April 9, 2019 • 50 mins
Free range parenting is all about giving your child the freedom to play and explore life on their own. Are there benefits? Sure. Do some people hate the concept? Yes! Listen and learn right here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there, and this is stuff you should
know about kids. Can I see a right off the
(00:24):
bat here? I presumed you would. All right, there's a
couple of c o as I want to issue. One,
we are not telling anyone how to parent their children, indeed, uh.
And two we realized that the whole concept of free
range parenting that will follow is comes from a place
(00:50):
of extreme privilege. Yes, to be able to entertain the
idea of free range parenting comes from a place of
extreme privilege. Okay, I've Can I amend that or should
I wait until we talk about that part to kind
of amend it? No, you can amend it, so so
to me, free range parenting, having the freedom to free
(01:11):
range parent is what I saw it ties in with
parenting that's already being done by people who might not
have a choice. Are you saying that the the um,
the the ability to choose whether you want a free
range parent or not is privileged? Yes? Okay, Yes, agreed.
I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and and again we'll
(01:33):
get into that, but um, well we'll get into that
at the end, but I just want to just go
ahead and lead that off because it's um a lot
of privilege involved with being able to say, you know
that you want to free range parent Are you going
to Are you going to land one way or another
on it on whether or not I support free range parenting? Yeah?
(01:54):
Uh yeah, I mean Emily, and I don't title it
or say hey, I think we should do this as
a style, but we, um, as it turns out, are
sort of dabbling in free range parenting a bit as
much as you can for a three and a half
year old. So you're listening to your instincts. I've never
(02:16):
read a parenting book, not knocking them, but I've never
read one. And we parent by instinct, and our daughter
has always had a lot of room to free play
and explore and figure stuff out on our own and
fall down and get back up and all that all
that stuff. Okay, I'm reading between the lines. You guys
haven't decided yet, all right, so ready free range parenting
(02:40):
go okay, So, um, do you remember when we were kids,
back when we used to hang out when we were
kids mm hmm, and we would go ride bikes together
at like UM sunrise. We had no idea where we
were going to go, but it might involve a swamp,
could involve a glacier. UM. There may have been like uh,
(03:03):
rail riding hoboes that we shared lunch with. Who knows
what the day was gonna bring, but we were up
for all that and may or may not have engaged
in any of that UM during that day. And then
at the end of the day, around sunset, maybe a
little later, depending on whether it was summer or not,
we ride our bikes back home, say see you tomorrow,
go to our respective houses UM, and then talk the
(03:26):
night away on our soup cans that were connected by
UM a rope. And that was our childhood, right we
turned out. Sure, I have have talked about my childhood
some growing up, but you know, I grew up in
the woods basically on like a couple of acres of
land with a creek and forest, not in a subdivision,
(03:46):
but on a street with like seven houses in the woods,
and my mother had a UM. We had this giant
iron bell it's probably about eighteen inches across that on
a mounted on a big um like a telephone and
pole kind of right beside our driveway, and she would
at the you know, when it was dinner time in
the evening, she would go pull that bell and you
(04:11):
could hear it from like a mile away. This the
bell tolling. And that's when Scott and I were like,
all right, we you know, it's time to go eat
um after having been out all day long with zero supervision.
And I had a great mom, Like, she wasn't neglectful.
This is just how it was done. Yeah, were you
(04:33):
a latch key kid? Um? I know your mom was
a teacher, but did she stay at home with you?
She didn't go back to teaching. She she quit teaching
to raise kids and then started up again when I
was like I feel like eighth or ninth grade or
something like that. Okay, yeah, my mom took off until
I was like six seven. I guess, like kinder no,
(04:54):
maybe she's still around a kindergard I guess about first
grade when I was when I started school and she
was like, okay, I'm going back to nursing um. And
then after that point, I was a last key kid
for like the rest of my life. But I had
like older sisters who would be home around the time
I would, And but I had like my own key
to my house that was just a couple of blocks
away from my school, and I would walk myself or
(05:16):
ride my bike myself, and then i'd be home by
myself if my sister was doing something else for a
couple of hours, until either my mom or my dad
showed up. Um. And I think I turned out pretty
well too, so that I even key. Ever, Well, you
guys probably didn't lock your doors if your mom rang
a bell on the telephone poll to call you in
for dinner. I don't think we locked our door, okay,
(05:36):
But but you were. You had free range literally of
your your house, your yard, the woods around you. Um.
But here's a really big caveat from what I've seen.
I think a lot of people who are like um,
who aren't familiar necessarily fringe free range parenting, assumed that
we could have done anything we wanted and gotten away
(05:59):
with it because we were we had overly permissive parents.
That's not That's not the case for me, and I
would dare say that wasn't the case for you as well.
That we actually had plenty of rules and structure. We
were just also given a lot of freedom to do
things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom right
for sure. Okay, yeah, so that is what I thought
(06:22):
all kids had up to this time. And I knew
that there was like such things as piano and Mandarin
lessons or um mandarin classes, that kind of stuff, like
things that kids were taking more and more and they
were really busy and stressed out, and they had like
like um iPhones at age seven, that kind of thing.
But I still thought that this happened, and I was
(06:43):
really shocked, about as shocked as I've ever been in
researching an episode of stuff you should know to find
that that is not the case. That not only does
has this been kind of squeezed out by other activities,
it's actually become criminalized behavior by society at large, the
parents who were raising children today. I was blown away
(07:04):
to find this out. I really legitimately didn't know. Yeah,
I mean, and getting back to the activities, you know,
I played some soccer in high school and then I
did like church sports, which there's not a lot of.
I mean, I think we did like maybe one basketball
practice a week, um, and so it wasn't like everyday
practice and stuff like that. I never took lessons of
(07:24):
any kind. Uh, like I taught my self guitar and
all that stuff. So like, I I don't think I
literally ever had a structured post school activity in my life. Yeah,
did you say church sports? Yeah, I played church softball
and basketball. Did like everybody win every game? No, it
(07:46):
was actually fiercely competitive. Okay, I'm just kidding. No, no,
no it was. It was it was legit like we
had a pretty good basketball team and in the league
was pretty impressive too. But um, yeah, I don't, I don't,
I don't never signed it. I never had a class.
Like the idea of my mom having been like, all right,
I'm gonna take you to your violin lesson and then
(08:07):
on the weekends we have gymnastics and uh whatever else
people are doing these days, was just just we didn't
do that. She was just like, go play, right. So,
so there has been and we'll talk about all the
reasons why, but there has been a movement away from
the kind of childhood we had a very pronounced one. Um.
(08:27):
If you if you look at you know, culture is
a pendulum swinging one way or another. It has swung
very far the opposite way to where kids lives are
structured um down to the minute, where they have actual
calendars and schedules that they have to keep up with
because they have so many things going on. Um and
(08:48):
and there has come about in reaction to that, uh,
an antithesis basically, and it is nothing more than letting
kids grow up the way that you and I did,
um and then and it has become so novel in
the face of of the world and the culture that
(09:09):
we have in raising kids in the United States now
UM that it has its own name. It's a movement.
They have to go to court to defend themselves. It's
so weird. But really, if you strip it down and
look at it, all they're doing is raising their kids
the way you and I and and Jerry I'm sure
was raised. Well yeah, I mean to a certain degree, um.
But the whole idea, and it's not just like I
(09:31):
want you to grow up the way I did. It's
what it really is is an argument that says, you
know what, kids will grow up healthier and happier. Uh
if they have freedom to play and they have freedom
to fail and freedom to um get in a playground,
scrap and to work it out with another kid on
their own and figure things out for themselves. They will
(09:54):
end up better people because of this. It's not oh,
I'm lazy or I have nostalgia for my childhood. It's uh.
And and you know, there's a lot of research into
this now or some research that says, no, what we're
doing is is trying to make better future adults by
not hovering over my child scheduling them to death and um,
(10:17):
you know, every time they fall, run over, pick themselves
up and like and you know, rock them to sleep,
you know if they get a boo boo. Right, So
I sound so judgy. I don't mean that. Well, let's
let's just take a second. Let's take a break real
quick and like connect ourselves and then we'll come back
and we'll really get into what free range parenting is. Well,
(10:37):
now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from Josh, Damn, Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, stuff? Okay, Chuck?
(11:06):
So I think you demonstrated something that is um has
made free range parenting very unpalatable to a lot of
a lot of parents who don't raise their kids that way.
And that it seems to be a reaction, um, almost
an in your face to some people reaction or judgment
of um, that helicopter style parenting where you're always kind
(11:29):
of around your kid there, Um, their entire life is
very structured and supervised, including playtime. UM, and that free
range parenting is meant to be a reaction to that.
And in some ways it is a reaction to that,
but it also stands on its own. And if you
step back and look at it and look at free
range parenting not as a reaction to helicopter parenting, but
as its own thing, is its own philosophy for how
(11:51):
to raise a kid, and you strip away like the
judginess and all that stuff. It holds up to me.
And like you said, there's been a lot of um,
a lot of a lot more study recently, but the
whole thing really started back in two thousand eight, um,
by a journalist. It wasn't a child psychologist, It wasn't
a child development psychologist, it wasn't a child development, child analyst, psychologist,
(12:14):
none of those things. I made that last one up,
by the way. It was a journalist named Leonor's Skenazi. Yeah,
so she was a New York mom. And in two
thousand and eight, she wrote a column for The New
York Sun called Why I let my nine year old
ride the subway alone. She was in a store one
(12:34):
day in Manhattan and her son had been badgering her
to be able to ride the subway and bus back
home by himself. And finally one day she said, all right, great,
let's do this. Here's a subway map, here's a subway card,
here's twenty bucks. Um, here's some change for a pay phone. Um,
(12:55):
have at it. The kid made it home. Uh, and
he said he was quote ecstatic with independence. Yeah. And
like she got a lot of blowback from this from
like the judgment goes both ways. I mean there were
people that said it was neglect and abuse for her
to do this and let her kid ride the subway alone.
(13:17):
Oh oh yes, Yeah. If you had to divide the
two sides up and start weighing which one was a
little judge e er, you would definitely your hand would
be much lower holding um the helicopter parents side for sure. Um. Yeah.
If you're a free range kid proponent or you raise
your kids following that, there's a whole burden, whole social
(13:38):
burden that you have in addition to the burden of
raising your kids that you have to put up with
for sure. Yeah, and I should point out to real
quick that it all depends on upon your kids too.
I don't think there are any sweeping generalizations. Um my
daughter has always been very, um just instinctively kind of
safe and smart about stuff. Um, other kids in her
(14:00):
class are just like a little wild banshees, and I
would probably be a lot more um worried if she
was the kind of kid who has an instinct to
like jump out of a tree, um instead of like
back down very slowly out of a tree. So right,
it's all It's all different depending on your kid, you know,
(14:20):
or a kid who like can't seem to shake being
totally fascinated with matches or knives or something like that. Yeah. Yeah,
I think that was a really good point. Like it's
you shouldn't sweep or generalize, but I think that's an
even larger point to people should be left to raise
their children, um how they see fit. Yeah, given a
certain amount of um trust invested in the parents that
(14:43):
the parent isn't going to harm the kid or let
harm come to the kid because that's their parent, right right. Okay,
So this whole thing started with Lenora Skins, and like
you said, she got a lot of blowback, but she
also got a really positive response to an ex actually
parlay the whole thing from that New York sun Um
article into a blog that she called free Range Kids.
(15:06):
So from what I understand, she coined the term free
range kids and started writing about this stuff. And at
first a lot of it was just like it's it's good.
It's on its face, it's obvious that this is how
you should raise a kid. You know, kids need play,
they need to learn how to pick themselves back up
when they fall down. Um. And not only that, you're
(15:27):
doing a disservice to your kid when you pick them
up after they fall down, um, because they're not learning
how to get back up themselves. Uh. And over time
it kind of went as people became more and more
enamored with her philosophy or this whole free range kid's idea. Um.
More child psychologists started weighing in and the whole movement
(15:48):
kind of took the shape and they figured out that
for a parent to kind of see the light as
they as far as they were concerned, they had to
first change just the mindset about what kind of world
they were raising a kid in, because if you're a
free range kid parent, um, you probably don't feel as
(16:10):
threatened by the world in general as say a helicopter
parent would. Um ounce for ounce, Yeah for sure. UM.
I mean when when when parents have experimented with this,
the the changes that they've seen and their kids have
been pretty striking. Um if anecdotal. UM. There's this one woman,
(16:30):
Dana Bloomberg. She's a school counselor in suburban Chicago. And
we should also point out depends on where you live
as well. If you live in a very safe suburb
or way out in the country, it's a little different
than a kid like in the middle of the city
or something like that. But she gave her kid a
lot of free range um starting in the second grade,
(16:52):
and got some neighborhood parents involved and letting their kids
do it. And they said, before you know it, they
had this little, you know, little gang of kids kind
of touring around the neighborhood, are on their own, and
she's getting all these texts from these different parents, UM
saying like what a big change has happened, Uh, in
their own kid. One parent even said it was life
(17:13):
changing for her daughter, gave her a nuisance of confidence,
and um, that's sort of what the free range thing
can look like. But like you were saying, it all
comes down to a squashing appearance fear, the biggest fear,
which is my child will get abducted, or my child
(17:33):
will get um uh, there will be a sexual predator
to target my child, or heaven forbid, my child will
get kidnapped and murdered. Right, because you can understand and
it's really tough to fault somebody who doesn't want their
kid wandering around by themselves because they're afraid that something
(17:53):
really bad is going to happen to their kid. So
kind of the first step to um, to adopting like
a free range kid attitude, is to adjusting how you
see the world. Um And they think they think that
with there are several things like if you it's really
fascinated me. I love cultural changes, especially when we can
(18:14):
point to different things, seemingly unrelated things that all kind
of converge and has changed the world in ways you
never think of that seems to have happened to produce
today's helicopter parents or at least to produce the level
of fear, the climate of fear that the world is
an inherently dangerous, brutal um, sadistic place. That that where
(18:37):
children have no call to be wandering around themselves. UM.
That that is actually you can trace that back to
a convergence of things that have happened starting in like
the late seventies and early eighties. UM. And in particular
there was some high profile UH child murder cases basically
(18:58):
UM that all kind of took place between nineteen seventy
nine in Night one, and those really changed a lot
of parents minds about things. Yeah. Um. In New York,
the very sad story of six year old Eaton pats
Um disappeared and was later found out to have been murdered. UM.
(19:19):
John Walsh very famously his son Adam. UM, he's the
one that does all the TV shows now. I think
he's on the Hunt on CNN now and really made
this his life's work. But his son Adam disappeared, uh
and died in nineteen eighty one. UM. Obviously the Atlanta
child murders UM from seventy eight one, and this all
(19:40):
converged around the same time, Like you were talking about this,
these these strange things aligning UM cable news coming out
seeing Inn was launched in nineteen eighty, So all of
a sudden, you have parents that are getting this kind
of constant flow of fear from the news about their children.
Right Because so if if a um prior to cable news,
(20:03):
twenty four hour news, UM, if something happened to a
kid somewhere in in some state, maybe if it were
just particularly egregious or outrageous, um or everything was kind
of set up in just the right way, it would
capture the attention of the national media and you would
hear about it around the country. But that was really
(20:24):
really rare. And then second to that, the other place
that you would hear about child abductions, child murder, murders,
horrific like accidents that befell a child would be locally,
right like on your local news that maybe maybe expanded
to a region, maybe the state, but it was pretty localized.
And so if statistically something like that happened fairly rarely,
(20:47):
you weren't going to hear about it very often, And
so in your mind it was a pretty rare thing,
and you weren't afraid of the world in general. But
what a lot of commentators and a lot of UM, well,
some of the people I ran across some research UM
propose is that with cable news, that potential pool of
horrible things that befell kids to talk about um expanded
(21:10):
to the entire nation, not just local, not just regional
or even state, but the whole nation. So now all
the bad things happening to all the kids around the
nation was potential news fodder. And so when you were
watching CNN, it seems like every other story was about
a kid who had been abducted and killed, or sexually assaulted,
or any number of horrible things. And there's really no
(21:32):
way to put it other than that that kind of
stuff keeps people glued to their televisions, and so it's
really in the best interests of news networks like CNN
to feed people that, because while you're glued to your television,
you're also glued to the ads that they showed too.
And so from this model came a climate of fear
(21:52):
that a lot of people point to is like, this
is the source, and it's not just CNN. CNN gets
pointed to because it was the one that started at all.
That is Ted Turtor who came up with this and
started the first twenty four hour cable news network. But
all cable news is guilty of this, and became guilty
of it pretty quickly because that's the model of cable news.
Um And because cable news laid that foundation and showed like, oh,
(22:16):
you've got that kind of you can really make some revenue.
Nightly news tried its best to resist that kind of thing,
but it kind of had to follow suit a little
bit too, so it would become more sensational from the
eighties onward as well, not nearly anything like cable news,
but compared to how it had been before, it was
much more sensationalized because it was following the cable news model.
And all that put together created the foundation of why
(22:40):
people are just scared to death about the world because
we we think that it's way more dangerous than it
actually is, because the statistics are inflated by hearing about
this stuff all the time. Yeah, and there's another couple
of things that contributed that um Skins has pointed out. One,
we live in what you dubs and expert society, So
(23:02):
again on cable news or on social media, like everywhere
you turn, there's another expert coming out with a new
book they're trying to sell basically telling you how you're
doing it wrong as a parent, how you should do
it um. And then the whole fact that we live
in a very litigious society. Now, so what if I
want a free range parent my kid and they go
(23:23):
down and get their friend um out of the house
and their riding bikes and one of them gets hurt,
Like their parents gonna sue me because my kid went
and lured them into the mean streets. Right, Well, yeah,
that was another thing that happened, Chuck. In the seventies,
the idea of negligence became really big, and there was
what's called like a tortue revolution to where you went
(23:45):
from well you know your kid was your kid didn't
know your the the other kid's arm was gonna get broken,
so you can't get sued for that. To know that
was negligent, and we're going to allow that and more
and more case law expanded to to to make people
think like lay yours because of it too. Dude, when
you were a kid, was I mean that must have
been a thing, because did you ever have the lawsuit
(24:08):
threat from another child? Yeah? That was such a thing
like yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna kick your butt or whatever.
It's like, oh yeah, well my dad's gonna sue you
for all the money you got. That's right, he's a dentist.
That's so funny, man, to think back in the seventies,
these children threatening lawsuits on Yeah, I'd forgotten about that
for like ripping their shirt or something. Any number of
(24:30):
things could could generate yea. Um. But in the end,
Skins says, and this is I think a pretty relevant quote.
She said, all of this stuff combined has convinced parents
that they have to be both omniscient and omnipotent um
because of fear, and monitor every single move that your
kid makes. So, uh, let's take a break and we're
(24:53):
gonna come back and talk a little bit about the
the facts about whether or not your kids are really
in danger out on the streets. After this, Well, now
we're on the road driving in your truck. Want to
learn a thing or two from Josh can Chuck. It's
stuff you should know, all right, shot alright, Chuck. So um,
(25:31):
like we're saying to to not be just scared to
death because you're letting your kids say walk home from
the park or something like that. Unsupervised, you you have
to go through a change in mindset, like you have
to stop seeing the world is a very very scary place.
And sometimes statistics can be actually kind of comforting. So
(25:52):
the free range Kids movement has really, you know, made
one of its um foundational support polls, and you think
I would actually be getting better at this all this time,
but but you stumble through something like anyway, they talk
a lot about statistics and crime statistics related to kids
(26:14):
in particular, and when you look at them in the cold,
hard light of the day, UM, it doesn't seem like
it's a very dangerous world after all. Right, if you
look at the numbers, UM, the National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children says that just one percent of the
twenty seven thousand missing children cases are non family abductions,
(26:39):
and that also includes like friends and acquaintances. So if
you're talking about literally a stranger targeting your child and
plucking them off a playground, it is exceedingly rare that
that happens. And then so one percent is non family, right, right,
(27:01):
But that also doesn't even break down like if it's
a friend or an acquaintance of a family or something
like that. It's a little strangers snatching your kid rarely, rarely,
rarely happens. Yeah. So even even that, even including like
friends of the family, um, somebody who's not a direct
family member but known to the kid, a non stranger,
that's two hundred and seventy kids that that happened to
(27:23):
in two thousand, seventeen out of twenties seven thousand, I think, um,
which is that's awful for those kids that they were kidnapped, right.
There's that's That's another thing too, is when you throw
out statistics like this, it's really easy to be like,
see that was it, um, But you don't want to
do that because to those two hundred and seventy families
that that's that's all that matters. And that's really important
(27:45):
to remember as well when we're kind of tossing out
these statistics too. Yeah, and not to make light of
family abductions, which is you know ninety one percent of abductions, Uh,
those are horrific and traumatic as well. We're just talking
about the bare bones of like the fear that if
I let my kid go to a park as strangers
going to pluck them right, right, so, so and so
(28:08):
even that even if you look at its twenty seven
thousand out of all the kids in the United States
in two thousand seventeen, seven thousand of them were went
missing in two thousand seventeen, and the vast majority of
them ran away. So, if you're worried that your kid
is going to get plucked by a stranger, specifically out
of a park somewhere, because you let them go to
the park with the free range parenting, people are saying,
(28:31):
if you look at the statistics, the chances of that
are so small that it's actually not worth limiting your
kids freedom of movement because of that outlier possibility. It
just doesn't. It's just a disproportionate response to that risk,
is what they're saying. Right. Um, if you want to
(28:51):
talk about the worst thing that you can imagine, which
is UM, a child murder Uh. From nineteen eighty to
two thousand eight, UM statistics about murders of children under
five years old, Uh, sixty percent of the time the
parents are the ones who did it, um, followed by
(29:13):
so that's total or male acquaintances. UM, So like you know,
mom's boyfriend or something like that, Uh seven percent or
other relatives. So only three percent of all murders of
young children are strangers. Right, So again and again, dressing tanks.
(29:34):
We're addressing the fear of strangers doing something to your child,
not making light of these other statistics. And there are
parents out there who are like, good, that's enough. That's
the fact that it happens to one kid makes me
want to protect my child and make sure that they
don't do that. Okay, you're the parent, You're you're raising
your kid in that that way. I understand, um, But again,
(29:56):
what the what the free range kids people are saying
is like, like, is it really worth that? Like what
what about that is? Is? I mean, is it really
worth that kind of a response, And we'll get to
we'll get to that, because you could say, like, if
there were no negative aspects of of completely ensconcing your
kid in protection, then the free range kids advocates wouldn't
(30:19):
have anything. They could be like, Okay, well whatever, that's
what you're doing with your kid. But there's suspicions that
the that actually is detrimental to the development of a kid,
protecting them from everything at all costs. And I think
that's one of the big other Um foundational platform post
tenants of the free range kids thing that one was
(30:47):
for showing off. Uh, alright, so building on that, um,
like you, like you were saying, like they're there, There
has to be like in order to get a parent
on board with a free range parting lifestyle. It's not
just I want to be lazy or I want to
go back to my childhood. Um, it's a parent who
thinks there are actual benefits to doing so, and that
(31:09):
that outweighs the risk, like you were saying, of the
three percent, uh chance or the one percent to the
point five percent chance that something's gonna happen to my
kid if they're on their own. Um, there is evidence,
and it's growing and growing evidence that all these efforts
to schedule all these activities for your kid are overlooking
(31:31):
one big fundamental element of raising a healthy, well adjusted
child that seems to be getting lost more and more,
which is something called free play. Um. The American Academy
of Pediatrics has a report out that said that free
play promotes social um. Sorry, social, it's the saying, uh,
(31:55):
social emotional, cognitive, language, and self regulation skills that build
executive function and a pro social brain. And play is
fundamentally important for learning twenty one century skills like problem solving, collaboration, creativity,
uh and executive functioning skills that are critical for adult success. Right,
And they threw that last one in to be like, well, okay,
(32:17):
maybe plays good, but it's not going to help them
in life, and they're saying, yes, it will actually help
them in life, and that by keeping them from playing,
you're basically creating a little adult from from the nursery.
Which is interesting to be chucked because prior to the
nineteenth century, when you were a kid, starting around age
five or something, you you had a job, even if
(32:38):
it wasn't around like your family's farm. Maybe you were
helping out with um, the wash that your mom took
in who knows. But then you like, there was no
such thing as childhood really um, And then we moved
away from that and we developed childhood. And now it
seems like we're moving away from childhood. Now we're taking
kids and they're not they're not working on the farm.
(32:59):
We're making little CEOs and marketing directors and brand managers
and stuff like that. But they're they're losing their childhood
in that bargain. As I think what they're saying, and
from play specifically, play helps, but it helps also like um,
just in and of itself for its own sake, but
it also helps eventually down the road. It's an investment
(33:19):
that will pay off, I think in terms that helicopter
parents can understand. Yeah, there's another guy named Peter Gray.
He's a developmental psychologist. UM. He has a book called
Free to Learn and founded a nonprofit I believe with
yes skins called Let Grow. UM little play on words there,
(33:40):
and he basically says that, you know, if you look
back to human evolution, um children, Uh, their education was
through play with their peers. And if you look at
um societies and cultures in the world today that um,
(34:02):
I mean, how would you classify these cultures traditional societies?
I'm not sure maybe, but they say that that children
of these cultures that still play and explore freely. Um,
if they're left to do that, they will do so
into their teen years. UM. Like that is their natural
instinct is to be among their peers, free playing, right,
(34:22):
but so and so like, I think one of the
problems that helicopter parents have with the idea of play
is that like it's it's a waste of time the
kid could be learning like cello or um, you know,
doing math flash cards are like creating a better foundation
for a better future for themselves, and that if they're
not doing that, they're falling behind. And so what Peter
(34:43):
Gray and some of his ilk are saying is like no, no, no.
Play helps develop a child in ways that no other
thing you could possibly come up with their supervisor get
them to do can because this is what we've done
all this time, and this is how we've built society
is letting little kids play and figure things out on
their own. And he says that if there's a parent around,
(35:05):
if it's supervised, if there's a parent even within like
eyesight er, ear shotter, you know there's a parent watching,
it's going to be different. It has to be unsupervised,
unstructured play so that the kids can be left to
make up their own rules, can can be taught by
the group that you know, actually, no, that's not really
fair or it's not really cool to take the ball
(35:26):
and go home because you aren't winning. Um, that's how
you learn that stuff, and those are good things to learn.
That makes you a more socially well adjusted kid than um.
Probably learning Cello is going to well, yeah, I mean,
you can try and teach your kid by showing and
by telling as much as you can as a parent,
(35:47):
and that is all valuable, But nothing will teach a
lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with
their peers. Right, And like I remember myself, you know,
when I was a kid, Like the biggest lessons I learned,
we're lessons that I learned among my peer group, you know,
like tough, hard lessons that a lot of parents, I
(36:09):
think try and even shield their kid from because it's
tough stuff sometimes. But um, and you know, you don't
want your kid to suffer traumas and things like that.
But uh, and not to sound like a parent from
the nineteen fifties, but that stuff does help build your
child's character. And I mean, I guess that sounds of
old school. What it does is it helps them learn
(36:31):
how to regulate their emotions and how to fit in
with their peer group, which is in turn going to
be eventually just society at large. Right. It's funny you
say that that sounds kind of fifties because this whole
idea of like free range kids is kind of based
on that philosophy of Dr Spock, who was like one
(36:52):
of the first experts, one of the first child experts
that America ever really paid attention to. And he wrote
a book in nineteen forties called The Common Sense Book
of Baby and Child, And he basically is saying all
the stuff that free range kids parents say is like,
let your kids play, Let your kids like learned through
their own um, their own way of like exploring the world, like,
(37:15):
let them take risks, UM, let them be themselves. Trust
your instincts as a parent. And so that's what free
ranch parents seemed to be kind of getting back to,
is like the doctor spak Um school of thought. Benjamin Spock,
not um, the other spok not live long in prosper Spot.
Did he have a first name? Oh? I don't know, man,
I didn't watch a Star Trek. I didn't either. Just
(37:38):
lay it on a million people who are going to
send the email we're waiting. Uh. There's something called the
internal external locus of control scale UM. It's an odd name,
but this is UM been around since the nineteen sixties.
It's a psychological indicator scale. UH. And these days, since
(38:00):
the nineteen sixties, there's been a big shift in the
scale and how teens report themselves and their internal control
in today, teens report very little internal control over their
own lives. And Gray believes and I think he's really
onto something here that, uh, these high levels of anxiety
(38:21):
and depression among kids these days has a lot to
do with that, and the things is directly related to
the decline and free play over the last you know,
forty or fifty years, right, which I want to say
like this, this is like one psychologist's opinion. It makes
a lot of sense to me, and I'm sure it
does to a lot of people. But there's you know,
(38:42):
this is not necessarily like like gospel truth or set
in Stone. It's the jury is still kind of out,
but there's a lot of evidence out there that that
does seem like over protecting your kid can stunt them
and um, emotionally or developmentally, and then letting them go
be themselves and learn things on their own and learn
(39:03):
that they can pick themselves back up and still survive
and failure is not the worst thing in the world
can actually help them develop. Um. This is it's just
like we we routinely shoot holes in in social psychology
stuff all the time, and we do it gleefully. So
I don't want to like go the opposite way and
just be like, but this one's right because we agree
(39:23):
with you. Um, that's not necessarily the case, and I'm
sure a lot of people disagree with it, but I
tend to kind of favor that that mentality, probably because
that's how I was raised. Yeah, And like I said,
it does sound like um from the nineties say that
failure breeds character, but you know, it really does. It's
sort of a simplistic way to say it. But when
you fail, you um hopefully learn something and build on that,
(39:49):
and that does build character. Right. So one of the
one of the things they call that is the dignity
of risk, where you are showing your kid, I'm I'm
letting you go figure this out on your own. Um.
And and another big misunderstanding with free range parents is
that that you just go from like zero to walking,
(40:11):
you know, taking the subway in New York, Um, at
the flip of a switch. That's not how it works.
You you slowly build your kid up for this, you know,
the big thing that you write an article about. But
there's you know, dozens or scores or possibly hundreds of
little little interactions that you're having to kind of make
sure that your kid is up for this when they're
(40:32):
finally when you decide they're finally ready to um. And
it's not just like flipping a switch. It's very kind
of thoughtful and protracted and um planned but not necessarily
shared with the kid. That's planned, UM paying out of
trust and so that the kid can show you, yeah,
I'm ready for this, I know what to do. I'm
not just gonna like ball up on the on the
(40:52):
ground in the subway and and start crying until someone
calls nine on one and the cops come get me. Well. Yeah,
And I'm sure when she sent um her kid on
on the subway home that very first time, it wasn't
just like all right, here's the stuff, see you later.
I'm sure there was a very serious talk like all right, dude,
I trust you. I'm letting you do this. I know
(41:13):
you know the way. We're gonna give this a shot. Um,
don't if I see you on the news in the
middle of time square like you're gonna be a big trouble. Um.
I'm sure there was a lot of thought in talk
that went into that, and uh, you know what, I'm saying, yeah,
so totally, and kids get that stuff. You know, for sure,
kids are smarter than people give them credit for a
(41:34):
lot of times. I think, Um, it's interesting when it
comes to the law because it's such a new thing. Um.
In Utah last year in two thousand eighteen, became the
first state to pass what was called a free range
parenting law, where it basically was just sort of redefining
what child neglect was. Uh. And in Utah, I thought
I was gonna go the other way when I was
reading this, but um, it actually went the way of
(41:56):
sort of encouraging or being behind free parenting. The new definition,
a parent cannot be accused of neglect just because their
kid is going to a store by themselves that's down
the street, or playing outside alone, or biking to school
on their own, or at home without a parent there, Um,
(42:18):
if they're a minor, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, I
thought so too. Um, But most free range parents are like, oh,
we don't want to live to you in Utah. So
hopefully our states will all come up with similar laws
that that decriminalize free range parenting, because in a lot
of states, things like latch key kids are illegal, like
you can have your kid taken from you if they
(42:40):
are a latch key kid under a certain age. I
think in Washington you have to be fourteen to be
left at home alone like you, you could lose your kid.
And so there's a real problem with trying free range
parenting because part of this um helicopter parenting society is
also helicopter villaging. But rather and picking up the phone
(43:00):
and calling the parents whose kids you see wandering alone
down the street like you used to would have done,
now that people just call, pick up the phone and
call the cops, and then the cops respond and they
take the kid to child protective services and the parent
has to go down and explain that they will never
do this again and they're very very sorry, or else
(43:21):
child protective services will take their kid from them because
most states rule on what's called the best interests of
the child, which is totally subjective, is completely not based
in any actual case law. Necessarily, it's just does the
child protective services person think that that the kid is
is smart enough to walk from the playground to the house. No, okay,
(43:44):
well we're taking your kid, maybe permanently, and so it's
it's really risky to raise your kid this way, because
people will call the cops if they see your kid
walking down the street and real trouble your your parentship
of your kid is in jeopardy at that moment, which
has got to be one of the worst things that
(44:04):
could possibly happen to a parent. Yeah, and this is
where we kind of we get back to the place
of like, this is a privilege. Has a lot to
do with this, because when it comes to the law
and children and child protective services, you are way more
likely um to get a visit um from child protective
services if you are poor, UM, or if you're a
(44:26):
person of color or minority UM. Like, they may write
an article about you in the local magazine praising you
if you're like a white suburban parent of middle or
upper middle class for letting your kid free range around.
But um. In the case of like Deborah Harrold in
two thousand fourteen in South Carolina, UM, she wasn't like, oh,
(44:49):
I want to be a free range parent. She's like,
I am a working mom, and I work at McDonald's
and I'm finishing a shift and my nine year old
daughter is playing in a park nearby until I'm done,
and and they sent her to jail for a night
and took her daughter for two weeks away from her
seventeen days. Yeah, so it is very much a case
(45:09):
of privilege to even be allowed to do this without
getting a visit from Child Protective Services. Right so, um,
Skinazy and some of the other free range parents say, right,
this is why we need laws that are much more
common sense and decriminalize this kind of behavior and put
the trust back in parents to know that their kids
are smart enough, or if they think their kids aren't
(45:31):
smart enough to be trusted with that kind of stuff,
they wouldn't let them do that. Um. They argue that
this would benefit everybody, whether no matter you know, whether
you're a minority or um whatever, um socioeconomic status you have,
which is which is true? That's a pretty it's a
pretty sensible. Um, it's sensible. But I think that that
(45:51):
kind of underscores the larger problem, which is, you know,
like some people don't have the choice to to get
childcare if the school suddenly canceled class, like you just
can't afford it. What are you gonna do? And then
your your work says, well, you can't bring them here,
this is work You know what, what can you do?
Hopefully you've raised your kid to a point where you
(46:12):
can trust them to go play, you know, next door
at the playground or something like that. But that doesn't
mean that you're not gonna end up in trouble with
with the authorities. So it's a sticky, sticky situation that
we're in. Two it is, and you know, again, it
depends on your kid. It depends on where you live.
Like in my brother's neighborhood, Uh, if I live there,
(46:32):
I would let my kid go out and do what
she wanted when she was like seven. It's just so
safe and kids are everywhere on their own doing stuff,
very much like it was when we were kids. At
my house, I live next to a super scary busy street.
Like I would never let her out of the front
(46:53):
of my house, but even at three and a half,
we let her go in the backyard by herself and
do stuff all the time. Right, Um, I mean just
this past weekend, I uh, she was out in the
backyard and with the dogs, and I went out about
half an hour later and she was walking through the
garden with a watering can singing we will Rock You.
(47:18):
And I was like, all right, everything's fine. But again,
she's in my enclosed backyard. I wasn't sweating it. I
would um, I would never just open the front door
and be like, go have fun. Memorial drives right there, sixty.
But that's the point. It's all context, you know, Like
you would have had to have worked up to that point.
She would have had to have shown you that she
(47:38):
was able to be trusted with that busy street, and
maybe she'd be sixteen before you would. But that's that's
the point. It's all. It's all, it's context, you know. Yeah,
you know. Again, just do the best you can. It's hard.
There a thousand ways to do it, and everybody thinks
their way is the right way. Also, just before we
sign off, I want to say I did mean to
(48:00):
pick on kids who take cello lessons. Cello is, by
the way, my favorite stringed instrument, which means it was
the one that was easiest called the mind. That's why
I kept bringing up the cello. So all of you
out there learning cello, hats off to you because that's
my favorite string instrument. Yeah what if what if Yo
Yo ma had just been free planning? All right? But
(48:23):
I'll bet yo Yoma did free play. A bet he
did both, and if he didn't, I'll bet he regrets it. H.
If you want to know more about free range kids
will just go on the internet and start reading because
there's a lot about it. And since I said that, oh, also,
there's a pretty good article on how stuff works you
can read too. Since I said that, it's time for
listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this, uh desert flooding. Hey, guys,
(48:48):
listen to the podcast this morning on Desert Survival. I
live here in Phoenix, Arizona, and have for nineteen years,
and the flash flood issue is real even in metro Phoenix. Um,
they have a stupid motorist law here and that's capitalized
and end quotes. Um. She said, and she said after
and during her heavy rains, a lot of washes fill
(49:11):
with running water. A lot of the washes have been paved.
Barriers will be put up when they flood, even if
the water is only a few inches deep. But there's
always someone who decides that their sub or truck is
hefty enough to get through, and their rescue is always
on the nightly news because they have to pay for it.
They actually have to pay for the cost to their rescue. Uh.
(49:31):
Sometimes these stare deevils don't fare too well. Um. Actually,
lives have been lost in less than a foot of
moving water in a watch. Yeah, I believe that I've
heard six inches. Yeah, and she Teresa Henburry closes by
saying this, I do so enjoy your podcast. Nice, Thank you, Teresa.
(49:52):
We do so enjoy your emails too. Yes, I like
the way she put that. Yeah. Um, if you want
to be like Teresa, impresses with your verbal or written dexterity.
We love that kind of stuff. You can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com and you can look
us up on the social links. You can also send
us a podcast like Teresa did to stuff podcasts at
(50:14):
I heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's Jerry over there, and this is stuff you should
know about kids. Can I see a right off the
(00:24):
bat here? I presumed you would. All right, there's a
couple of c o as I want to issue. One,
we are not telling anyone how to parent their children, indeed, uh.
And two we realized that the whole concept of free
range parenting that will follow is comes from a place
(00:50):
of extreme privilege. Yes, to be able to entertain the
idea of free range parenting comes from a place of
extreme privilege. Okay, I've Can I amend that or should
I wait until we talk about that part to kind
of amend it? No, you can amend it, so so
to me, free range parenting, having the freedom to free
(01:11):
range parent is what I saw it ties in with
parenting that's already being done by people who might not
have a choice. Are you saying that the the um,
the the ability to choose whether you want a free
range parent or not is privileged? Yes? Okay, Yes, agreed.
I got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and and again we'll
(01:33):
get into that, but um, well we'll get into that
at the end, but I just want to just go
ahead and lead that off because it's um a lot
of privilege involved with being able to say, you know
that you want to free range parent Are you going
to Are you going to land one way or another
on it on whether or not I support free range parenting? Yeah?
(01:54):
Uh yeah, I mean Emily, and I don't title it
or say hey, I think we should do this as
a style, but we, um, as it turns out, are
sort of dabbling in free range parenting a bit as
much as you can for a three and a half
year old. So you're listening to your instincts. I've never
(02:16):
read a parenting book, not knocking them, but I've never
read one. And we parent by instinct, and our daughter
has always had a lot of room to free play
and explore and figure stuff out on our own and
fall down and get back up and all that all
that stuff. Okay, I'm reading between the lines. You guys
haven't decided yet, all right, so ready free range parenting
(02:40):
go okay, So, um, do you remember when we were kids,
back when we used to hang out when we were
kids mm hmm, and we would go ride bikes together
at like UM sunrise. We had no idea where we
were going to go, but it might involve a swamp,
could involve a glacier. UM. There may have been like uh,
(03:03):
rail riding hoboes that we shared lunch with. Who knows
what the day was gonna bring, but we were up
for all that and may or may not have engaged
in any of that UM during that day. And then
at the end of the day, around sunset, maybe a
little later, depending on whether it was summer or not,
we ride our bikes back home, say see you tomorrow,
go to our respective houses UM, and then talk the
(03:26):
night away on our soup cans that were connected by
UM a rope. And that was our childhood, right we
turned out. Sure, I have have talked about my childhood
some growing up, but you know, I grew up in
the woods basically on like a couple of acres of
land with a creek and forest, not in a subdivision,
(03:46):
but on a street with like seven houses in the woods,
and my mother had a UM. We had this giant
iron bell it's probably about eighteen inches across that on
a mounted on a big um like a telephone and
pole kind of right beside our driveway, and she would
at the you know, when it was dinner time in
the evening, she would go pull that bell and you
(04:11):
could hear it from like a mile away. This the
bell tolling. And that's when Scott and I were like,
all right, we you know, it's time to go eat
um after having been out all day long with zero supervision.
And I had a great mom, Like, she wasn't neglectful.
This is just how it was done. Yeah, were you
(04:33):
a latch key kid? Um? I know your mom was
a teacher, but did she stay at home with you?
She didn't go back to teaching. She she quit teaching
to raise kids and then started up again when I
was like I feel like eighth or ninth grade or
something like that. Okay, yeah, my mom took off until
I was like six seven. I guess, like kinder no,
(04:54):
maybe she's still around a kindergard I guess about first
grade when I was when I started school and she
was like, okay, I'm going back to nursing um. And
then after that point, I was a last key kid
for like the rest of my life. But I had
like older sisters who would be home around the time
I would, And but I had like my own key
to my house that was just a couple of blocks
away from my school, and I would walk myself or
(05:16):
ride my bike myself, and then i'd be home by
myself if my sister was doing something else for a
couple of hours, until either my mom or my dad
showed up. Um. And I think I turned out pretty
well too, so that I even key. Ever, Well, you
guys probably didn't lock your doors if your mom rang
a bell on the telephone poll to call you in
for dinner. I don't think we locked our door, okay,
(05:36):
But but you were. You had free range literally of
your your house, your yard, the woods around you. Um.
But here's a really big caveat from what I've seen.
I think a lot of people who are like um,
who aren't familiar necessarily fringe free range parenting, assumed that
we could have done anything we wanted and gotten away
(05:59):
with it because we were we had overly permissive parents.
That's not That's not the case for me, and I
would dare say that wasn't the case for you as well.
That we actually had plenty of rules and structure. We
were just also given a lot of freedom to do
things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom right
for sure. Okay, yeah, so that is what I thought
(06:22):
all kids had up to this time. And I knew
that there was like such things as piano and Mandarin
lessons or um mandarin classes, that kind of stuff, like
things that kids were taking more and more and they
were really busy and stressed out, and they had like
like um iPhones at age seven, that kind of thing.
But I still thought that this happened, and I was
(06:43):
really shocked, about as shocked as I've ever been in
researching an episode of stuff you should know to find
that that is not the case. That not only does
has this been kind of squeezed out by other activities,
it's actually become criminalized behavior by society at large, the
parents who were raising children today. I was blown away
(07:04):
to find this out. I really legitimately didn't know. Yeah,
I mean, and getting back to the activities, you know,
I played some soccer in high school and then I
did like church sports, which there's not a lot of.
I mean, I think we did like maybe one basketball
practice a week, um, and so it wasn't like everyday
practice and stuff like that. I never took lessons of
(07:24):
any kind. Uh, like I taught my self guitar and
all that stuff. So like, I I don't think I
literally ever had a structured post school activity in my life. Yeah,
did you say church sports? Yeah, I played church softball
and basketball. Did like everybody win every game? No, it
(07:46):
was actually fiercely competitive. Okay, I'm just kidding. No, no,
no it was. It was it was legit like we
had a pretty good basketball team and in the league
was pretty impressive too. But um, yeah, I don't, I don't,
I don't never signed it. I never had a class.
Like the idea of my mom having been like, all right,
I'm gonna take you to your violin lesson and then
(08:07):
on the weekends we have gymnastics and uh whatever else
people are doing these days, was just just we didn't
do that. She was just like, go play, right. So,
so there has been and we'll talk about all the
reasons why, but there has been a movement away from
the kind of childhood we had a very pronounced one. Um.
(08:27):
If you if you look at you know, culture is
a pendulum swinging one way or another. It has swung
very far the opposite way to where kids lives are
structured um down to the minute, where they have actual
calendars and schedules that they have to keep up with
because they have so many things going on. Um and
(08:48):
and there has come about in reaction to that, uh,
an antithesis basically, and it is nothing more than letting
kids grow up the way that you and I did,
um and then and it has become so novel in
the face of of the world and the culture that
(09:09):
we have in raising kids in the United States now
UM that it has its own name. It's a movement.
They have to go to court to defend themselves. It's
so weird. But really, if you strip it down and
look at it, all they're doing is raising their kids
the way you and I and and Jerry I'm sure
was raised. Well yeah, I mean to a certain degree, um.
But the whole idea, and it's not just like I
(09:31):
want you to grow up the way I did. It's
what it really is is an argument that says, you
know what, kids will grow up healthier and happier. Uh
if they have freedom to play and they have freedom
to fail and freedom to um get in a playground,
scrap and to work it out with another kid on
their own and figure things out for themselves. They will
(09:54):
end up better people because of this. It's not oh,
I'm lazy or I have nostalgia for my childhood. It's uh.
And and you know, there's a lot of research into
this now or some research that says, no, what we're
doing is is trying to make better future adults by
not hovering over my child scheduling them to death and um,
(10:17):
you know, every time they fall, run over, pick themselves
up and like and you know, rock them to sleep,
you know if they get a boo boo. Right, So
I sound so judgy. I don't mean that. Well, let's
let's just take a second. Let's take a break real
quick and like connect ourselves and then we'll come back
and we'll really get into what free range parenting is. Well,
(10:37):
now we're on the road, driving in your truck. Want
to learn a thing or two from Josh, Damn, Chuck.
It's stuff you should know, all right, stuff? Okay, Chuck?
(11:06):
So I think you demonstrated something that is um has
made free range parenting very unpalatable to a lot of
a lot of parents who don't raise their kids that way.
And that it seems to be a reaction, um, almost
an in your face to some people reaction or judgment
of um, that helicopter style parenting where you're always kind
(11:29):
of around your kid there, Um, their entire life is
very structured and supervised, including playtime. UM, and that free
range parenting is meant to be a reaction to that.
And in some ways it is a reaction to that,
but it also stands on its own. And if you
step back and look at it and look at free
range parenting not as a reaction to helicopter parenting, but
as its own thing, is its own philosophy for how
(11:51):
to raise a kid, and you strip away like the
judginess and all that stuff. It holds up to me.
And like you said, there's been a lot of um,
a lot of a lot more study recently, but the
whole thing really started back in two thousand eight, um,
by a journalist. It wasn't a child psychologist, It wasn't
a child development psychologist, it wasn't a child development, child analyst, psychologist,
(12:14):
none of those things. I made that last one up,
by the way. It was a journalist named Leonor's Skenazi. Yeah,
so she was a New York mom. And in two
thousand and eight, she wrote a column for The New
York Sun called Why I let my nine year old
ride the subway alone. She was in a store one
(12:34):
day in Manhattan and her son had been badgering her
to be able to ride the subway and bus back
home by himself. And finally one day she said, all right, great,
let's do this. Here's a subway map, here's a subway card,
here's twenty bucks. Um, here's some change for a pay phone. Um,
(12:55):
have at it. The kid made it home. Uh, and
he said he was quote ecstatic with independence. Yeah. And
like she got a lot of blowback from this from
like the judgment goes both ways. I mean there were
people that said it was neglect and abuse for her
to do this and let her kid ride the subway alone.
(13:17):
Oh oh yes, Yeah. If you had to divide the
two sides up and start weighing which one was a
little judge e er, you would definitely your hand would
be much lower holding um the helicopter parents side for sure. Um. Yeah.
If you're a free range kid proponent or you raise
your kids following that, there's a whole burden, whole social
(13:38):
burden that you have in addition to the burden of
raising your kids that you have to put up with
for sure. Yeah, and I should point out to real
quick that it all depends on upon your kids too.
I don't think there are any sweeping generalizations. Um my
daughter has always been very, um just instinctively kind of
safe and smart about stuff. Um, other kids in her
(14:00):
class are just like a little wild banshees, and I
would probably be a lot more um worried if she
was the kind of kid who has an instinct to
like jump out of a tree, um instead of like
back down very slowly out of a tree. So right,
it's all It's all different depending on your kid, you know,
(14:20):
or a kid who like can't seem to shake being
totally fascinated with matches or knives or something like that. Yeah. Yeah,
I think that was a really good point. Like it's
you shouldn't sweep or generalize, but I think that's an
even larger point to people should be left to raise
their children, um how they see fit. Yeah, given a
certain amount of um trust invested in the parents that
(14:43):
the parent isn't going to harm the kid or let
harm come to the kid because that's their parent, right right. Okay,
So this whole thing started with Lenora Skins, and like
you said, she got a lot of blowback, but she
also got a really positive response to an ex actually
parlay the whole thing from that New York sun Um
article into a blog that she called free Range Kids.
(15:06):
So from what I understand, she coined the term free
range kids and started writing about this stuff. And at
first a lot of it was just like it's it's good.
It's on its face, it's obvious that this is how
you should raise a kid. You know, kids need play,
they need to learn how to pick themselves back up
when they fall down. Um. And not only that, you're
(15:27):
doing a disservice to your kid when you pick them
up after they fall down, um, because they're not learning
how to get back up themselves. Uh. And over time
it kind of went as people became more and more
enamored with her philosophy or this whole free range kid's idea. Um.
More child psychologists started weighing in and the whole movement
(15:48):
kind of took the shape and they figured out that
for a parent to kind of see the light as
they as far as they were concerned, they had to
first change just the mindset about what kind of world
they were raising a kid in, because if you're a
free range kid parent, um, you probably don't feel as
(16:10):
threatened by the world in general as say a helicopter
parent would. Um ounce for ounce, Yeah for sure. UM.
I mean when when when parents have experimented with this,
the the changes that they've seen and their kids have
been pretty striking. Um if anecdotal. UM. There's this one woman,
(16:30):
Dana Bloomberg. She's a school counselor in suburban Chicago. And
we should also point out depends on where you live
as well. If you live in a very safe suburb
or way out in the country, it's a little different
than a kid like in the middle of the city
or something like that. But she gave her kid a
lot of free range um starting in the second grade,
(16:52):
and got some neighborhood parents involved and letting their kids
do it. And they said, before you know it, they
had this little, you know, little gang of kids kind
of touring around the neighborhood, are on their own, and
she's getting all these texts from these different parents, UM
saying like what a big change has happened, Uh, in
their own kid. One parent even said it was life
(17:13):
changing for her daughter, gave her a nuisance of confidence,
and um, that's sort of what the free range thing
can look like. But like you were saying, it all
comes down to a squashing appearance fear, the biggest fear,
which is my child will get abducted, or my child
(17:33):
will get um uh, there will be a sexual predator
to target my child, or heaven forbid, my child will
get kidnapped and murdered. Right, because you can understand and
it's really tough to fault somebody who doesn't want their
kid wandering around by themselves because they're afraid that something
(17:53):
really bad is going to happen to their kid. So
kind of the first step to um, to adopting like
a free range kid attitude, is to adjusting how you
see the world. Um And they think they think that
with there are several things like if you it's really
fascinated me. I love cultural changes, especially when we can
(18:14):
point to different things, seemingly unrelated things that all kind
of converge and has changed the world in ways you
never think of that seems to have happened to produce
today's helicopter parents or at least to produce the level
of fear, the climate of fear that the world is
an inherently dangerous, brutal um, sadistic place. That that where
(18:37):
children have no call to be wandering around themselves. UM.
That that is actually you can trace that back to
a convergence of things that have happened starting in like
the late seventies and early eighties. UM. And in particular
there was some high profile UH child murder cases basically
(18:58):
UM that all kind of took place between nineteen seventy
nine in Night one, and those really changed a lot
of parents minds about things. Yeah. Um. In New York,
the very sad story of six year old Eaton pats
Um disappeared and was later found out to have been murdered. UM.
(19:19):
John Walsh very famously his son Adam. UM, he's the
one that does all the TV shows now. I think
he's on the Hunt on CNN now and really made
this his life's work. But his son Adam disappeared, uh
and died in nineteen eighty one. UM. Obviously the Atlanta
child murders UM from seventy eight one, and this all
(19:40):
converged around the same time, Like you were talking about this,
these these strange things aligning UM cable news coming out
seeing Inn was launched in nineteen eighty, So all of
a sudden, you have parents that are getting this kind
of constant flow of fear from the news about their children.
Right Because so if if a um prior to cable news,
(20:03):
twenty four hour news, UM, if something happened to a
kid somewhere in in some state, maybe if it were
just particularly egregious or outrageous, um or everything was kind
of set up in just the right way, it would
capture the attention of the national media and you would
hear about it around the country. But that was really
(20:24):
really rare. And then second to that, the other place
that you would hear about child abductions, child murder, murders,
horrific like accidents that befell a child would be locally,
right like on your local news that maybe maybe expanded
to a region, maybe the state, but it was pretty localized.
And so if statistically something like that happened fairly rarely,
(20:47):
you weren't going to hear about it very often, And
so in your mind it was a pretty rare thing,
and you weren't afraid of the world in general. But
what a lot of commentators and a lot of UM, well,
some of the people I ran across some research UM
propose is that with cable news, that potential pool of
horrible things that befell kids to talk about um expanded
(21:10):
to the entire nation, not just local, not just regional
or even state, but the whole nation. So now all
the bad things happening to all the kids around the
nation was potential news fodder. And so when you were
watching CNN, it seems like every other story was about
a kid who had been abducted and killed, or sexually assaulted,
or any number of horrible things. And there's really no
(21:32):
way to put it other than that that kind of
stuff keeps people glued to their televisions, and so it's
really in the best interests of news networks like CNN
to feed people that, because while you're glued to your television,
you're also glued to the ads that they showed too.
And so from this model came a climate of fear
(21:52):
that a lot of people point to is like, this
is the source, and it's not just CNN. CNN gets
pointed to because it was the one that started at all.
That is Ted Turtor who came up with this and
started the first twenty four hour cable news network. But
all cable news is guilty of this, and became guilty
of it pretty quickly because that's the model of cable news.
Um And because cable news laid that foundation and showed like, oh,
(22:16):
you've got that kind of you can really make some revenue.
Nightly news tried its best to resist that kind of thing,
but it kind of had to follow suit a little
bit too, so it would become more sensational from the
eighties onward as well, not nearly anything like cable news,
but compared to how it had been before, it was
much more sensationalized because it was following the cable news model.
And all that put together created the foundation of why
(22:40):
people are just scared to death about the world because
we we think that it's way more dangerous than it
actually is, because the statistics are inflated by hearing about
this stuff all the time. Yeah, and there's another couple
of things that contributed that um Skins has pointed out. One,
we live in what you dubs and expert society, So
(23:02):
again on cable news or on social media, like everywhere
you turn, there's another expert coming out with a new
book they're trying to sell basically telling you how you're
doing it wrong as a parent, how you should do
it um. And then the whole fact that we live
in a very litigious society. Now, so what if I
want a free range parent my kid and they go
(23:23):
down and get their friend um out of the house
and their riding bikes and one of them gets hurt,
Like their parents gonna sue me because my kid went
and lured them into the mean streets. Right, Well, yeah,
that was another thing that happened, Chuck. In the seventies,
the idea of negligence became really big, and there was
what's called like a tortue revolution to where you went
(23:45):
from well you know your kid was your kid didn't
know your the the other kid's arm was gonna get broken,
so you can't get sued for that. To know that
was negligent, and we're going to allow that and more
and more case law expanded to to to make people
think like lay yours because of it too. Dude, when
you were a kid, was I mean that must have
been a thing, because did you ever have the lawsuit
(24:08):
threat from another child? Yeah? That was such a thing
like yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna kick your butt or whatever.
It's like, oh yeah, well my dad's gonna sue you
for all the money you got. That's right, he's a dentist.
That's so funny, man, to think back in the seventies,
these children threatening lawsuits on Yeah, I'd forgotten about that
for like ripping their shirt or something. Any number of
(24:30):
things could could generate yea. Um. But in the end,
Skins says, and this is I think a pretty relevant quote.
She said, all of this stuff combined has convinced parents
that they have to be both omniscient and omnipotent um
because of fear, and monitor every single move that your
kid makes. So, uh, let's take a break and we're
(24:53):
gonna come back and talk a little bit about the
the facts about whether or not your kids are really
in danger out on the streets. After this, Well, now
we're on the road driving in your truck. Want to
learn a thing or two from Josh can Chuck. It's
stuff you should know, all right, shot alright, Chuck. So um,
(25:31):
like we're saying to to not be just scared to
death because you're letting your kids say walk home from
the park or something like that. Unsupervised, you you have
to go through a change in mindset, like you have
to stop seeing the world is a very very scary place.
And sometimes statistics can be actually kind of comforting. So
(25:52):
the free range Kids movement has really, you know, made
one of its um foundational support polls, and you think
I would actually be getting better at this all this time,
but but you stumble through something like anyway, they talk
a lot about statistics and crime statistics related to kids
(26:14):
in particular, and when you look at them in the cold,
hard light of the day, UM, it doesn't seem like
it's a very dangerous world after all. Right, if you
look at the numbers, UM, the National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children says that just one percent of the
twenty seven thousand missing children cases are non family abductions,
(26:39):
and that also includes like friends and acquaintances. So if
you're talking about literally a stranger targeting your child and
plucking them off a playground, it is exceedingly rare that
that happens. And then so one percent is non family, right, right,
(27:01):
But that also doesn't even break down like if it's
a friend or an acquaintance of a family or something
like that. It's a little strangers snatching your kid rarely, rarely,
rarely happens. Yeah. So even even that, even including like
friends of the family, um, somebody who's not a direct
family member but known to the kid, a non stranger,
that's two hundred and seventy kids that that happened to
(27:23):
in two thousand, seventeen out of twenties seven thousand, I think, um,
which is that's awful for those kids that they were kidnapped, right.
There's that's That's another thing too, is when you throw
out statistics like this, it's really easy to be like,
see that was it, um, But you don't want to
do that because to those two hundred and seventy families
that that's that's all that matters. And that's really important
(27:45):
to remember as well when we're kind of tossing out
these statistics too. Yeah, and not to make light of
family abductions, which is you know ninety one percent of abductions, Uh,
those are horrific and traumatic as well. We're just talking
about the bare bones of like the fear that if
I let my kid go to a park as strangers
going to pluck them right, right, so, so and so
(28:08):
even that even if you look at its twenty seven
thousand out of all the kids in the United States
in two thousand seventeen, seven thousand of them were went
missing in two thousand seventeen, and the vast majority of
them ran away. So, if you're worried that your kid
is going to get plucked by a stranger, specifically out
of a park somewhere, because you let them go to
the park with the free range parenting, people are saying,
(28:31):
if you look at the statistics, the chances of that
are so small that it's actually not worth limiting your
kids freedom of movement because of that outlier possibility. It
just doesn't. It's just a disproportionate response to that risk,
is what they're saying. Right. Um, if you want to
(28:51):
talk about the worst thing that you can imagine, which
is UM, a child murder Uh. From nineteen eighty to
two thousand eight, UM statistics about murders of children under
five years old, Uh, sixty percent of the time the
parents are the ones who did it, um, followed by
(29:13):
so that's total or male acquaintances. UM, So like you know,
mom's boyfriend or something like that, Uh seven percent or
other relatives. So only three percent of all murders of
young children are strangers. Right, So again and again, dressing tanks.
(29:34):
We're addressing the fear of strangers doing something to your child,
not making light of these other statistics. And there are
parents out there who are like, good, that's enough. That's
the fact that it happens to one kid makes me
want to protect my child and make sure that they
don't do that. Okay, you're the parent, You're you're raising
your kid in that that way. I understand, um, But again,
(29:56):
what the what the free range kids people are saying
is like, like, is it really worth that? Like what
what about that is? Is? I mean, is it really
worth that kind of a response, And we'll get to
we'll get to that, because you could say, like, if
there were no negative aspects of of completely ensconcing your
kid in protection, then the free range kids advocates wouldn't
(30:19):
have anything. They could be like, Okay, well whatever, that's
what you're doing with your kid. But there's suspicions that
the that actually is detrimental to the development of a kid,
protecting them from everything at all costs. And I think
that's one of the big other Um foundational platform post
tenants of the free range kids thing that one was
(30:47):
for showing off. Uh, alright, so building on that, um,
like you, like you were saying, like they're there, There
has to be like in order to get a parent
on board with a free range parting lifestyle. It's not
just I want to be lazy or I want to
go back to my childhood. Um, it's a parent who
thinks there are actual benefits to doing so, and that
(31:09):
that outweighs the risk, like you were saying, of the
three percent, uh chance or the one percent to the
point five percent chance that something's gonna happen to my
kid if they're on their own. Um, there is evidence,
and it's growing and growing evidence that all these efforts
to schedule all these activities for your kid are overlooking
(31:31):
one big fundamental element of raising a healthy, well adjusted
child that seems to be getting lost more and more,
which is something called free play. Um. The American Academy
of Pediatrics has a report out that said that free
play promotes social um. Sorry, social, it's the saying, uh,
(31:55):
social emotional, cognitive, language, and self regulation skills that build
executive function and a pro social brain. And play is
fundamentally important for learning twenty one century skills like problem solving, collaboration, creativity,
uh and executive functioning skills that are critical for adult success. Right,
And they threw that last one in to be like, well, okay,
(32:17):
maybe plays good, but it's not going to help them
in life, and they're saying, yes, it will actually help
them in life, and that by keeping them from playing,
you're basically creating a little adult from from the nursery.
Which is interesting to be chucked because prior to the
nineteenth century, when you were a kid, starting around age
five or something, you you had a job, even if
(32:38):
it wasn't around like your family's farm. Maybe you were
helping out with um, the wash that your mom took
in who knows. But then you like, there was no
such thing as childhood really um, And then we moved
away from that and we developed childhood. And now it
seems like we're moving away from childhood. Now we're taking
kids and they're not they're not working on the farm.
(32:59):
We're making little CEOs and marketing directors and brand managers
and stuff like that. But they're they're losing their childhood
in that bargain. As I think what they're saying, and
from play specifically, play helps, but it helps also like um,
just in and of itself for its own sake, but
it also helps eventually down the road. It's an investment
(33:19):
that will pay off, I think in terms that helicopter
parents can understand. Yeah, there's another guy named Peter Gray.
He's a developmental psychologist. UM. He has a book called
Free to Learn and founded a nonprofit I believe with
yes skins called Let Grow. UM little play on words there,
(33:40):
and he basically says that, you know, if you look
back to human evolution, um children, Uh, their education was
through play with their peers. And if you look at
um societies and cultures in the world today that um,
(34:02):
I mean, how would you classify these cultures traditional societies?
I'm not sure maybe, but they say that that children
of these cultures that still play and explore freely. Um,
if they're left to do that, they will do so
into their teen years. UM. Like that is their natural
instinct is to be among their peers, free playing, right,
(34:22):
but so and so like, I think one of the
problems that helicopter parents have with the idea of play
is that like it's it's a waste of time the
kid could be learning like cello or um, you know,
doing math flash cards are like creating a better foundation
for a better future for themselves, and that if they're
not doing that, they're falling behind. And so what Peter
(34:43):
Gray and some of his ilk are saying is like no, no, no.
Play helps develop a child in ways that no other
thing you could possibly come up with their supervisor get
them to do can because this is what we've done
all this time, and this is how we've built society
is letting little kids play and figure things out on
their own. And he says that if there's a parent around,
(35:05):
if it's supervised, if there's a parent even within like
eyesight er, ear shotter, you know there's a parent watching,
it's going to be different. It has to be unsupervised,
unstructured play so that the kids can be left to
make up their own rules, can can be taught by
the group that you know, actually, no, that's not really
fair or it's not really cool to take the ball
(35:26):
and go home because you aren't winning. Um, that's how
you learn that stuff, and those are good things to learn.
That makes you a more socially well adjusted kid than um.
Probably learning Cello is going to well, yeah, I mean,
you can try and teach your kid by showing and
by telling as much as you can as a parent,
(35:47):
and that is all valuable, But nothing will teach a
lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with
their peers. Right, And like I remember myself, you know,
when I was a kid, Like the biggest lessons I learned,
we're lessons that I learned among my peer group, you know,
like tough, hard lessons that a lot of parents, I
(36:09):
think try and even shield their kid from because it's
tough stuff sometimes. But um, and you know, you don't
want your kid to suffer traumas and things like that.
But uh, and not to sound like a parent from
the nineteen fifties, but that stuff does help build your
child's character. And I mean, I guess that sounds of
old school. What it does is it helps them learn
(36:31):
how to regulate their emotions and how to fit in
with their peer group, which is in turn going to
be eventually just society at large. Right. It's funny you
say that that sounds kind of fifties because this whole
idea of like free range kids is kind of based
on that philosophy of Dr Spock, who was like one
(36:52):
of the first experts, one of the first child experts
that America ever really paid attention to. And he wrote
a book in nineteen forties called The Common Sense Book
of Baby and Child, And he basically is saying all
the stuff that free range kids parents say is like,
let your kids play, Let your kids like learned through
their own um, their own way of like exploring the world, like,
(37:15):
let them take risks, UM, let them be themselves. Trust
your instincts as a parent. And so that's what free
ranch parents seemed to be kind of getting back to,
is like the doctor spak Um school of thought. Benjamin Spock,
not um, the other spok not live long in prosper Spot.
Did he have a first name? Oh? I don't know, man,
I didn't watch a Star Trek. I didn't either. Just
(37:38):
lay it on a million people who are going to
send the email we're waiting. Uh. There's something called the
internal external locus of control scale UM. It's an odd name,
but this is UM been around since the nineteen sixties.
It's a psychological indicator scale. UH. And these days, since
(38:00):
the nineteen sixties, there's been a big shift in the
scale and how teens report themselves and their internal control
in today, teens report very little internal control over their
own lives. And Gray believes and I think he's really
onto something here that, uh, these high levels of anxiety
(38:21):
and depression among kids these days has a lot to
do with that, and the things is directly related to
the decline and free play over the last you know,
forty or fifty years, right, which I want to say
like this, this is like one psychologist's opinion. It makes
a lot of sense to me, and I'm sure it
does to a lot of people. But there's you know,
(38:42):
this is not necessarily like like gospel truth or set
in Stone. It's the jury is still kind of out,
but there's a lot of evidence out there that that
does seem like over protecting your kid can stunt them
and um, emotionally or developmentally, and then letting them go
be themselves and learn things on their own and learn
(39:03):
that they can pick themselves back up and still survive
and failure is not the worst thing in the world
can actually help them develop. Um. This is it's just
like we we routinely shoot holes in in social psychology
stuff all the time, and we do it gleefully. So
I don't want to like go the opposite way and
just be like, but this one's right because we agree
(39:23):
with you. Um, that's not necessarily the case, and I'm
sure a lot of people disagree with it, but I
tend to kind of favor that that mentality, probably because
that's how I was raised. Yeah, And like I said,
it does sound like um from the nineties say that
failure breeds character, but you know, it really does. It's
sort of a simplistic way to say it. But when
you fail, you um hopefully learn something and build on that,
(39:49):
and that does build character. Right. So one of the
one of the things they call that is the dignity
of risk, where you are showing your kid, I'm I'm
letting you go figure this out on your own. Um.
And and another big misunderstanding with free range parents is
that that you just go from like zero to walking,
(40:11):
you know, taking the subway in New York, Um, at
the flip of a switch. That's not how it works.
You you slowly build your kid up for this, you know,
the big thing that you write an article about. But
there's you know, dozens or scores or possibly hundreds of
little little interactions that you're having to kind of make
sure that your kid is up for this when they're
(40:32):
finally when you decide they're finally ready to um. And
it's not just like flipping a switch. It's very kind
of thoughtful and protracted and um planned but not necessarily
shared with the kid. That's planned, UM paying out of
trust and so that the kid can show you, yeah,
I'm ready for this, I know what to do. I'm
not just gonna like ball up on the on the
(40:52):
ground in the subway and and start crying until someone
calls nine on one and the cops come get me. Well. Yeah,
And I'm sure when she sent um her kid on
on the subway home that very first time, it wasn't
just like all right, here's the stuff, see you later.
I'm sure there was a very serious talk like all right, dude,
I trust you. I'm letting you do this. I know
(41:13):
you know the way. We're gonna give this a shot. Um,
don't if I see you on the news in the
middle of time square like you're gonna be a big trouble. Um.
I'm sure there was a lot of thought in talk
that went into that, and uh, you know what, I'm saying, yeah,
so totally, and kids get that stuff. You know, for sure,
kids are smarter than people give them credit for a
(41:34):
lot of times. I think, Um, it's interesting when it
comes to the law because it's such a new thing. Um.
In Utah last year in two thousand eighteen, became the
first state to pass what was called a free range
parenting law, where it basically was just sort of redefining
what child neglect was. Uh. And in Utah, I thought
I was gonna go the other way when I was
reading this, but um, it actually went the way of
(41:56):
sort of encouraging or being behind free parenting. The new definition,
a parent cannot be accused of neglect just because their
kid is going to a store by themselves that's down
the street, or playing outside alone, or biking to school
on their own, or at home without a parent there, Um,
(42:18):
if they're a minor, which is pretty interesting. Yeah, I
thought so too. Um, But most free range parents are like, oh,
we don't want to live to you in Utah. So
hopefully our states will all come up with similar laws
that that decriminalize free range parenting, because in a lot
of states, things like latch key kids are illegal, like
you can have your kid taken from you if they
(42:40):
are a latch key kid under a certain age. I
think in Washington you have to be fourteen to be
left at home alone like you, you could lose your kid.
And so there's a real problem with trying free range
parenting because part of this um helicopter parenting society is
also helicopter villaging. But rather and picking up the phone
(43:00):
and calling the parents whose kids you see wandering alone
down the street like you used to would have done,
now that people just call, pick up the phone and
call the cops, and then the cops respond and they
take the kid to child protective services and the parent
has to go down and explain that they will never
do this again and they're very very sorry, or else
(43:21):
child protective services will take their kid from them because
most states rule on what's called the best interests of
the child, which is totally subjective, is completely not based
in any actual case law. Necessarily, it's just does the
child protective services person think that that the kid is
is smart enough to walk from the playground to the house. No, okay,
(43:44):
well we're taking your kid, maybe permanently, and so it's
it's really risky to raise your kid this way, because
people will call the cops if they see your kid
walking down the street and real trouble your your parentship
of your kid is in jeopardy at that moment, which
has got to be one of the worst things that
(44:04):
could possibly happen to a parent. Yeah, and this is
where we kind of we get back to the place
of like, this is a privilege. Has a lot to
do with this, because when it comes to the law
and children and child protective services, you are way more
likely um to get a visit um from child protective
services if you are poor, UM, or if you're a
(44:26):
person of color or minority UM. Like, they may write
an article about you in the local magazine praising you
if you're like a white suburban parent of middle or
upper middle class for letting your kid free range around.
But um. In the case of like Deborah Harrold in
two thousand fourteen in South Carolina, UM, she wasn't like, oh,
(44:49):
I want to be a free range parent. She's like,
I am a working mom, and I work at McDonald's
and I'm finishing a shift and my nine year old
daughter is playing in a park nearby until I'm done,
and and they sent her to jail for a night
and took her daughter for two weeks away from her
seventeen days. Yeah, so it is very much a case
(45:09):
of privilege to even be allowed to do this without
getting a visit from Child Protective Services. Right so, um,
Skinazy and some of the other free range parents say, right,
this is why we need laws that are much more
common sense and decriminalize this kind of behavior and put
the trust back in parents to know that their kids
are smart enough, or if they think their kids aren't
(45:31):
smart enough to be trusted with that kind of stuff,
they wouldn't let them do that. Um. They argue that
this would benefit everybody, whether no matter you know, whether
you're a minority or um whatever, um socioeconomic status you have,
which is which is true? That's a pretty it's a
pretty sensible. Um, it's sensible. But I think that that
(45:51):
kind of underscores the larger problem, which is, you know,
like some people don't have the choice to to get
childcare if the school suddenly canceled class, like you just
can't afford it. What are you gonna do? And then
your your work says, well, you can't bring them here,
this is work You know what, what can you do?
Hopefully you've raised your kid to a point where you
(46:12):
can trust them to go play, you know, next door
at the playground or something like that. But that doesn't
mean that you're not gonna end up in trouble with
with the authorities. So it's a sticky, sticky situation that
we're in. Two it is, and you know, again, it
depends on your kid. It depends on where you live.
Like in my brother's neighborhood, Uh, if I live there,
(46:32):
I would let my kid go out and do what
she wanted when she was like seven. It's just so
safe and kids are everywhere on their own doing stuff,
very much like it was when we were kids. At
my house, I live next to a super scary busy street.
Like I would never let her out of the front
(46:53):
of my house, but even at three and a half,
we let her go in the backyard by herself and
do stuff all the time. Right, Um, I mean just
this past weekend, I uh, she was out in the
backyard and with the dogs, and I went out about
half an hour later and she was walking through the
garden with a watering can singing we will Rock You.
(47:18):
And I was like, all right, everything's fine. But again,
she's in my enclosed backyard. I wasn't sweating it. I
would um, I would never just open the front door
and be like, go have fun. Memorial drives right there, sixty.
But that's the point. It's all context, you know, Like
you would have had to have worked up to that point.
She would have had to have shown you that she
(47:38):
was able to be trusted with that busy street, and
maybe she'd be sixteen before you would. But that's that's
the point. It's all. It's all, it's context, you know. Yeah,
you know. Again, just do the best you can. It's hard.
There a thousand ways to do it, and everybody thinks
their way is the right way. Also, just before we
sign off, I want to say I did mean to
(48:00):
pick on kids who take cello lessons. Cello is, by
the way, my favorite stringed instrument, which means it was
the one that was easiest called the mind. That's why
I kept bringing up the cello. So all of you
out there learning cello, hats off to you because that's
my favorite string instrument. Yeah what if what if Yo
Yo ma had just been free planning? All right? But
(48:23):
I'll bet yo Yoma did free play. A bet he
did both, and if he didn't, I'll bet he regrets it. H.
If you want to know more about free range kids
will just go on the internet and start reading because
there's a lot about it. And since I said that, oh, also,
there's a pretty good article on how stuff works you
can read too. Since I said that, it's time for
listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this, uh desert flooding. Hey, guys,
(48:48):
listen to the podcast this morning on Desert Survival. I
live here in Phoenix, Arizona, and have for nineteen years,
and the flash flood issue is real even in metro Phoenix. Um,
they have a stupid motorist law here and that's capitalized
and end quotes. Um. She said, and she said after
and during her heavy rains, a lot of washes fill
(49:11):
with running water. A lot of the washes have been paved.
Barriers will be put up when they flood, even if
the water is only a few inches deep. But there's
always someone who decides that their sub or truck is
hefty enough to get through, and their rescue is always
on the nightly news because they have to pay for it.
They actually have to pay for the cost to their rescue. Uh.
(49:31):
Sometimes these stare deevils don't fare too well. Um. Actually,
lives have been lost in less than a foot of
moving water in a watch. Yeah, I believe that I've
heard six inches. Yeah, and she Teresa Henburry closes by
saying this, I do so enjoy your podcast. Nice, Thank you, Teresa.
(49:52):
We do so enjoy your emails too. Yes, I like
the way she put that. Yeah. Um, if you want
to be like Teresa, impresses with your verbal or written dexterity.
We love that kind of stuff. You can go to
stuff you Should Know dot com and you can look
us up on the social links. You can also send
us a podcast like Teresa did to stuff podcasts at
(50:14):
I heart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookRSSStoreSYSK ArmyAboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Death, Sex & Money
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.