More Than one Way to Skin a Knee: Lenore Skenazy on DarkHorse
Lenore Skenazy is “America’s Worst Mom”, founder of Free Range Kids and President of Let Grow. Bret talks to her about parenting in an era of zero risk.Find Lenore on X: https://x.com/FreeRangeKids (@FreeRangeKids)Find Let Grow at their website: https://letgrow.org/*****PaleoValley: Wide array of amazing products, including SuperFood Golden Milk and beef sticks. Go to https://paleovalley.com/darkhorse for 15% off your first order.*****Join DarkHorse on Locals! Get access to our Discord ...
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Lenore Skenazy, who is the founder of Let Grow, of Free Range Kids, and also, I am led to understand, she is America's worst mother.
Is that true, Lenore?
Well, I think that's for your listeners to decide, but if you Google America's Worst Mom, I come up for it.
You know, they don't do pages anymore, they just do an infinite scroll, but it used to be 77 pages, so I'd say yes.
Wow, that's quite an accomplishment.
Yeah, sort of.
Perhaps your listeners want to know why.
Yes, I was hoping you would tell us.
Okay.
It's a story from long ago, which is that when our younger son, not our, you and mine, me and my husband's younger son was nine years old.
I'm sure he would be relieved to hear that.
Right, right, right.
Sorry, Heather.
He was asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before in New York City, where we live, and let him find his own way home on the subway.
And we talked about it for a little while, my husband and I, and we decided yes.
So one sunny Sunday, I took him to Bloomingdale's fancy-schmancy store in a beautiful zip code, and I left him there because that was an easy place for him to get home from.
There's a subway stop right underneath Bloomingdale's, and sure enough, he took the subway down, and then he had to take a bus across town.
And he came into our apartment levitating with pride and excitement and, you know, a little swagger, I guess.
It's hard to remember because he's 26 now.
But anyways, I wrote a column about that, and I called it Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.
And two days later, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR being described as this terrible mom for having taken my eyes off my kid.
So that is wild to me because I mean you know you and I know each other in person and you're of course familiar with my background as an evolutionary biologist but to me the idea of raising a child so that they are capable of facing risk is more or less a requirement.
I mean, in fact, not even more or less.
It's a requirement to being a good parent.
And the idea that anyone would look askance at you for allowing your child to ride the subway alone turns the world on its head.
I mean, you know, unless your child was incapable of doing it and you knew that, then, you know, your kid did make it home.
Is that correct?
He did.
Yes, right.
He exists to this day.
Wow.
I mean, that suggests that at least you were in the ballpark of correctly assessing his capability.
Yeah.
You know, because of your background, you'll appreciate the fact that I'm actually in D.C.
right now on a trip, and I'm right near Georgetown University.
And there are three professors there who are interested in doing a study about whether American kids are getting their independence so late that they're not getting risks at the right time.
The idea is that basically from age 5, 6 or 7 up till 12, I think the actual growth slows a little in humans.
But that's because Mother Nature is expecting everything else to grow, the brain and the ideas and the world.
And that's when they're supposed to be, you know, climbing trees and chasing things and trying out new ideas and being mad at their friends and then coming up with something to do, exploring.
And The fear is that because they're not doing that till a later age, like an unprecedentedly later age, like 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, the average age that American parents think that kids can go to the park on their own is now 14, that they're not getting, they're not calibrating their sort of internal risk-ometer
when it should be calibrated, and that therefore they are overreacting to smaller risks later on because they never got it right.
And this is a woman named Julia Chetsova, and she did like a little, I guess, pilot study where they interviewed students in Russia and Turkey versus America and Canada, and they asked them, these are college students, describe a risky situation.
And Yulia's from Russia, and she agreed when most of the Russian kids said things like, oh, being chased down the street by a drunk, you know, with a vodka bottle, or something like that, or being, you know, having some guy who's drunk driving towards you.
And in America, they were saying things like, sitting at a cafe by yourself, or taking an Uber.
And so it does worry me that trusting your kids to do things when they're young has become taboo, whereas waiting for them till they're much older to do these things is considered good parenting now. - Yeah, I'm concerned too.
And I guess my concern, I would put it in a little bit stronger terms.
Okay.
I think, in some sense, these kids are never maturing into adults because they are being beyond delayed.
They're being insulated from risk.
And let me just lay a couple ideas on you and see what you think.
Some of these are covered in Heather in my book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
But one, I would say, maybe the most uncomfortable fact I know from normal life is that you cannot raise a child properly without some risk of losing them.
Yeah.
I don't, you know, or another way to put it is the purpose, the job of a parent is to raise an adult and an adult is inherently capable of managing risk.
But managing risk is a skill that you learn and the longer it is delayed, the less likely you are to become good at it.
So, to me, you know, if I look at the way somebody learns a language, the later in life they learn it.
Right.
They got the weird accent.
Yeah.
Right.
They're stuck with a handicap.
And so, You know, when I hear what you've been doing, my feeling is not only do I think it's ridiculous that anyone would think you were a bad mom for doing it, but I wonder if you're not the best mom in America for making this explicit so that other moms have a chance of learning from you and doing the same.
Well, I don't think there's actually a list of like the best and the second best, the 321st best mom.
But after, there's things that I want to talk about risk in a second, but I'll just explain that after the whole hullabaloo on in the media about letting my kid take the subway alone, a couple things happened.
One is that I was constantly asked How I would feel if he'd never came home.
And it took me a long time to realize what that was, which was a couple things.
It was an accusation that if you're not thinking of the very worst-case scenario, you're a bad mom in America today.
It's like, why weren't you thinking that way?
Because if you were thinking that way, then you would have said, oh, it's not worth it, and you wouldn't have let him go.
So there's something strange about us being taught as viewers, as consumers of the media, that the only good way to be a parent is to be catastrophizing.
And also, thinking of almost everything that we let our kids do or not let them do in terms of risk.
I don't think when my mom let me walk to school as a five-year-old back then, that she was thinking, well, you know, she'll get fresh air, and it's good for her, and she'll learn her directions better, but, you know, she could die.
But that's okay, because they weren't always framing it as, like, something, you know, positive, but the alternative is, or but the other end of the spectrum is death.
And that strikes me as something new, To keep putting all our decisions into this framework of like, I could regret it for the rest of my life, which is what those interviewers were asking.
How did you deal with the fact you could regret it for the rest of your life?
Or something nice, fresh air and exercise, because fresh air and exercise are never going to win if I'm thinking about them dying.
And so there's something weird about the framing That we automatically do these days that feels innate that I know isn't innate because my mom didn't do it back in the day.
Have you noticed that?
I mean, this is something, you know, maybe as an evolutionary guy, you know what's going on.
Well, I mean, first of all, as an evolutionary guy, I'm a little bit of an oddball because I do some things explicitly that others do implicitly.
And, you know, every good parent understands that there is risk in things that are worth doing.
So it's not as if those things aren't in the calculation, but, you know, I've spent a lot of time You know, when Heather and I took 30 students to Ecuador, we went to the Galapagos, we went to the Amazon.
We actually had a conversation with them, and we took our children with us.
They were along on the trip.
We had a conversation with the students, which they did not know how to take at first.
We said, you know, there is a prime directive for this program.
Nobody comes home in a box.
And they thought that's such an odd thing to say.
It must be a joke.
And we said, no, not a joke.
Obviously, you cannot perfectly control that, but you have to understand it's not a risk you are allowed to take.
There are lots of risks you are allowed to take.
If you break your arm, Right?
We'll get you home.
You might do something that could put you in danger of breaking your arm.
That's well within the range of the kinds of things we're going to be doing.
But there's this other level at which you have to become highly alert that you're not, you know, imagine the damage you would do to the other students on this on this program.
If you died, imagine the damage you would do to your family if, you know, they had to go and receive your dead body.
So the point is, that was an explicit conversation.
Wild conversation.
I'm like, maybe I'll do a year in Australia.
Right.
But I mean, we've had similar conversations with our children.
You know, there are rules.
You're allowed to break your arm.
You're allowed to break your leg.
You're not allowed to crack your skull open.
You're not allowed to damage your eyes.
You know, the stuff that has permanent implications.
Now, does it mean, you know, that we wouldn't take care of you if you did?
No, of course.
But the point is... Try not to.
I guess what I'm saying is, I don't even...
You're up against such a strange backlash.
You personally are up against such a strange backlash because actually, I don't even, it's not even just risk.
You actually have to get hurt in life in order to be able to figure out how to not get hurt as an adult when the stakes are higher and the risks are greater.
Right?
I don't want you having a childhood in which you didn't skin your knee.
Right?
That's not a childhood in which you faced enough to learn.
So, I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but... I'm nodding along vigorously!
Right, but I don't know how we... I mean, how do we convey the message to people that actually...
Childhood is precisely about this.
It's not the only thing it's about, but it is precisely about picking up the skill of managing risks so that you can live a long life that isn't shortened by an accident, or you're not paralyzed by terror, or something like this.
You know, it's not a nice thing if your child has it.
It's essential that that skill be conveyed, and there's no way to do it on a chalkboard.
Right, which is strange because, of course, a lot of schools are doing sort of lessons in like, this is about empathy or this is about, you know, facing your big fears, but they don't let them do anything in real life.
So, as you know, after the... I'm just going to go back quickly and then get to your question, which is that after the whole weekend of being, you know, raked over the coals, I started my blog and I called it Free Range Kids, and then I wrote the book called Free Range Kids.
And the slogan was, our kids are smarter and stronger than our culture gives them credit for.
But then in 2017, Jonathan Haidt, who most recently wrote The Anxious Generation, was talking to Daniel Schuckman, who was the long-term chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech on campus.
And they were worried about what you're saying, that Young people were coming to campus confused between feeling uncomfortable and literally being unsafe because whenever they were uncomfortable, they were told they were unsafe.
You shouldn't have to deal with that.
You know, there's always an adult stepping in to mediate or to to assist.
And so, they saw the need for the—you know, there's—people were asking for trigger warnings and safe spaces and cancellations—I think you're aware of this—rather than simply, you know, raising your hand after Brett's wonderful lecture and saying, I disagree, and here's what I read, and engaging in a robust kind of debate and open-minded, like, you know, prove me wrong sort of thing.
And they were worried that trying to fix this on campus was a late stage intervention.
And that really, we had to go back to when kids were younger and try to make sure that our culture wasn't undermining their resourcefulness and their resilience with just too much assistance.
And an assumption that they're all so vulnerable and also on the edge that they need, you know, the emotional and physical padding that has become sort of de rigueur.
And so together, they came to me, Dan and John came to me and said, let's start Let Grow, this nonprofit that we run now that's dedicated to childhood independence and free play, because that's how we think you do build up the resilience and do face some risk and do learn how to deal with The world and each other.
And I said, OK, but we also have to bring in one other person, and that was Peter Gray, who himself is an evolutionary psychologist at Boston College, who has spent his adult life studying the importance of mixed-stage free play, like the hunter-gatherers always did, where the 3-year-old is toddling along just as fast as she can after the cool 7- and 12-year-olds and playing, and the 12-year-olds learn how to, you know, empathize and deal with younger kids.
And together, we realized that our goal is to really renormalize the idea that kids are resilient, and in fact, they need this kind of risk and a little bit of fear, just the way the immune system needs some germs, right?
And the bones need some resistance.
Children also need the good and the bad, not the horrible, not the trauma.
But they need to be frustrated.
They need to feel a bit of betrayal.
They need to feel a little fear.
And what's really cool is that just about a month or two ago—this isn't even my personal triumph, this is in Canada, I had nothing to do with it—but at last, the Canadian Pediatric Society came out with a white paper, and they said that children need risky play.
They literally used the word risky.
And these are pediatricians.
American Pediatric Association has done nothing like this yet.
But here's somebody, you know, here's an organization that worries about, you know, broken bones and, you know, abrasions or whatever.
And yet they're saying we, you know, as a culture, we swing so far in the direction of safety that we've actually made our children less safe.
And we have to bring them back to at least to somewhere in the middle with allowing them to climb some trees.
And I just want to explain one other thing, because I was talking to the woman who really persuaded the Canadian Pediatric Society to do this, and her name is Mariana Brussoni.
You might want her on your podcast.
Maybe she's been on.
But she was telling me that the reason risky play is so important is not just, you know, it's fun and exciting, but you need to feel your heart beating.
You need to feel the flush of fear in your body.
So that you get used to it and you realize that's not the end of the world.
It's not a panic attack.
It's just scary.
You've climbed higher than you expected.
You have to jump over the river.
Look, there's a, you know, a scary frog.
Whatever it is, you have to get used to the physical feeling of not being in total control and being faced with something unusual and daunting.
So that every time you're faced with something unusual and daunting from, you know, talking to the barista to asking a girl on the date, you don't pass out.
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All right, you said two things that I want to highlight because I think they really do make the case very well.
You said to re-normalize the exposure to risk, which I think is exactly the right thing.
This used to be, A, unavoidable, and B, very normal, and it became abnormal You know, in fits and starts.
I remember when I was a kid, we played outside.
We rode our bikes.
Nobody knew where we were.
There was a radius we weren't allowed to go beyond, but it was, you know...
At least a mile in any direction, you know, as a little kid.
And, you know, did I fall off my bike?
Yes.
There was no cell phone, you know, so that whole thing was normal even then, and that wasn't that long ago.
Okay.
Right, just a few weeks back.
Yeah, but all right, so here's the other thing that you said, and I didn't capture the phraseology exactly.
Maybe I want to rephrase a little bit, but if you make your kids perfectly safe, the adults they will become will be very unsafe.
They will not be in a position to manage risk.
And this is, I think it's inescapable.
Now, maybe they will make themselves safe by becoming the equivalent of shut-ins and never straying off the beaten path, but it is the exposure to risk that allows you to learn to manage it for yourself.
Here's the deal.
I never want to sound like I'm blaming parents for making their kids the shut-in or any kind of basket case.
And I actually do believe that there's just so many variables into what makes a kid the adult that they become.
It's not just us.
It's their neighborhood.
It's the bad teacher or the good teacher.
It's the, you know, the great camp that, you know, finally you feel like yourself.
You know, it's your siblings.
It's your friends.
So, the determinism that the parent can, like, ruin the kid feels Terrible, including to me, you know, because, you know, you have more than one kid.
They're different, right?
So it's partly just who they are.
As a culture, we have decided that safety is the only goal, almost.
And I think that is making it hard, even if you want to be a free-range parent.
You know, you have to worry about — schools won't let kids walk home.
There's schools that won't let the kid get off the bus, unless there's a parent there who has apparently, like, quit their job, so they can stand there at 3 in the afternoon every day to walk them home, whether it's two miles or two houses.
You know, there's all these papers you have to do.
You can't drop the kid off at karate.
You have to come in and watch the thing.
So it's an entire culture that has decided that any time a child is not supervised by an adult, they're in danger and you're wrong to do that.
And so that kind of culture seems to be undermining a generation more than us individual parents making our decisions.
And I say that because I'm a nervous mom and I'm, you know, people think I'm way more free range than I am.
So it's, uh, it's the little asterisk after my name, but she's really quite scared and she believes in helmets and car seats and seat belts and mouth guards and, and, uh, and more and more.
The only thing I don't do is track them.
I think tracking is really gross.
Um, all right.
Well, uh, I resonate with that and I, and I accept the caution.
I wonder though, I want to tell a couple, give their vignettes and not really stories, but that I think are telling.
One, just an interesting point, something that I've noticed, is that it's not a slider in which your kid is either good at managing risk or bad at managing risk.
It's actually partially dependent on the task in question.
So, my kids had a lot of experience in the woods, right?
They had experience in the Amazon.
They did not have experience in cities, because they didn't live in one.
And that meant that my kids, who I would trust in many different circumstances, you know, to climb things, to deal with lumber, power tools, that kind of thing, had no intuition whatsoever about traffic.
And traffic is one of those things, like... Traffic is terrifying.
Six inches this way, you're safe.
Six inches that way, you're playing with your life.
Right?
So anyway, Heather and I were on this trip with our students in Ecuador and our kids are there and we are trying to manage their interaction with Quito, which is a very, not only is it a very large city, but it's a Latin American city and different style of driving.
Scary enough.
Heather and I pay a lot of attention in that circumstance, so we don't get hit.
And anyway, we're at the street corner.
Complex intersection.
Several different roads coming together.
Some of them very busy roads.
And we are trying to manage our kids who are not paying attention to traffic the way they should, because it's just not intuitive to them.
And this tiny child... I think he must have been three or four.
but a tiny child comes toddling down the road with money in his hand and he walks into a little bodega and we don't see what happens inside but he obviously gets something for his mom and he navigates the traffic and he toddles his way back and up into the neighborhood It was like, that kid is actually way ahead of my kids in this skill, right?
Enough that his mother was not incorrect, that he had everything necessary to get that job done without finding himself.
Right.
So anyway, that...
The idea that, you know, my kids were stunted with respect to city traffic because, I mean, you can live a whole life and never end up in the city.
There's no reason to expect somebody, you know, a hunter-gatherer off in the Kalahari is not going to have street smarts, right?
They're going to have a lot of other kind of smarts.
But, so, just the difference, the fact that you need practice with the particular risks in question in order to develop an intuition for them was key.
All of these different kinds of risks are something that you develop with the kind of practice, and you shouldn't expect a kid in the Kalahari to develop street smarts.
Right.
Right.
So anyway, I thought that that was kind of You know, I mean, we joked, you know, you get the idea of what kind of parents we were, but we joked with our kids that they were very bright.
But when it came to cities, they were mentally retarded because they were, which, you know, it's not true anymore.
Retarded, but not mentally.
They were retarded.
I mean, like, you know, in the old sense of it.
Well, in the really old sense of the word.
Yeah, they were retarded.
I think we're going to have to cut out that whole part.
She said retarded.
No, I said it first.
You've been canceled before.
I have not been canceled.
You have not been canceled.
Well, see, that's the thing.
It's a skill you're going to have to develop.
That's right.
I'm going to have to roll with some punches.
Right.
Yeah.
So, all right, the other story is from earlier in my life when I was doing my first research gig in Jamaica.
I was living in a little town called Southfield, which literally did not have a telephone.
I was the only white guy for many miles in any direction.
when my professor went back overseas.
So I was there with the professor who was not living in the same place.
But anyway, I was living off in the country with this family who took me in, it was wonderful.
And so I got to see their life from the inside.
And one day under circumstances I don't quite remember, the kids, which were like a gang of kids of every age that went around the neighborhood and did stuff together, They were cool kids.
They were very interested in me because I came from a place that they knew nothing about and they wanted to know, so they asked me lots of questions.
Anyway, cool group of kids.
Had a bonfire somehow.
Now, kids had a bonfire.
Pause.
They were also playing around the bonfire, joking and doing stuff that, frankly, even now makes me shudder, right?
Like pushing each other towards the fire and stuff.
Now, on the one hand, yikes!
On the other hand, even the little kids had a really good sense of fire, its danger, you know, so Yeah.
It again creates the idea that, let's say that, you know, it's not like you want your kids to grow up to be competent.
What you really want is your kids to be hyper-competent when it comes to risk because it's a dangerous world and hyper-competence is going to require some sort of Escalation of risk that allows you, you know, so that it's always pushing you a little bit and you're developing better and better skills for navigating hazards.
And I just think we don't even have the, we don't even understand the puzzle correctly.
No, we only see the hazard and we don't see our kids ever being competent around these things.
And we also sort of look at things litigiously, like, oh, would I be liable for that?
I don't even want to have to worry about that, so I just won't let them do it.
After I'd started the Free Range Kids blog, when people started writing to me and telling me sort of stories from the outside world, because what did I know?
I was just living in my Manhattan bubble.
Like, in terms of fire, I heard from a mom who said that in her kid's Girl Scout troop, The girls were still allowed to toast marshmallows, but they always had to have one knee on the ground.
Yeah, right.
The fear being, I mean, like, you know, you can imagine it.
Like once you imagine your kid falling face first, you know, following that marshmallow into the flames, you know, it's this worst first thinking again.
Well, that would be so bad.
Isn't there a way to mitigate it?
Yes.
From now on, no child can stand over fire.
They must have one knee on the ground.
And that becomes the rule.
And then that's how the kids know how to relate to the fire.
They would never joke around it.
They would never run near it.
They will, you know, assume the position.
and toast the marshmallow.
And then, not to rag on the Scouts, but then at a similar time, somebody wrote to me about their Cub Scout kid had been at the troop, and a man had come in and explained to everybody, demonstrated how to whittle, right?
Which involves a stick and a knife.
But then he gave each kid a stick and a potato peeler.
Which, you know, I use a potato peeler and there always is blood.
But there's never a, let's just say, a latke without blood.
Anyways, the point is that we are so ahead of ourselves in worrying that we've become kind of absurd.
I mean, you see these kids in my neighborhood, I'm sure in your neighborhood too, they're on their scooter on the way to school.
And first of all, the parent is holding the scooter as they scoot along.
And they're about two feet off the ground and it's the helmet okay but then also the knee pads and stuff and it's like you know I wish you would just watch a kid that size fall off their scooter once and you'd realize like It's not a big deal.
They're two feet from the ground.
But these things are sold and then everybody else is holding onto the scooter and everybody's got the helmet.
I've seen parents walking to school, and it's kind of nice and also kind of bad that I don't think of it as nice, that two parents are holding a child and the child is like 7, 8, 9, 10.
But these are the norms.
And if I can, I'm going to stun you with a couple of statistics from the University of Michigan.
May I?
Sure.
I was really happy they did this study because sometimes I think that I'm like, am I exaggerating what's going on in America to make a point?
But they are not me.
And they did a reasonable study, a survey of parents, thousand parents across America, every demographic, socially, racially, economically.
And they asked the parents of kids age 9 to 11, would you let your kids play at the park with another friend?
And the majority said, mm-mm.
Okay, would you let your kid walk to a friend's house?
Mm-mm.
Would you let your kid, this is 9 to 11, trick or treat?
The majority said no.
The majority also wouldn't let their kids stay home, for I can't remember if it was like an hour or just under an hour.
And then the one that is sort of the killer is that 50% said they wouldn't let their kids go to another aisle at the store.
Wow.
Yeah.
So when you're talking about a little kid in keto clutching whatever money they have in Ecuador and going to buy the bananas versus parents at a suburban store not letting their kid go to another aisle also for the bananas.
It's that's what I'm talking about.
It's a culture that is really undermining any kind of competence or confidence on the part of the kid.
And that isn't even risk that's seen as risk, but it's not risk.
And so that's what I think is really sort of interesting.
It keeps me up at night.
It's like we are delusional when it comes to imagining the worst.
I mean, if you can imagine the worst at a grocery store or even an Ikea because your kid is, you know, stuck in the pillow section.
You're living in a horror movie that's in your brain, and then you're raising your kid in your brain's horror movie.
It's a strange moment.
Yeah, it's strange in a couple of different ways.
So you mentioned the litigious aspect of society, and Heather and I talk about this all the time.
Yeah.
In part because the litigiousness of a society changes the level of safety, exactly as you're implying.
And we have a favorite example of this.
Oh, me too.
Let's hear yours.
I wonder if it's the same.
Yeah, I wonder if it is the same.
In Latin American cities, there's a thing called a gringo trap.
A gringo trap is like a hole in the sidewalk often with rebar sticking out of it that no one who's grown up in an environment where that's common would fall into because everybody is paying enough attention as they walk down the street that they would see it.
But a gringo could easily be distracted enough and have the sort of sensibility of walking down a street in a major American city and they could end up in one of these things.
All right, what's your example?
OK, well, first of all, you played right into a story I have to tell, which is that in Germany, I've got to scooch up a little.
In Germany, the city, I think, is responsible for, you know, paying out money on, you know, if somebody sues.
And so the insurance companies went to schools and said, you got to start making playgrounds that are a little more risky, because nobody is paying attention.
And they're just they've gotten so used to never, you know, like everything is so regulated.
And of course, I'm going to walk up this slide, and it's going to be fine.
It's going to be everything is two feet from each other.
And when they're not paying enough attention, then they do You know, fall into the whatever the Aryan trap, let's say, and and then they end up suing the city.
And so they started to build more dangerous or risky German playgrounds.
And when you look at pictures, you go, oh, my God, you know, what about litigation?
And it's like, well, actually, the litigation is less because people start grow up paying more attention.
But then in terms of the litigious story I was going to tell you, And this goes against everything I believe, so everybody has to forget this story, but I just have to tell it because it's amazing.
Because I don't want people to be afraid of lawsuits, because in the end, lawsuits are more rare than we think.
And just like we're worried about kids being kidnapped, and that's very rare, being sued for millions of dollars is also more rare than we think.
But it did happen in New Jersey, of course, which is that a kid at a school, public school, fell off a slide and broke her arm.
Too bad, you know, that nobody wants that to happen.
It's sad.
But then the parents sued the school and the school's like, well, this playground has been the same for like, you know, 25 years.
It's not dangerous.
It just happened, you know, like the odds are that once in a while somebody will have an accident.
That doesn't mean that something is ipso faxo, you know, hazardous.
It's just, you know, the way life is.
But they brought the school to court.
And their lawyer said, look, the playground slide was at a 35 degree angle, and it was supposed to be at a 30 degree angle.
And therefore, it was, you know, ridiculously dangerous, litigiously dangerous.
And they won.
And the school had to pay $170,000.
So, which is terrible because I want schools to have more risky playgrounds and give kids more recess and more chance to climb things and whatever.
But we also, it is part of this Gordian Knot of like, how do you say I want kids to, you know, to look out for the rebar and to climb the trees when you might have to worry about you know, lawsuits that never recognize reality and only assume that like there's zero risk and anytime anything bad happens, there's somebody at fault and you can sue them. -
Yeah, and it teaches a particularly bad lesson because it teaches the lesson that fun things like slides are safe by virtue of being no more than 30 degrees rather than you auto assess each slide, right?
And also a 30 degree slide isn't that fun.
Now they're getting less fun.
I mean, when you have a slide like this, it's not that fun.
You have to scooch along, right?
Take it out, take out the fun and now you have safety.
Fun is nature's way of telling you that this is a risk worth navigating.
So I do want to talk about fun.
So Peter Gray, who comes in and is one of our co-founders of Let Grow, is talking about how important it is for kids to learn to deal with each other and learn to deal with some risk and learn to deal with some frustration.
And he points out that fun Is the goal, but getting there is the lesson.
And if you and I wanted to, you know, play tag, it's like, well, I don't want to be it.
Well, I don't want to be it.
Let's make Heather it.
Okay, Heather, you're it.
And then we have to go and hide.
And you know that Heather always goes towards the garage.
And so I'm going to go towards the front lawn and we're thinking about what to do.
And it's kind of scary because you hear her getting ready.
10, 9, 8, here I come.
And all the things that are involved in making that happen, Both organizing the game, deciding what the game is going to be.
Where is the, you know, free space that you can't get touched?
And not on you, but I'm like, you know, where's the jail and where is open space?
There's a word for that.
Anyways, all these negotiations on the way to having fun, and then the arguments.
That's not fair.
This was supposed to be the safe space, and it's not a safe space.
I don't know why I keep calling safe spaces.
But the point being that all the arguments and all the negotiations and all the compromise on the way to the fun are how you learn to deal with other people.
How do you get buy-in?
How do you deal with your frustration?
This is so not fair.
I keep being the last one picked.
And so fun is the drive that Mother Nature put into us.
I guess you'd say evolution.
Look who I'm talking to.
And when adults are with kids, they see it as wasted time.
You guys are arguing, you know.
All right, Brett's going to go first, and then Lenore's going to go.
That's the way it is.
Or you guys, you know, it's taking forever to make the teams.
I'll make the teams.
Or, you know, if you guys don't decide something fast, I'm just going to take you home.
I mean, they are optimizers.
And the assumption is that the fun part is what's important, but it turns out that the stuff you don't care about, the squabbling, the pouting, is all about learning human interactions that makes you into a human.
And so when we get to the fun immediately, if life is all Chuck E. Cheese, right, and all the birthday party, and it's not It's not developmentally rich.
It is fun-rich, but not developmentally rich.
That's it.
Just had to talk about fun.
No, I'm glad you did.
It is exactly, it's two things.
One, it's the right lesson, right?
You think the feeling of exhilaration is great, right?
Would you like to have it all the time?
Then cocaine is your drug, right?
I mean, I don't know.
I've never, I've literally actually never seen cocaine, but I've certainly never done it.
But nonetheless, the point is it short circuits something important, right?
You're supposed to get the endogenous reward for accomplishing something.
If you can have the endogenous reward for, you know, committing a crime and Snorting powders off of a mirror, then it teaches you the wrong lesson.
You end up pursuing that thing rather than the accomplishment that is supposed to give you the thrill.
So what you're saying about kids, the idea that they're That any of it is wasted, right?
This is the skill set for being a human being and navigating disagreements and hurt feelings and offense and, you know, seeing what you can get away with, what other people can detect and will mock you over, what they can't detect.
That's how you become capable.
And instead, we have this insane culture where we are Literally training children to seek outside intervention in order to relieve discomfort.
It's so obvious that that will end in a societal catastrophe of, you know, protest demanding utopia, which is, of course, where we are.
Right.
So the problem is not... I don't think the problem is demanding, you know, make me feel good instantly.
Who wouldn't?
What the problem is, is that we're there.
And so we do.
You can't have adults with kids all the time.
I mean, that's really what Let Grow boils down to is if a parent, people always say like, are you against trophy culture?
You know, everybody gets a trophy.
I'm like, I'm against parents being there to give trophies.
I'm against an adult coach.
You just have to have some time when they're figuring things out.
And I wrote myself a note that says leaf pile.
Because I have to tell you the story.
So Peter Gray said, how are we going to bring back free play into kids' lives?
Mixed ages, the arguments, the frustration, all the stuff you were just talking about in a culture that won't let the kids go to the park until they're 14.
So his idea was to do something very simple.
We call it a let grow play club, play and social club, we're calling it now.
But really, it's just keep the schools open For mixed-age free play before or after school.
You don't have enough space?
Block off the street in front of, on the side of, or behind the school.
And you have an adult there just like a lifeguard, right?
For litigious reasons and also just to reassure the parents, whatever.
But the adult doesn't organize the games and doesn't solve the disputes.
And a beautiful example we had of that was there was a play club down in a Let's Grow play club.
I keep forgetting.
You know, get the message across.
All our materials are free, right?
So there's a Let Grow Play Club guide.
And so the teacher was watching as the children at this Let Grow Play Club in South Carolina were jumping into a pile of leaves.
And it was one kid after the other, and hilarity ensued, and it was really great.
And then one kid jumps into the middle, and he stays there.
He's being a jerk.
And the kids are going like, move!
You're in the way!
Hey, get out of the way!
I can't hear you!
You know, really classic, dumb third grader behavior.
And after a while, one of the kids said, well, let's just jump around him.
And that's what they started to do.
And then, of course, the kid got bored and walked away.
And so if the adult had intervened, they would have given the kid in the middle exactly what he wanted, which was attention.
And the other kids who came up with a solution would have had no chance to come up with any problem solving because the problem would have been solved.
The adult said, you get out of the way so the children can keep playing.
So just by being there, just by being a smart, empathic, proactive adult, watching kids squabble and be annoying ruins the experience.
For the kids.
And so how do we make that part of kids lives again?
The only way we've come up with is with this idea of keeping the schools open, because at least you have a lot of different kids of different ages.
If you're in a dangerous neighborhood or a safe neighborhood, it doesn't matter.
You still are at school.
You stay there.
And there's enough kids and there's enough time.
So otherwise, kids will go home and they'll be on their devices or they'll be in a car off to a sport that is really more school than play.
And so play is this important part of childhood that we took out that one of the goals of Let Grow is to figure out how do we bring that back so the kids get these interpersonal skills and life skills that we were just talking about.
Let me ask you a question as I play that through in my mind.
Yeah.
It seems to me that the parents would have to sign a waiver.
They do.
Because otherwise, the institution can be hijacked by students asking adults to intervene because if the parent, if the adult, the teacher fails to intervene and somebody gets hurt, which frankly has to be within the teacher fails to intervene and somebody gets hurt, which frankly has to be within the realm of possibility Mm-hmm.
And the school might get sued, as in your story of the 35-degree slide.
Is there a waiver?
I wish I hadn't told that story, but I just couldn't resist.
It's a question of whether schools are liable.
It's usually covered by the same insurance policy as recess, because it's still on the property and it's still there.
And we make two things happen.
The parents do have to sign a waiver.
The waiver that we have on our site is they sign a little thing that says, I realize my child will not be happy every single second of Play Club signed.
Mrs. Skenazy.
And then the kids have to sign a waiver that says, I will not deliberately hurt somebody else, and I won't leave without telling the adult there that I'm leaving.
You know, we have a lot of play clubs around the country that are up and running with the recognition that things cannot be perfectly safe.
But in New Zealand, they tried this thing called No Rules Recess.
You can look it up on YouTube.
Have you heard about it?
It was great.
I mean, they had a lot of space, because it's New Zealand.
But there were like six schools who tried no-rules recess versus a very top-down, very controlled recess.
And the researchers wanted to see what happened.
And instead of saying, you can't climb the trees, and you can't play leapfrog, and you can't, you know, jump over the rocks or whatever it was, and they gave them a lot of loose parts, you know, like sticks and old suitcases and paper boxes, whatever.
The incidence of actual injuries went down, and the reason is the same reason that kid in keto was able to cross the street, which is because, once again, the kids were actually paying attention, and kids don't want to get hurt, and kids like being in control, and they like trying things, but that's what we're talking about.
They develop their riskometer by taking little mini risks, and you've at last allowed children to develop normally, By giving them some free time with other kids to play.
I have a personal piece of philosophy that I call, for lack of a better term, the theory of close calls.
And the idea is that risk is, let's say, normally distributed or something like that.
There are little tiny risks not worth worrying about.
There's some very, very extreme risks on the other side.
And then there's a lot of sort of intermediate risks.
When you have a close call, there is an instinct to think, oh, well, nothing happened, I guess.
Nothing to learn.
Whereas what I do is I say, well, is the difference between my having been hurt or killed luck?
Is the situation, this close call, could that have killed me but for the fact that I was three inches this way rather than three inches that way?
Yeah.
If so, then I should treat that as... As if it happened, and yet somehow it didn't happen.
Right.
Right.
Statistically speaking, that is, wow, you screwed up badly enough to die.
Right.
Um, so anyway, you can sort of map out the real risks in the world by your close calls and your close calls.
If you have several close calls in a row in the same venue, you're doing something wrong, right?
So anyway, I think you can develop a very sophisticated model of the actual hazards in the world this way.
And you can get very good at taking a lot of risk without suffering harm through this.
And I supplement it with something else.
I've become almost an addict of this other something.
It's a subreddit called What Could Go Wrong.
Oh, you're kidding.
I gotta write it down.
Okay.
What Could Go Wrong is... it's a fraction of an education.
Right, because what it is is people have captured, because cameras are everywhere now, lots of situations in which something has gone wrong.
And a great many of them there's nothing to learn because it's just a completely bizarre freak something or other, right?
But there are also patterns.
There are certain things that go wrong all the time that you don't realize how dangerous they are, right?
Never, ever, ever accept a flaming drink if you have hair or wear clothes.
I've never, ever, ever been offered a flaming drink.
How do you like that?
Me either, but I know to turn it down should it happen.
Never use liquid gasoline to augment a fire.
Right, right.
Never do a wheelie on a bicycle or motorcycle in traffic.
Okay, these are things that go wrong all the time.
Never, and I assume that everybody who tries this is drunk, never assume that if you dive onto a folding table that it will collapse, right?
These are just things that happen all the time.
Diving onto a folding table?
This is common?
Am I hanging out in the wrong crowds?
I would never have thought to do it, but apparently, and I understand it, people, you look at a flimsy table and you think, That flimsy table is flimsy, and you don't understand that it is specifically not flimsy in certain ways.
Right.
Right?
It is designed to exert a lot of force in one direction.
So anyway, the What Could Go Wrong subreddit allows you to... Oh, then there's some things that are really scary that are very hard to protect yourself from, like wheels that have escaped trucks on highways.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The flaps, the pieces of rubber.
No, no.
The whole wheel breaks free.
I guess a wheel bearing has broken or something.
The wheel is now moving at 60 miles an hour down the highway and it leaves the highway and goes careening into some, you know, shop.
That apparently is more common than you would think.
Okay.
Enough that it gets captured with some regularity on film.
I don't know how to protect yourself from that one.
In New York City, you get around on the subway.
You don't have to worry about any of that.
It's so safe.
Right.
But anyway, I've departed from the point, but the idea is...
Taking risk is a kind of a subject that you can learn about, which is exactly, you know, kids, just as kids don't want, yes, kids break rules.
They do not want to live in a world free of rules.
They want the rules articulated, and they want the rules to be intelligent rules, right?
And that's part of why they push them.
They're trying to get you to refine them, and they're trying to get you to spell them out.
And, you know, anyway, just the kids also don't want to live in Lord of the Flies.
Peter Gray, I have to quote him again, but as Peter Gray always points out, Lord of the Flies is fiction.
And when a real group of children was, like, thrown off course and ended up on an island and lived there for a little over a year, they developed a very nice society and they helped each other.
But yes, we don't want to live in Lord of the Flies.
But I mean, I think that's the same point.
Yeah, the point is, kids will figure they will discover the skills in which they do get to have fun, and they don't get routinely hurt.
And you know, yeah, so they're built for that.
And of course, they would be evolutionarily.
Why would we expect anything else?
Right, so that's the play drive.
So I want to talk about the other drive that we see and that we're trying to renormalize, which is the drive to be a competent person in the world and not just a taker, but somebody who can do things either for your family or for yourself and be part of the world instead of just sheltered from it.
Because the other I guess the other big program that Let Grow pushes is something called the Let Grow Experience.
And like I said, all this stuff is free.
So it sounds like I'm selling, but I'm just sort of selling an idea.
You're selling at an excellent price.
That's right.
Right.
The best.
Yes.
So the experience is simply a homework assignment.
that teachers give their students, and this is K through eight, although we're expanding it to high school.
But the homework says, "Go home and do something new on your own "with your parents' permission, "but without your parents." And the parents get this letter, and it's like, "What do you mean?" And really what we're saying is you must let go.
Because today's parents don't know when they can let go, as evidenced by that University of Michigan study that parents don't think their kids can do anything that children normally do, like go to a friend's house or the park or trick-or-treat or get you the peas from another aisle.
And so we think they need more than permission to let go.
They need a push.
And they need it because once you do let your kid do something on their own, and they come back, then the cycle begins.
Because then you feel proud, and they feel proud, and they feel trusted, and you realize you can trust them, and then you can let them do it again.
But the cart has to happen before the horse, because the parents don't know when they're allowed to let their kids do anything.
We've just seen these remarkable experiences across the country as kids go home with this little homework assignment that's free, that doesn't take much class time, and they talk with their parents and they decide, I'm going to go to the store, or I'm going to go to a friend's house, or I'm going to make pancakes.
And I can't tell you, Brett, so many times when I have seen kids' projects, we call them When they do something.
I thought the kids were being histrionic when they would say things like sixth graders saying, like, I decided to make eggs, but I was afraid because I worried I would burn down the house.
I worried I made toast, but I worried I would burn down the apartment.
I walked the dog.
I wanted to walk the dog, but I was afraid I would be taken by a scary man.
This was these were words from a seventh grader.
I wanted to use a knife, but my parents had never let me.
I wanted to go to the movies with friends as another seventh grader, but there would be nobody to watch over us.
So this is like, it's strange to me how, how common These examples are, and one kid, my favorite story of a kid, wanted to get himself to karate.
And when I asked how, you know, like, are we talking bike?
Are we talking by foot?
And he was like, no, no, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna open the car door.
And then I close it behind me and I look both ways and I walk into the dojo and then my mom parks the car in the parking lot.
So when I try to explain that our culture has gotten crazy to the point where an eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 year old maybe never went someplace by themselves, maybe thought they could only go into a store with an adult, thinks that independence is the 32 seconds from the car door into the karate class.
It's disturbing.
What's also sometimes disturbing to me is like, how come there's like all these organizations that are dedicated to other things in childhood?
Like, you know, like getting rid of phones is a big one now.
And there's nobody else dedicated to making sure that kids have some time separate from adults so that they can do things on their own.
It's weird that we're the only one.
But we are.
So when kids do their Let Grow Experience, we just keep hearing these amazing stories of transformation.
And the one I heard last week, so it's the easiest for me to remember, was a boy in Santa Fe, a teacher who had actually a mixed age class, 9 to 11 or 12.
So he was like 10 or 11, decided to go to the store to get groceries to make the meal for his family.
And he was doing his shopping by himself, you know, going around the aisles and then he couldn't find one of the ingredients.
And I'm just going to say it's hot sauce.
But he Didn't know what to do, right?
Because he didn't want to talk to an adult.
That was too scary to him.
And so he actually left the cart and bolted out of the grocery because he was just too covered with shame and humiliation at the idea of doing something so tough, risky to him.
But then he stood out there for a while and he went back in.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's awesome.
It is awesome.
And when I tell it to people, I'm like, that's like a big deal.
I mean, it's it's not a big deal.
He went in and he asked, where's the hot sauce?
He found it.
He got it.
But it is a big deal.
And if we're talking about a country with these giant, you know, the escalation of anxiety and depression in kids and anxiety is when you think you can't do something or if you do, you'll mess up.
And if you mess up, you will never survive.
And here was a kid who was totally worried about that.
And faced his fears, well, look it, you can start all these kids on a hero's journey by just telling them, do something new on your own without your parents and parents, you have to let them.
So that's, that's our big revelation and big assignment for America, which is just let kids do this, have kids do this, and it will change the parent and it will change the kid, which changes the parent, which changes the kid.
Yeah, that's actually the next thing I was going to ask you about.
And we are going to, at some point, come to this study that has just been released.
But one of the things that it caused me to think in looking at it was that it is not the kids.
It's the system.
Yes.
And I wonder how much the oversensitive parents are themselves the victim of having been insulated from risk in a way that they don't have a rational model for it themselves.
Gee, I don't—I don't know.
I don't know if it's that the parents—today's parents already were growing up like today's kids are, and so everything seems scary.
But it's also—you're in a culture where you're being told that everything is dangerous.
I mean, if you pick up any of the parenting, you know, magazines or you look at any of the blogs, they're always coming up with new things for you to be afraid of, you know, new warnings.
And there's some, you're an evolutionary, what are you, an evolutionary biologist.
So I feel like trust is a muscle.
And that in earlier eras, it was automatically built, just like people were stronger, right?
I mean, you had to, like, carry the sacks from the fields or go and kill deer or whatever it was.
And my mom, who was just as, you know, I'd say innately nervous as me, sent me off to school and didn't see me from 9 to 3.
And had to trust that I was fine, that the neighbors were, you know, were good, that I had crossed the street safely and that I'd arrived at school and that I would do my work and come back again.
And when you no longer have to trust because everything can be verified, and, you know, whether that's by tracking them or by staying at the bus stop with them until the bus comes and picks them up, maybe parents don't get The chance to develop the sort of trust in their kids and the world that older generations did.
Yeah, I think that's quite right.
So we've got two hypotheses on the table and they're not mutually exclusive.
One is that the parents were oversheltered as kids, which frankly strikes me as unlikely because, you know, I'm of that generation and I remember playing outside and that was not unusual.
The other is that the current system is inducing An uncertainty about risk that is causing parents to falter on what they might otherwise know.
I think the word uncertainty is key, but I think what it's fostering is an inability to deal with any uncertainty.
Because we have so many ways of knowing exactly what our kids are doing, either we're with them or we know that an adult is taking care of them, or now we're tracking them.
I think being uncertain for even a moment seems untenable.
It makes us super uncomfortable, and it may even feel like we're irresponsible.
Like, you can know everything, so why wouldn't you know everything?
And I just have to—I was just at a conference here, and one of the moms was showing me her phone, and it was a readout of—she's going to send me the screenshot—of the information she gets every day from her daycares, from her kids' daycares and her daughter's three.
And it tells you One—you know, 10, 15 a.m., P, 12, 17 p.m., P and B.M., 3, 02 p.m., P, ate all of her carrots, all of her apple slices, all of her sandwich, you know, fussed at such-and-such a time.
It's—it is so outrageously granular.
And on top of that, She showed us all.
They never turn this off.
There's a camera in the classroom.
And so you're always allowed to verify exactly what your kid is doing, what that terrible teacher is doing to your kid, possibly.
And it's a level of omniscience That makes any uncertainty start seeming just impossible.
I can't deal with it.
I want to be able to see my kid every second.
I want to know whether she peed at 10.15 or 10.17.
It is on the dot, they tell you.
And also, how do they even know all this?
It's just so gross.
But that's, that's the culture.
And if you're growing up, if you're raising a kid in that culture, the idea that you could just trust them on their bike, you know, to go to the store seems like trusting them to go to the Himalayas with a yak.
That is so disturbing, and it so thoroughly makes your point, that it is not healthy for either parent or child to have that level of supervision in the classroom, let alone The parent able to tune in at any moment.
You are raising... And it's based on distrust.
It's based on the idea that something bad could be happening.
And so I must be always vigilant.
And so you're wondering why are parents so, you know, hyper worried and vigilant?
Because this is the level that they're told is normal, that you have to do this if you're going to be a good parent, which is why letting your kid ride the subway without me and without a phone seems so outrageous.
Yeah, it reminds me of a little asymmetry that I think about sometimes.
I think of it as the cat that is so terrified it hides under the bed, right?
A cat that is too bold learns the lesson that it's being too bold because it gets hurt at some point.
Well, I hear that chastity killed the cat.
Well, right.
But most cat, you know, it's amazing.
You ever notice a cat that is able to navigate traffic?
In fact, I had a friend who had a cat who lived in San Francisco and the cat would literally follow him to the bar blocks away.
Drinks, right?
Exactly.
But you're covered with fur.
It's a bad idea.
Right.
Even without clothes.
Um, but.
I, you know, it's not like somebody can sit a cat down and explain what a traffic light is or what the pattern of traffic is.
Somehow that animal understood it.
It had figured it out, right?
Well enough to navigate city traffic, which it's not evolved for.
So that tells you that these systems are learnable.
Right.
And flexible.
They're flexible wherever they lay.
If he was in the Kalahari, once again, he wouldn't know about the traffic lights, but he'd know about lines.
Right, exactly.
But the frightened cat, the one that hides under the bed whenever company comes over, cannot learn the lesson that company isn't dangerous, right?
Because they're always under the bed and they don't know that that's not what's keeping them from getting eaten.
Right.
So it's an asymmetry.
One of these things is self-correcting, the other one is absolutely not.
Self-correcting!
That's a really great term.
Okay, yeah.
So I'm just thinking about this, you know, surveillance society for toddlers in which you're able to... Well, it starts with toddlers.
It's surveillance society on up, right?
Well, but of course it would be because the parent who has, you know, who's nervous to have their kid in daycare...
Or not!
Or not!
She hated getting these messages, but it comes, right?
That's what I'm saying.
It's not that the parents are so nervous and neurotic.
It's a culture that has accustomed them to being that way.
And the idea that you're not that way is wrong.
That's, that's the me.
And it doesn't, you know, you're supposed to develop as a parent.
increasing capacity to deal with distance and you're supposed to intuit that no news is probably good news right if you're not hearing about your kid it's because not because they're dead in a ditch it's because everything's fine and So yeah, I am compelled that your hypothesis is way better than mine here.
I don't even know quite what my hypothesis is except that I blame the culture and not the parents.
So I was going to say, I have written down to myself, omniscience and control.
And one of the people at this conference I was just asked said, how come we're more nervous Even though now we can track our kids and know their grades instantly and know where they are and see them on a map and know if they had, you know, the BM and did they finish their apple slices.
And I think there's something about what the assumption behind all that information is that if you have all that information, you can be in complete control.
But you can't.
And there's this dissonance between omniscience, yes, omnipotence, no.
And I think that there's like no sympathy if anything goes wrong because why weren't you paying more attention?
Why weren't you with them?
Why weren't you tracking them?
Why didn't you see that she hadn't peed all day?
You know, it's like, It's your God, and it's really nerve-wracking to be God if you're not God, right?
It's probably nerve-wracking to be God, I actually don't know.
Couldn't say.
Couldn't say.
Let's just believe it is.
But it doesn't really matter.
The problem is that we have the omniscience of God, and therefore, anything that happens is because we willed it or because we were terrible.
Okay.
I think you, again, not surprisingly, given that this is your stock and trade and that you are either America's worst or best mom, depending upon how you look at it.
But there's an error that I see with increasing clarity over in the world of medicine.
Oh, I can guess.
Where there's this idea that, you know, health is the result of correct intervention.
Wait, that seems right.
Nope.
No.
Absolutely not.
No.
Absolutely not.
And you'll see it in a second.
In fact, maybe even misunderstood what I'm getting at here.
Mostly, health comes from the fact that you are built to be healthy in an environment that provides the necessary prerequisites for it, whether that's a developmental environment, whether that's the food you're eating, whether that's the level of sunlight and the air you're breathing.
If those things are tailored to you because they look like your ancestral environment, then the default assumption is you will be healthy.
It is disruption of that natural environment that causes us to be unhealthy in the first place.
And unfortunately medicine, because medicine is occasionally capable of rescuing you from death, Right?
Through intervention.
It has become addicted to intervening, rather than, if you're not well, figuring out what the thing upstream of your not well is, and how can we correct that, rather than, what pill can we give you for the rest of your life that corrects the imbalance that resulted from the thing we haven't identified?
So anyway, to circle back to the child development question, The idea that safety arises because you fended off all of the hazards is wrong.
Right.
Right?
That may be true for an infant, who literally can't roll over.
But the more they can do, the less their well-being should depend on intervention.
And at the point that they're adults, it shouldn't depend on your intervention at all.
Right, right.
So you should be relaxing the level of intervention, whereas a system that gives you so much information that you think, well, you know, how do I know that that's not why the child reached its fifth birthday, was that I was there every second of the day if I needed to be.
Right.
I mean, even before there were the phones and all these things, when I wrote Free Range Kids, it's really hard to make people feel that, you know, you don't have to be at the bus stop with your kid.
And people think, well, yes, I do, because I don't want them kidnapped.
And there's sort of no way to prove that, like, they wouldn't have been kidnapped even if you weren't there, because they know that their child wasn't kidnapped, and they were there.
And so how do you explain, no, you didn't need that.
And in fact, in being there all the time, they don't get to make their friends.
They don't get to play the games.
They don't get to be brave.
They don't get to, you know, skip school for a day and see what that's like.
And so how do you explain that you don't need to be doing all these interventions?
This is what you're saying, for your kids to be well.
And in fact, they're better when they're not with you all the time.
So Let Grow, when you boil it down to its essence, is sort of trying to convince parents that you don't have to be with your kids all the time.
There shouldn't be an adult with kids all the time.
Kids are built with not only resilience, it also feels like we've just been talking about physical safety and maybe even emotional safety.
But the idea of adults with kids all the time now is also so that everything can be teachable, like a teachable moment.
And that insults me because it implies that kids are like really bored and dumb and don't notice anything unless you point out, honey, look at the bird.
Isn't that a beautiful bird?
What color would you call that?
Oh, red?
Red starts with R. And you've turned this Moment of a kid being alive to the world into a boring lesson that's run by an adult.
And what do we do when people are teaching us lessons that we're bored with?
We tune out.
And so much of childhood has been turned into an adult run activity and a teachable moment and a safety precaution that kids are.
I mean, I know we're worried about anxiety and kids and depression and kids, but I see passivity.
And I don't think you see passivity in, you know, a five-year-old clutching his money in keto going to the store.
They have to be alert.
They're important to their family.
They're doing something real.
They're interacting with people, adults, the store, the cats, the traffic.
And to keep taking all of that out of kids' lives or being the intermediary, because we're so worried about them surviving and doing the right thing, is not letting them learn how to survive and do the right thing.
So it is this topsy-turvy world, and that's what I do all day.
I discuss a topsy-turvy world and say that it's not crazy to let your kids do some stuff without you, without you there, without another adult there, without you tracking them out in the real world, because that's where they were built to be.
Yeah, you are doing your child's future self a huge favor by learning how to let them face and manage risk.
And I would say their current self.
That too, but you know the counterintuitive thing from my perspective, or what I find is counterintuitive for people, is that we tend not to think much beyond our own species.
And we tend to think, yeah, childhood is long.
That's true.
Except in a cat, yeah.
Well, but we should because, you know, childhood is long.
Fits with a lot of garbage thinking that has become sophisticated in waves, right?
You know, parents have in various recent decades come to understand themselves as, you know, babysitters of a sort.
Right?
They don't understand that they are actively involved in the child developing the skill set of adulthood.
Childhood is not about innocence.
It's about becoming an adult with high capacity.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't have fun, but the fun should be the result of stuff that you should feel rewarded for accomplishing, whether that's, you know, beating somebody in handball, or I don't know.
Who knows what it is, but that thrill is there to reward you, to get you to do more of the thing that was worth doing.
And I forgot where I was.
No, parents have to do something or other.
Stand back.
We say when adults step back, kids step up.
I'm realizing my kids are now 18 and 20.
Oh, you're pretty young.
Okay.
I have tremendous trust in both of them.
I, of course, don't know when they, you know, we live on an island.
I don't know when they leave the island whether they will ever come back again, right?
there's always the remote risk that something very bad will happen and I will feel, you know, just the same as any parent if something terrible.
But the chances of something terrible happening are quite low because my kids will detect it as they put themselves in danger.
And also we're living in pretty safe times and certainly, you know, in world history, one of the safest times ever.
Absolutely.
Oh, Well, safe in some ways, right?
Well, physically, yeah.
There are hazards, you know.
The food isn't as safe as it once was.
There's lots of stuff in your food that you should not be eating.
That's probably true.
You know, it shouldn't, you shouldn't have to think about whether or not, you shouldn't have to think about whether or not to eat a tuna fish sandwich, you know, just because you're pregnant.
So there are lots of dangers that have gone up, but the big obvious physical dangers are greatly reduced.
But I noticed this one thing.
I was having an interaction with my younger son, Toby.
He was actually going to a neighboring island.
They were going to do some jumping off some cliff into the water.
Um, well, my basic feeling is I jumped off some cliffs into water.
I know that it can be done safely, but I also know that he's never been to this place.
And I'm asking, none of the people, it was a place that people did this, but none of the people he was going with had ever done it.
And I was, like, starting to get alarmed as I was hearing some of these things.
Like, nobody... you guys haven't done this, so I don't know if there are dangers that none of you are aware of.
And he's telling me, it's fine, people jump from this place all the time, yadda yadda yadda.
And I said, look, Toby, I do not want you to tell me it's safe.
I want you to tell me that you understand it might not be.
Oh, that's really good.
And he looked at me and it hit him like that.
And he's like, got it.
And that was the end.
And I knew at that point that he was taking responsibility for the risk rather than telling me there wasn't any.
And the point was, oh, now Toby's going to have his eyes open and they're going to go jump off a cliff.
He's going to figure it out.
If there's something that he needs to know, he'll be back.
Exactly.
When did this happen?
He's back.
He's fine.
I'm trying to remember if... Is he gone now?
No, he's not gone now.
He's not gone now.
But let's just put it this way.
At 18, that's the lesson I want him to have.
I don't want to know why it's safe.
I want to know that you are thinking about in what way it might be.
And if you are, I think your chances are so good, I'm not going to worry about it.
Right.
Want to know.
I'm actually writing this down.
I want to know that you know what?
Want to know that I want you, I want to know that you are aware that it might be risky.
So that you are alert for figuring out.
I don't have to be there to spot the risk that you don't sleep.
That's really good.
You're taking over that job.
Right.
Got it.
Wrote it down.
Yeah.
So do you want to talk about this?
Actually, there are two things I saw from you recently that I want to talk about.
I want to talk about the study, and I want to talk about the Japanese crosswalk.
Oh, yeah.
I saw you retweeted that.
I was like, oh, OK.
The Japanese crosswalk was just—a lot of people have probably seen the show Old Enough.
Have you seen that?
Nope.
Love it.
Oh, my God.
There's a couple of shows that are just amazing.
Old Enough is one of them.
There's also one called Becoming You that I think the BBC did about children zero to five.
Anyways, in Old Enough, it's a show that's been running for 30 years in Japan, and they just started running it on Netflix like last year.
In Japan, it's called My First Errand, and it shows kids age 2, which is a little much, 3, 4, 5, 6, Going on errands.
You see them going to the fish market to get fish for the sushi.
It's all about sushi.
You see them giving the dad, you know, dad forgot his apron.
He's a sushi chef.
Of course.
Oh, we're going to go.
It's not all about sushi, but it's all about kids doing something in the real world.
And These kids, it just does your heart good.
I mean, they have a, like it's not a laugh track, it's an oh track, because you're watching the kid and like a five-year-old is taking her three-year-old brother and they're going to get the ingredients for dinner.
And the little brother is crying.
He's crying.
He's scared.
But instead of, like, the producers going, Cut!
The kid is crying.
And the mother running out saying, We can't do it yet.
He's too young.
You see the kid sniffling along.
And then he goes with his sister.
And then they get to the store.
And then he's looking at it like, Oh, this is interesting.
And they get the noodles.
And then they go to the next store.
And they get the fish.
And then they get the seaweed or whatever.
And you're You realize how proud these kids are and how competent.
And also, you have a culture there that does not say, excuse me, is this CPS?
I'd like to report a child outside.
You know, I hope you can come soon.
And the, you know, the cop cars roll up.
It's a culture that cherishes children, but venerates their growing independence.
And so, this little video that somebody put on Twitter the other day that I retweeted was showing how a child in Japan properly crosses the street.
And they wait on the sidewalk, and they make eye contact with the driver.
They hold up their hand, which makes them taller.
Then they walk across in the crosswalk, which is clearly marked.
And they get to the other side, and then they do a nice little bow, like, thank you for not running me over.
And then they go on their merry way.
What you have there is so many things going on at once.
One is people alert to children.
People expect children to be out there, and they're sort of looking for them.
People paying attention to what a crosswalk is supposed to be doing, which is allowing people to cross.
And then somebody who has taught their child, look, you don't just race across the street.
You don't look down.
You have to take some responsibility for being safe here, and here's what you do.
And then the child internalizes it.
You know, kids are so—I mean, I always refer to the movie Big, you know, the Tom Hanks movie, the iconic movie Big.
That's what they want to be.
And crossing the street by yourself, especially if you're going to school or running an errand for your parents, is You're allowed to grow up and I think that's why I see the depression and anxiety in kids today because if you're told that You're in danger, and you're a baby, and you need somebody else, and if you try to do it on your own, you'd be a dismal failure and possibly dead.
That's a depressing way to grow up, and the people who love you most and who know you best aren't trusting you.
Well, that sells something, right?
Your parents don't even trust you to go to the store, which is why, when I talk about the Let Grow experience being such a big deal, Because the parents let the kid do something.
The kid sees not only that they're allowed to go to the store or to the park, but that their parents trusted them.
I was once at a lecture, and this lady made us close our eyes and think about somebody who made us feel bad about ourselves when we were younger.
And it could be any time younger.
It could be an old boyfriend or a teacher or a coach or maybe even a bad parent.
And when we opened our eyes, She asked, where did you feel it?
And it's like, oh, in my chest or my shoulders or I have a headache.
And then she said, OK, now close your eyes.
And think of a person who believed in you, you know, who really, you know, thought that you were the cat's meow.
And for me, it was a seventh-grade teacher who just thought that I could go and talk to garden clubs about my adventures in archaeology.
It just had me doing stuff for her.
Sort of teacher's pet, but she was also sort of a—she just treated me like a competent person.
That made me feel great.
And where did we feel it?
Oh, our lungs are filling out, you know, our shoulders, our back.
And it's this, you know, tears in our eyes of gratitude that somebody believed in us.
And why wouldn't we want to be that to our kids?
You know, when they close their eyes, oh, my mom always believed in me.
Oh, my dad knew that I would be safe, right?
Because he knew I had a good hat on my shoulders.
So if you want to give that kind of wind under the wings to your kid and have that kind of relationship, you have to trust them.
I mean, all relationships, good relationships, are based on trust.
And as John Haidt pointed out to me once long ago, like a blazing revelation is trust requires risk, right?
If you're verifying everything, that's not trust.
And it's also it's safe, right?
There's no risk because you verified it, but it doesn't have anything to do with a real relationship.
It has to do with surveillance, right?
And distrust and power.
And so trusting your kids to do something out in the world is more than just giving them the world.
It's giving them this relationship with you and the wind beneath their wings that sets them out.
So, it's this minor thing, really, Let Grow is pushing, pushing, pushing, just do this thing at school.
All the kids are doing it, so the parents don't feel guilty.
It's not me deciding to send my kid to the subway.
Everybody's doing something.
And the school is making me do it, so I don't feel like I'm an idiot.
Why am I doing this already?
I shouldn't.
And all the kids are comparing notes.
I'm like, I got to go get ice cream.
Oh, I had to get a haircut.
I had to do my homework.
It changes everything.
It is simple and it's free.
And when you mention the study, there was a professor named Camillo Ortiz, who's a professor of psychology at Long Island University, who was a fan of Let Grow and also liked John Haidt's work a lot.
And he heard me talk a million times about how transformative a simple, independent activity could be.
And he is a clinical psychologist as well, and he treats a lot of children.
And he thought, I wonder if independence might work on kids who had a diagnosis of anxiety, because it sounds like so many of these anxious kids feel a lot better once they start doing more on their own.
So he and his PhD student, Matt Fastman, devised a pilot study where they recruited four families where the kids had a diagnosis of anxiety.
And the paper was just published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, which you can imagine what the journal is about.
It is the number one journal in that field.
And a drag.
What can I say?
All these anxiety things.
They described the four kids who were between the ages of 9 and 12 or 13, and they all had like palpitations, or they would breathe hard, or they had headaches, they had stomachaches, because it wasn't just garden variety, like worrying about, you know, does somebody like me, or am I going to do well on this test?
It was really a pervasive thing.
And the pilot study was this.
It was a five-week protocol.
And the first week, Camillo just met with the parents of one kid.
He met with each of the sets of parents separately.
It wasn't group therapy.
And he found out what's wrong.
And, like, one family said, well, our nine-year-old, we love him to death, but, like, he won't go upstairs or downstairs in our own house without us.
Like, in our own house, we have to go up to the bedroom and come downstairs to dinner.
And that was a kid who was like 9 or 10.
And then one girl was 9 and too scared to sleep in her own bed.
Every night she went in and slept in her parents' bedroom.
And then there were two other kids with similar problems.
And then the second session was with the kid.
The first session he talks about how important independence is.
The second session, he does the same thing.
And normally, in cognitive behavioral therapy, he would say to the kid who's afraid to go upstairs and downstairs in his own home, well, you know, that's a problem.
It's getting in the way.
And I know you're afraid, but how about tonight?
You go up and you're there for five minutes, okay?
Just five minutes, and then you can come down.
And that would be exposure therapy.
But he wondered, Can we avoid the scary thing completely and just deal with something that they want to do, which is just like the let grow experience?
And so he asked them like, look, you're 10, you know, you're gonna be in sixth grade soon, what would you like to do?
And, and these kids, even these anxious kids had things they wanted to do.
They wanted to walk to the park.
They wanted, they wanted to, um, one kid wanted to go to the park and play chess with the, with the guys there who are, you know, $3 and play chess with them.
And Somehow they live on that.
And one kid wanted to sell bracelets at her school, and the girl who was afraid to sleep in her own bed wanted to take a bus, a city bus.
And so their job was to do one independence activity every day or every other day for the next four weeks, and Camilla would check in with them every week.
And what he told me afterwards is that what we're secretly hoping for is that something will go wrong, which sounds mean, But then here's an example, and this is why they were hoping for it.
The girl who took the bus, something went wrong with her phone, or somehow she missed her stop, and she got really upset, like, oh, my God, where am I?
This is wrong.
I'm supposed to be getting off.
And she actually talked to the lady next to her, which is a stranger, which she would never do, but she was in this tizzy, and the lady said, where are you trying to go?
Oh, you got off You know, you should have gotten off two blocks back, get off at the next stop and then walk backwards for two blocks and you'll be where you wanted to be.
And the girl did that.
And this is what Camilo lives for, because a kid who thought that something was scary and something could go wrong.
I mean, that's what anxiety is.
And if I mess up, you know, I'll never recover.
Something went wrong.
She messed up.
She recovered, using her own smarts and her own bravery to talk to this other lady.
And after that, and I don't know if it was that night or if it was a couple weeks later, but she started sleeping in her own bed, and they never mentioned that.
Sleeping in your own bed had never come up in any of these sessions.
And the way psychologists describe it is generalizing, like the bravery from being on the bus and from doing these things, selling bracelets at her school, generalized to the rest of her life.
And And that's sort of my goal in life, is to make people realize that kids are ready for way more than our culture lets them do.
They're braver, they're smarter, they're stronger, they're more curious, they're more intelligent than we give them credit for because we think they're only okay because we're with them.
And when we step back and we see what they can do, and they see what they can do, It really is going to break the back of this anxious generation, which was getting anxious before phones, which was getting anxious before COVID.
It's been anxiety has been going up as freedom has been going down for decades.
And we give them back some of that and watch them fly.
That is fascinating.
And I've never thought of these things in terms of trust.
I mean, I guess I would say I trust my kids quite a bit.
Sounds like it.
I know they trust me, but it has not been the focus of this.
But when you think about this study, And you realize at one level, not only are parents failing to trust children or trust themselves, but the kid who has anxiety doesn't trust themselves to face whatever it is that they can't face.
And just a simple experience of having solved some problem gives them a basis on which they can imagine that they might be able to solve whatever problem it is that's at the center of their anxiety.
And so it's almost like You know, you could you could map the whole thing with trust.
Do you trust yourself?
If not, you're going to be anxious, right?
Do you trust your kid?
If not, they're going to be, you know, they're going to have learned helplessness because you're going to see yourself as a solution to their problems and so will they.
And - Trust the world, trust the world a little bit.
I mean, don't be naive, like you said, go and make sure that it's not a crazy place to dive.
But there was another study done of primals, which are sort of the way you see the world.
And parents who thought that they were helping their kids by saying, hey, it's a tough world out there, People are mean.
Don't be a, you know, don't get taken advantage of.
Don't be a sucker.
You know, watch out for yourself because everybody else is doing that.
There was a long-term study, and I can find it for you, that found that actually kids raised that way with this sort of mean, vicious world outlook did worse, did worse in their relationships and their jobs and their life satisfaction.
So parents were doing it out of love, but it was undermining their kids.
Alright, well, this is a paradox for me, because the world that my children have grown up in...
Is one in which Heather and I talk very openly about what I would say is a pervasive distrust for the structures of civilization.
We want a civilization that is trustworthy, but do not feel that we live in one.
We don't trust the Academy anymore.
I mean, especially, you know, it turns out... Wonder why!
Yeah, wonder why.
Well, it's gone insane.
Likewise, we are, you know, uh...
Constitutionally in favor of good governance but have been traumatized by what looks like malignant governance.
We've seen medical malpractice globalized over the entirety of civilization.
We are concerned about pollution that we are not well positioned to address.
You know, pollutants that we can't detect that are in our food, in our water, in our air.
Does that sound like a household in which we trust the world?
It's the opposite.
But... Do you trust?
Go ahead.
That's sort of global distrust, but are you just are you thinking like most people are mean and out to get you?
No, most people are good and capable of being trusted under good circumstances.
Many are perversely incentivized and it makes trust harder to establish.
So yeah, I guess this is what I'm looking for is my kids did not grow up in a household that was just reflexively trusting, but Yeah.
You know, it was a culture of trust between us and between us and people we care about.
We've seen, you know, my kids saw the betrayal of that trust when Evergreen melted down.
So that was an interesting experience for all of us, but they also saw people... Oh, how old were they?
That's so amazing.
Yeah, this is a question Heather's better at answering.
Uh, you know, it was, uh, it was 2017.
Oh my God.
Now I got to do math.
So you minus seven years.
So like around tweens, basically.
Yeah, they were, they were, uh, tweens.
Exactly.
Um, so anyway, that, you know, let's put it this way.
I don't think the story is simply one of trusting the world, but I would also say that paradoxically, The trick about managing risk is exactly knowing where you can afford not to worry and worrying about those things that are worth worrying about.
So the household was kind of divided in that way too.
You know, it is worth worrying about what's in your food, right?
It's, you know, not worth worrying that, you know, if you cross the street carefully that you're going to get run over by a truck.
Right.
I mean, people who actually do study risk talk about risk versus hazards.
Risk is inherent in all life.
Hazard is something really dangerous, like jumping from a cliff where there's rocks below.
So you really do have to be aware of hazards.
And hazards are something that we should be, you know, telling our kids to look out for.
And I even think the primals, you know, is saying, you know, but the primal was basically that, you know, you're strong, most people are good, go forth.
Yeah, go forth.
And then that other thing about the theory of close calls is that if you pay attention as things go wrong, you get some warning as you exceed your risk tolerance.
Right.
Right.
Things go well, and then if things start not going well, that's a sign that actually something is outside of what you've anticipated.
Right.
And that, you know, that's how I navigate my life, right?
I basically assume things are workable until something starts sending message that I'm not where I think I am, and that causes me to become very conscious.
I think you're more vigilant than me.
I mean, I think you're just more self-aware than me.
I mean, that's good.
I just don't even do that.
Well, here I'll tell you a quirk about me that may fill in the model a little bit.
OK.
I'm much better in an emergency than I am under normal circumstances.
OK.
I lack some executive function stuff, stuff that other people manage pretty well.
Sometimes I have trouble managing.
But in an emergency, I get very clear-headed.
Yeah, it almost feels like, you know, it feels very intuitive.
Yeah, sort of like that's what you were built for.
Yeah.
Yeah, oddly.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if I'm any good in an emergency.
Thank God I can't remember any emergencies right now.
You're that good.
I am in a new town.
Yep.
All right, let's just see.
There's so many things.
Wait, I'm looking at my little notes that I wanted to mention.
Oh, it's a simple one.
And I think this is, you know, I think everything sums up everything I believe.
But this one does.
This is a phrase I learned in college, and that is that action breaks the cycle.
If you're really afraid of something, take action.
And if you're afraid of letting your kids go, let them go.
Because thinking about them doesn't change it.
You'll just go off into worries.
And the only thing that breaks that cycle of fear, I would say, and anxiety, is action.
And that's sort of what Camilo's study proved, too.
When those kids took action and Became part of the world and saw how much they could handle, they changed.
So action breaks the cycle.
When I describe free-range kids, which was before I started Let Grow, free-range kids, I went around the country talking about these ideas, but Let Grow is dedicated to Making these actions really easy, giving kids free play and giving them independence so that they happen.
That we're not just thinking about them like, oh, free play would be good.
Oh, independence would be good.
No, this makes them happen.
And then everything changes.
Your kids grow from both of these things.
They're better off when we give them free play and independence.
Oh, that's fantastic.
And I think it mirrors something else that Heather and I frequently talk about in an educational context, which is that an education that is all abstraction, even if it's very high quality abstraction, does not train the mind for the world the way any activity in which Success or failure is clear and does not, you don't need an authority to tell you, right?
If you're trying to fix an engine, you can't fool it into working.
It either works or it doesn't.
That has never worked.
So that's, that's important.
And I also think that action, this bias towards action that you describe, or how did, what was your phrase?
Action breaks the cycle.
Action breaks the cycle.
goes to this issue of, you know, my version was the cat under the bed can't learn the thing.
If you, in the examples in the study where the kids had something go wrong and Basically, they developed a track record of successfully solving a problem, and it didn't matter that it wasn't on the topic of the thing that most frightened them.
It was just like, oh, I'm a problem-solving person.
Right.
It's a new definition of yourself.
I can do this.
I can handle it.
Oh, things come up.
I'm okay.
Maybe they think that in an emergency, they're preternaturally calm at this point because they did handle something.
I mean, anxiety is thinking you can't handle something, and so you avoid it.
And the opposite is confidence going like, OK, even if this goes, you know, even if something goes wrong, it'll be all right.
Yeah.
All right.
I want to I want to tell you just a little anecdote about my grandfather.
Get your reaction and then we'll see if there's anything left after that.
All right.
All right.
My grandfather's name was Harry.
He was a great guy.
He he He was a lot of fun.
He did cool stuff.
You know, he used to go backpacking, rode his bike, you know, through the city to go body surfing.
Anyway, he was a cool guy.
But he had a relationship with risk that was misunderstood by almost everybody.
He had the reputation of being a safety nut.
Oh really?
Even though he's a body surfer?
Huh.
See, that's just the thing.
So he was a pollution control chemist.
He saw lots of, he saw people get hurt in an industrial context.
He told me a story about a guy after World War II that he saw at the coffee shop and he noticed that the guy had a very smooth manner of picking up a cup of coffee and putting it down.
And it was sufficiently bizarre that he asked the guy about it at some point.
Yeah, what was it?
Guy was a bomb maker.
That's great!
But anyway, my experience of my grandfather does not fit with the idea that he was a safety net.
He certainly, you know, I had my hair was really long at one point and he's like, Brett, I want to talk to you about your hair.
And I was like, yeah, I'm sure you don't like it.
And he's like, no, I don't give a damn.
But you work with a lot of power tools.
And let me tell you.
I can't even think about it.
Yes.
No, I used to.
Exactly.
Pull it back.
Pull it back.
Yes.
So he's a guy who spotted risks and talked about them explicitly, which is where he got his reputation as a safety net.
But my memory of him, you know, he took me when I was 13-ish.
We hiked up Mount Whitney and Mount Whitney above Treeline is a very rocky, desolate, difficult place and there's a lot of switchbacks going up the last segment of it and it's very boring and the air thin and it's not it's the the last part of the hike is not fun.
We get to the top and he breaks out some trash bags and we decide, he says, we're not walking down the switchbacks.
We're going to slide down this glacier.
No, it was totally cool.
It was great.
Worked wonderfully.
He had been there before.
He knew he knew that this was going to work.
So a guy who slides down a glacier from a 14,000 foot peak on a trash bag is not a safety nut.
At least that does not But what I realized on, you know, at his death, after his death, I heard a lot about how obsessed with safety he was.
And my thinking was, no, that's not what's going on.
What it was, was he was so, had such an explicit, careful relationship with risk that he could afford to take a ton of it.
And that, What I'm getting at is by teaching your child to face risk in an intelligent way that lets them manage it, you are buying them the ability to experience
incredible things right if you want to go to the far reaches of the world you better have a relationship with risk that goes way back and allows you to deal with it so that you can go to that place and make it home safely right and it's like that's the question do you want your child to be rich in this uh in this currency in the ability to face risk and live to tell the tale do you want your child to have stories Yeah, yeah, the stories are so amazing.
So I just have to say one thing and then at some point we will end the conversation, but when I was just talking before about somebody who believed in you, maybe before you believed in yourself, and your grandfather takes his precious, precious grandson, you know, just Bar Mitzvah age, to the top of a glacier and says, we're going to slide down and you're going to be fine.
Yeah, no, that was really it.
And, you know, that does fit exactly because I was also not academically successful.
I had a terrible time in school.
Just absolutely appalling.
And, you know, I sort of thought that meant that my intellectual life was over because I just couldn't figure the school thing out.
My grandfather didn't think any such thing.
He believed in me.
And, you know, OK, so you're not good at school.
Like, and?
You know, so it is exactly the the perfect example of your story.
He believed in me and it mattered a great deal.
And I'm still thinking about his relationship with risk because You're still thinking about your relationship with him.
Absolutely.
All the time, actually.
Wow.
That's a cool grandpa.
Yeah, he was great.
He was fantastic.
All right, Lenora Skenazy, this has been a lovely conversation.
I've learned a lot about child rearing a little late from you.
And it's not child rearing.
It's what's wrong with the culture that we have to change, right?
Child rearing, everybody does it differently.
I hate all the judgments out there.
So it's just a culture that is saying you can't let your kids do anything.
It's a culture that's undermining you and your kid.
Yeah, that's a very good way of putting it.
And I would say from the evolutionary side, you're wired for this, and so is your kid.
And, you know, the idea that people are being advised into overprotecting their children, you know, in fact, your instinct, if it says your kid might be ready for that, it's probably telling you something.
All right.
Lenore, where can people find you?
Let's Grow?
No, it's not Let's Grow.
That's what everyone thinks.
It's Let Grow.
It's a weird phrase, but it's like instead it was going to be Let Go and Let Grow, but then we chopped off at the beginning.
But it's just L-E-T, new word, G-R-O-W, letgrow.org.
Go to letgrow.com.
We bought that.
Yeah, you know, I feel terrible.
I had it right in my mind and then I talked to you.
Everybody gets it wrong.
And then, you know, me, Lenore, you can look up America's Worst Mom, I'm the free-range kids lady, but Let Grow is where you find all the materials and everything is free.
For schools, we have home versions of the Let Grow experience and of the play club, but we really think that a collective problem, which is an entire culture that has decided kids can't do anything safely or successfully, Needs a collective solution, which is why we try to get our programs out through schools, because then a whole culture can change at once.
And it was letgrow.org.
Good.
And Free Range Kids is findable where?
FreeRangeKids is basically I just recycle the let grow material on FreeRangeKids and sometimes throw a little new thing up there, but it's FreeRangeKids.com.
It's like I'm doing both at once.
It's Stereopticonville.
All right.
And on Twitter, where are you?
Letgrow.org and also Free Range Kids.
But once again, it's like retweet from here to here.
I, you know, I'm doing that.
Well, I hope that people and especially parents will come find you and take advantage of the wisdom that you are dispensing apparently for free.
All free.
Oh, speaking of which, so also Camillo, after he did this, um, independence therapy is what he called his intervention.
He has a free manual on how to do independence therapy, which is what I was just talking about before.
And you can find that at Let Grow Too.
Basically, it's all there.
Fantastic.
All right, Lenore, it's been a real pleasure.
Thank you for joining me on Dark Horse, and thanks to everybody who watched or listened.
