freedom in this way
or that way. How do they do that? I know
that Let's got some resources to help with this, but
what guidance would you give?
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Well? Yeah, first, I do have to put in a
plug for our Let Grow project because it's free, and
so is the elect Grow Independence Kid. Pretty Much everything
that we do is free. And the reason I'm mentioning
it is because it is very hard to be the
only parent who is doing something that goes a little
bit against the grain. If nobody is letting their kid
ride their bike, you know, more than two blocks, and
(32:27):
you say, I think you can go all the way
to the you know, to the drug store, not the
drug store, the pharmacy, you know, the candy store whatever,
oh my god, candy. If you're saying that your kid
can do something and other parents aren't, it is harder
to do. And so when schools do the Let Grow
project where all the teachers are sending all the kids
home with the assignment they have to do something on
(32:48):
their own, then you're not the only one. And in fact,
then your kid and your neighbor's kid can go together
to the park or together to the store. So the
reason I recommend the Lectro project, and it's corollary for
distance learning time the Elecro Independence kid, is because you
don't feel alone, and that is a much easier way
(33:08):
to go because you are changing the norms together. Right.
We've heard from towns that have done this project that afterwards,
like the principal went around like two weeks after her
school had done the Lecro project and she saw two
kids on bikes, a kid on a roller skate, and
a kid on skateboard in just her little ride home,
and she said she'd never seen kids outside on their
own before. So it changes the norms. It's much easier
(33:31):
to be brave when everybody else is bringing brave to
the point where it doesn't even feel brave anymore. It
just feels normal. Just like we were talking about at
the beginning of this our discussion, when your mother would
let you walk home at age seven and get yourself
a snack and walk back to school. She didn't have
to be an evil and evil brave. She was just
part of the norm, and so were you. So it's
easier when you do it together. But I would say
(33:55):
this if you you know, if you want to do it,
do it with a friend. You don't have to do
it with entire school. Send your kids to do something
together without you. And the thing that is so reinforcing
and makes it so easy is the first time you
do it. Because the first time you do it and
your kid comes home and they walk through the door
(34:16):
and they've taken the subway or they got you the milk.
There's that great commercial that you guys have, I think
either New Zealand or Australia about the kid who goes
and gets the milk for the first time, or when
they've done anything on their own and they come in
and they're so proud. You will be out of your
mind with pride and diddy, and that's reinforcing to yourself.
(34:37):
You know, this delicious feeling of seeing your kid blossoming
really helps you take the next step. Really, the first
time is hard, and after that it just keeps getting
better because it feels normal and you're proud.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
So obviously a quick reminder this needs to be developmentally appropriate.
We're not suggesting that we let the two year old
go and click the milk on their own, or even
the four year old. They need to be big enough
to handle them selves in a reasonable fashion. But we
can just ease off on the pressure list.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Actually, I'm sorry I should have jumped in one second
and said do the things that we were talking about
before too. If you're sending your kid off, you'll feel
better if you teach them how to cross the street
and you walk across with a couple of times, and
then you say when would you go and you say, yes,
that's right, and then you let them do it. Once
you see that your kids are not you know, they're
not kittens, they're humans, and they will get some information
(35:27):
into them and absorb it, that will give you a
lot more calm to Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
The practice runs and the appropriate scaffolding and necessary so
that you can see that each child does have the
developmental capacity to pull this off on their own. Last
question for you before we dive into these five how
can we promote free range parenting?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Well, this independence kit that I'm recommending, the Let Grow
Independence Kit, is the same thing. I mean, there's certainly
a lot of things that they can still do by themselves.
They can go outside, they can be making dinner for you.
They can be in charge of their own homework, they
can be finding new interests. You can give them freedom
sometimes to play video games, and you know, not worry
(36:07):
so much about that.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
You just imagine, imagine.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
That, Imagine that. You know. The thing is that when
they're home and when you're home, there's just too many
hours in the day to entertain or educate them yourself
the whole time. So I'd say, you know, we just
did a giant survey of sixteen hundred kids and sixteen
hundred adults in the States here, and we ask the kids,
(36:30):
what are you learning anything new? Just for fun, you know,
not for school, just on your own, And the answers
were just outrageously charming. I'm learning about fuses, I'm braiding hair,
I'm studying gangsters. I learned that my sister has a boyfriend.
There are just all these interesting things that once they
(36:50):
were bored, you don't have to cure their boredom all
the time, because they will migrate to something that interests them.
And when they do, that's edu. You know, if they're
studying everything about cars or everything about worms, reading up
on it, watching videos, maybe doing a podcast or whatever.
Fake thing on it. That's education. So everybody who's worried
(37:11):
about their kids filling their time, and everybody who's worried
about are their kids getting enough education, When they find
something that turns them on and they pursue it, that's
that's focused. That's research. That's frustration tolerance because you've got
to learn how to do it better and better and better.
And that's education. So don't be so concerned about the
schooling maybe going down a little bit.
Speaker 1 (37:32):
Yeah, so good, Okay, thank you. So five questions to
wrap up. Every single person on this podcast gets the
five questions and the first.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
One technical difficulties.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Repid fire really easy. If we ask your two boys
now age twenty two and twenty four, what their favorite
thing to do with you is, what would they say?
Speaker 2 (37:52):
Lick the ball? You know, I make a lot of brownies.
They still fight over who gets.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
The ball when they're around the brownies and the beta
have the same issue. When I go back to mom
and dads as well, what's been your trickiest parenting moment?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Every parenting moment? Can I just go with that? You
know everything about the car. We discussed this before. Do
you have to drive in the rain? I literally didn't
want my son, the twenty two year old, to drive
back up to college and the rain. I was overruled,
and I'm really glad I was overruled by husband and
son saying are you kidding? Aren't you the three range mom?
(38:28):
That always works.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
I love that you struggle with it, just like anyone
else with with your issues. You know, everyone's got their triggers,
and for you, that's the thing, and I just love
the fact that you're you're actually struggling with it. Question
number three. If you could spend an hour with your
boys at any age at all, Let's say, you know,
tomorrow afternoon they wander into the living room three o'clock
and they're at that magical age that you're envisioning right now.
(38:52):
What age would you pick them? Why would you pick
that age?
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Okay, I'm going to say it's I'm going to pick
like this weekend because they were visiting us, the both
of them together, which I really see, especially during COVID.
And I'm saying that in part because I think nostalgia
is my bet mair And if I start wallowing in
like I can't even look this is like me being crazy.
I hate looking at pictures of when they were like
(39:16):
six and eight. It just makes me so sad because
I will never see that moment again. And I don't
think I'm the only one I would like to tear
from your listener's, viewers or whatever. I think there's something
too painful about nostalgia. So I'm just going to say, oh,
I wish it was yesterday. We took a funny picture
in front of we bought a lousy new car. I
mean it runs, but it's really ugly, and we took
(39:37):
a picture in from the car.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Okay. Interesting. Well, even if you could be really happy
right now and say that this is what you want
to focus on, what are you looking forward to as
a mom?
Speaker 2 (39:50):
You should realize, like the crazy person you're talking to,
am I looking forward to anything? I look forward to, Like, oh,
one of the suns is coming back to visit us
again on Wednesday. You know, I really you know, people
think that I'm this daredevil and this non worrier. If
I imagine them getting married, I shut myself down and say,
(40:11):
you know, don't jinx it. So I'm just looking forward
to I think Wednesday tonight is Sunday. For the record,
I'm looking for Wednesday. Okay, okay, wait, night Monday. I'm
looking forward to two days from now. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
Sure, well, you never know what, you never know what
might happen. They say that we teach the most what
we need to learn, or we teach best what we
most need.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
To that's so funny. Oh that's so interesting. We hate
most and others what we eat most in ourselves. It's like,
why is is so grave? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Interesting? Okay, last question for you, if you could go
back to yourself, and now I know that there's no
there's no nostalgia in this one. Okay, this is this
is the advice question. If you could go back to
you when you were a brand new mum having one
of those really tough moments with your children where things
just aren't working out right and you've got no experience
this parent thing at all. What advice would you give
(41:02):
to yourself if you could go all the way back
to the beginning twenty odd years.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah. I think it would be about perspective. And actually
this is one that I'm stealing from Wendy Mogul who
wrote The Blessing of the Skin Knee, and she said
it's normal to think that other kids are better than
yours because you don't see them all the time, and
(41:26):
if you look at anything close up, you will see
the flaws. And so to not envy my friends when
they were having a perfect day with their kids or
what looked like a perfect day, and I was like,
you know, glum thing along and they were crying and
I or you know, hitting each other. It's just good
to remember that nobody really has the perfect kid or
(41:48):
the perfect answer, and that's that's reassuring to this day.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yeah, I think that'll bring a lot of peace to
a lot of parents listening to that, Lon, This has
been such a delightful conversation. I've I've learned well, I've
enjoyed your energy and your passion for free ranging. If
people want to learn more about you, whether they want
to grab your books, so they want to get hold
of the resource. So you've talked about what's the best
way for them to do that. What would you like
people to know more than anything right now so they
could get more in fun.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
So first of all, come to let grow dot org.
Oh my god, we have so many articles, we have principles,
we have videos. If you want to talk to your
fellow parents who are sort of working their way through this.
We're on Facebook at both let Grow easy Enough, Let
Grow Org, I guess or. We also have a page
called No More Helicopter Parenting. And believe me, I don't
(42:35):
blame helicopter parents, because as you heard, I'm part helicopter
and so it's just it was just for SEO purposes
to make it easy to find search engines. But at
No More Helicopter Parenting, it's just parents asking each other questions.
I can't get my kid off the couch. You know,
I'm worried about you know, something terrible happening. You know.
Can you reassure me? It's just a conversation. And then
(42:56):
my book is Free Range Kids, but I just got
a contract that I signed, which means i'd better start
writing it to update it. So I'm adding a chapter
on anxiety, and a chapter on probably on technology, people
are very concerned about that, and then one for schools
for school teachers and administrators.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
Well, what a great conversation diving into the early years
of the free range Kids movement with Lenor SKANESI, Leno,
I would love it if you would come back and
tell us more about Let Grow. You're not for profit.
Organization about promoting childhood independence and resilience, and maybe a
bit more about free range kids as well. The Happy
Families podcast is produced by Justin Ruland for Bridge Media.
(43:34):
We hope you have a great weekend. More information and
more resources though to make your family happier. You'll find
them at happy families dot com dot au
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