Lenore Skenazy

I mean, that's how normalized constant supervision has become.

but the way to fight it is the easiest way to to change anything is collectively if we're all afraid to send our kids outside you know what is the what are the other parents going to think is it too tough is it too soon is my kid too spacey is to have everybody doing it at once and so that's why let grow

the nonprofit that grew out of free-range kids, recommends that schools give kids a homework assignment called the Let Grow Experience.

It's free, where every kid gets the homework that says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents' permission, but without your parents.

And then we give a list of giant, you know, you can climb a tree, you can make pancakes, you can walk to the store, whatever it is.

But if everybody is doing it, all the third graders are, you know, getting themselves to their guitar lessons or picking up the milk for dinner, you're not the crazy mom.

letting them do it and all the kids are talking to each other and all the parents are talking to each other and you re-normalized letting go but but letting go is not just good because okay they're getting a little independence maybe they're less anxious letting go is really important because it rewires you the parent because when you see your kid come back from that errand

And they got the milk or I was just talking to a lady today.

Who was I talking to right before you?

I'm losing my mind.

But she let her kid go into the grocery and get the things for dinner.

And he came out.

He was six.

He came out with only cookies.

And I was like, I agree with that.

I think that makes a great dinner.

But she was a little disappointed, but also so proud because he'd gone in and he came out and he said, I think I got the exact change.

Didn't I?

And then they're looking over the change.

And

You, the parent, it's like the Grinch, your heart grows three sizes when you see your kid do something on their own.

And that's the only solution.

You almost have to let your kid go a little before you're totally ready because you will be ready when they come home and they will come home.

And if they screwed up, that's okay too, because then you realize like, it's okay, he got a little lost or he only bought the cookies and that's okay too.

And you just have to realize that this level of supervision and hypervigilance is new and unnecessary.

And it's not only a burden to a kid, it's a burden to you because it has made your job as a parent watching every single second.

You can't send them to get the bananas.

That's too much to ask of any parent.

birth rates are going down.

And I think maybe one unspoken reason, maybe even subconscious reason, is that it's becoming such a drag.

You have zero time.

Parents today are spending way more time with their kids than our parents spent with us because they think they have to be there to knit every synapse and to watch every play date and to eat every piece of pizza at every party.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

The family member is a little harder, but I would say find a friend.

I've heard of parents who like two women go and sit at Starbucks and they send their kids to the other end of the strip mall and here's $10, go buy something at the dollar store or go pick up the dry cleaning, we'll be here.

it's really much easier for your kid and for you you're distracted because you're talking to your friend and your kid has somebody to do something with i mean everything's more fun with friends so i'd say find a couple of people who want to practice this with you um all the stuff at let grow is free so i'm gonna it's let grow

So he's 27 now, so I've been thinking about it for a while.

I'm just going to say that we have the four weeks to a let grow kid kit.

And it's like the first week is like have kids start doing stuff for themselves that you've been doing for them.

You know, whether that's tying their shoes or getting them out the door or let them bake cookies and they take them out of the oven themselves.

And I think two things struck a nerve, because I looked at older columns of mine where I had let my kids play in the courtyard without me.

Imagine that.

And then the next week is getting around the neighborhood.

And then there's like do something with a friend.

And I have no idea what the fourth week is, but you'll find it out.

And and another thing that somebody once recommended to me, there's two cool things.

One is Free Play Fridays.

And I actually just heard of a kid who organized Free Play Friday in his neighborhood.

He went around, he put postcards in everybody's mailbox and it said Friday afternoon, like at three o'clock, three to six or three to five, how about all the kids, no grownups, don't come grownups, meet at Locust Park or whatever.

And we'll just see what happens.

We'll just play.

And he didn't know if anybody was gonna come.

And I wish I could remember where he was.

Anyways, to his delight and surprise, 20 kids showed up and the mom sent photos and it just looked like, you know, it looked like the Peanuts gang.

You know, minus Lucy.

But it was just kids in the park.

Some of them are playing with a ball and some of them were doing whatever.

And it's just so great.

I mean, it fills your heart as much as it's fulfilling for kids.

So that's one idea.

Free play Fridays.

Just, you know, use a list serve, use next door, use Facebook and say, how about we all send our kids to the park on Fridays and Fridays because it leads into the weekend and maybe they'll

I let them take elevators without me.

do it again on their own for the rest of the weekend.

And the other thing is this one mom in California started what she called a friendship club.

I let them go.

And that was she found

Her son had like three or four friends in the neighborhood and she contacted them and she said, how about we form a friendship club, which in my day would have just been called normal life, where I mean, really, all of this stuff is just like, aren't we all just trying to recreate our childhoods?

They're two boys.

But anyway, if my kid knocks on your door and your kid is free, you know, is is, you know, Cynthia home or is, you know, Oliver home?

Let them go to the men's room without me, obviously.

Yes.

OK, then.

They come in, they don't have to organize a play date beforehand.

You're not going to see this as an imposition.

I'm not using you as a babysitter or maybe I am, but you can do the same with me.

And so then the kid has like three or four doors that he can knock on any time, you know, any time of day, I would say.

And

They can go play outside.

They can play in the lawn, the front lawn, the back lawn.

They can go to the park.

And that just sort of re-knits the neighborhood too.

And nobody cared about any of those columns.

And I also think one of the things Peter Gray always says is that kids are not attracted just because there's a sidewalk and a tree outside.

They're attracted by other kids.

And once you have some kids playing in the neighborhood, and I've seen this, then other kids start joining them.

Once you have a couple of kids walking to school, other kids start joining them.

So you just want to sort of reseed, S-E-E-D, the neighborhood with kids, right?

So I think by writing about my kid taking the subway by himself, it was basically the subway.

And you do that with a little bit of planning with the other parents.

I feel for grandparents because a lot of us can remember this free-range childhood, and then we see the kids scheduled within an inch of their lives.

I'd say maybe you just happen to leave the... Peter Gray had a great TEDx talk about how free play is just so formative for kids.

So maybe if you help the parents see without lecturing them, like this free time is not stupid wasted time, interstitial time between the important time, you know, chess, soccer, and school, but it's when they're learning how to make a friend, how to compromise, how to explain an idea, how to be creative.

New York City subway does not have a great reputation.

If, you know, parents are very concerned about every aspect of their kids' lives, and if they see

that free play, unsupervised free play is actually educational and will get their kids ahead, then it becomes something that's sort of speaking their language.

Another thing that's really helpful is when we did this Harris poll, we were asking kids about their phone use as well as their independence.

And people think it's hell.

And it turned out that

And why would you send your kid?

you know, parents are very, very concerned about phones and screens.

So this is a way to speak their language about that, which is that when the kids were asked, these are kids eight to 12, given the choice of how to hang out or play with your friends, would you rather just play with them old fashioned way, you know, outside, no agenda, no adults watching, just figure out what to do, have fun that way.

down to hell at least without you and then um i think it wasn't just me saying you know kids need independence it was me actually doing it pedal to the metal and and the fact that he loved it i think was also um maybe just interesting it wasn't something that we did because he should do it he should learn he should be tough toughened up it was just he wanted to take the subway by himself and we let him it's like oh yeah kids have things that they want to do on their own and maybe we should listen to them and see what happens so

Or would you rather be in an organized activity like soccer or travel baseball or piano recital ballet?

Or would you rather be online with them playing games or just socializing or scrolling together?

What would you prefer to do?

And the vast majority, the overwhelming majority was free play.

They just want to be with their friends.

And then second choice was the organized activity.

And third choice, the distant third was being online.

So I know we all complain like kids are glued to their screens.

That's all they want to do.

Once they get it, it's like heroin.

But but they wouldn't be on them as much if they had an alternative.

So if the if you're if the grandparent is talking to, you know, their child, who's a parent who's worried and they don't want them to be on the iPad all the time and they want to restrict their screen use, which a lot of parents do, understandably, the the phrase that we use of Jonathan Haidt is one of the other co-founders with me of Let Grow.

And he also wrote The Anxious Generation.

And

One of the things we say is if you want to take away the screen, you have to open the door.

So opening the door becomes not just something that I think is good, but it's an alternative to the phone-based childhood that is worrisome.

think everything is stressful at the beginning.

It was stressful trying to set up this camera today.

It's like, oh, this is leaning this way and you look terrible and get closer.

And I mean, there's no such thing as a stress-free existence.

And I think one of the things that has happened to parents is they've been told that their kids shouldn't ever be frightened.

I mean, there's people who are against Halloween because they're scary costumes.

Fear and stress and a little bit of,

You know, stage fright, they're all part of everyday life in childhood and in adulthood.

And that doesn't mean you shouldn't face them and try them.

And if things turns out, so I have to tell you, so independence is being used, I tell you this already, there's independence therapy is a new thing.

which is giving kids, as you might think, some independence to do new things if they have a diagnosis of anxiety.

A professor named Camilo Ortiz at Long Island University did a pilot study where he had four families and he talked to each of the sets of parents first and found out what was bothering them most about their kids' behavior.

And one of them was they had a nine-year-old who wouldn't go upstairs or downstairs

in his own house without a parent.

And I thought that was the only family I'd ever heard of like that.

And I've heard of other families that said anyways, when the next week comes for therapy, the kid comes with the parents and

Camilo normally would do cognitive behavioral therapy.

I hear you're afraid to go upstairs.

How about tonight?

You go up for five minutes.

You know, I'll give you a watch.

You'll time it and then you'll see if it was bad or good.

And then we'll try it maybe seven minutes the next week.

He doesn't mention anything about the kid's deficit or the parents worry.

Instead, he says, you're nine.

I'll bet there's some things you're ready to do.

that you haven't tried yet.

And then the kid says, are you kidding?

I want to take the Long Island Railroad.

I want to walk home by myself.

And this particular kid who wanted to walk home by himself, his mom was so worried, she took the day off work on the first day he was walking home.

Anyways, and then it got more and more normal.

But one of the kids wanted to take a city bus.

And she was afraid to sleep in her own bed, but she was willing to take the city bus.

That was something exciting for her.

And when she was on the bus,

her phone stopped working and she was like oh no you know where do i get off i i i don't know what i'm supposed to do and she was like very frantic and the lady sitting next to her saw like is there something the matter can i help and she said yes i don't know where i'm supposed to get off and the lady said well my phone works oh you're you know you missed your stop you have to get off the next one you got to walk back a few blocks and the girl said thank you and she did and that night

She slept in her own bed, which sounds like it's too pat and perfect to be real, but it really happened.

And my whole point is that psychologists believe A, that independence is important, but B, messing up is great.

When something goes wrong,

That's when you realize like, oh, I can handle this, or that wasn't the end of the world.

but I think it's the subway.

And that is very freeing.

I think that's the whole Nike idea too.

Why do it?

You might mess up.

It's like, that's okay.

That's part of the process.

And once you realize that, that it's not doom, it's just a hiccup, then you are way more free.

I'm going to give you two different examples.

One is the workplace.

Eventually, these children go off to work, and I can't be the only one who's hearing the stories about young people at work being very, I'd say, conscientious.

But waiting for instructions.

They've had so much instruction all the time that I've heard in schools, the kids wait to like to fill out their name on a piece of paper.

It's like, do I put my name on the left or the right?

I've heard of schools where they say that a kid's like pencil drops to the ground.

they wait to be either for the teacher to come and pick it up or for them to be allowed to pick it up they're so used to being programmed that they've sort of lost this um get go you know what is it go get them spirit and and that's what we're hearing about at work too you know you have you have good workers but you don't have the entrepreneurs you don't have this amazing american spirit of like let me try this or this sounds crazy but so in the workplace you want kids who have grown up

you know, tinkering and trying things that when NASA had its generation of, you know, boomers retire, and they had these new kids coming in, they were great on computers and great at, you know, problem sets.

But if there was ever an Apollo 13, they didn't know what to do when things went off script.

So you want people who are growing up a little more scrappy, a little more self sufficient.

One thing that's obvious is that when you do have kids,

back out in the neighborhood.

I don't care if you have kids or not.

I mean, my kids are old, but it's pretty sweet.

You see them out there, you hear some laughter, you hear some spats.

It's just a neighborhood that comes back to life and that's a lot more friendly and heartwarming than a neighborhood just completely tumbleweeds up and down the block because the kids are driven and then they're pulled into the garage and then they insert themselves into the house and it's time for the reading log.

if only for just the joy of having a very vibrant culture as opposed to a very locked down culture and for the parents who are just so bored driving their kids everywhere.

Oh my, that's like, so the laws are great.

And when I gave the talk, I think we had eight states had passed the reasonable childhood independence law, which says that neglect is when you put your kid in obvious and serious danger, not anytime you take your eyes off them.

I knew you were gonna ask.

And it's great for the free range parents who want their kids to be wandering around and on their bikes like strangers.

like stranger things.

But it's also great for parents living in poverty.

You know, if a mom is working two jobs and her kid comes home with the old fashioned latch key, that's not because she's a neglectful mom.

It's because she's a mom who realizes like, look, my eight year old

And frankly, I've been asked this for a while and I never have a great pithy explanation, but it is basically,

can get herself a glass of milk or almond milk now, I guess.

And and that's and I can save on a babysitter.

So that shouldn't be considered neglect either.

So since the talk, the law has been passed in three more states, Georgia, Florida and.

Missouri.

And now it's being considered in eight more states.

And maybe someday there will be federal legislation that says the same thing, which is that, you know, we don't want the laws right now say if you see something, say something.

And too many people don't know, like, what am I supposed to say and see?

And it's like they see a kid outside.

Sometimes they'll call 911 because they're just so unused to seeing kids outside again.

So if if the 911 operator can say, is the kid OK?

Yeah, they're fine.

They're you know, they're they're playing in the park or whatever.

that should be the end of things.

It should not go from there to any kind of investigation.

So that's a great law.

And hopefully it will be passed in all 50 states pretty darn soon.

But more generally, I think we have to do this grace thing where we see kids outside and we don't think like, where's the mom?

believing that kids can do some things on their own the way most of today's parents and certainly the grandparents remember as kids.

And we don't think, somebody once wrote and said, well, so if your child is on a skateboard and they fall down in front of my house, I have to help them?

And it's like,

Yeah, you do.

If you see them, if you have a bandaid, you know, you have a phone, you do have to help them.

And I don't think of that as babysitting.

I don't think of that as like some horrible mom who thrust her entire responsibility on you.

I think of that as being part of a community.

You're at the park.

you know, a kid needs a Band-Aid, you give them a Band-Aid, not because it's an imposition, but because it's nice.

You know, you're nice and it's nice to be nice to a kid.

You hope that somebody's nice to your kid or to you when you're older and you fall down.

And so I think just giving everybody the benefit of the doubt, as opposed to thinking the worst about them, that, you know, any guy at the park is a predator.

Any kid at the park alone is, you know, somebody who's neglected by a

just giving people the benefit of the doubt is just a great way to live.

It makes your life more fun.

It makes you see the world in a better way.

And, and it actually, you know, weirdly enough, there was a study done of people who tell their kids, you know, the world's a dog eat dog place and don't be a patsy.

What's strange about childhood today is the fact that kids do almost nothing on their own.

And everybody's going to try and take advantage of you versus, you know, most people are decent and you can trust and default to trust.

And somehow they studied these two different groups of kids for years, like into their middle age.

And they found that the ones that,

The parents who raised the kids saying like, everybody's bad, beware, don't let your guard down, were doing it out of love.

They thought that they were protecting their kids.

But in fact, those kids in middle age had worse relationships, worse health, and less professional success.

So I'm not exactly sure why, but you might as well default to trust.

And I have some statistics.

We did a study with the Harris people, the Harris poll people, and they found that the majority of kids age eight to 12 have

Yeah, well first of all, I mean cars have existed for a long time and

Boy, in kindergarten, we were taught, you know, the school felt it incumbent upon itself to teach, look left, look right, look left again.

I have no idea why we had to look left and right and left again.

I just look left and right and go.

But I would teach them that because Mrs. Tiksinski taught me that.

And so far I'm alive.

Crosswalks are good if you can convince a neighborhood to put one in.

I guess you talk to your, you know, your city council or whatever you have there.

But you can't let

perfect be the enemy of the good, I guess, which is that if you have two kids together and they're holding hands and they're both looking left, right, left, and there's no cars coming, they're listening for it and they're looking for it, they're humans.

They can cross the street.

One thing that Let Grow has done is that if you go to our site, letgrow.org, I wish I had it with me, but we have a little card.

This isn't it.

And it says, kids can carry it with them.

And it's the electoral license.

It says, I am not lost or neglected.

My parents know I'm out here.

If you don't believe me, you can call my mom.

And here's some other.

Our old, more aggressive card used to say, call my lawyer.

a little much um but anyways it just says and it says i know i can talk to i can talk to people i can't go off with anyone i'm talking to you and i'm grateful that you care that i'm safe and that's why you're talking to me so it sort of flips the person from like where's your mom to thank you for caring this is the whole point you're an adult in the neighborhood you're worried for me that's what i assume of most adults in the neighborhood that they're looking out for me as opposed to you know they want to throw my mom in jail

rarely or never walked around their own neighborhood without an adult.

so and the other thing is going back to trying to create some some kind of collective thing either via the school or you put the notes in everybody's mailbox let's have free play fridays and then all the kids get used to coming to the park and looking both ways and the parents get used to it too it is cars are my least favorite thing i'm terrified of cars but i live in a world where there are cars and so

You know, when you've taught your kid and you've watched them a couple of times, you know, very, you know, like step back because there's a car a block away and they want to wait for it to get all the way across the street.

And you see that they're conscientious.

More than 50% had never gone to another aisle at the grocery without an adult.

I'd say by age five, you can start trusting them.

And they're free.

They're free.

You just download it.

It's free.

Well, I think the fact that people are recognizing, I mean, really, the fact that we're talking here, I mean, I've been trying to get a TED Talk for 17 years.

Here it is, year 17, and legitimacy shines on this message.

That gives me a lot of hope.

I mean, the fact that, you know, TED invited me to speak, and then here I am again today, is that...

25% weren't allowed to play on their own front lawn.

For a couple of years at the beginning of when I was starting my blog, the Free Range Kids blog, I was voted by some organization the most controversial blogger in America or maybe mommy blogger.

And, you know, I got this nickname, America's Worst Mom.

And I think that people are coming to see that, like, there's something to, you know, trusting your kids to do more on their own.

That is, it's not crazy.

It's actually organic.

It's what they were.

That's why they want to explore.

That's why they go from crawling to walking.

They want to, you know, they want to do more.

They want to take on the world.

And that when we step back, let grow slogan is when adults step back, kids step up.

And so that gives me hope and TikTok for God's sake, if it's a trend on TikTok must be really important.

I have to say, people always say that to me.

So it's like, well, I have a front lawn.

And I think they're saying like, my God, she just doesn't stop.

How am I going to get her to stop?

I'll say, oh, we could talk, but we got to say goodbye.

Kids aren't allowed there.

Oh my God, I'm excited too.

And thank you, Whitney.

And thank you, TED.

So also there was this really amazing piece done, and I know it's the Daily Mail,

But nonetheless, the Daily Mail did an incredible story several years back, and it was called How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations.

And it interviewed, it had a map, but it interviewed a great grandpa, 88, what had he done as a kid?

He'd gone six miles in any direction.

And then the grandpa, 66, had gone about a mile to the fishing hole.

And the mother, who was in her 40s,

had walked half a mile to school and her son who was eight was not allowed.

And I can't remember if it's not allowed off his block or not allowed off his yard.

But the the map that showed this just showed really childhood shrinking and free range kids is trying to make it easy, normal and legal to to widen that again, to trust kids with some independence.

And and that's what let grow.

the nonprofit that grew out of Free Range Kids is working on.

It's my favorite topic.

And we don't have 24 hours.

We just have one.

I would say that the change really began in earnest in the 80s and into the 90s.

And a couple of things changed back then that were significant.

One is that we got cable television in the 80s, which meant that we suddenly had a 24 hour news cycle, which had never been the case before.

And of course, if you have to keep people glued to the screen for all those hours, you have to find very compelling and I would say very upsetting content, as we've learned from later on with the Internet.

And so that's when we started to sort of obsess about stranger danger.

And also there were two very high profile kidnappings in New York, my city.

In 1979, a boy named Eitan Pates was taken from a bus stop.

um and never seen again and what was interesting about that case aside from utter tragedy is that the working assumption on the part of the public uh at the beginning was that some lovelorn lady had seen this cute little kid and taken him home to raise as her own so we weren't thinking at all

about predators and predators then were like lions and owls and and so it was only gradually as word got out maybe from the police and from the news that well maybe it wasn't the lady maybe it wasn't taken home to raise that people became became just shocked that there would be this weird and horrible and disgusting and upsetting crime and then when it happened to uh adam walsh was taken from outside of a sears in florida in 1982 there was a

a miniseries done on him that broke all ratings records.

And the news and the media are there to make money, right?

Not just to inform you and help you, but really to make money.

And when they saw that this is what really captivated audiences the most, they said, get me more of these.

Don't get me, don't steal more children.

Get me more content like this because the appetite for this has been unending.

And we know that because to this day,

law and order, I think has been on for like 25 or 30 years.

And every day people are tuning in to see just the most depraved and upsetting crimes.

And, you know, you breathe these in and gradually your lungs fill with this despair.

And what seemed to be, you know, almost unheard of in the Eitan Pates case in 1979 becomes something like the same Harris Paul interviewed parents.

And

What was it?

It was 50% of parents.

No, when asked what would happen if there were two kids age 10, 10, double digits, playing at the park together, what is likely to happen?

And 50% of the parents said they were likely to be kidnapped.

That's wildly out of whack with reality, thank God.

But that's the result of this constant drumbeat of terror and despair that we are marinating in thanks to the media.

Well, let's talk about kids first.

And I feel bad because my TED talk was really funny and now we're getting really somber.

But the sad thing for kids is that they are sad.

They are getting anxious and depressed.

And we all know this, but people think it's since COVID or since phones or whatever, since No Child Left Behind.

It's really been decades in the making.

One of my Let Grow co-founders is a man named Peter Gray.

He's a professor of psychology at Boston College.

And he did a big, long study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics two years ago.

And it showed that over the decades, like from the 50s to now, as kids' independence, ability to roam, problem solve, play on their own has gone down.

their anxiety and depression have been going up.

And he argues that it's not just correlation, it's causation.

And you can sort of understand that because if you were in a job and you were micromanaged all the time and somebody was saying, Whitney, why don't you try it this way?

Whitney, that's good.

But maybe you want to think about this.

Whitney, will you have this to me?

This is, you know, by 502 today, you know, nobody wants to be micromanaged and childhood has become micromanaged.

And

The other thing Peter Gray explains, which I think is really right, is that there's something called an internal locus of control versus external locus of control.

And when external is when somebody else is deciding how you spend your day and whether you're doing it good enough and gives you all this feedback and tells you what you're going to do next.

And internal is when you feel like, you know, I really feel like going and looking for bugs today, or I just want to get better at my free throws, or I'm going to go on my skateboard.

When you have an intrinsic...

internal locus of control means an intrinsic, so hard to say, desire to do something and you go and do it, you feel like you can handle things, even if you fall off the skateboard, even if you don't find a bug, which would be odd.

So when you have this feeling like I can handle things and people trust me and if things go wrong, I'm going to be able to figure out how to make them better.

you feel great you're on top of the world and we have taken most of that out of children's lives because we're so worried about them that we do everything with them and for them and as a result they're sort of there's you know they're like they're like in the passenger seat of their lives while we very smart helpful people are driving them to something that's going to be really important for them especially if they're trying to get into college

I'd say it plays a huge role.

And you probably remember this from your own childhood, something that you did yourself that you thought was a little scary or you're still proud of to this day.

Sometimes I ask people, what did you do as a kid that went really wrong?

And I'll just tell you one quick story, which is I was at an education conference of some sort.

And one of the ladies told me that when she was a kid,

She and her friends were riding their bikes down this, I'm sure it seemed like an incredible mountain.

It was probably just a little hill, but it was covered with pine needles.

And when she went down, you know, it was really slick and fast.

And so she's going down and she's holding onto the handle brakes and she goes to break because she's at the bottom and the handlebars came off the bike.

So suddenly it's like, ah, like a cartoon.

And she had a split second to decide what to do.

And she threw herself into a bush, right?

And she got all scraped off and it was okay.

And she put the handlebars back on.

She kept doing it.

And I said, well, you know, well, what'd you tell your parents?

And she's like,

didn't tell my parents and then when other people in the audience started telling stories like this kid this this one guy i think it was a principal got lost on like some family hike and he had to actually hitchhike back to where they were and of course he didn't tell his parents and and some guy played mumbly peg which is the stupidest game on earth where you throw a knife at each other's feet and of course somebody's foot got hurt and they like hid the fact that they were taking him up to the bathroom to wash off his foot and get the blood down the drain and put on a band-aid oh he's fine just taking a shower

you know and and none of them had told their parents and when i said why it was because they they didn't want their parents to know and then therefore take away their independence so their independence was just uh you know innately so important to them that they were treasuring it and protecting it and they were doing two things at once they were protecting their independence and they were saying to themselves look what i can handle

And anxiety is the opposite of that.

Anxiety is when you worry like, oh, you know, this seems hard.

What if I mess up?

If I mess up, it'll be terrible.

I'll be embarrassed.

And if I'm hurt, it will be forever.

So I might as well not do it.

I have to tell you, Nike just changed its slogan like last week.

And while they're keeping just do it, they added the new slogan, why do it?

Like, why do it?

And it's a recognition that kids are so afraid of messing up because they're watched all the time.

So there's high stakes.

You're always being judged.

You're always being protected.

And you never have a chance to see how much you can do.

So you finally just go, well, why do it?

I'll look stupid.

Maybe somebody puts a reel on Instagram.

Maybe I feel bad about myself.

Maybe I'll get hurt.

And so if Nike is recognizing a pervasive passivity in kids,

even wanting to play, I mean, Nike is about playing, right?

Then something's gone awry.

And so if you're asking what's the problem in the culture, it's that we're taking the childhood, the child out of childhood and replacing it with adult-oriented, adult-run activities and adult-supervised activities to the point where kids are like, okay, it's yours.

Tell me what to do.

I'll do it.

But otherwise, why?

yeah um first of all it's not reckless to give your kids some freedom i would argue that it's reckless not to give them some freedom for the reasons we've already discussed but i recognize that it is hard in a culture that says like there are there are schools that won't let the kids get off the bus at the end of the day unless a parent is there to walk them home and it could be two blocks it could be two houses i was i was actually giving a talk in

I have no idea where I was.

But the audience members told me that their school, the bus stops at each person's house and drops them off at the end of the driveway.

And you still have to come out of your house to get the kid.

You can't wave from the window.

You have to come down and get them.

So this is a culture that is demanding a level of safety and supervision and help for the kids that is just off the charts.

So I don't blame parents.

for being helicopters because the culture is recommending it and sometimes, often enough, demanding it.

And so, you know, Skechers shoes for kids, they now have a hole underneath the insole where you can put a tracking device.

And two days later, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR.

Fox News and NPR.

OK?

Kind of wild.

And I realize that a lot of you would not make the same decision, obviously, but you should have seen our son.

He came into the apartment levitating.

He was so happy.

So I want you to think back for just a second on something that you absolutely loved doing as a kid, maybe flashlight tag, building forts.

And now I want you to raise your hand if your mom knew exactly where you were.

Okay, it's an older crowd here.

Sorry.

It is usually the younger people who raise their hands because that's what's changed.

In fact, that's what I wrote my book about, free-range kids.

For the last generation or two, kids have been getting so little time on their own, so little time unsupervised.

And of course, some of that's good.

You know, togetherness is good.

Kids need a strong bond.

But, you know, too much is driving us all crazy.

There was the Surgeon General report from 2021, which a lot of you probably saw.

It said that kids are more depressed and anxious than ever, right?

And then he came out with a report like two years later, and it said parents are more depressed and anxious than ever.

I'm like, yeah, because we need our space, right?

The olden days were not perfect.

But back then, there were three worlds that were absolutely perfectly balanced.

There was the kid world, filled with, you know, bikes and adventures and playing.

And the adult world, so boring.

People were always talking about politics and who was having a procedure.

A lot of polyps, polyps, polyps, polyps.

And then there was...

Then there was family world, where everyone was together, like on vacation or at dinner.

But now they've all been sort of mashed up together, and especially since phones, because now, even when parents aren't physically with their kids, they can be texting and talking and tracking to them, so the worlds are not in balance anymore.

Fortunately, the reason I'm here is that there is a sort of easy way to start teasing the worlds apart again, and it just begins with a little bit of deprogramming.

So here goes.

We have to realize that we've been sort of brainwashed into believing that any time our kids aren't with us, they're in terrible danger of being kidnapped by a guy in a white van looking for his puppy, or ...

Also tragic.

Not getting into Harvard.

And as a result... Terrible.

I don't even like to think about it.

But the upshot is that we are spending way more time with our kids than our parents spent with us, usually helping them do things that they could do on their own.

And we call it the adult takeover of childhood because it's so vast that the University of Michigan did a study two years ago

And they found that parents want to give their kids independence.

They recognize its importance.

But the majority of parents of kids age 9 to 11, which is tweens, right, kind of old, will not let them play at the park with a friend, will not let them walk to a friend's house,

And if they're at the store shopping together, only 50 percent will let their kid go to another aisle.

OK?

That's the real statistic.

That's University of Michigan.

So sending your kid for a can of peas is like sending them to NAMM.

OK?

It's just crazy.

We've got to get braver than that.

We've got to get brave enough to send our kids to the canned food aisle or to the park before their voice changes.

So how?

Well, I've got two helpful facts and three solutions.

Helpful fact one is this.

Your kid is not going to be kidnapped.

Okay?

If for some reason you wanted them to be snatched off the street by a stranger, statistically, how long would you have to keep them outside?

750,000 years.

Years.

Okay?

It's a while.

And after the first 100,000, they're not even kids anymore.

They're not even cute.

They're like dust.

Fact two is that when our kids aren't with us in all our teachable moments, they're actually learning more.

And let me explain.

When adults organize a game, we are efficient, right?

We decide what they're going to play and whether the ball was in or out and who gets a trophy, which is easy, because everyone, right?

But when kids are organizing a game, it is a total mess.

Especially if you've got a bunch of kids of different ages, like the Peanuts gang.

Well, they have to decide what they're going to play, and then they have to make the teams kind of even, a lot of negotiating, and then you have to keep the game going, even when there are arguments, which there will be.

So along the way, they're learning, hmm...

how to make something happen, how to get buy-in, executive function, focus, compromise, you know, communication, just all the skills they need to be a functioning human being.

And if like a 12-year-old ends up pitching to a five-year-old, which would never, ever happen in adult organized sports,

Well, there's no glory in striking out a kindergartner, right?

So the older kid throws the ball kind of gently, and the little kid taps it, and the older one goes, my God, it's a home run!

And the little kid is so ecstatic, right?

But the older one is too, because he's doing something new.

He is learning how to emphasize and how to be generous, how to be an adult, right?

And that's the most teachable moment of all.

When we take those experiences out of our kids' lives by always being with them to help them and high-five them, good job, good buddy, you know, they get anxious because they don't see how much they can do, how much they can handle on their own.

I am here to talk about parenting, which is kind of weird because if you Google America's Worst Mom, you find me there for 22 Google pages, followed by America's Worst Mother's Day Gift, which, guys, a lot of you here, we don't want an iron and lingerie is for Father's Day.

And we get anxious because we don't see it either.

And so we're all feeling way more anxious than we have to.

What can we do?

Here's the deal.

About eight years ago, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and I and two others got together and we started a non-profit to make it easy, normal and legal

for parents to let go and let grow.

OK?

In fact, we call our organization Let Grow.

And because a collective problem, which is nobody letting their kids do anything, needs a collective solution, everybody doing it at the same time so they don't feel guilty or weird or judged, God forbid, judged, we came up with two school programs that are free and one new law.

The law is this.

The law says that it is not illegal to let your kid play at the park with a friend or walk to the store or do all sorts of things on their own.

We call it the reasonable childhood independence law.

And so far, as of last month, it has been passed in nine states.

Yes, right.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's a great law.

And actually, they're voting on it in Florida tomorrow.

Anyways, and then our two school programs are these.

We would like schools to stay open after school, not just for chess and homework help and soccer and all these adult-run activities, but for actual mixed-age, no-devices, free play.

You put out some balls, some chalk, cardboard boxes, and there is an adult there, crouching in the corner with an EpiPen.

But ...

But they don't solve the arguments, they don't organize the game.

They're like a lifeguard, OK?

And I know everyone thinks that kids just want to run home, they really want to be with their phones.

they really want to be with each other.

They really want to be having fun, playing, having adventures, maybe flirting.

And if the only place they can do that without constant adult supervision is on their phones, of course that's where they go.

But if you give them back a place that's free of phones, filled with kids, a swath of time, they love it.

I've gone to these play clubs.

It is so great.

I consider them a wildlife sanctuary.

for childhood, right?

Simple, just keep the schools open for free play, right?

The second thing we suggest is that schools do the let-grow experience.

And that's when teachers give kids the homework assignment that says, go home and do something new on your own, with your parents' permission, but without your parents.

You can climb a tree, walk the dog, make pancakes, doesn't matter, anything, depending on your age and your neighborhood, et cetera.

And it's in just over a thousand schools so far.

And last year, we heard of one kid who was 10 or 11, and he decided, for his Let Grow experience, he would make dinner for his family.

So he went to get the ingredients at the store, and he's shopping, and he's getting everything, and then he can't find the hot sauce.

So how do you get a name like that?

And the idea of asking a clerk for help, going up to an adult like a moron, an idiot, he just felt so tiny, he couldn't do it.

He ran out of the store.

He literally left his cart and all the other groceries there, and he bolted.

And then he went back in, and he talked to the clerk, and he got the hot sauce, and in one sense, it's just a simple errand, right?

But in another sense...

It's the hero's journey, right?

Because he had been defeated and humiliated.

He actually abandoned his quest, just like they say in those hero's journeys books.

But then he went back in, and he did it himself.

I did it myself are childhood's magic words.

Well, years ago, when our younger son was nine, he started asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before, in New York City, where we live, and let him find his own way home by subway.

I did it myself is the original anxiety buster.

And in fact, if I ask you right now, and probably we'll talk about it later, to remember something that made you really proud of your own kid or your grandkid or your niece or your student, nephew, whatever, it's usually something like, you know, he was on an overnight last night and the other mom called to say he cleared the table.

Really?

Or, we were on vacation and she got lost, but she found her own way back to the hotel.

Or, my kid took the cousins out last night and let the five-year-old get a home run.

We're most proud of our kids when they do something on their own.

And our kids are most proud of themselves when they do something on their own.

So the solution to the parent anxiety crisis and the kid anxiety crisis

turns out to be the exact same thing.

You've got to pull apart those worlds again.

You've got to put the kid world separate from the parent world, put them back in balance.

You've got to let kids do something on their own in the big, wide world, maybe without even tracking them or talking to them or texting them, just trusting them to do something on their own.

And if you can do that, if you can let go, I can guarantee...

your kids are going to end up less anxious.

Your kids are going to end up smarter.

And your kids are going to feel really proud, but not as proud as you.

Thank you.

So we talked about it, me and my husband, who you never hear of as America's worst dad.

And we decided, sure, why not?

Long story short, I wrote a newspaper column, Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.