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America’s Worst Mom: Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway · The Parent Tap

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever stopped your kid from walking to the store because you were scared a neighbor would call the cops, this episode is for you.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: They called her America's worst mom.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Then she helped change the law in a dozen plus dates.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Lenora Skinesi of Free Range Kids and Let Grow.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: She's gonna talk to us about why youth anxiety is up, childhood independence is down.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Today's guest says that's not a coincidence, and she's brought a TED Talk, a nonprofit, and a federal bill to prove it.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: In one minute, what's the single smallest independent move a nervous parent can make this weekend that actually moved the needle for their kid?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, I'd say do something with a friend.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: You and another mom or dad get together and decide to let your kids go.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: You can be sitting at Starbucks, have the kids go to the other end of the of the strip mall and get something from the dollar store.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: Something very simple.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's easier if you're sitting with a friend because you're a little distracted, and it's more fun for your kid if they're doing something with a friend, and you'll probably f feel a little reassured because it's two kids together.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Your TED Talk, I just watched it before we got on this call.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I love the message of the independence, giving kids independence, letting them do things on their own, having the free range opportunities that I feel like we grew up with, right?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly I gave up some of it.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely more than than my kids have the opportunity to say, honestly.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, it was unheard of to be inside when I was a kid.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's like the norm.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's kind of what I'm seeing and witnessing myself.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: See the merits of both, and I see how both topics are super important.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us the importance of free range and tell us what we're doing if we we stifle that.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is it causing our kids to grow up missing?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, I don't want to blame us parents because we are living in a culture that has really normalized the idea of constant adult supervision.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I just brought along two little, I don't know, visual aids, which I realize some people will just be listening, so I'll describe them.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: But I just want to show the where where our culture has brought us.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then we can talk about what are the implications for kids.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is a book from 1981 called Your Six-Year-old Loving and Defiant.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: And it is, it was part of a series of child development books from 1981 for different age kids.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_02: And this is if your kid is six years old, about to enter first grade, there's a list in here of things by a developmental psychologist that a normal, neurotypical six-year-old would be able to do.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: For instance, can he ride?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's back when they used to use he instead of they.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: Can he ride a small two-wheel bike without helper wheels?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Can he tell his left hand from his right hand?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Can he travel alone in the neighborhood four to eight blocks to the store, school, playground, or to a friend's home?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: So you got to think of four to eight blocks that the kid age six was walking by him or herself before they entered first grade.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that was that was a norm, right?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't this is radical free-range parenting.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then there was a study done just this past year, survey by the Institute for Family Studies.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: They surveyed 24,000 American parents, so a significant study.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: And they asked, What age do you let your kids out of the house, off the block, out of the neighborhood without you?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the majority of parents up through and including age 14 won't let them off the block.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I made a little graph.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I realize that your listeners aren't going to hear it, but you should know that there's a tiny little speck on the graph, and that is how far we allow 14-year-olds to walk today.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And then there is a skyscraper on the other side of the graph, which shows how far six-year-olds were allowed to walk in living memory.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if yeah, okay, let's just wow for a second because I keep thinking like if if kids today, if if 14-year-olds were four to eight inches shorter than they were in 1981, we would notice if they had four to eight times more teeth, we would go, wow, something weird is in the water.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: But here they are, treated like younger than half their age, right?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: They're treated like babies, not even big six-year-olds.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and they have four to eight times less independence than kids, six-year-olds.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's a very, to me, it's a shocking.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was so happy when I finally got these statistics.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: This this is the first year I got that statistic about the 14-year-olds.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, some 14-year-olds are allowed off the block.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the fact that this would be normalized, it's like keeping your kid in the crib.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so you're asking, what is what is happening to kids when they are given so much less independence than we know for a fact that this exact species in this exact country is is capable of.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it's sort of like, well, how would you feel if you were you're in the crib and it's getting tight and the slats are pressing in and you're really tired of the mobile, and you know, you'd finally like to use a blanket because you're not gonna die.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: And and you're told, no, for your safety, for your safety, I'm just doing this for you.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: And meantime, I'm gonna have the monitor on the crib because that's also for your safety.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if there's like no independence, you're under constant surveillance, you're you're sort of undertrusted and you're underdeveloped because you haven't had the day-to-day experience of dealing with the dog that's barking on the way to school and finding your way home and buying yourself a candy bar and making friends with the older kids who are playing basketball on your route home.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: And and so the what's happening, and I don't blame parents, I blame this culture that has normalized constant and excessive supervision.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, what's happening is that as kids' independence has been going down over the decades, and this is not according to me, this is Journal of Pediatrics, their anxiety and depression have been going up.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: And you could sort of understand that.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because let me ask you, you said it was it was unheard of to be inside.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: What were you doing outside when you were a kid?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sports, sports, any sport, really.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Some organized by you, or was it always oh, so bikes, and was it always an organized activity, like an adult run league, or was it just like, hey, let's go.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Adults were never out there.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: Never.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: So, and here you were six years old, you're six years younger, so that's really exciting because you were with these gods who were like 12, 13, 14.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: What did you get out of it?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, I got a lot out of it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that helps me, it gave me confidence knowing, especially in the sports area, like knowing I could compete with people six, seven years older than me.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm just gonna let that sink in for a second.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Fondest memories of your life.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: And presumably you've had a lot of other stuff happen since then.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: I have college, gone on vacation, married and kids, and yet.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I sometimes I give a lot of lectures, and what I often ask the audience is to to think of something that they love doing as a kid that they don't let their own kids do.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll ask you.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: My dot we live close enough for our daughter to walk to school.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: She's five.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's something we haven't even considered.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's just it seems like there's a lot of we've gone backwards in a sense where we're just not trusting our kids to sort of make those decisions or be capable enough to to go through with it.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like I my wife and I wouldn't even consider letting her walk to school, but it's like a 10-minute walk at most.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so that's that's one example because I used to walk to the bus every every day, and I always walk to school when I walk to high school, and it's something I just haven't considered for my own five-year-old.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: All I can say is I walked to school at five too.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, five is is an age that most people are are at this point not willing to consider letting their kids do anything on their own.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: But but what's interesting is that the reasons are they feel rational.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: It feels like it's a it's a great thing.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm keeping my kids safe.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: But but in terms of crime, uh what year were you born?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: 1986.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: 86, okay.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, crime was going up for about your first six years of life.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: But seven years, uh it hit '93, it hit a peak, and it's been going down since then.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I I would never say there's no crime.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, there is still crime, and obviously there are cars, right?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: But in terms of our own experiences versus now, crime is lower.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if you go to letgrow.org and you scroll to the very bottom, you can click on crime statistics.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I just collect crime graphs from the FBI and I put them up there, and they all go 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, their peak around 93, 94, and then they come down.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: They go up a little during COVID and then they come down again.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: And even this past year was like one of the lowest crime rates on record and the lowest homicide rate on record.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's it's really, if you go to let grow, let grow, you will find them there.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And so what has happened is that we've had a culture that has really trained us to think in terms of the worst case scenario in almost any time that we let our kids do anything on their own.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: We don't think of the worst case scenario when we think, oh, I couldn't drive my kid to the dentist.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: What if there's a drunk driver?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: What if there's a tractor trailer?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: What if a car, what if we are getting stalled on the train tracks?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: We don't, we don't catastrophize in that sense.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we don't catastrophize when we think, oh, I couldn't live in a house with stairs.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: What if they fall down tumbling head first and then it hits vertebrae number three?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: We don't do that, but we do that anytime our kids leave the house.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: What if some guy comes along and he's got a white van and he says he's looking for his puppy and I never see my kid again?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: What if a giant truck comes by and it hits my kid and it never keeps going and it's a hit and we we've somehow just decided that anything that happens outside the home is going to be not only bad, but disastrous, catastrophic.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to blame the parents if it ever does.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we're going to become so afraid of that that we won't let our kids do anything.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's the we've taken away any risk of them walking however many 10 minutes to school.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: But there is this new risk of all this anxiety and depression, which is less dramatic, right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like suddenly taken by a van.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's like over the years, it's like, how come my kid doesn't want to do anything?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: How come my kid is scrolling?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: At this age, I would be running outside on Saturday mornings and meet my buddies, and she just wants to sit on the couch.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's there's no such thing as no trade-offs.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: And the trade-off we've made for our exorbitant fears of kids being outside without us is that we have them inside with us, and it's not good.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: Me as America's worst moment.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone a long time ago.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a poem about it.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's such a great idea.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I don't know if it's a great title.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: You embrace it seems like you embrace it and you're not going to be able to do it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: He's married at this point.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: So it's been a long time since he was a nine-year-old.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it seemed like your your child really you described that story, and I don't want to butcher it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: I probably will, but you basically described how he had such a great sense of just independence and like and just was really like proud of himself for getting through the subway system at nine years old.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: And as a parent, too, that makes you proud when your kid does something on their own, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like so that I I totally understand that feeling and that sense of that.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Given all the the positives of a situation like that, why do we in 2026 think about throwing our kid on the subway?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Someone's gonna call CPS, someone's like something bad's gonna happen to our kid.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we think of the worst situation?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas back in the day, maybe we didn't.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what I call this worst first thinking.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, when I let my son ride the subway and I wrote a newspaper column about it, but why I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: Two days later, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: I was just on NPR again, like three weeks ago, talking about the same thing.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's just sort of a perennial story.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: And at some point, most of the interviewers would go off topic, which was my kid was fine, he was excited, I was happy, the end, and go, but what if the opposite had happened?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: What if he had never come home?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: And and I never understood why they were asking, because obviously they'd know how I felt if he'd never come home.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: But why were they taking a positive story and turning it into not only a negative story, he got lost, he was confused, he lost the$20 you gave him.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, they've turned it into he's dead and buried and it's all your fault.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason they did that is because cultures get addicted to certain stories, right?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: If you read a romance novel and in the end, Count Ostrovsky marries the Countess instead of the scullery maid who's so beautiful and sings to the birds in the morning, you would hate that book because it's state that a romance novel has a story.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: We expect that story.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: And similarly, the story that we've come to expect and and weirdly love to the point where Law and Order SVU, the rape and murder of small children and other vulnerable people, is the longest-running non-cartoon on television.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: There are stories we like.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And for some reason, we love the story of a child by themselves in the real world who ends up dead or wrapped in some horrible situation.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: And your brain, your brain gets a message after a while.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's something called the availability heuristic, it's it's a psychological term.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: And it means that the easier it is for your brain to picture something happening, the more likely you think it is.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: And if you've been filled with 27 years of law and order SVU and an entire Liam Neeson taken franchise and a podcast world that, aside from Ryan's show, is mostly true crime, that's what's up there.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's very easy to picture that episode or this episode or remember that horrible story.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And it is impossible to picture 180 million children, since I let my sub kid go on the subway, who have walked to the bus stop by themselves, gotten on the bus, had a boring day at school, gotten back on the bus, come home, and walked home from the bus because you can't picture it.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: And you certainly can't picture what is 180 million kids, but you can picture that one kid.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so our minds have really been corrupted, I'd say, by the media.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the media is happy to do this because the more compelling a story, and I'll tell you what is not a compelling story, kid walks to bus stop and comes home later.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: That's not a compelling story.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: The most compelling stories get the eyeballs, the eyeballs get the money, right?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: For whether it's a social media channel or an old-fashioned TV channel.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so they just keep giving us the stuff that's going to wire us to watch, to be unable to take our eyes away.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then our brains are filled with this.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's also this desire if something bad happens, you always want to blame someone.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so if something bad does happen, you want to blame, oh, well, why wasn't she with him?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Why wasn't she there?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we we've gotten into this bad habit of imagining something terrible happened.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: And when it does, which is rare, then we blame the parent for having been made a rational decision that my kid can play at the at the park, my kid can walk to the bus stop.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And once in a zillion times something bad happens, and we say, see, it's her fault, as opposed to see, fate is so fickle and unpredictable.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: We just have to throw our hands in the air and pray to God for don't don't kill our kids.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: We can't we can't prevent everything, right?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Even having a mobile phone, letting our kids scroll.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's dangers there just with that, that right, what the what they're gonna see, what they're gonna experience.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: And and what you said is so true.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: We romanticize true crime in this.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up, honestly.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Nancy Grace was my inspiration for getting into the listening to podcasts and stuff like that.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's been in my background and my playing in my head for the last 15 years.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe that's why I draw that that connection of like, oh, I don't know, I would never let my kid do that.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: But I love what you said there is how many millions of kids have done that and why the news cycle is the way that it is, because it draws the clicks, draws the money, and we just we hyper-fixate and hyper-focus focus on this type of scenario.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: What are the dangers of just keeping our kids inside, letting them on our phones, our tablets, or computers, and not letting them have that free range or that interaction with the kids in the neighborhood?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: First, I'm gonna tell you what Le Grow does, and then I'm gonna tell you about the dangers.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: So Le Grow was started about 10 years ago by me, Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation, Peter Gray, who's a professor of psychology who studies the importance of mixed-age free play, and Daniel Schuckman, who used to be chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech on campus.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what we all recognized is what I just showed you in that first graph is that kids' independence has been plummeting and their anxiety and fragility have been going up.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: And what we also realized is two things.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: John Heid always says that a collective problem needs a collective solution.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: If nobody got your kids' phones until eighth grade, then no kid would feel left out in sixth grade without a phone because it would be a collective solution.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Similarly, if nobody is letting their kid leave the block at ages 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, then nobody knows when they're allowed to let their kids leave the block.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: But if everybody started doing this earlier, then you would have a collective, collective solution to the collective problem of when am I allowed to let my kid have Ryan's childhood, running after his friends, playing outside, building these incredibly fantastic memories and a wonderful relationship with his brother.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: So how do you collectively get people to start opening the door more?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we have a free program for schools.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's called the Let Grow Experience.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Here I have to just sniffle for a second.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm getting over a cold.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the Let Grow Experience free is where teachers, K through 12, give kids a homework assignment once a month that says, go home and do something new on your own that you want to do, for some reason you haven't done yet, with your parents' permission, but without your parents.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And each month there's a different theme.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Do something with a friend, do something for your community.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like climb a tree, go to the store, make pancakes, play at the park, whatever it is.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so everybody is doing this.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: Finally, the parents are letting the kids go because it's homework.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And once they do, you've gone from, oh my God, what if this horrible thing happens?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: I could never forgive myself, forget it, to look at my kid.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: Look at he just, he finally look at he's coming in.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: He just had the best day ever.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: He was playing baseball at the park with his buddies without adults.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: They figured out he hit he hit a home run or he struck out every time and he still doesn't care because he got to play with the older kids and it was so exciting.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: And finally they they tussled his hair.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: And when they said, This is great, come back tomorrow.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: You are so proud when your kid does something on their own that that is what breaks through the fear cycle and brings you into the trust cycle.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: I can trust you, I can trust my neighbors, I can trust my parenting, I can trust the odds, right?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you're asking what happens when we don't allow kids to do any of that, well, we asked kids themselves how, or this was me and Jonathan Haidt and his chief researcher, a guy named Zach Rausch, last summer did a did a study with the Harris poll.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: And we asked kids ages eight to twelve, excuse me, how would you I'm I'm reading my actual question, how would you rather spend time with friends?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: And they had a choice of free play, like you were talking about as a kid, right?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: No adults, no organized activities, or in an organized activity like soccer or ballet or chess, or online.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that could be video games or social media or whatever.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Anyways, I'm gonna show you the graph and then I'm gonna explain it to the listeners.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: So this giant part, the the biggest one by far, is just free play.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: Second choice among the kids age age to 12 was organized activities like again, ballet and soccer.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: And very last, 20 points lower, is online.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: So we have kids who are scroll scrolling, doom scrolling after school, going in their rooms, sitting on their beds, not moving a muscle, right?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Not contributing to the world, not smelling a flower, not learning how to skip a rock, doing nothing.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we keep saying it's their fault because they're just so addicted to their phones.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, they're not.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: By their own admission, they desperately want to be with friends playing, and we don't let them, and then we blame them for being in the virtual world instead of in the real world.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if you don't allow them to have the real world, then you've created a doom scroller.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: And even the kids themselves, we asked them, we asked them one other thing from this survey was agree or disagree.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: I would spend less time online if there were more friends in my neighborhood to play with in person.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll show you the graph here.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: Green is that's exactly true.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's 73% of kids.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: So kids are desperate.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Kids know what they're missing.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a starving person knows I need food.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: And we keep saying, well, here's a food pellet.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: That should be fine.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, no, I need food.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, here's a pellet.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: This will give you everything you need.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, I would really like to have a meatball sub.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, well, too bad.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're addicted to those food pellets, aren't you?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, no, I'm not.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't have an alternative.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: So I eat the food pellets.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: I love your charts and your handy, just the way you phrase things, it puts it in perspective.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, I never thought of it that way.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's amazing.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: How do we get this in?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a kindergartner.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: How do I get this program in her classroom?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what's the steps a parent would take to kind of get this adopted?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, thanks for asking.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: So once again, it's called the Let Grow Experience.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I wouldn't recommend just you going to the to the teacher or to the principal.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'd say find a couple other parents who think that this is a cool idea.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you're not going there saying I'm going to shove this down your throat.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And get you fired if you don't do this.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: But like, have you heard of this idea?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's free.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe you'd want to try it one month and see how it goes.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's recommended in the Anxious Generation book.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's also recommended in the Amazing Generation book, which is the sort of the anxious generation for kids.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: All of us at Let Grow are promoting this.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And there's there's these studies being done now of independence as therapy for kids with a diagnosis of anxiety.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the therapy is basically the let grow experience on steroids.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Instead of doing one new thing a month, you do one new thing a day for four weeks in a row.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: And the parents have to be on board because this is the therapy for their kid.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it has shown such amazing promise.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_02: There's now a one million dollar three-year randomized control study being done of it.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: Because if it works as it did in the pilot study, and if it works as we've seen in schools, it's free, it's fast, it's fun, there's no downside, there's no drugs.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so why wouldn't you give kids back this part of childhood that seems to be a a lack of which is leading them to be droopy, right?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: Passive and lonely and inactive and depressed and anxious.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And if this is part of the answer, it doesn't have to be the whole answer, but if this is part of the answer and it barely takes any class time, doesn't cost any money, why wouldn't you try it?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'd love that.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna go into my classroom, be like, I'm Ryan McDonough and I interviewed Lenore Skinese.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right, right.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: This is what we're doing because I was a former kindergarten teacher myself.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so you work.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: I know I know the value.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was, yeah.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I know the value as being an educator, the value of programs like this.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this seems really something that needs to be adopted.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because like I I really, you know, I struggled as being a teacher.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: They really they were cutting into recess time back back when I was a teacher, and I hated that.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I hated that.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, let's give them more homework and less time to get outside and wiggle and and be kids.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I hated that concept because I I felt like when my kids got re I actually gave my kids extra recess time, don't tell everyone, but yeah, I would always take them out every every Friday, and they have like 30 minutes, an hour, whatever, and like go play, get out, your wiggles, whatever.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: They they seem to perform better like on the test after that than than when if they didn't have that time to get out there and get be kids.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't have any like research to say that, but it was just firsthand experience and and observations of that.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyways, I'm a big proponent of that.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: What do you say to schools right now?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll I'll close on this.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: What do you say to schools right now that are cutting into recess time?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're not, they're they're basically just having kids be on the phones, or I'm sorry, not the phones rather, but but the tablets in the classroom or the computers, and then they're just kind of cutting the recess time.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what do you say to that?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we get out of this this weird situation we're in where we just don't let kids be kids?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, there's plenty of studies for anybody who feels like looking it up.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a Catherine Ramstetter, R-A-M-S-T-E-T-T-E-R, has a whole website about how important recess is, and there's a whole pro-recess movement out there.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: But I think you don't have to look at charts to know how much better life is when every moment is not micromanaged by your boss telling you, heads down, let's start filling in some bubbles with a number two pencil.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: And even talking about it as like getting out your wiggles or whatever, it's so much more than that, as you know from your own description of your childhood.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: It is relationship building, it is bodybuilding, it is a reason to live, right?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: It is figuring things out, it is recovering from disappointment, it is life.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: And there's exposure therapy is being exposed to something that you're afraid of, and then you get more brave, right?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: You're afraid of dogs, you look at a picture of a dog, you sit in a room with a dog, you pet a dog, and pretty soon you're not afraid of dogs anymore.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: We have taken life out of kids' life, including recess, including free play, including walking to school, going to the store, making an omelet, all these things.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: And we wonder why they're so anxious today.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, what they need is exposure back to that.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what free play is.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's what recess is, that's what the lec grow experience is.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: And you try it and you'll see.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: It will, it's just the proof is in the pudding.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: Your your kids are happy or they like coming to school.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they'll probably do better on their tests, but even if they don't, won't they do better in life because they've learned how to make a friend and how to deal with whether the ball was in or out?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems so yeah, it just seems pretty straightforward.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I I love this.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: All of generations in human history until very, very recently when we decided everybody should be separated by age and put into desks and sit there all day, and we wonder why they're flagging.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't do that as adults, and that was my like retort to that.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like we don't we don't work, we don't have a boss standing over our back.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: We don't sit in our desk all day.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: After this interview, I'll get up and I'll go watch TV.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not gonna just sit here all day for eight hours and do nothing like like we expect our kids to do sometimes.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's just I I think it's crazy how we structure it.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not setting them up for what the life, what the work life experience is like, and we're we're doing them a huge disservice.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I this is like music to my ears.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I would have met you like 20 years ago and you could have been like doing uh presentations in the auditorium because I think that schools need to hear this kind of message.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you for being such a policy advocate and and changer for this stuff.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know who who coins you the world's worst mom in America, but America's worst mom.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: America's worst mom.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I could think of probably 10 names being a true crime for uh yeah, I bet you couldn't.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: No, you're you're super nice, you're awesome.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you are one of the smartest people I've ever had on this show.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I thank you so much for giving me your time.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Independence isn't a single decision, it's a ladder.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And most of us haven't even stepped on the first rung.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Follow Lenore Scanese and letgrow at letgrow.org.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Subscribe to the Parents app and send this to the parent who's one neighbor complaint away from never letting their kid outside again.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then pick one rung from today and do it before next Sunday.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see you on the next one.