Okay, so tell us what happened here.

Okay, well, what happened was bizarre, actually.

A woman named Carrie Ann Parkinson, eight months pregnant, takes a walk in the morning, actually a bike ride in the morning with her five-year-old son, Sam, around their gated community.

So gated that there are guards everywhere, and they're surrounded by three golf courses, you know, leafy and quiet.

And then when they get home, it's about lunchtime, and her son says, well, Mom, can I go back and collect some more goose feathers? It's the favorite thing for him to do.

He loves collecting goose feathers.

Mom wants to make lunch.

So then why is this case important to all families? And can kids really handle this kind of freedom?

There are these inherent risks of young children being on their own, aren't there?

Well, there are inherent risks in the fact that we're alive on the earth.

And it's horrible what happened to that child with autism.

Obviously, it's just obviously a horrible, horrible tragedy.

Carrie Ann knows her son.

He does not have autism.

She has seen him safely cross the street.

And so these are kids that need some supervision when outside and shouldn't be on their own.

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 kidnap 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 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 And it's the same thing as exposure therapy.

How would you characterize where we are?

It's a human reaction at times, right?

It is.

Uh, uh, to be concerned and worried, I think, is the human condition, and actually, I think one of the reasons that childhood has become so strange is because parents think that they can avoid worry and anxiety by simply being with their kids all the time, which is just not something that works for either generation.

But worst-first thinking is actually a phrase I coined, and I'm so happy to hear somebody else use it.

[laughs] It has not become super popular yet.

Um, but I was trying to counter the idea of stranger danger, and stranger danger, it, it just, it sounds so true, in part because it rhymes.

So I came up with worst-first trying to counter it.

Lenore, uh, what would, what would normal look like to you in a, in a healthy way?

But I also was really proud of her for being able to do that.

Yeah, it's not a but.

Let me just pause here.

You know, I was scared, but also proud.

No, those go together.

Right.

I wasn't there.

can I be helping?

Mm-hmm.

And the majority of parents, even of 14-year-olds, will not let them leave the block.

I mean, it's not me coming up with a statistic.

[laughs] That's, that's... 14 years old, they're like, in two years they're gonna be driving.

And, and I, because I've been studying this issue so long, how children lost their independence, I, I have a, a wonderful reference book from 1981.

It was part of a whole child development book series, and this was, uh, the book for parents of six-year-olds, and it was called Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant.

And it has a checklist of what neurotypical six-year-olds should be able to do before starting first grade.

... uh, is, is going through, has gone through as well.

Mm-hmm.

And the majority of parents, even of 14-year-olds, [laughs] will not let them leave the block.

I mean, it's not me coming up with a statistic.

[laughs] That's, th- 14 years old, they're like, in two years they're gonna be driving.

And, and I, because I've been studying this issue so long, how children lost their independence, I, I have a, a wonderful reference book from 1981.

It's part of a whole child development book series, and this was, uh, the book for parents of six-year-olds, and it was called Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant.

And it has a checklist of what neurotypical six-year-olds should be able to do before starting first grade.

... uh, is, is going through, has gone through as well.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs] And a guy named Peter Gray, who's a professor at Boston College, professor of psychology, who studies the importance of play.

Just kids playing with each other, different ages, just goofing around, making things happen.

And then Danielle Shuckman, who used to be the chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech on campus.

And we were all concerned exactly about what you're saying, that kids were, um, fragile, right? We'd been treating them as fragile, and that gradually made them fragile.

Treat them as incompetent, and gradually they don't realize h- not that they are incompetent, but how competent they could be.

And trying to change kids at, you know, when they turn college age, which is what the, uh, my co-founders were originally concerned about, um, is a late-stage intervention.

so much to, like, 20 minutes.

... crippled and paralyzed in parenting?

parenting?That's, um, basically you've just asked the question that gets me up every day.

[laughs] You know, the, the nine-year-old who rode the subway is 27 and married at this point, so it's been a, a long time perseverating [laughs] on that question.

But you nailed it.

It's not, uh, it's not that parents haven't always worried.

Parents have always wanted their kids to survive and thrive and go on to live, you know, happy and productive lives, and also love them and, you know, and, and have joy in their lives as well.

And that has not changed, I don't think, since the beginning of time, and probably since the beginning of our species.

Yeah.

How do you navigate

that? Um, there's two, there's three answers.

Um, the first one is, I'm just going to tell you what let grow does.

Cause that will answer part of this.

So when we started let grow, I didn't want to be a thought leader anymore because people would always nod along.

Oh, that makes so much sense.

Yes.

of...

Mm-hmm

... is that the majority of 14-year-olds are not allowed off their block.

But there was a book called Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant, and it just has a checklist of what normal six-year-olds were doing back in 1981.

And it was, "Can you tell your right foot from your left foot? Can you," you know, uh, I don't know, "Have you lost a baby tooth?" And one of the things was, "Does your child go four to eight blocks in any direction to school, to the store, to a friend's house?" So a six-year-old was going eight blocks, and now a 14-year-old is not allowed off their block.

Right.

That, that trust does not exist.

Secondly, we're not talking about the experience of race, and it is very important to talk about the experience of both race and class.

You know, for our film, we interviewed this, this mother, Nadia, who lived in a predominantly white neighborhood.

Um, so you've been talking about this for years, kids n- needing, uh, independence, and so tell us about kinda what's going on right now that feels different culturally and politically.

Okay, I can tell you the great stuff, and I can tell you the stuff that makes me go, "Ah, I can't believe it." [chuckles] The, the great stuff, uh, start with that, is that, um, since 2018, excuse me, Let Grow! has helped pass what we call reasonable childhood independence laws, and at this point it's 13 states.

And the laws say, like everybody else, we hate neglect.

You cannot neglect your kids.

You cannot leave them at home for a weekend with nothing to eat but heroin.

You can't let your three-year-old hitchhike home from preschool along, you know, I-85.

But there's a difference between real neglect, which is bad, and trusting your kids with some unsupervised time.

Right?

Again, that's learningtomompodcast.com slash makeup for my go-to staples of clean makeup that I can wear without any worry of transferring harmful chemicals to my kids.

No, it's just really interesting.

What they say is in real life.

They just want to be with their friends.

They don't want to be at soccer and they don't want to be online.

But these are the only choices we give them, right? So many kids' lives these days are so structured because we're so worried that our kids will be hurt or fall behind if there isn't an adult with them or if they aren't inside.

We put them in organized activities or...

Yeah.

Richard R., for instance, says, uh, "Do you have any suggestions on how to constructively help our children let their own children grow without risking undermining their trust in us as caregivers?"

caregivers?"I feel for grandparents, 'cause a lot of us can remember, uh, this free range childhood and then we see the kids scheduled within an inch of their lives.

I'd say maybe you just, you know, happen to leave the...

You know, Peter Gray had a great TEDx talk about how free play is just so formative for kids.

And so maybe if you help the parents see without lecturing them that, like, this free time is not stupid wasted time, interstitial time between the important time of, 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.

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, um, then it becomes something that's sort of speaking their language.

Mm-hmm

[laughs]

But, 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 the, call it the adult takeover of childhood because it, it's so vast that the, uh, what is it? 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 nine to 11, which is tweens, right, kinda old, um, 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, you know, the store shopping together, only 50% will let their kid go to another aisle.

Okay? [laughs] That's a real statistic.

That's University of Michigan.

Hmm.

[laughs]

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

You got, especially if you got, like, a, a bunch of kids of different ages, like, like, the Peanuts gang.

Well, they have to decide what they're gonna play, and then they have to make the teams kinda 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, [laughs] how to get by, and executive function, focus, compromise, you know, communication, just all the skills they need to be a functioning human being.

And if, if, like, a, a 12-year-old ends up pitching to a five-year-old, which would never, ever happen in adult organized sports, well, there's, there's no glory in striking out [laughs] a kindergartner, right? So the older kid throws the ball kinda gently, and the little kid taps it, and the older one goes, "My God, it's a home run." [laughs] You know, okay? A- a- and the little kid is so ecstatic, right? But the older one is, too, 'cause he's doing something new.

He is learning how to empathize and how to be generous, how to be an adult, and that's the most teachable moment of all.

[applause]

(laughs)

... right? Or on vacation.

But it wasn't every single second of the day that the kid was not in school.

And by the way, schools beam all the information out to parents all the time throughout the day too, so they know exactly what the kid got on their Spanish test, and if they're in preschool, they know if they ate all their orange segments or all their nuggets.

So- so the three worlds got mashed together, and the result is, once again, these depressed kids 'cause they have no autonomy, no agency, and the depressed parents 'cause they're always with their kids.

And- and Wendy Mogel said it best, she wrote The Blessings of a Skin Deep, and she wrote that when you look at anything close up, you see the flaws, right? And now we're so close to our kids that we see everything they're doing that's unsafe, or mean, or slow, or suboptimal, and so then we jump in to fix it, at which point they don't fix it, and so they are sitting back.

They're sort of the passengers in their lives, and the parents are taking control.

They panic and they think, "But what if? You know, what if the risk is higher than she said? What if some, th- th- you know, the risk is really low but something, some other horrible thing happened to me? What if there's no external risk but the cops will be called and, and I'll have to answer to them, and CPS is gonna be on my back?" For the people who perhaps rationally say, "Look, absolutely I wanna go do this," and have trouble getting themselves there because it's such an emotive issue, what would you say to them?