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After letting her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway alone—and creating a media firestorm—Lenore Skenazy wrote the book “Free-Range Kids.” Lenore is also a co-founder of Let Grow.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Lenore Skenazy explore why parents are reluctant to let their children take risks, how unsupervised activities help children learn, and how to embrace giving your kids independence.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a long time, actually, because I've been following your work. You were really at the forefront of calling attention to a strange phenomenon in parenting in the United States—and increasingly in other countries as well—which is that of helicopter parenting: parents who are always hovering over their children. Some of this is enforced by legal norms. Sometimes, parents end up in serious legal trouble, facing the risk of their children being removed, or even of going to jail, simply for letting their kids take a little bit of risk.
Tell us about some of the more shocking stories and how they reflect a broader transformation—not just in the choices parents are making, but in the broader culture and legal regime we live in.
Lenore Skenazy: First of all, the word you used is the key word, which is letting your children take a little bit of risk. The minute you mention children and risk, you're in dangerous territory—and people are mad at you. There is somehow this belief that there’s a way to take all risks out of children's lives if we just watch everything they eat, see, do, read and hear. When there’s a belief that you can prevent everything bad from happening, you sort of get frozen with fear. You see everything through the lens of: how could this hurt a child? I call it worst-first thinking. It hasn’t become a popular phrase, but let’s try it out. It means coming up with the worst-case scenario first and proceeding as if it’s likely to happen.
When you have that, you have people who see a child outside without an adult next to them—preferably Velcroed to them—and sometimes they call 911. They think that any child outside is automatically not just in danger, but in great danger. Not only great danger, but great danger of being kidnapped by a stranger and either trafficked or eaten. So the Good Samaritan actually thinks they’re doing something good. I don’t think they’re just there to ruin the parent's life—but that is what subsequently happens. So I’ll just tell you a couple of recent stories of cases like that.
The one that a lot of people have heard of, because it happened just a few months ago, was of a mom in rural Georgia. She has four kids. She’s taken one of them to the doctor, and another one doesn’t want to come. So she says, okay, you can stay home. The grandfather lives with them too. He’s in a wheelchair, but he’s there. So the mom takes off with kid number one, and kid number two—who is either 10 or about to turn 10—doesn’t tell his grandpa, and guess what he does? First time anyone in the history of the world has ever done this—he decides to leave without telling Grandpa and walk to town, which is about a mile away. There’s a Dollar General. There’s a gas station. He knows his friend’s grandma works at the gas station. He says hi to her. I guess he shops at the Dollar General. He’s walking back. Somebody sees him, stops him, and actually talks to him:
“Who are you?”
“I’m this kid.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m walking around.”
“Okay… does your mom know where you are?”
“No.”
“Really? She doesn’t? I’m calling the cops.”
So even though she saw that the kid was fine—and it’s rural Georgia, and he’s 10—she calls the cops. The cops screech over, which shows you that they’re not busy fighting crime. They have nothing to do, right? They run over, they get the kid:
“What are you doing? Does your parent know? Call them. Mom, guess what? Your kid is outside. Really? You didn’t know that?”
“No, I thought he was staying at home.”
“Well, that’s your fault.”
Click.
So the cops take the kid home. And a few hours later, around dinnertime, they knock on the door. I can’t remember if it’s two cops or three—there’s body cam footage of this.
“Are you the mom of this kid?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t know where he was?”
“Yes.”
They put her hands behind her back and they click on the handcuffs—in front of three of her four kids—throw her in the cop car, take her to prison, get the thumbprint, the mugshot, and throw her in jail. All of this because she simply didn’t know where her child was for a short amount of time. That was considered, in itself, bad parenting—because the idea is that you should always know what your kid is doing, every single second.
Mounk: Not just bad parenting, but criminal parenting. It's not just that the cop was like, make sure next time you look after your kid and you know where he is or whatever else. It is literally “we’ll take you to jail.”
Skenazy: I’ve got another story, also from Georgia, that happened just a couple of weeks ago. Anyway—long story short—she gets a lawyer who knows to call me, and I wrote a piece about it. It became international news, which is great. I think she’ll end up with the charges dropped. But in the meantime, the cops called Child Protective Services, who came and visited the mom when she was back home. They came up with a safety plan for her that included always letting the children know exactly where she was, always knowing exactly where the kids were, and—this was done in front of the caseworker—installing a tracking app so she would be able to track her son at all times. That’s the government deciding that any untracked child—any child who grows up without constant surveillance—is automatically in danger, and that a parent is neglectful simply for not thinking that way.
So she refused to sign it. That is still up in the air—what’s going to happen to her for not signing the safety plan. But as the lawyer pointed out, it’s not making the kid safer. The kid was already safe. The kid is safe at home. The kid is safe when he walks to town. Also, there’s nothing that literally makes you safer simply because you’re being tracked. It just means you’re being tracked. It doesn’t mean a mother could stop—30 miles away—somebody from running her kid over or kidnapping him.
So it’s this weird kabuki of protection that is being forced upon parents. And if you don’t go along with the idea that your child is in constant danger and you must know where they are at all times, then you’re wrong—even though neither of those things is true.
Mounk: Give us a little bit of a sense of how recent this is, and why this has changed. I didn’t grow up in the United States. I certainly know that I would go to school on my own when I was living in rural Germany at eight, nine years old. I would bike to school when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old in a small town, and then would roam very freely around Munich, which is reasonably safe, but a major city. From the age of 12, I’d obviously tell my mom vague plans ahead for the day, but if some friends said, hey, let’s run to the store, let’s go play soccer, I’d shoot off. She wouldn’t know exactly where I was at 13 or 14 years old, and I didn’t have a cell phone. I was a good kid, and I would come home, more or less, at the time we’d established. I’m sure sometimes I was late. But she didn’t know exactly where I was in the city, and that was normal.
I’m actually struck now—when I’ve spent some time in Berlin, for example—I sometimes think, oh, wow, look, there’s an 8-year-old on the street, or a couple of 8-year-olds, and they’re riding their bicycles or they’re going off somewhere, and they’re unaccompanied. Berlin is probably the most dangerous German city but it’s still a pretty safe place. And that’s perfectly normal. 30 or 40 years ago, was that normal in the United States, if I’d grown up here? I was born in 1982—would that have been my life as well? And if so, why is it that this has changed so quickly over the course of this particular time period?
Skenazy: Well, there’s a couple of questions in that. One is, how did parenting change? And then the second is, how did the whole thing of getting reported to the cops start? The reporting to the cops, I think, changed more recently—because we have phones. Now, if you’ve been told that any child who’s unsupervised is in danger, and you have a way to “make them safe” by calling the cops, you do. If this had been an era before you had a cell phone, if you saw a kid outside, you might say, are you okay? and then you’d go home. By the time you’re home, you would have forgotten it. You wouldn’t call the cops and say, go look on Route 7—is there a kid still out there? Please arrest the mom. So part of it is just the availability of instantly contacting the authorities.
The thing that has changed over the course of these 40 years is the idea that kids doing anything on their own is dangerous and foolhardy. And that changed much more gradually. That started, I’d say, to change in the ’80s here in America with a couple of things. One is the growth of cable television and the birth of the 24-hour news cycle—we didn’t have that before. So you just had a little bit of news, and nothing was fixated on the way a missing child case would later be. The broadcasting rules changed in the ’80s. They’d been the same since the invention of radio, but in the ’80s all bets were off. You could sell much more gruesome images, much more graphic things. I had a TV historian friend who said: there’s not one episode of Law and Order that could have been shown before the broadcast code changed.
And then you had the kids on the milk cartons—those were kids whose pictures were placed on milk cartons under the phrase "Have you seen me?" or "Missing." It was poignant, and it was devastating to see all these children. But they never had the asterisk next to their name that would have said, Yes, I’m missing. I was taken in a custodial dispute between my divorced parents, or I ran away because my uncle was messing with me.
It began to feel as anodyne as eating your cereal, or drinking your milk. There was no explanation that these kids were not taken by strangers. That’s when we got all the ads about stranger danger, and McGruff the Crime Dog, and television shows like America’s Most Wanted, etc.
There were two very high-profile kidnappings, in ’79 and ’81. The ’81 one was Adam Walsh. His dad was John Walsh who started America’s Most Wanted and went around the country saying that 50,000 kids are murdered every year—which is off by a factor of 50,000. It’s about 100, which is horrible. But it felt like there was no way you could let your kid out the door in the morning and realistically expect to see them in the evening, if you weren’t careful.
Mounk: One of the strange things here is that there’s a little bit of a collective action problem. Part of it, of course, is that if it’s not normalized to let your kids be outside, then it somehow marks you out as a horrible parent. Whereas if you live in a culture where it is understood that it’s normal, then that’s fine. Part of it is even that if there’s a very small number of people who are highly motivated to, in fact, prey on kids, they may still be able to find the kids. If it’s their life’s mission to somehow lure a kid away from a parent in some context, they may very well succeed—even if all the precautions are taken. But if you’re a parent—obviously you care particularly about your kid—and you live in a culture where kids are generally allowed to roam freely, the risk to any one individual kid is much lower. Because people understand: those kids are in public space, they might look out for each other, and an adult might look out for the kids that you’re sharing public space with.
Whereas if you live in a city where no other parent lets their kids out, and your nine-year-old is the only kid walking around the city on their own, the risk to that particular kid may, in fact, also be higher than it would be in that other scenario. But I see you shaking your head—what am I getting wrong in this?
Skenazy: I’m shaking my head because the risk is vanishingly small. There isn’t one circumstance that really amps it up a thousand percent and another that decreases it. It’s already decreased almost to zero automatically because it’s so extraordinarily rare. The statistic I like to use is this: if you wanted your kid to be kidnapped by a stranger in a stereotypical Law and Order-type kidnapping, how long would you have to keep your kid outside for that to be statistically likely to happen?
Mounk: I know, a million years.
Skenazy: You’re like the only one who says that. It’s 750,000 years so you’re very close! But most people say a day, some say an hour, some say five minutes. Some people think five minutes at the grocery store, if you’re in another aisle. The University of Michigan just did a study last year asking parents of 9 to 11-year-olds whether they let their kids walk to the park, or walk to a friend’s house—and the majority said no. Let them play at the park with a friend? The majority said no. Trick-or-treat? No. My favorite one: they asked, would you let your child go to another aisle at the store while you’re shopping? 50% said no. We’re talking about kids who are 9 to 11 years old. Half of American parents won’t let their kids go to the canned food aisle.
Our perception of danger is so extraordinarily out of whack with reality. It’s not that if I let my kid walk to school, there’s somebody waiting for him—or that if there were 10 kids walking to school, the guy would go someplace else. There mostly aren’t strangers waiting to kidnap kids. So to start taking precautions based on the perception that one kid is in danger and five kids are safe is already mistaking the safe for the unsafe.
Mounk: What are the costs of this? Presumably those come in different buckets. One cost is just to the parents. You need to supervise the children closely at all times. You're so stressed that if your kid wanders off into the next supermarket aisle, you think you’ve done something horrible, and thank god they’re okay. You go through a spike of adrenaline that is not rationally justified. Part of it is that if your kid can’t walk over to a friend’s house a few hundred yards away, it means that a) you have to continue to supervise your kid, and b) your kid might be in a bad mood because they don’t get to be with the kids they trust. So your life is going to be harder. You might have to drive your kid there, and that interrupts whatever you were doing. So there are costs to the parents.
But there are presumably also costs to the kids. The kind of autonomy that I assume you enjoyed when we were growing up also gave us social skills for maneuvering the world around us. It allowed us to grow in a particular way that was conducive to our well-being. We traded off some risk—it might have been a tiny risk—in being out and unsupervised on our own, against growth opportunities that also provided other benefits and perhaps protected us against other risks down the line. So tell us a little bit about why you think this is such an important issue. What is it that’s lost in this current world?
Skenazy: Well, thank you for that. There are so many things I want to say, but I’ll start with a study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics in 2023 or 2024. It had a really long headline, but basically, as children’s independence and free play time have gone down over the decades—not just since COVID, not just since phones, but since before that—childhood has become more supervised. And their anxiety and depression have gone up. As you know, that’s a public health crisis at the moment—or so it’s defined by the Surgeon General. Kids are more depressed and anxious than ever. Well, guess what? Two years after the Surgeon General put out that report, he put out another report saying that parents are more depressed and anxious than ever, too. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think that they’re both spending so much time watching and being watched that nobody is growing in full. The parents aren’t growing in trust of their kid—because they only see their kid with them. The kid’s only “okay” if they are supervised. The kid always has somebody else leaning in saying: here, let me do that for you, or Try it this way, or No, don’t do that, or Watch out, or It’s time to go.
Neither of them has the breathing room to become happier people, or more confident and competent. Especially kids. I just had somebody explain this to me. I’ve been talking about the same thing for so many years, but she put it so bluntly: independence leads to competence. You’ve got to figure out how to get yourself home if you’re lost. You’ve got to figure out how to fix your bike chain. Independence leads to competence, and competence leads to confidence.
So when we worry about kids being so anxious and depressed, it’s because they have no idea how much they’re capable of doing. There are schools that will not allow a child to get off the school bus at their stop unless there’s a parent there to walk them home. It could be that they’re walking two blocks home. It could be they’re walking two houses home. But the bus driver is not allowed to let the kid off. So the mom just has to quit her job to be outside at the bus stop Monday through Friday at 3:30pm. Or 3:45pm if the bus is running late. It really has recalibrated childhood and parenthood.
We hear about how stressed parents are, and it’s sort of like a rueful laugh. Of course I’ve got to be with them, and Of course I’m going to another party this weekend, and I’m going to eat more cake and pizza because I’m never allowed to drop off the kid at a party and leave. If I do, I’m considered irresponsible. And my kid is considered a burden on everybody else’s.
When we’re talking about actual danger, the ironic thing is that your kid is in more danger on that car ride than in anything else we’ve discussed today—because that’s how kids die: as passengers in cars. Yet we don’t obsess about driving kids to the dentist or cheerleading practice. What if something happens? I could never forgive myself. The odds are bad—but they’re not awful. It’s just that the only thing we’ve really demonized is a parent who thinks their kid is going to be okay without them there.
Mounk: That’s an important point. It’s a fundamental structure of risk that there are low-probability, terrible-outcome risks in life all of the time. If I’m running late to meet a friend for lunch, I’ll cross at a red light. At some level that is completely irrational. I can see the safest position: you should never cross the road at a red light. What could possibly be worth the risk of dying just because you don’t want the social embarrassment of being 30 seconds late to meet your friend? But that’s not how we lead our lives. Some risks we normalize. We know it’s dangerous to cross the street at a red light. I certainly don’t do it in the middle of a very busy four-lane roadway. But I look left and right, and I say, I don’t see any cars—I may as well cross.
There are other areas where we say, Well, that’s a risk where, if something happened, I would never forgive myself. It really does seem to depend on that background set of social norms—about which risks have been normalized, and which haven’t. We understand that there’s a risk in driving somewhere. But we think of driving as such a normal human activity. We take precautions—we wear seatbelts, we’ve invested in the safety of the cars, which are much better at protecting passengers in a car accident today than 30 years ago. All of that is good. I’m not against safety in general. But we understand that it would be really irrational to say, I’m never going to enter a car because of the risk of dying. It’s important to be able to get around, to be mobile, etc.
But somehow, when it comes to kids, we say, No, no, no. This is the area in which safety is the only approach. This is where the precautionary principle rules. This is where you must eliminate all potential risk of a bad outcome.
Skenazy: There was an interesting study done by sociologists or psychologists at the University of California, Irvine. One of the researchers was a woman named Barbara Sarnecka. She and her colleagues devised this fun—I’d say brilliant—study. They presented the same case to five separate groups of people. All the participants were demographically similar. The case was: a child is waiting alone in a car for half an hour without their parent. Group one was told the mom wasn’t there because she was just returning a book in the library slot and had passed out. She meant to be right back in the car, but ended up unconscious for half an hour. Group two was told the mom was doing some work for her job. Group three, she was exercising. Group four, she was volunteering—I forget which order exactly. Group five, she had gone to meet her lover for half an hour.
Then they asked each group, separately, on a scale of 1 to 10: How much danger was that child in during that half hour? While the results weren’t perfectly linear, they clearly showed this pattern: Group one rated the danger at a five. Group two, it’s a six. By the time they got to group five, they’re like, oh my God, that kid is in so much danger!
What the study showed is that we think we’re judging danger, but we’re actually judging parents. The more we disapprove of a parent, the more danger we confabulate their child having been in. And because we now believe that any child is in danger anytime their parent isn’t with them, we always assume that the parent is immoral. Because what kind of parent leaves their kid in danger?
Another example I was going to give you of a mom who was arrested—another story I broke—was a big case out in South Carolina. A single mom, Debra Harrell, was working her shift at McDonald’s during summer break. Her nine-year-old daughter normally came with her and sat in the restaurant playing on her laptop while the mom worked. But their laptop got stolen. So the daughter asked, could I please go to the park instead? It wasn’t far. Her friends were there. They served breakfast and lunch. There were sprinklers. And the mom said, okay, that sounds good.
So the kid goes for three days. On day three, a lady comes up:
“Little girl.”
“Yes?”
“Where’s your mother?”
“She’s working.”
“Where?”
“At McDonald’s. Want to call her? I have a phone—we can call her.”
“No, I don’t want to call her.”
Instead, the lady calls the police. Mom gets thrown in jail for a couple of days. Kid is taken away from her for seventeen days. The reason? The mom had “abandoned” the child, and anything terrible could have happened. Well, I wouldn’t call that abandonment. I’d call that my childhood—my mom letting me play at the park during the summer when I was young. Anything could have happened. But with a bunch of other kids and adults around, you’d really have to imagine a Liam Neeson movie: someone in a ski mask figuring out that one kid didn’t have a parent there, grabbing her, and driving off—and no one sees, no one stops them. It’s so impossible. It’s like a billion-to-one odds. Yet, the footage of the interrogation of the mom was released to the public. You see this man asking:
“So you thought she’d be okay?”
“Yeah, I thought she’d be okay.”
“You didn’t think about a sexual predator coming and taking her and having his way?”
“No. I didn’t think that.”
So if you’re not catastrophizing—if you’re not fantasizing a movie-plot threat—you’re bad. Somehow that makes your child “in danger.” It’s just this weird moment we’re in. I was just on another podcast with a woman who’d said—boldly, I think—what age do you think a kid can go into the grocery store, get a loaf of bread, pay for it, and come back out again if the mom is just waiting outside? And she said, I think five. She was raked over the coals for it. Once again, what do you think is happening inside that grocery store in the time it takes to buy a loaf of bread? The reason I get so hyper about this topic is that you can’t have a culture that makes its decisions—its laws, and even its incarcerations—based on a lie. A lie like: a kid going into a store is going to die. A kid playing at a park during the day, with other people around, is going to be kidnapped. Or a child walking home from a store is likely not to make it—and therefore, the mother must be so horrible that we’ve got to teach her a lesson in jail.
Mounk: I feel like there are these two levels of trying to calculate the acceptability of risk where people have a lot of resistance to engaging in trade-offs. For the first one, there’s a great example from allergies. I’m not a medical expert, but my understanding is that parents, understandably, are concerned about their children growing up in a reasonably clean environment. They want to keep a clean home and get a little nervous when the kid is on the ground in the park, maybe eating dog poop or whatever. But it turns out that one of the reasons the incidence of allergies has gone up a lot—at least according to some researchers—is because children now often grow up in an overly sanitized environment. So even though, in that moment, there probably is some real risk to the kid—consuming dirt, coming into contact with bacteria that might make them sick for a few days, or eating something that’s disgusting and perhaps bad for their health—in the long run, it’s actually good for the child, because it reduces this other kind of danger.
Presumably, there’s an equivalent here. Yes, there’s some risk—I know you get nervous when I say that—to a five-year-old being on their own in the store. Maybe a very remote risk. But it’s still some risk. But also, the kid is building the skills so that if they’re actually in a dangerous situation, they have the resources, the wherewithal, and the experience to deal with it. So there’s a trade-off between some calculated risk you’re exposing them to in Situation A, and the development of all the skills that are going to allow these kids not to run risks later in life—or to manage the risks that life’s going to throw at them, one way or another, in a better way. I think where the trade-off becomes even harder is when it comes to the interests of the parent.
Skenazy: How dare you mention the interests of the parent? What are you, some kind of baby hating monster?
Mounk: Yeah, exactly. Perhaps the parent is just having a nice time connecting with their spouse—which, by the way, is good for the kid. It’s good when parents don’t get divorced and still have some enjoyment in a busy schedule, by connecting with their spouse and watching a movie together or whatever. They could interrupt that to drive their kid to a friend’s house and engage in small talk with the other kid’s parents, who also don’t particularly want to be engaging in that small talk. Or they could just say, Yeah, sure—walk the one block to see your good friend, little Timmy. And perhaps there’s a genuine trade-off there. But that too is part of parenting.
It’s a problem if there’s no room for the self-concern of parents. Obviously, there should be a deep amount of concern for their kids—and they should prioritize their kids’ interests in all kinds of contexts. But sometimes the parent also needs to say, hey, it’s in my interest to have this downtime. To be able to connect with my spouse. To be able to work. To put food on the table. And it’s fine to trade that off against some tiny risk to the kid.
Skenazy: Right. So, first of all, you keep using the word “risk”, and I would use “normal life”. Let your kid have a normal life: walk home from school, play at the park, go to a friend’s house, go on a sleepover. Those things are no more risky, I would say, than eating solid food, or walking down the steps in the morning, or having a dog you could trip over. We just can’t keep calling them “risks” when they’re really just everyday life.
Mounk: To me, the more natural way to put it is: Risk is part of life. There’s no way to completely eliminate risk. Again, walking down the street is risky. Letting your kids play sports is a risk—you can have all kinds of injuries from sports. Driving in a car—there’s just no way of eliminating risk whatsoever. So to me, it’s more natural to acknowledge that there’s some small amount of risk involved in all of this. But there’s some small amount of risk involved in taking a shower or in anything you do.
Skenazy: That’s why whenever we say there’s a risk involved in going outside or walking to school, we also have to acknowledge that the same is true for everything else—eating solid food in the morning, having a loose brick in your driveway, whatever. So yes, we agree: risk is part of life. These are tiny, tiny risks in an ever safer world.
That brings us back to the idea of self-concern. That’s why the study about the kid waiting in the car for half an hour caused such apoplexy when people heard the mom had gone off to see her lover. Let’s imagine she was going off to have a tryst with her husband. I have a feeling it would still be rated a 10. Maybe a little less, but still high. Once again, the idea is that a mother made a rational decision that her kid was going to be fine—and then did something she wanted to do. And that alone was seen as immoral.
There was a case like this in New Jersey about 10 years ago. A mom left her kid in the car—he was asleep—and she didn’t want to drag him into the mall. She comes out, and he’s fine. But of course, somebody had called 911 to report a child left in the car. Now, I do want people to call 911 if they see a kid in a place like the IBM parking lot, where it’s clear that someone forgot the child and went into work. But I’ve dealt with parents who had the cops called on them when they parked right in front of the dry cleaner’s. There are plate-glass windows, they’re waving to their kid from inside, and still someone called the police. The justification is always the same: anything could have happened. But that’s just not happening.
So back to the New Jersey mom. She was returning something, she came back to the car, and was charged with child neglect. The case went to the appeals court, and the judges upheld the conviction. Three of them. They wrote that they didn’t even need to list all the “horribles”—they turned the adjective into a noun—that could have happened to that kid. Finally, it went to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which—God bless them—said, just because we can imagine terrible things happening doesn’t mean they’re likely. We cannot judge a mom for putting her child in danger when the dangers are entirely in our imagination. So they reversed the ruling. But think about it: here was a mom going about her day, returning something. It’s not urgent. Nothing’s going to catch fire if you don’t return a shirt to Macy’s. But it was treated as evil. Because she didn’t make her child’s presence her entire focus at that moment.
There’s something about this—parents even thinking about their own needs becomes suspect. Like that Simpsons’ scene—Helen Lovejoy saying, won’t someone please think of the children? That line became iconic because it captured this moral panic. We seem to reward people for coming up with ever more elaborate ways to accuse others of not having thought hard enough about all the bad things that could happen to kids. That’s the highest morality right now—not thinking about kids’ actual safety, but thinking about the worst-case scenario, even if it’s wildly improbable. And then asking, why weren’t you thinking that? And if the answer is, well, I was thinking about my own needs, then suddenly you're a horrible person. That’s why parents are so stressed and depressed—because the job now takes up literally every second and every inch of the day.
Mounk: This is my broader frustration with today’s parenting culture. I still see, in some places—like Italy and other parts of Southern Europe—an ability to integrate your child into your life more broadly. You end up spending a lot of time with your children, but they’re not always at the very center of attention. They’re not always the number-one priority. You go to a dinner party, you take your kid along. Hopefully there are some other kids to play with, and if not, the kid gets a little bored and falls asleep on a couch—but that’s OK. I think that has benefits for the child, because the child doesn’t always feel like they’re at the center of attention. They learn the social skills required to integrate into human society, where you’re not always the center of attention and not everyone is concerned with your every move. And of course, it’s much better for the parents. They actually have a better time with their children because they’re not so exhausted.
Whereas in the United States, there’s this idea that whenever you’re spending time with your children, they have to be at the very center of your focus. As a result, you then need all this time away—you’re hiring babysitters or whatever—because, my god, you need a break. You’re going crazy. That just seems like an equilibrium that’s really bad for both sides.
Skenazy: I have a friend, Chris Byrne—he’s known as “The Toy Guy”—who explained this to me really well. It’s not that kids and parents are always together now; it’s that, in the past, there used to be three separate worlds. There was the Kid World, which was full of candy, bike rides, and playing. There was the Adult World, which was so boring to us—parents talking about politics, who was having an operation, business stuff. And then there was Family World—dinner, vacations, things you did together. But it wasn’t every single second of the day that the kid wasn’t in school. Now, even schools beam information to parents constantly—what your kid got on their Spanish test, or, in preschool, whether they ate their orange segments or nuggets. So those three worlds have been mashed together.
The result? Depressed kids, because they have no autonomy or agency—and depressed parents, because they’re always with their kids. Wendy Mogel put it best in The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. She said: when you look at anything close up, you see the flaws. Now we’re so close to our kids that we see everything they do that’s unsafe, mean, slow, or suboptimal and we jump in to fix it, at which point, they stop fixing it themselves. They become passengers in their own lives, and the parents are in the driver’s seat. The real trick is to rebalance. Kids can’t be the center of the world all the time, because they shouldn’t always be in our world. Sometimes they need to be physically and psychologically separate, and so do parents.
That’s why I started Let Grow. I’m the president of Let Grow, the nonprofit that promotes childhood independence. It grew out of Free-Range Kids, the book I wrote. We’ve developed two free initiatives, ideal for schools or individuals, but especially powerful when used in schools, because they solve the collective action problem by getting everyone to do something at the same time. The first one is called the “Let Grow Experience.” It’s a one-sentence homework assignment: go home and do something new, on your own, with your parents’ permission but without their help. Jonathan Haidt, one of Let Grow’s co-founders, talks about how important it is to get everyone doing something at once. If every parent is suddenly sending their kid out to do something independently, there’s no shame, no fear. It’s just normal.
So one parent says, “I’m having my kid get the groceries.”
Another: “Mine’s going to get a haircut.”
Someone else: “Can mine go with yours? Guitar lessons are next to judo.”
Everyone is letting their kids go for the first time because they didn’t realize they could, or they were worried they’d be judged if they did. But now it’s homework. Some kids go and actually get the haircut. Some ditch the plan and adopt a puppy. One parent sent their kid to get a haircut, and they came back with a mohawk. Fine—that’s agency. Whether they succeed or screw up, whether they forget the change, get lost, or buy the wrong kind of bread—none of that matters. What matters is that they went. Once that happens, the parent realizes that things don’t have to be perfect. They’re going to be okay.
Right now, kids live in a very tightly-wound system: one wrong move and your grades drop, and then you don’t get into the right high school, and then the right college, and then it’s the gutter. Or someone else gets the brass ring. The “Let Grow Experience” is a release valve. You come back saying, That was fun. Or hard. But I did it. Or I screwed up—but it wasn’t the end of the world. Parents need to realize that kids are okay even when they’re not being supervised every second. That’s what the “Let Grow Experience” does. The kids are doing it. They’re comparing notes. The parents are too. And it breaks the collective action problem.
The other Let Grow initiative is even simpler: keep schools open for no phones, mixed-age, loose-parts, free play. Play like we used to do—balls, chalk, cardboard boxes, rocks, kids of different ages. No adults organizing it. Nobody tells them what to do. Some kids start a soccer game. Some play jump rope. Some draw with chalk. Some throw rocks. It doesn’t matter what because then they learn that no one wants to play with you if you’re a jerk. It’s more fun if you make up your own rules. Suddenly, all the social-emotional skills we worry about start to flourish because kids have always developed those skills in groups, by doing things on their own. That’s my commercial for Let Grow’s free programs—as endorsed by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation.
Mounk: Excellent. Those are really good initiatives, because as you’re saying, it is important to get the collective action right. It’s much easier to take that first step—if you’re not used to it—of letting your kid go off on their own, go around the neighborhood, and so on, when other parents are doing it too and the community has some awareness of it. But what if that fails? What if you’re trying to persuade your school to adopt the program, or you get together with some neighborhood parents and they’re horrified? They say, no, no, no—we would never want to do that, and suddenly you’re on your own.
One of the things I think is so challenging about parenting is that, if you're just an individual (without kids), you can kind of chart your own way. If your political opinions are different from those of most of your neighbors—who cares? You find the neighbors who think more like you do, and hang out with them. The fact that your next-door neighbor disagrees with you politically doesn’t really matter—unless you’re in some very unusual situation. If you want to swear in your own home, you can swear. That’s fine. If you think it’s fine for your kids to swear, well—that’s more complicated. If they swear at school, and the result is that their best friend’s parents say, you’re not allowed to play with that kid anymore, suddenly your child is paying the price. They lose their best friend. So you can’t even swear in your own kitchen. That’s what makes this kind of thing so tough. You live in a community that’s very safety-oriented, and you say, hey, let me tell you about Jonathan Haidt’s endorsement of this, or listen to this podcast with Lenore Skenazy, and it’s not working—it’s not helping—you’re not getting anyone on board with this new way of thinking. Then what? What can you do as an individual parent? What can you do in your own life to incorporate those moments of free play, those empowering tasks, even if your community isn’t with you?
Skenazy: Well, that’s why we do love it when schools take this on. Actually, I just heard of a church that’s doing it as part of its faith initiative. The idea is: don’t just trust yourself—trust God. Let your kids do things. One neighborhood I spoke in a couple of months ago—Piedmont, California—started a very cool thing. They have a group that’s anti-phones, and that group sent out an email to all the parents saying, hey, let’s do this Free Play Friday thing. It’s also mentioned in The Anxious Generation. The idea is simple: just send your kids to one of these two parks—and don’t stay with them. That way, the parents who don’t want to participate don’t have to, but the ones who do have permission and support from others. If you’re the only parent in your entire neighborhood who wants your kids to walk to the store, have them do it with a sibling. We even have a little card—it’s small, I don’t have it on me—which says: I’m not lost or neglected. My parents know I’m out here. If you don’t believe me, here’s their phone number. It gives kids something simple to show, and reassures concerned adults.
Honestly, I’ve heard stories like this all the time. But this happened with my own kid. Why am I telling a hypothetical? I used to let my son, Izzy, walk home from PS 116 in Manhattan. His best friend was Chris, who was a year older and bigger. Chris’s mom said, I’ll let Chris walk home—if he can walk with Izzy. So just a little bit of breaking the ice like that can normalize it for other parents. I think parents are stuck in a collective action trap. I once talked to a dad who said that every morning, he walks his seven-year-old to the bus stop and waits with her. I asked why. He said, I don’t know. It was just something that had become de rigueur—something he did on autopilot. Sometimes it just takes a nudge. One of the things I suggest in my book is, if you’re already standing there with your kid at the bus stop, and there are three other parents with five other kids, just say, I’ll watch them all. That simple gesture can go a long way—just reminding people that we’re in this together. Some parents might be a little weirded out but many might be relieved. Maybe they can get to work a bit earlier or grab a coffee, now that they don’t have to wait for the bus. It’s about asserting your own trust in your neighborhood, your kid, your parenting and your local park. That trust can go a long way in helping other people remember: That’s right. I moved to this neighborhood because it’s safe. Letting my kid wait at the bus stop with other kids doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. Sometimes we just need to be jolted back into reality.
Mounk: What would you say to somebody who listens to all of this and is intellectually convinced but just isn’t in the habit of giving their kids that kind of freedom, and feels torn? Someone who says, Look, you’ve convinced me. I think it’s important for my child to develop that kind of autonomy. I think it would make my own life better. And they’re about to do it but something makes them pull back.
They panic and think, What if the risk is higher than she said? What if something—however improbable—actually happens? What if there’s no external danger, but someone calls the cops anyway? What if CPS gets involved? What do you say to the parent who, rationally, wants to do this—who agrees with you—but still has trouble getting themselves there because it’s such an emotional issue?
Skenazy: A bunch of things. First of all, I'm so sorry that this is the era we’re living in—one that constantly undermines our trust in ourselves, our neighbors, our parenting, and our kids. That’s just an evil miasma to be breathing in every day. But I’d say a couple of things.
One is that there was a really interesting pilot study done on independence-as-therapy for kids diagnosed with anxiety. I’d recommend having him on your podcast—his name is Camilo Ortiz, a psychology professor at Long Island University. It was a five-week study. In week one, he met with the parents—parents saying things like, My kid is so anxious, he won’t go upstairs or downstairs in the house without us. He’s 10. Or, My daughter won’t ever sleep in her own bed. And he told them, independence is good. In week two, he met with the kid and the parents. Now, normally as a cognitive behavioral therapist, he might say, You’re afraid to go upstairs without your dad? Let’s try five minutes tonight with a timer, and next week we’ll try ten. But instead, he didn’t mention fear or deficits at all. He just said, You’re 10. I’ll bet there’s some stuff you want to do on your own. And it turns out that even these highly anxious kids had things they wanted to do—quirky things. One wanted to play chess with an adult at the park. One wanted to ride the Long Island Railroad. Another wanted to walk home from school. One wanted to sell bracelets at school. And the parents had to say yes—because this was therapy. The therapist was prescribing it. They had to do one independent thing every other day for four weeks. And by the end of that period, the kids who had said they were “worried most of the time” were now saying they were “worried a little bit of the time.”
So when you recognize the psychological importance of independence—how it transforms your kid, and how it transforms you—that should give some lift to an anxious parent. Because now you’re seeing a different kid. Their confidence builds your confidence. Your confidence, in turn, builds theirs. That should move the needle. It’s not just that it’s a good idea or that it’ll save you time, but that it’s a psychologically crucial foundation of childhood, and we’ve denied it. Kids are suffering because of it. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is that we are changing the laws. We’ve passed laws in nine states so far, and two more are just waiting on the governor’s signature. Our “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law says that neglect is when you put a child in serious, obvious danger—not simply when you take your eyes off them. It is not a serious, obvious danger to let your child walk to school—unless they’re in a demilitarized zone or an active shooting neighborhood. You know what serious danger is. It’s different from imagining something bad might happen. Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Connecticut, Montana, and now Georgia have adopted our law (Georgia, in the wake of that mom getting arrested for letting her son walk to town). Florida and Missouri—or it may be Indiana, but I think it’s Missouri—are next in line. The bills have passed the legislatures and are just waiting on the governor’s signature.
So if you’re interested in having this law in your state, go to letgrow.org, click on “State Laws,” and you’ll find a form to fill out. We’re working on five more states for next year. And yes, in some places it’s gone down in flames—but we’ve had success in nine (almost eleven).
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Lenore discuss how these parenting trends affect college students, and how to empower young people to resolve interpersonal issues without appealing to authority. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
