On this week’s episode, author and free-range kid expert Lenore Skenazy joins to offer her parenting advice, especially in light of COVID-19. She answers questions like, “is there such a thing as free range parenting while we’re all stuck in the house?” She also gives us some tips on how to keep the kids occupied.

Lenore is the co-founder and president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting independence as a critical part of childhood. Ever since her column “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” created a media firestorm, Lenore has been declaring that our kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. She is the author of Free-Range Kids, the book-turned-movement that garnered her the nickname, “America’s Worst Mom.” At Let Grow, Lenore oversees school programs, an online community, and legislative efforts all promoting childhood independence.”

TRANSCRIPT

Beverly:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, author and free range kid expert Lenore Skenazy joins us to offer her parenting advice, especially in light of COVID-19. She’s going to answer questions like, is there such a thing as free range parenting while we’re all stuck in the house? And also to give us some tips on how to keep kids occupied.

Before we bring her on, a little bit about Lenore. Lenore is the co-founder and president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting independence as a critical part of childhood. Ever since her column Why I Let My Nine Year Old Ride The Subway Alone created a media firestorm, Lenore has been declaring that our kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. She is the author of Free Range Kids, the book turned movement that garnered her the nickname America’s worst mom. At Let Grow, Lenore oversees school programs and online community and legislative efforts all promoting childhood independence. It is a pleasure to have on America’s worst mom on She Thinks this week.

Lenore:

Thank you, Beverly. What a lovely introduction. I appreciate it.

Beverly:

You’re welcome. We appreciate having you on today. I mean, first question, when you were labeled America’s worst mom, did you consider that a badge of honor because you must be doing something right if they’re criticizing you?

Lenore:

You know, not at first, but my God, the nine year old who rode the subway just turned 22, so I’ve had a while to get adjusted to it and now I think it’s very cool. Yeah, I think it’s cool to be Google-able.

Beverly:

Well you mentioned the subway and that is exactly where you are joining us today from New York City. Of course, we are in-

Lenore:

But not from the subway itself.

Beverly:

Not from the subway itself.

Lenore:

I’m not there now, right.

Beverly:

You are in the hotspot. You are where of the coronavirus is having a peak and of course everything is shut down there. So living there right now, in Queens, what has it been like living through the coronavirus?

Lenore:

Well, I wish I had something interesting to tell you, but I’m just as chicken about the virus as anybody else. So I’ve been in the house now, in my apartment actually for I’d say 10 straight days because we are down the street from Elmhurst Hospital, which is seemingly dominating the news, which just seems like the saddest place on earth, so there’s no need to go outside just to get fresh milk.

So we’re staying inside and there’s two things that are happening, one that’s awful and one that’s very heartening. Awful is when we hear the sirens going by because we’re on the way to the hospital. Heartening is that every night at seven o’clock, and the first time I heard this I couldn’t believe it, I thought there was a parade going by, everybody is whooping and clapping and banging on things and blowing horns. And it really sounded like New Year’s Eve out there and I thought, “Oh my God, you can’t tell me that people are actually gathering outside for some event.”

But they weren’t. Everyone was just reaching out of their windows and clapping for the local health professionals and our food delivery guys and the garbage men and everybody, the FedEx guys who are out there on the front lines, you know, continuing life so that the rest of us can hunker down.

Beverly:

And I live in Washington D.C. and one thing that I’ve noticed is that even during a time in the past few years where people will say it’s been more polarizing than ever, thinking that people can’t get along if they don’t agree on politics, I haven’t heard anybody talk about politics in my neighborhood. People are helping neighbors, and I think it’s a time that people are really coming together because we have this common ground of needing everybody to stay home and play the role that they need to play in order for us to get through this, which has been a really neat thing to do.

Lenore:

Yes, it is. You know, I was here during 9/11 too. And the thing that actually bums me out almost more than 9/11 is that at least with 9/11, we could all gather together. I mean, there were rituals, people would just go and hang out, and there’s the comfort of being around your fellow humans and also all those barriers dropping because really we’re all just humans.

And now, we have this sort of connection to the world. I mean, you could be anywhere in the world and you’re dealing with the same problem. Rich, poor, the virus is out there. So there’s that common humanity that I relish, but it’s so sad that the only way we can help is by not going to anybody, not hugging anybody. It’s such a dystopian thing where you want to be with people and the one thing you have to do to make life better is to not be with people.

Beverly:

And it feels so odd to what we normally do. And I think where you first gained a lot of notoriety was doing something that people felt odd as well, which is saying that I’m going to raise my kids by letting them become independent and learn how to do things on their own. So can you take us back to when you wrote that column that created so much media attention? You mentioned your nine year old is now 22.

Lenore:

Yeah.

Beverly:

But you let your then nine year old ride the subway alone. Why did you write the article and why do you think it did have so many eyes looking at this and why was there so much criticism about it?

Lenore:

Well, back in those ancient days, it really does feel so long ago, it feels like everything is so different now, I let our kid, and it’s not just me, it’s my husband and I, had been asked by our son if we’d take them someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home on the subway because we’re on the subways all the time here in New York. That’s how we get around.

And when I let him, it was with proper precautions I thought. You know, we made sure he knew how to read the map. We are always on the subway, so he’s very familiar with it. He knows how to get in, how to get out, how hold on, everything. And I didn’t even write about it right after he had done it because it was a milestone for us, but it didn’t strike me as anything that anybody else would care about. It was just sort of like, if I was in the suburbs, he would have been learning how to… There’s one of those sirens going by what a drag. If we were in the suburbs, he would have been on a bike, right? But here he’s in New York City, so he’s on a subway.

But when I wrote about it, I guess caught so much attention because of a couple things going on at once. One is that, over the past generation or two, we’ve gradually been not letting our kids do almost anything on their own. I mean, there’s statistics that are shocking to me that 11% of kids walk to school. That’s like one in ten, and I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, we all walked to school. I don’t know about you, Beverly. Was that true?

Beverly:

Well, I didn’t walk to school, but when it was bright outside and I wasn’t in school, my mom would not let us in the house. She’s like, “You’re not coming back until dinner. Go out and play with your neighbor friends and do something.” And I lived in a small town, but we lived downtown. We were on a main street, but we rode our bikes everywhere. So it was definitely an era where you were supposed to go out and use your imagination and play.

Lenore:

Yeah. Yeah. Well the fact that that had sort of evaporated I think was made stark just by… I mean, the subway thing is weird, so people are interested. It’s New York. They’ve seen the subway only in movies, so it seemed crazy.

But really, what started the conversation about subways became a conversation about like, yeah, come to think of it, when I was a kid, I walked to school, rode my bike, met my friends at the park, played pickup basketball, we organized our own games, we took our Barbies outside and people were looking around and realizing like, “Oh my God, that’s not happening. I’m driving my kid to travel soccer, I watch every second, I drive them home and then it’s time for homework, and then it’s time for the reading log, and then we start the next day again.”

And I just thought it sort of made people reflect on something that had been gradually happening, which was changing childhood from a child-run a time, you know, kids making their own fun, to an adult-led time, very structured and very supervised. And it sort of caused this friction in people. On the one hand, they loved their own childhood. On the other hand, they weren’t letting their own kids do it and they had to scratch their heads and go, “Why not?”

And I’m a newspaper reporter by trade and so I look things up. I’m a reporter and I kept pointing out that like, well, it might feel less safe, but in terms of crime, we were at a 25 year crime low. The crime peaked in the ’90s, early ’90s, and it’s been going down ever since. And so it’s not that kids are literally more endangered now, it’s just that we’ve become intolerant of the idea that they would face even the most minimal risks even crossing a two lane street on their own to get to school. We’ve sort of lost our faith in our kids, lost our faith almost in our own parenting to prepare the kids.

And I think that’s what just started this big conversation that made the story so resonant for people, is everybody started going, “What the heck happened to childhood? Why don’t I trust my kid to do anything that I absolutely loved doing as a child?” And we’ve been talking about it ever since.

Beverly:

And I think it’s also the fact too that often there is this alarmist messaging that parents often hear. I know IWF’s Julie Gunlock, she’s the director of IWF’s Center for Progress and Innovation, she authored a book called From Cupcakes to Chemicals, which people should look it up if they haven’t read it. It’s fascinating. [crosstalk 00:09:51]

Lenore:

It is so, so great. Oh my God, I love that book. It is so underlying here. She talks about, you know, why do we get even afraid of drinking from the hose? She quoted some newscaster saying, “Hoses are made out of plastic and plastic can leach and blah blah blah.” And it’s like, yes, I guess if you guzzled like a horse gallon upon gallon every day from the rusty spigot of an old falling apart hose, maybe this could move the meter like one millimeter of an inch towards danger, but kids drink from the hose when they’re thirsty in the summer. It’s not doing anything bad to them.

But you’re right. The media came up with this sort of goose, that they just kept asking for golden eggs and the golden eggs were horror stories about kids. If you could come up with anything that could possibly be repackaged as a danger to kids like drinking from the hose, which for the record, once again, is not dangerous, then you would keep people tuned in. And so her book is so great because we went from cupcakes to thinking like everything is so dangerous for kids, even eating a cupcake.

Beverly:

And so where are we today on this? So in your time in working on this and your nonprofit organization that you work on, have you seen that parents are more open to this idea of free range parenting? Or has it gotten even worse, where if somebody is a proponent of raising their kids in the way that you did and your husband did, are they still scrutinized the same way or is there a more open perspective to it?

Lenore:

You know, I cannot tell. I could make the argument for both ways. On the one hand, I remember when I started the Free Range Kids blog, two years in a row, I was voted like the most controversial blogger in the universe, which was weird because all I was saying is like, maybe we should raise people like I was raised, which was with a nervous mom and a stay at home mom. I mean, I was not any in any radical kind of way.

So on the one hand, now free range kids is a phrase that people use. There was a law passed in Utah, the Free Range Kids law. We’re not going to arrest parents who let their kids play outside or walk to school. So it has become, I’d say, really much more mainstream, but, I could also argue the other, which is almost with the rise of the internet and mom shaming and mom blaming as a pastime for the whole country, it’s hard to say, “I let my five year old play on the front lawn today,” because somebody somehow will get on your Facebook page and say, “I can’t believe you did that. What about men in white vans? What about clowns with Uzis?” And then everyone will say, “Yes, I would never do that.” And suddenly, just a simple statement of like, “Oh, it was so sweet that I had my seven year old take the three year old to the park today so she could swing for a little while, it’s across the street,” and it blows up as a nattering thing.

So, with all the surveillance and all the social media out there, it feels like it is harder in one way to let your kids go because there’ll always be people who hate on you, but on the other hand, more people are recognizing that actually, sort of hovering and constant surveillance and structure for kids hasn’t been good. I mean, the numbers before COVID were pretty off the charts, that childhood anxiety had just been spiking to the point where, gosh, the National Institutes of Health found that almost one in three, 30% of adolescents have an anxiety disorder.

And that’s not good, right? And one of the reasons at Let Grow that we say, and we work with a man named Dr. Peter Gray, who’s a psychology professor and has studied the importance of play and free time with kids for his entire career, and he says that when you’re always micromanaged, when somebody is always helping you, directing you, watching you, grading you, coaching you, driving you, which is a lot of what childhood is like today, you’re micromanaged and you don’t have much of what they call an internal locus of control. An internal locus of control is when you feel like you’re in control of your life. Like me, I just had a snack even though it’s just an hour before dinner, so yay, I’m an adult, I get to do that.

However, when you don’t have much internal locus of control because first you’re at school, then you’re in the carpool, then you’re at soccer, then you’re at Kumon, then there’s the reading log, you feel depressed and anxious. And that is something that people were starting to recognize was really doing kids no favors, making sure they were making the most of every moment because they were in the travel soccer league and they were getting that [inaudible 00:14:56] down pat and they were working hard on their SAT prep, that all added up to not a lot of feelings of control and therefore a spike in anxiety. And therefore, parents were starting to say, “Maybe we do have to pull back, maybe we have to let go a little.”

And I’ve seen that happening. And there are schools around the country doing the Let Grow project where kids’ homework assignments is to go home and do something by themselves because the teachers recognize that the parents need a little push to let go. And we’ve just seen people sort of going, “Oh, that’s great when my kid does something by herself. I’m proud of her. She’s proud of herself. Let’s do it some more.” So I do think there is a gathering movement to take a step back so that the kids can step up.

Beverly:

So let’s talk about this then in the framework of COVID-19. We are all staying in our homes, or at least most states now have these orders. How can someone maybe start letting the reigns go? What kind of practices can they try to incorporate even though we’re all stuck inside together? Or is free range parenting just not going to work with our current situation?

Lenore:

Actually, I think weirdly, it’s almost a great social experiment in free-ranging or letting grow, whatever you want to call it. Because yes, the kids are right there and so are the parents and some homework and some online schooling or distance learning is getting done, but suddenly, these kids… I was just talking to a mom today who says that her daughter goes to bed at 11:00. She’s 12 years old, and she used to have to get her up at 7:00, like, “Come on, come on, we got to get going, we got to get going.” And now the kid is sleeping until 11:00 in the morning because everything is up for grabs.

And a lot of the thing I was just talking about, this super structured, highly overseeing minute by minute enrichment has to fall by the wayside because a lot of parents are working from home, a lot of parents have more than one kid, they can’t pay tons of constant attention and constantly like creating activities for the kids. Nobody can do that. And so, the kids suddenly have free time.

And what I’m hearing is that, okay, yeah, there’s bickering and there’s boredom and there’s a lot of video games, but there’s also, you can ask the kids to do some things because you don’t have to get them done so fast because you don’t have to catch the bus, you don’t have to get to work. You know, if you ask the kids to do the breakfast dishes and they do them at lunchtime, it’s okay. You don’t have to jump in and do them for them and being angry and then try to get out the door so that they can get to the lacrosse practice before school.

So it’s an anxious time because of the virus, but it’s a relaxed time in terms of the stretch of 24 hours. And I think that it’s like a new day for kids when they aren’t so structured. And I’ve been hearing about kids playing more board games. I’ve heard from a mom who said that, yeah, her kids are playing a lot of video games, who isn’t? But when she suggests, “Let’s do something else,” they say okay because they’re a little bored of the video games. And frankly, I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with the video games because it’s a thing that kids play together. You know, they have to come up with strategies. It’s hard or it wouldn’t be engaging, and when something is hard, that means you’re learning.

And so really, it is a total reset button on the frantic and micromanaged childhood we had right up until, I’d say, March 1st. And I think the kids are going to grow a lot. I think parents are going to be impressed by how their kids rise to the occasion. And I just have to say one more thing if I can, one more positive thing.

Beverly:

Please.

Lenore:

Yes. Okay. I’ve been talking to some psychiatrists and, you know, we always hear about posttraumatic stress syndrome, but actually, what is more common and yet never talked about because it’s just not talked about as much is posttraumatic growth. And that is that, nobody wishes bad things on anyone, but a time like this, which is difficult and confusing and scary, it doesn’t mean that kids are going to emerge from this way behind or crippled with fear or trauma. Most people grow, even from rotten things that nobody wishes they’d gone through, and I think that these kids are going to come out with a bigger sense of what they’re capable of, what their real interests are, what they mean to their family, and maybe even a new way to organize their lives that allows for a little bit of this breathing and creativity and self-direction that wouldn’t have come about otherwise.

Beverly:

Something that I’ve noticed in my neighborhood is the most chalk drawing on sidewalks I’ve ever seen. Kids are going out there and drawing on all the sidewalks. So I go on my daily walk and that’s what I’ve noticed. That’s what they’re doing because that’s what they can do, be outside. They can’t go far, but they’re going to draw on the sidewalk.

So kind of final question for you to kind of wrap that up. If we could summarize then a good exercise for parents, would it then consist of this? And of course it depends on the age of your child, but give them tasks to do that day, whether it’s your homework or whatever schooling you need to do, or maybe it’s unload the dishwasher, but allow them to it when they want that day. So you can set your schedule that day. It’s up to you. Is that a way we could kind of summarize maybe something a parent could do to test this out and see how it works?

Lenore:

Yeah, and I’d say just a couple of tasks sound good. And you know, kids feel better also. I mean, they feel a little in control when they are helping, when they watch the baby for a little while or they do unload the dishwasher. So it’ll be great for all of you, and just chill a little because nothing has to be perfect. This is a really shaggy time for us all. So step back, let the kids impress you, but they might not do it every day.

Beverly:

Well, I so appreciate not only the work that you’re doing, but you coming on and offering us some positive outcomes that we could have from this, that this could actually be a good thing for kids longterm. So thank you not only for being here, but for that encouragement as well. Lenore, it’s a pleasure to have you on today.

Lenore:

Beverly, this was really fun. And I have to say, when I was talking to the psychiatrist about posttraumatic growth, it’s not a common thing that anybody knows about and I was really heartened to hear about it too. It’s real.

Beverly:

Well, thank you so much and you have a good one. Stay safe.

Lenore:

Yeah, you too.

Beverly:

And thank you all for joining us. We did want to let you know that during this time of uncertainty and unprecedented challenges due to COVID-19, it’s more important than ever to show what America is made up. That’s why Independent Women’s Forum is highlighting American ideals of ingenuity, generosity, thoughtfulness, and kindness, from everyday Americans sewing masks and donating blood, to companies providing free food and housing to those on the front lines. It’s a beautiful reminder that we’re in this together. Visit iwf.org or check us out on Facebook and Twitter and follow our campaign using #InThisTogether. That is #InThisTogether to learn more about the campaign.

And last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes, it does help, and we’d love it if you shared this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for listening. [inaudible].