The Freedom Factor: Why Childhood Independence Matters with Lenore Skenazy

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a journalist and an entrepreneur.

Lenore Skenazy is the president and co founder of Let Grow, a nonprofit focused on promoting childhood independence and resilience. She's also the founder of the Free Range Kids movement. Lenore spent more than a decade as a columnist at the New York Daily News.

I'm happy to see you again. I don't even remember what year we talked, but it's been a minute.

It has been a minute and so much has happened, I feel. And we are going to be talking about raising capable kids and an age of anxiety.

So, Lenor, nearly 20 years, nearly 20 years after you were dubbed America's worst mom, has the conversation around childhood independence changed in your view?

Oh, thank you for asking.

I would say for sure, because when I did the Subway ride and got all this whatever, notoriety for a couple of years in a row when I was writing the Free Range Kids, blogging, there used to be, when blogs were a thing, a much bigger thing, there was some contest or something where somehow my blog came up as the most controversial for a couple of years in a row. Like it was just crazy that this nutty, that America's Worst mom was suggesting that kids could do anything on their own unsupervised.

And then since then, the conversation has come around in an interesting way.

There was the University of Michigan study that that asked parents of kids age, I think, 6 to 12 or something like that, how important is independence? And the vast majority said it's really important. So it had switched from like, it's a crazy idea to it's important.

But what hadn't changed and maybe had gotten even worse is that nonetheless they could not let go. And one of the questions was, would you let your kid go to another aisle at the store?

And 50% of them, and these were of kids ages 7 to 12, I believe, said no. And so that's a very disturbing statistic to me. And I've since then unearthed other Unnerving statistics.

And I'll just say one and then I'll get to the end of my sentence.

But there was just this study done of 24,000American parents asking what age do you let your kids leave the house, leave the block, leave the neighborhood? And the majority of parents, even of 14 year olds will not let them leave the block.

So what's interesting to me is that people believe in independence, but letting their kids do.

I mean 14 year olds, those are high school students, not letting them leave the block is like keeping your kid in a crib, you know, when they're 14, it's like that doesn't make any sense. So the belief is there, what is. The mind is willing but the body is weak. It's just there, we can't do it. So that's what's interesting.

Well, and if you unpack what you just shared there, we are talking ultimately about a question of safety and risk in many parents minds. Right. So are parents becoming more open to giving their kids freedom or more fearful than ever in certain respects?

Well, that's, that's the sort of, the tension. I think they are much more open.

They, they think that their kids need independence, but they are so fearful that letting 14 year old leave the block somehow has become taboo. And that's what let Grow exists to change. Our goal is to make it easy, normal and legal to give your kids back some independence.

And the idea that it is risky for really anybody over seven to walk around the block, to walk around the neighborhood, unless you're in a very dangerous neighborhood is a new one. And I would say untrue. My God, you're in Canada. Where are the criminals? Anybody criminal here? Please come show yourself.

But even in the United States the crime rate has been plummeting since the early 90s. And there was just a study done that came out two weeks ago that said that we are on track right now to have the lowest.

I can't remember if it's murder or violent crime rate ever recorded here in the United States. And I know it doesn't feel that way, but it is.

And it's sort of, it's impossible to incorporate into your everyday ethos the idea that crime is really, really down.

But once you start letting your kid do things on their own, then you can start breathing easier and taking advantage of the fact that we live in the safest times in pretty much human history. I can't hear a word you're saying. You went away for a little while and you turned it. You can hear me Right. Yeah.

So you turned into a picture for, like, a minute, and now you're coming back without sound. Wait, I heard a breath.

Okay.

Can you hear me? I can hear you. Well, keep talking.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Yeah.

Wow.

I've never had any of this happen to me before. Okay, now we're back, we'll just pick it up. Sorry, Lenore. Sorry about that.

Don't worry about it.

Okay, so based on what you just shared, then the question becomes, how can parents tell the difference between a real danger and a fear that's holding them back from. From helping their kids become more independent?

The only thing that I've seen that changes parents is literally action. Because when you're thinking about something and you're thinking about it in terms of danger and fear, you go into what we call the fear loop.

It's like, I'd like to let her walk to the bus stop. But what if something terrible happened? What if a man came up? What if he was in a van? What if he asked about a puppy?

What if I never saw her again at the end? Right? You keep going through that loop.

Even me giving you the amazing statistic with is, in the United States, if you wanted your kid to be kidnapped by a stranger, how long would you have to keep them outside for this to be statistically likely to happen? For them to be statistically likely to be kidnapped, how long do you know?

No idea.

Take a guess and think big.

Okay, three days.

You got to think a lot bigger.

Okay, two weeks. I don't know. Several years.

I give up. Yeah, it is several years. It is 750,000 years.

Wow.

Three days. I have no idea what I was saying.

So I. I know. Well, that's the thing. I mean, sometimes parents say, you know, three hours. Sometimes parents say three minutes.

And it's because, frankly, if you watch TV for three minutes, you will see a kid kidnapped. Certainly if you're watching Law and Order svu, you will see a kid kidnapped within three minutes. But the reality is that it is the rarest of crimes.

Okay, so. So the only thing but my statistics will not move the needle. What? The only thing that moves the needle is.

Is literally sitting with your anxiety for half an hour while you let your kid walk to the store, ride their bike, climb a tree, go to a friend's house. And it's the same thing as exposure therapy. I mean, we've really been scared to death by the media.

I mean, if you think three days and the actual answer is 750,000 years, your perception has Been skewed by a media that loves nothing more than to scare us. Cause that keeps us engaged. And the more eyeballs, the more money it makes. So how do you break through? Perception. Only reality changes perception.

And the reality is that you're a parent and you're going to be nervous some of the time. Nobody said you could be a parent and have, you know, total ice cream sundaes. From now until the day you die.

There's going to be some dark clouds there. And one of the dark clouds that you're going to have to sit with is, my kid is on her way to the bus stop for the first time without me.

I hope she's okay. And then the next day, my kid is on her way to the bus stop and yesterday was fine. And then the next day is like, go. Because you become used to it.

That's what exposure therapy is. You expose yourself to something that you're a little bit afraid of or a lot afraid of, and gradually you become inured to it.

It loses its power over you. Right now we're in a culture that is inculcating OCD in parents. I mean, to the point where, like, don't you want to track them? I usually. I don't.

I don't know if people are listening to you or watching you, but if they're watching you, they can see me holding up this Skecher's shoe to just a, you know, a standard issue, normal mass market sketcher shoe. And I'm lifting up the insole to show you the bottom part where you can put in an airtag.

So you're in a culture that has normalized, valorized the idea of tracking your children. Even though we all know that 10 years ago this was impossible, right? There weren't air tags 10 years ago. So suddenly, something is crucial.

You better be watching your kid even with an airtag. Whereas we all know that the entire history of humankind somehow lived without airtags. And that was fine.

So when you have a culture that keeps saying, you must know for certain every single second what your child is doing, and track them on their phone and track them on your watch and track them with the shoe and track them with the monitor, and that all turns out to be a lie.

And in fact, the only way you're really going to feel the peace of mind that they promise is by growing faith in your kid, trusting your kid, trusting your community, that actually they're fine without me knowing it, without me being there, without me tracking them. The only thing that gives parents peace of Mind is trust. Not the certainty that these devices are promising, but the trust.

Like, you know, I let her go to school every day. It's fine. You know, once she came home kind of scared because a dog barked at her, but she's fine.

Once she got lost, and then she had to ask a stranger, and she's fine. Only reality can break through. And reality means trust.

So then, Lenore, how would you go about characterizing how these manageable risks, as you've called them around, what we let our kids do? Why are they so important to healthy development?

Oh, well, I'll ask you. Tell me about something that you did as a kid that made you really proud as a kid, like maybe 7 to 10, something that.

Do you remember anything that you did that was like, so cool?

Oh, it was so long ago, Lenore. I'd have to really think hard. I probably just. I don't know, going to the store with my friends, like the mall, like something like that. Without.

Yeah, okay. And how would that have been different if your mom was with you?

Yeah, it would have been different.

How?

We would probably have been more guarded. Not that we were wild and crazy, but you know what I mean? Right.

And how would you have felt about it? I mean, like, you know, grown up or babyish or.

Yeah, it would have been like being babysat.

Trusted or not trusted, somewhere in between.

Not fully trusted.

So I'd say for child development, I mean, what are children doing? Their. Their. Their thrust is to grow, right? To become independent. And they do that by doing stuff on a daily basis on their own. They, you know, they.

They get their cup down, you know, they brush their own teeth, they get themselves to school, they choose their outfit, they do their homework, they go to a friend's house, they have an argument, they make up with their friend, they make up a game. They. They see themselves, not consciously, but they are growing and they see their parents trusting them.

And all of that is what child development is about. It's about gradually becoming independent. Not that you don't care about your parents.

Not that you think that your parents don't care about you, but in fact, do you know that they're there?

I mean, the whole idea of attachment theory is that, you know, at first you're physically attached to your parents, and then you're in the same room and you learn how to toddle. And you. You go a few steps and you look backwards to make sure your mom is there and you laugh.

And then you run a few more steps and you look back and she's there. And you're secure in the knowledge that your mom is always going to be there. But eventually you don't need her to be literally in the room with you.

And then eventually you don't need her at the mall with you. And you carry her in your heart, right? You know that she loves you and you carry her in your brain. Don't cross the street without looking both ways.

Don't go off with a stranger. And so that is what child development is about, not about always being with your mom. Right.

If you're always with your mom, you're sort of in the womb, you know, you're safe, but you're not. You're not going forth.

And so child development requires parents stepping back gradually and letting their kids know that they love them and they're always there for them, but they're not always literally with them.

So how far along then are we, Lenore, you say we are moving the needle forward, certainly in the last 20 years since your article and everything else. But what is the key stumbling block here?

Because we are living in an age of anxiety and of hyper parenting and a whole bunch of things that really run counter to independence in childhood. How would you characterize where we are?

Well, so Let Grow was founded almost 10 years ago by me and three other people. Daniel Schuchman, who used to be chairman of fire, which fights for free speech, and Peter Gray, who you're probably familiar with.

He has written a lot about the importance of mixed age free play. And then the other person was Jonathan Haidt, who you know as the author most recently of the Anxious Generation.

And John was concerned back then 10 years ago that kids on campus seemed very fragile and trying to make them more open minded, excited about new ideas and new experiences.

At age 18, 19, 20, he said, was a late stage intervention that wouldn't it make more sense to try to grow kids who are robust and excited and engaged and ready for the world starting at a younger age. That's why we founded Let Grow.

And we founded it to make it easy for parents to let go easier than it had been already because we'd seen that parents were clamping down because they don't know when they're allowed to let go. That's why we call it Let Grow. It was originally Let Go and Let Grow.

One of the most brilliant things Jonathan has said and that has influenced us is that a collective problem needs a collective solution.

Right now we're talking about the collective problem of parents not having any idea when they can let their kids do anything on their own, to the point where the majority of parents of 14 year olds won't let them leave the block. So if nobody knows when they can possibly do this and that it's safe enough and not crazy, you need a collective solution.

So Let Grow's solution is really simple and it's free. And it is a program for schools that we call the Let Grow experience.

That's a big name for something that's basically a once a month homework assignment that the teachers give the kids that literally says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents permission, but without your parents for K through 12.

And obviously there's different things for different ages, but it's always something a little bit beyond your comfort zone, like scramble an egg, climb a tree, go to the store, ride your bike, visit a friend, make dinner. Depending on what you've already done, depending on what interests you, depending on your neighborhood and your age.

But what we've seen is that collectively, parents are all being told at the same time, you gotta let go so you don't feel like a nut, you don't feel like a lazy jerk. This is my homework and my kids doing their homework. I had to let them go get ice cream. I had to let her go get a haircut.

And then that's what rewires the parents. They've gone from, oh my God, this is crazy. I'm so scared to look at my kid. Oh my God, I hate that haircut.

But I'm really, really proud that you did it yourself. Or this is really a delicious taco. You know, maybe it's not delicious the first time. Maybe you should have cooked the meat.

The point being that once you've done it a couple of times, it becomes so much easier.

And when everybody is doing this in your whole culture, then you have things like, we heard of a town where one kid went to the store to get a. I don't know what he got. So I always say a muffin. And the grocery, it was a small grocery store in a suburb and it's like, well, what are you doing here by yourself, kid?

It was a kid who was in fourth or fifth grade and he's like, I'm doing my let grow experiment, okay? What is that? I have to do something on my own, okay? What? It's like, my mom can't be with me.

Okay, fine, well, here's your muffin, you know, good luck. But after that, when kids started coming in, it was like, oh, it's a let grow, kid. Oh, let grow.

Oh, they're all doing their Let Grow stuff, and then the kids come in and it's not the Let Grow experience. It's because they want to get their own muffin or their popsicle or whatever.

And so that is the entire goal of Let Grow is when we say we're making it easy and normal to let go of kids. That's what it is. You make it easy because there's a push. You make it normal because a bunch of people are doing it at the same time.

And it's sort of valorized. It's homework. And the kids write on this little piece of paper that we give that's shaped like a leaf. You know what you did for.

I went, I made ziti, I got a Slurpee. I sat next to a kid I don't normally sit next to.

And then these leaves go on a tree in the hall somewhere at the school or in the classroom, and you just see the tree getting filled with these leaves. I did. I taught my sister how to ride a bike. I made a tortilla, I painted my door, I made a birdhouse.

And suddenly you have flourishing of kids doing normal childhood things that had disappeared from our very fearful culture.

So then I'm just going to assume there's data that's been amassed in the time that Let Grow has existed. So what have you learned about how children respond when adults give them more freedom?

We don't have enough data, which is shameful, and hopefully we're rectifying it this year with two different kinds of surveys that we're doing. We've done very tiny surveys.

What we've heard is, first of all, I'll tell you about parents, which is that parents who have let their kids do new things on their own, let them do more. What a surprise.

There was this wonderful study recently of a grammar school, two grammar schools, of a control group where they didn't do let grow, and a group where they did. And the parents of the kids who did let grow afterwards were much more likely to let them go to the store, pick their own clothes, who cares?

And also play outside on their own without supervision.

So that is the renormalization what we've seen in terms of kids is best exemplified by the fact that now independence is being studied as therapy for kids with anxiety. And there was a pilot study done of this by a professor named Camilo Ortiz in New York.

And he found in the pilot study that having the parents come in without the kid the first week and just talking to them like, what's the matter? And oh, my kid won't even go upstairs or downstairs in our own house, he's so afraid, he's so anxious.

Or my kid won't sleep in her own bed, she's so anxious. Okay, found out the problem.

Week two, the kid comes in with the parents, and instead of talking about the problem, he says, you're nine, you're 10, you're 12. What new thing are you ready to do that you haven't done yet? Maybe you thought your parents would say no.

And the parents are there like, and it's like, oh, I want to ride the Long Island Railroad. I want to go to school and sell bracelets. I want to go to the park and play chess with the crazy guys who play chess there.

You know, there are all these things that even the anxious kids wanted to do on their own. And the assignment for the therapeutic version of Let Grow was to do one new thing a week for four weeks.

What Camilo found at the end was that the independence worked faster than cognitive behavioral therapy and better than meds. Now he's got a million dollars to test this for the next three years in a randomized control study.

And the early evidence shows that it's working like gangbusters both that way and also just as he's doing group therapy just with the parents of anxious kids as well. And that's being amazing too. So the evidence so far is coming in from the therapeutic side, but it's working really well.

Very interesting. Now, at the same time, we're seeing new laws aimed at protecting parents who give their children age appropriate independence.

What do you think this issue, and why do you think this issue has gained momentum now?

Well, this is going to sound vain, but for like the past 15 years or so, I've been publicizing case after case of parents who were investigated or sometimes even arrested. And it's usually the mom for letting their kids walk home from the park, ride their bike, go to the store, play outside.

And I'd say every couple years, one of the stories goes mega viral.

The most recent one that was Big Story was Brittany Patterson, a mom of four in small town Georgia, who was taking one of her kids to the doctor, and her 10 year old said, I'll just stay home with grandpa. But he didn't. He actually ended up walking to Town Mile away, going to the Dollar General store, talking to his friend's grandma who worked there.

And some lady saw him on the way home and called the authorities.

And that night, Brittany was arrested and handcuffed in front of her children because her son had been someplace and she hadn't known where he was for that hour. So that made national and eventually international news. Because it's insane, right? The kid was in no danger.

The woman who even turned him into the police knew he was in no danger. I mean, she talked to him, he was fine. He was on his way home. And since when do we have to know where our 10 year olds are?

Every single second of every single day. So when you hear stories like that, it makes the blood boil. And you think, what can we do? And the answer is make a law that says that's not illegal.

Letting your kid do something without you there is not illegal. And that's what our reasonable childhood independence laws say.

They say that neglect is when you do something really bad, when you put your kid in obvious and serious and likely danger, but not when just taking your eyes off them is not neglect. And so those have passed in 13 states here in America.

And now there's a federal bill sitting in the House of Representatives that I hope gets called at some point, doesn't just die. It has bipartisan sponsorship, as do almost all of those other 13 laws.

Because nobody wants to be a parent with the child protective services knocking on the door. Because somebody doesn't think that I wouldn't let my kid ride his bike at that age. Neither should you.

It's like, well, how about you don't let your kid ride their bike and I let mine ride mine.

So.

But then, Lenore, what does it say to you that we are having this kind of discourse and this is happening currently in our world in terms of, you know, where we are with what good parenting looks like if it doesn't involve constant supervision.

Well, what we have is a culture that I think is expecting constant supervision.

Right before I was talking to you, I was talking to a mom who's kid isn't allowed to get off the bus in first grade without somebody else, without a pre approved adult, her waiting to take her kid home and another pre approved adult waiting to take another kid home. And so it is almost as if only supervision is considered good enough.

But the fact that these laws are passing, we have another three that are pending, shows that the tide is turning in terms of. Wait a minute, this doesn't even work. What if you have three kids?

What if one's going to soccer, one's coming home and one's going to her babysitting gig? I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. So I think that there's certainly a recognition that constant supervision is impossible.

And that you just certainly don't want to be demanding it in legal form.

We spent a lot of time talking about the fear out there, the risks out there that are in a lot of parents minds as it relates to physical safety of their children.

Where does that align to the online world and the digital risks that are out there that we, I would say, seem less concerned about if we compare them to what we're talking about here,.

Which is physical safety, largely, you know, the whole idea of the online world is one that I have almost not completely avoided. But I feel like there are experts out there figuring all this out better than I can. You know, what is the optimal time?

What should kids be doing online, what shouldn't they be doing online?

And all I can tell you is that anybody who is concerned about their child spending too much time online, which I think is a lot of parents at this moment, you have to recognize that you can take away the phone, take away the screen, but you have to also open the door and let grow is the open the door part. Even before there were phones and screens, kids anxiety and depression were going up over the decades. And I mean since the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s.

And that was long before there was a phone or certainly before there was a cell phone.

They weren't allowed to have unsupervised play dates. All of their time after school was in organized and structured activities.

You have to be able to give kids back the independence and the free play that were taken out even before the phones came in. In a way, phones were an escape hatch for the kids who couldn't just go outside and play anymore because of inflated fears.

There was an amazing study that John Height and I did last summer with the Harris poll. And I know not everybody's going to be watching and some are going to be listening.

I'll talk about this graph, but I want to show you this just so I can hear you gasp. Because the question we asked kids age 812 through the Harris poll last summer was how would you rather spend time with friends?

We gave them three choices. One was old school, just hanging out, no supervision, no structure, 80s childhood.

Two was organized activities, you know, soccer, chess, ballet, you know, just an after school thing, or online, you know, and you could be playing video Games or Snapchat. You could be social media, whatever. And here are the results that the kids gave. And there's one graph.

There's one bar of this graph that's way higher than the others. And that happens to be what? Do you know what it is online? Nope, sorry. Online is at the bottom.

Nice.

Very, very the 80s.

80S.

80S. Childhood was the number one. Just hanging out, old school with friends. Second choice. Okay. Still in person. Organized activities. Distant third.

20 Points less was online. So we think that kids are addicted to their phones. There's so much screen time. That's all they like, really.

What they want is what they're not getting, which is free time with their friends unstructured and unsupervised. So it's not that they're on their phones by desire, they're on their phones by default. They don't have this choice. We asked them other questions.

One of them was yes or no. I'd spend more time with my friends. And then if there were more kids to hang out with in the neighborhood, and that was off the charts.

That was in the 70s or 80%. So what let Grow is trying to do is make it easy, normal and legal to open that door and to send your kids back outside. They know they want it.

It's like a starving person. Do you want a food pellet or do you want a meatball? It's like, I think I'd like a meatball, please. Right. And we're not giving them that.

We're giving them the little pellets, which happen to be screens. And it's good. It's okay. It's something for them to do, but it's not what they long for. It's not what they're programmed to want.

It's not what Mother Nature expected them to have. So it's up to us to give that back to them.

You have been on the front lines of advocacy around childhood independence, as we mentioned, for at least 20 years and probably longer. You've got the lived experience, etc. Etc. Lenore, why are you still, after all this time, so passionate and invested in this question?

Yeah, I sometimes wonder that myself, but I think it goes back to believing in people. Right. I mean, one of the things that's very disturbing is that if you look at a chart of trust, at least in America, it's plummeting. People my age.

I'm old. Are the most trusting, and young people are the least trusting. And I think that that's terrible. It's terrible for their morale.

It's Terrible for the country. And it's all based on a lie. And the lie is that you can't send them outside. It's too dangerous. And so I think if we.

Once we open our doors and open our hearts to other people and to our kids, hanging out with people who aren't just us, everything becomes better. Our lives becomes better, our culture becomes better, maybe even our politics. But mostly it's just this base idea.

I mean, I became a reporter as a reporter for so many years because I was interested in people. And I think that they're often. I think they're mostly good and often fascinating.

And to say that they're not, and the only thing that you can do is sit on the couch and scroll through TikTok and is is a lie. And we'll all be better off when we open the door. And my job is to make it easy to open the door.

We're almost out of time. But I did want to ask you if there's one thing that you could change about how parents and society today think about childhood, what would it be?

This is. This is a weird one. And it's.

It's slightly off tack, but I feel like so much of what we're doing with kids now is based on the presumption that they aren't curious, they're not interested, they'll never learn anything except if we sit them down and teach them something in a class or an extracurricular. Like, there's no drive to figure things out on their own or to become curious about one weird thing and pursue that.

If you don't believe that, then you end up spending all your time with teachable moment after teachable moment by us.

But in fact, you should really trust that Mother Nature invented this species that has gotten as far as it has by installing the play drive, the exploration drive, the curiosity drive, and we have to unleash those. And you can't unleash those just in the classroom or travel, soccer or the car.

Lots to think about, as always. Lenore Skenazy, entrepreneur, author, journalist. Thank you so much for your time and your insight today.

Well, thank you, Leanne. You actually made me think about a lot of new things. So, you know, I do a lot of these, and so the fact that it's a new one is fun. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate your time.

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