Free Range Kids & Parenting

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a Wearthy podcast. I'm your host Lukas Ritson. Thanks so much for joining me. I talk a lot about play — I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favorite people who are advocates of children and nature and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated, and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

My next guest is a mother from Queens, New York who has been dubbed "America's Worst Mom" for letting her nine-year-old son catch the subway. In her quest to give kids back some old-fashioned independence, she is an author of a book and a founder of a blog both named Free Range Kids. She's also a co-founder of Let Grow, a school program and parent empowerment movement. Today we are talking about overcoming fears and cultivating courage in parents, common myths about children and experiences, giving kids agency and freedom, plus a whole bunch more. Please welcome into the studio Lenore Skenazy!

Lenore: Hey, thanks! Wow, Australia! Hello!

Lukas: Yes, all the way — winter to summer, different time zones, from 11 to 9 o'clock at night. Thank you so much! Thank you for inspiring so many of us in Australia to really empower children to get outside and take ownership over their freedom.

Lenore: You know, I can't imagine Australian kids not going outside. In my mind you guys are still free. Like don't go where you've gone, right? Just use America as a cautionary tale. I was just writing to somebody today — there was a study that had American kids spend an average of four to seven minutes outside in free play every day. And the other person thought it was 47 minutes. It's like, no, that'd be okay almost at this point. We're talking four to seven.

Lukas: Yeah, that's scary. And some of the statistics we're facing at the moment — from the UN declaring a state of emergency on children's physical activity in Australia and ranking Australia 140th out of 146 countries.

Lenore: What? For physical activity? Really?

Lukas: Yes.

Lenore: Wow, too much to lay off the Fosters, man. Yeah, and that's a funny thing — we see America as this aspirational society in so many ways and adopting a lot of the culture there and maybe forgetting some of our own and our own accessibility to nature. So, you know, I've been to Australia a couple times and it was so spectacular and fun. And there was Bondi Beach, and there were in fact kangaroos that I saw, and there was a lot of bush, and there was just so much beauty out there. And cool birds! So get out there already, my god.

Lukas: It's really wonderful. You're preaching to the converted here.

Lenore: That's probably true, right? But it is like the crazy thing — we're seeing children in high density living in apartment buildings having more outdoor interaction than children in medium density suburbs in Australia.

Lukas: I wonder if that's because — I have, you know, look, I'm over here, I don't know what's going on there — but in America we had a couple of things going on in the suburbs. And one was something they call basically a lollipop development. Do you know about this?

Lukas: No.

Lenore: Everybody wants to live — in fact, I grew up on a cute little cul-de-sac with, you know, ten houses and a little cul-de-sac, that little circle at the end. And so basically if you can imagine one giant super highway with, you know, a cul-de-sac and then two kilometers later another cul-de-sac, and then a kilometer later another cul-de-sac. So they all are these cute little self-contained environments except there's no way to go from one to the other because the only way to go any place is over and across the giant access highway.

And so what looks like the perfect place to raise kids ends up being completely stultifying. There's nothing the kids can do — they can't get to a store, they can't get to a friend on another block. And then you're stuck driving them because they can't hop on their bikes and go to the school. And then often in these larger new developments, the school board will buy the land that's cheapest, which is at the far end of the development, and that's where they put the school. And in front of the school they put a giant parking lot because of course nobody's going to be able to walk there because those giant access roads.

And it's so far from, you know, at least some of the houses. Where when I grew up, there was a little school that was in the middle of the neighborhood and everybody walked there. But even my own neighborhood school — I've been back to and the little street that I would cross is now one way only during drop off and one way only during pickup because there's going to be a line of cars dropping every child off, even though the houses are still the exact same distance from the school that's in the exact same neighborhood with the exact same tiny, tiny crime rate as a zillion years ago when I was there.

Lukas: Yeah. And being an expert with such view over this for so long, what's changed in that amount of time? Why?

Lenore: Well, it's changed in my lifetime. A lot of things have changed, but if we're just talking about a walk to school, which is a sort of easy thing to hook on to — I was allowed to walk to school at age five. How about you?

Lukas: Yeah, yep, you. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Lenore: About this, right? That sounds crazy to people now. I mean, people think that five-year-old — people don't actually see a developmental difference between a five-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old, you know? It's like a five-year-old walking by herself, oh my god. And when I got to that street that I had to cross, the crossing guard was a ten-year-old. Right? Because there was a belief, you know, in my lifetime, in living history, when people thought that ten-year-olds were pretty mature and could actually be trusted to help five-year-olds. As opposed to ten-year-olds needing an adult there every second, even for them to walk them or stand next to them at the bus stop.

What has changed in my lifetime is there are parents waiting at a lot of the bus stops with the kids. And sometimes it's like four kids and four parents, and sometimes it's four kids, four parents, and four cars. And then the kids are waiting in the car, you know, toasty or on their iPad or whatever. And then along comes the bus, and then the parents make sure that the child gets safely from the car to the bus. And then the bus drives off with a lot of waving as if the kid's going off to war. And then it repeats itself at the end of the day when the parents are stuck, as if they have nothing else to do, waiting at the bus stop for the children to come off.

Lukas: Lest what? Lest what? That's what I don't understand.

Lenore: Lest the children feel like nobody loves them! Lest — this won't let the children off. That's sometimes the case. There's school rules in some places that if you're not waiting to take the child home, if there's not a responsible pre-ordained adult waiting there, then the kid just gets whipped back to the bus terminal. Which seems a lot less safe than walking home from the bus stop. And it's as if nobody has anything to do other than — as if the only calling of all adults is to never let a child have a moment when there isn't a specific adult watching a specific child to make sure that they're safe, comfortable, watched.

Lukas: And in your view, was there a specific event that happened? Like, it seems — what was the tipping point? Was it this incremental fear, or was it like — what is it in your view?

Lenore: Yeah, I just, you know, if you saw me here I'm like doodling, because you know I've been studying this for all these years. Yeah. And I can't tell you that there was one specific thing. I think there's a lot of different factors going on, which is always less interesting to me than if there was like, "How did the dinosaurs die?" "There was one giant comet," you know.

But in this case it's like, "How did childhood die?" Well, it started, I'd say, in the late 70s here in the United States and early 80s. There were a couple of very high profile child kidnappings by a stranger — as if this had never happened before. What changed is that they came along sort of at the dawn of cable. And cable was interesting and different in that it was 24 hours a day. And CNN had to fill up 24 of those hours with news.

Well, how are you going to keep people glued to a screen? You can't say, "Huh, I guess there was a car crash somewhere." I mean, that's, you know, or "There was a golf match someplace." It's just too dull. But if you can grip people with the story of a white, middle or upper middle class child stolen by a stranger, it turns out that it broke all ratings records. And when that happens, the producers on television say, "Get me ten more." And they do. And if they have to go to the ends of the earth to find this story, they will.

Lukas: Wow.

Lenore: You know, the first time I came to Australia, which is probably eight years ago, I turned on the TV in my hotel room and there was — who was it? It was Jaycee Dugard who had been taken by a stranger. It was the most horrible story you could possibly imagine. She was kidnapped for 18 years. Nobody had ever heard a story like this. Thank God it's the rarest of all stories. But it had traveled around the globe so that you guys could be watching it too, almost feasting on it, like this fascinating thing people can't get enough of.

And that makes us sound ghoulish, but really it's just that we're so empathic that to watch it almost feels like you're communing with her. And to turn it off feels like you don't care. So we watch. And we see the video they were showing on your television in Australia, in Sydney, was of her like an early video before she'd been kidnapped, baking with her mother. And what could be more poignant and heart-wrenching?

And you know, the way the brain works is like Google. Google is really good for like, "I want to take a vacation to Aruba," and you type that in, and for the next week all you're going to be seeing is these beautiful beaches and different plane fares and hotels. And "Why don't you get a, you know, here's a free drink in Aruba," because they know that you're interested. But — and that makes sense, right? The search results for Aruba make sense.

But the search results when you ask "Is my kid safe at the bus stop?" — up comes the things that made the biggest impression on you. Jaycee Dugard making Christmas cookies with her mother comes up at the top. And under that in our country it's Etan Patz, this boy who was taken at age six from a bus stop. And under that is Adam Walsh, who was taken from his mom in the Sears.

The easiest to retrieve are of course the most emotional things, not all the boring kids who've ever been to a bus stop. I mean, every day there's hundreds of millions of children waiting at bus stops, and they don't make it into your brain. And the way the brain works is that it thinks that what's easiest to retrieve, the first search results, are the most relevant. And with your Aruba vacation they are, and with kidnapping they aren't.

So I would say that certainly one of the things that changed is that when my mom was sending me out at age five to walk to school, this hadn't happened yet. She couldn't name five kidnapped children. And we can. But the thing is, we can name them and they happen to span 45 years, but it feels like they're all at the top of the search engine results. And so it feels like, "Oh my god, every day, every second, I can picture a kid getting taken. Forget it, I'm not sending her out. I'll go with her to the bus stop."

Lukas: Yeah, the front of mind trap. It's always in front of you.

Lenore: Yeah, exactly.

Lukas: And I was chatting to some friends and they were saying, "Well, you know, before it was just the milk carton with the missing child on the milk carton. And then all of a sudden it went cable and went everywhere." It was — all of a sudden it wasn't just about the same time.

Lenore: Yeah, it was the 80s. And the milk carton kids — did you have milk carton kids there?

Lukas: We saw it through like, now on TV, that they were — that was a part of America. You had these missing kids on milk cartons.

Lenore: Isn't that a strange idea?

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

Lenore: You know, it was actually very brief. It was, I think, a year or less than a year. But it made this deep impression on everybody, including me, because you're eating your cereal and you're looking at a picture on the side of a milk carton that says "Have you seen me?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm looking at you right now." But of course it was like, "You see me to turn me in."

So we're all citizens on the lookout and you feel sort of proud because you could possibly save a child. But you're also terrified because you think that all these kids, each week a new kid, has been taken. And they never explained — and this I find horrifying — they never explained to the public that most of these kids were runaways or taken in custodial disputes, like in a divorce.

And that's a big difference, right? Not that's great, but the idea that you can send your child out on the bike and the chances that they'll come home are about 50-50 is something that really changed our perception of the world and of what childhood could be or should be, and what our job was as parents.

Lukas: Yeah. And interviewing Mariana Brussoni, she stated that the fact that it was — the equation on it is like 250,000 years you'd have to leave —

Lenore: No, that's me! What's that? Yeah, it's 750,000 years!

Lukas: Yeah, that's it!

Lenore: I mean, it was somebody crunched the numbers for me, this guy named Warwick Cairns. But it was: if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep them outside unsupervised? And people usually guess, "I don't know, a week? A day? A couple hours?" Some people have said 20 minutes. I mean, people think 20 minutes, which is amazing. And I say, no, actually it's 750,000 years. And as I like to point out, after the first hundred thousand years, they're not really a child anymore. Probably like a mummy or dust.

So it's impossible. The thing that has disheartened me over the years of talking about that, including that amazing statistic, is that statistics don't change anybody, ever.

Lukas: That was my next statement. I've used that statement, I've mentioned it to families. Like, and you're an expert and you've gone in to consult with many families on being what — hyperprotective of their children. And I've jumped in and having conversations with, I think it was family friends, saying, "Well look at this stat! It's like hundreds of thousands of years to leave your child on the street for them to get abducted, and you're worried about them playing outside?"

Lenore: Wait, wait, let me guess. And they say, "But what if it's your child?"

Lukas: No, they said, "I don't care. I'd still — I'd still bring them inside. I don't care about that." They don't — the number about reality, because they're so in the thrall of the picture in their mind.

Lenore: Which I was just talking to an expert on anxiety. And I wish I had the notes in front of me, but it was basically: if you can picture something, your brain can barely tell the difference between reality and an imaginary thing. And if you're picturing your kid jumping rope on your driveway and a man in a white van comes up and takes her away — and that's your picture in your brain — it's almost as if it happened already. And "I'm not gonna let that happen again." And inside she goes.

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely. And they were just — their argument was, "Well, there's still a chance, so I'm not gonna do that. There's still a chance."

Lenore: So that's what I've been puzzling over. Maybe you can help me, Lucas. I've been puzzling — like, you know, there's sort of different facets of this that I don't get. And what I don't get is that obviously when our parents sent us out and we were five, it wasn't that they thought, "Well, there's no crime in the world, right? I'll let her out. There's nothing about — you know, there's no cars, there's no evil, man. I've never heard the word rape. There couldn't possibly be any danger." That wasn't — they weren't naive like that, right?

And so they weren't forced to do what I feel everybody is doing now, which is weighing the odds. And the fact that they put this in terms of odds — like, "Well, there is that chance" — then of course if there's, you know, if you're talking about, "You want your child murdered" and "You want your child to have a nice walk to school," it's like, "I don't care about the walk to school if the alternative is, you know, if the chance is that she could get murdered."

But how did we start making these calculations every morning? These dire, extraordinarily depressing calculations? I mean, when your friend or your family member is saying, "I don't care because there's a chance," they're already thinking in terms of like working their way backwards from their kid being kidnapped and saying, "That wasn't worth it." Which means that they're always making some equation, and the left side of the equation is always death. So how did we get to that point? I know that's what you're supposed to be asking me, but ha!

Lukas: Yeah, I think as a culture we're always — everything has to come at a cost. "Yes, you can have a great career, but yes, you're going to miss out on something." Well, is that true? Everything has a cost. So you know, "Oh, I can have family time, but it means I have to miss out on this." And, you know, as a culture it's everything but — but — that's our thing. We just apply that same framing to our children. You know, "They can be a good athlete or they can be academic. Which one are you going to focus on?"

And it comes back to this thing — what's coming to me now is like, what we do with children all the time. They have a dream and so many people go, "Yeah, what are you going to fall back on?" You guys — you always have to view the alternative. Always the alternative.

Lenore: You know what? That — like the alternative — it sounds like when something terrible happens, then what? I mean, it's not talking about alternatives. It's really going — I call it worst-first thinking. You're going to that worst case scenario first and then working your way back from it.

But what you were talking about, everything having a cost, is very interesting to me. I know that my kids are older now, they're 23 and 25. And when they were younger, the whole worry was like, "What about work-life balance?" or "How can you balance being a mom and working?" And I thought — it didn't strike me as that hard, you know? I worked and I had kids. It just didn't strike me that I was like cheating on either of them.

And yet I feel like you're right. Society tries to paint it as this zero-sum game. And if you're doing, you know, if you're spending time on work, then you're cheating your children. And if you're spending time with your children, you'll never get ahead at work. And it's like, I don't think it has to be that hard or that — I don't think it's a deficit on either side just because you're doing both.

Lukas: Yeah. And that's that "you win or you lose" mindset.

Lenore: I mean, there's something interesting about everything.

Lukas: Yeah. And also I'm talking to Peter Gray, who's like researched this — and I know you've, one of your co-founders with Let Grow — investigating from an anthropological standpoint. I always in my early days assumed that it was just a manifestation of trying to scratch that primal itch to protect our children. From once we were protecting them for the basic needs of shelter and food, now that that is so readily available, is that same primal need manifested into, "Okay, well, I'm going to protect you from these things"?

And as we get down the line, protection and certainty and all of these things can be a representation of you getting good grades and being well educated, and then therefore you're going to get money and a good job. And that's my way of protecting you because I don't need to —

Lenore: That actually sort of makes sense to me. Yeah, I mean, you do want your kids to succeed. And it sort of does seem easier to succeed if you're not failing and not dropping out.

What interests me is I do believe there is this primal part of us that desperately wants to keep our children, you know, basically alive until we die, right? Because that — have them — and that is our protective instinct. What's new is that the instinct seems to have been sort of hijacked by this catastrophizing we were just talking about.

Like, I mean, yes, I want to keep my kids safe. Does that mean that the minute they're outside they're going to be murdered or run over by a steamroller? And I feel like all parents in every generation, and probably every species except the ones that eat their children — but the other ones that don't eat their children are probably trying to keep their children alive. And as we were saying, so were our parents.

But what's new is believing that the minute we take our eyes off them they are in danger. And they're in danger of two things. One we've been talking about a lot, which is danger of being kidnapped, raped, and eaten. And the other thing is, you know, not getting into — here in America it's an arms race to get into a great college. So you're gonna be kidnapped, raped, or eaten, and that's terrible — or not get into Harvard, and that's really terrible!

So I better be with you. And then there's this strange notion that sort of bubbles up from that, which is that I have to be watching you all the time. And if I'm not watching you, not only are you going to be hurt, but you might not achieve your entire potential. So I'm going to sit with you and point to interesting shapes and say, "That's a triangle. You're going to put the triangle on the puzzle. Puzzle starts with P. Puzzle, two Z's — is generally a soft sound, or puzzle, I don't know how you say it in Australia."

And then, "Let's talk about it some more, because this piece happens to be orange. Orange, you know, it's not a primary color, honey. It actually is a blend of —" and it's just like everything is this torrent of information and insight. And all the intelligence that a person has gathered by the time they're 25, 35, or 45 is being shoved into this, you know, toddler while they're trying to do a puzzle. Because, you know, "Don't just do that. I can be enriching it. I can be optimizing this moment."

Lukas: I heard — I was talking to god, I talked to all these people, I can't remember — somebody who works in a school who was telling me that gym class, PE class, was not allowed to simply be like running anymore. Now you had to count the number of steps so that you were getting numeracy while you were getting your heart rate up. And neither of those are fun, right? There wasn't a game. It's just, "You're moving your body, so that's good. And you're counting, you're moving your brain, so that's good." And it's like, the idea of actually enjoying yourself had like wasn't even on the list.

Lenore: Yeah. Where I wonder where that would come down the list in the priorities of childhood experience. I don't think you have it, really.

Lukas: No, no.

Lenore: And the — yeah, time and time again, there's like this term we love to throw around: "Let's scaffold their learning." "What's a teachable moment?"

Lukas: And even from a moment — yeah, it's like, "Oh, they're climbing a tree. Oh, there's a teachable moment. I can talk about the tree and the environment and everything and then make it teachable." I'm like, "Oh, let's hijack that experience! Let's steal their joy! Let's steal their adventure! Let's steal the teaching!"

Lenore: Excuse me, let's turn an actual teachable moment — when a kid is feeling the tree and deciding whether it's too high, or if they can handle this, the fear of going up another branch's worth, or looking at the worm and eating the bark, whatever they do in a tree — and all these things that could be going on because the kid is alive and focused and interested and a little bit scared and a little bit exhilarated. And instead we're turning it into school.

"Children, do you know that trees can be deciduous or they can be —" permafrost or whatever. You know, you can get through life without actually knowing what the opposite of deciduous is. And yet we think that we've turned it into a teachable moment when we've actually done like the most boring thing, which is made it back into school.

Lukas: Yeah, 100%. And I'd like to — you've consulted with so many families and this has been a part of your drive and passion for so many years. How do you encourage people to get beyond this? Like, there's so many things and we're still trying to unpack it now about the why and the reasons. How do we go, "Okay, we're still working out the whys and reasons. What's the action we can take now that —"

Lenore: Right. I have to say, so intellectually I have to say I do like playing with the whys and the reasons and I'm always interested in our culture. But the action has been boiled down to something very, very simple. It's distilled at this point.

And what I came to realize, after, you know, here are my statistics, 750,000 years, your kid won't get kidnapped, and they need a teachable moment, and they're getting diabetic and they're dropping dead of depression — but blah, blah, blah, blah, shut up Lenore, what can I do?

And it's like, listening to me won't do it. Listening to you probably won't do it. Maybe a little more authority, I don't know, the beard. But me, I don't move the needle.

So what moves the needle is your own kids. You must let go of your kids. Have them go do something without you. Have them get excited, be successful, or be frustrated, but survive and come back. And that changes you. It's the only thing. It changes the kid, and the only thing that changes you is the action of letting go.

And you guys — look, I'm talking to Australia — the boomerang, right? You let them go and they come back, and everything changes.

And so Let Grow has been very, very focused on action, on changing behavior, rather than trying to change minds, which is just a fool's errand. Change the behavior. How do you change the behavior? Parents aren't willing to let — you just told me that your friend wasn't going to let them go outside because there's always that chance.

So you make them. You push them gently, but you push them. And how do you push them? We recommend the Let Grow Project. Happens to be free, so I can sit here and do a whole infomercial about it because I don't make any money on it.

It's the Let Grow Project. You download it at letgrow.org. And it is this: it's a homework assignment that the teachers give the kids that says, "Go home and do something on your own without your parents." That's the homework assignment. We give a zillion pages of ideas about — you can climb a tree, you can walk the dog, you can skip stones, whatever it is. Doesn't matter, you can make anything up. But you must do it.

And all the other kids in the class must do it. Which means that all the other parents are doing it. Which means that instead of it being crazy Lukas saying, "I'm going to send my kid up a tree and I'm praising Lenore, I'm going to send my kid on the subway" — everybody has to do it. They're not crazy. They're part of the gang.

The kids are all talking amongst each other: "You know, I went to get ice cream." "Oh, I went to get a kangaroo, whatever." And then it normalizes things. So the parents feel ecstatic when the kid comes home because yay, the kid has done something. The parents — the kids feel so grateful that the parents don't just love them and think they're cute and wonderful and brilliant, but actually trust them to handle something without them hovering, that for, you know, five minutes, an hour, two hours.

And then the kids go and talk about it and then they make little leaves. So they say, "My Let Grow Project was I drew on the sidewalk." "My Let Grow Project was I went and got the milk." And then everybody's off to the races.

And that's why, you know, someday there's going to be this archive and you're going to hear like me at like the Thomas Edison cylinders, and it's going to be saying, "I think children should go outside and do something on their own." And it's like, that's how it began — then sending children back out again. Then they got confident, they stopped being so anxious. Their parents stopped being so crazy and anxious because it normalized kids going outside again. "Why were they so afraid? The kid came back on his bike, right? It was great."

And that's what's going to do it. So I'm begging anybody in your country — and god, I don't know if anybody in my country's listening — but do the Let Grow Project. Ask your teacher to do it. Ask your kid's teacher. If you're a principal, have your whole school do it, because it doesn't take class time. And you will have different children and less crazy parents once you do it. It's as simple as that.

Lukas: The links to that will be in the show notes, so they — and they'll be on the Wearthy social medias across all of them. So I'm thinking of some certain principals in my network that I think I'll go and have a little meeting with and try to get this rolling out right across their school because they're doing some great work.

You mentioned it there briefly — the impact that lack of freedom is having on children with anxiety and depression. What's a standout scary stat you drop on people if you do it?

Lenore: All right. I do. I used to not do it because I thought, here I am, sick of parents being scared to death, and now I'm scaring them from the other side: "You can't let your kids outside, they'll be kidnapped!" "Well, you can't keep them inside, they'll get depressed!"

But at some point, to a certain extent, I'm willing to fight fire with fire. And the fact of the matter is that depression and anxiety and self-harm are all going up pretty significantly. And I was just talking today to a school psychologist who was talking about the self-harm part. And it's — it's actually too sad for me to talk about.

But the point is, what is anxiety? Anxiety is two things. I mean, you know, I didn't make this up, I learned this. And that is: the fear of something bad happening that you don't know what it's gonna be — and so once again, you're catastrophizing — and then the fear that you can't handle it, no matter what it is.

And when you're anxious, you don't want to do the thing that is scaring you, right? And then if you never have to — if it's scary to walk to school, or scary to let your kid walk to school, and you're so anxious, "No, don't make me, don't make me, don't make me, don't make me," and then finally someone says, "Okay, you don't have to" — all you have is this great feeling of relief from not having to do the thing that you have thought was scary.

So you've reinforced the idea that like, "You know, my heart is pounding and my head is about to explode when I have to let my kid play outside. And I feel happy and relaxed and I guess safe and wonderful when I keep them inside." And so it just keeps reinforcing itself.

And that's why the only thing that makes anxiety — that breaks the cycle — is the action. They call it in psychiatry, they call it exposure therapy. You're gonna let the kid go outside while you stay inside. And then the kid comes inside and all they want is a, you know, a drink of water because they're so hot and they want to go outside and play some more. That changes you.

And so children are getting really anxious because they don't know that they can handle anything, because they're never allowed to. "Don't walk to school, it's too scary." "I'll talk to the teacher for you." "I'll talk to the coach." The coach is always there telling you which game to play and which position to play. And you know, it's all school, it's all supervision, and it's all protected as if any time you were left to your own devices, you would be a train wreck.

Actually, a train wreck is kind of an interesting word. Because so I — my — I'm not at my normal computer. Normally I have this list of things that seventh graders wrote of stuff that they are interested in doing but they're scared to do. And seventh graders are 12 and 13 years old. And the teacher was telling me recently that one kid said he was interested in walking to town — and this is in a small, safe suburb — but what if he walked or he was riding his bike and he got stuck on the tracks? Then what?

"What if he got stuck on the tracks while walking to town?" I — it was just really an interesting one to me because I just like, even if you're — even if it was a guy walking in high heels — which is just, I'm trying to imagine how you would get stuck, right? Presumably you could leave the shoe behind.

But if you haven't had any experience in the real world, it's like, you know, if I was put on a football field, I wouldn't know what to do. I've never done it. I've never been taught how to do it. And so it would be terrifying. And that's how they felt about the world.

I mean, they were saying things like — the question the teacher had asked them was, "What do you want to do, but you're a little hesitant to try? You're interested, but you're a little hesitant." And the answers were things like: "I'd like to walk my dog, but what if he gets off the leash?" "I'd like to go into a store, but it's filled with strangers and I've never been in one without my mom." "I want to use a knife, but I haven't been allowed to." "I'd like to climb a tree, but what if I fell and broke my arm?"

So these seventh graders are sounding like 93-year-old grannies, who, you know — and I have a feeling the 93-year-old grannies are going to be insulted by this because they, goddamn it, they climbed a tree and used them —

Lukas: Resilient.

Lenore: Yeah, the ones that are less anxious. Yeah.

Lukas: It is a hindrance. And Peter Gray uses the analogy — and I can't remember, I gave it to him or if he gave it to me — a foot binding. You know, for a while there — and by a while I mean like a thousand years — it seemed like a great idea to break a girl's feet when she was young so that they would keep being smushed enough to end up being like, you know, to fit into a shoe the size of a tennis ball.

And if I had said, "No, that's horrible, that's crazy, you're crippling her," people would say, "Excuse me, that's beautiful, and you're the nut." And I feel like we are — as weirdly, like — we are so — our perception is so warped that the idea of a kid waiting at the bus stop with three other kids and two other parents is striking us as dangerous. That's almost hallucinatory.

Lukas: And where do we go from here? Like, there's so much fear, it's this culture of "What if, what if." The comes back to the cost again. "Okay, I want to walk my dog, but what's the cost?" There has to be a cost. And you go, "No, that doesn't need to be." And catastrophizing it.

What's your approach for families that are split in their decisions? One's really bro and one's not so much. And you're speaking to a few people I know out there. I'm not mentioning names, but just — listeners of this podcast, I'm gonna give them some tips.

Lenore: Hi! Perhaps it's Mrs. Ritson.

So, you know, I did a television show called World's Worst Mom. And actually I don't know if it's available there or not. It's available on YouTube here, finally. I did it like five years ago, suddenly showed up.

And that was one of the tasks I had. I would go to extremely overprotective families and my job was to spend four days with them, sending the kids out on little independent adventures and sitting with the parents — sometimes sitting on the parents while the kids went out.

And sometimes it was a question of the tension between the family. The very first family I worked with was a blended family. And the mother had a 10-year-old who she wouldn't let do anything. She wouldn't let him ride a bike, she fed him in his mouth with a spoon sometimes. She wouldn't let him pour milk. She wouldn't let him walk to school, obviously, go on an overnight, blah, blah, blah.

But the husband came with his daughter from another marriage who was six. And she could do anything. And so, you know, the poor, mortified 10-year-old boy was kind of, like, literally being run rings around by the girl on her bike.

And there was the tension, because then the mother felt like this little kid was showing up her son. And "Don't make him feel bad." And then it was just — it was a bad scene.

And so the only thing I could do is basically — before I'd even come up with the Let Grow Project — was to do that with them. And so I sat — I sent the mom and dad off to like a spa while I stayed home with the kid and showed him, "Here's how you use a knife. You're going to be able to use a sharp knife — not only feed yourself in your mouth, but use a sharp knife — by the time your mom comes home."

And sure enough he could, because there's literally nothing easier than using a sharp knife to cut like a cucumber. And then I sent him on a bus one day. And one day I got him a bike. And I felt bad because it meant that he was going to have to learn how to ride a bike on national — actually international — television at age 10, which isn't easy.

But he was so excited because finally he got to try riding a bike. And he fell a couple times. I mean, you know, nobody's going to be perfect the first time. But after about an hour he sort of like could wobbly go across a small parking lot where there were no cars. But he was doing it. You know, it was like more than one rotation of the wheels.

And when we came home — and this is why reality TV is so annoying, the cameras were outside and I was inside — and the mother burst in to tell her mother, the grandma, "Guess what, Mom? What? Sammy can ride a bike!" And the grandmother was like, "What? Sammy can ride a bike?" And she's like, "Yes! Sammy just learned how to ride a bike!" And they were dancing around with joy. "Sammy can ride a bike! Sammy knows how to ride a bike!"

And I'm like, "Oh my god, these are the very people who kept him for an entire decade from setting foot on pedal!" Right? And now they're happy!

But that's all it took for me to change. I was like, "Oh my god, this fear is as thin as ice." And you have to crack it. And once again, it gets to action. Because as much as they felt like their job was to constantly protect — they didn't want the boy to fall off his bike, and they didn't want him to feel frustrated while trying to ride a bike, so the best answer was "never ride a bike." And until then, that worked just great.

But it turns out that this new and improved idea — "Put him on a bike" — was even better, because now they had all the joy of seeing their kid blossom instead of just being safe inside and kind of surly. He was outside doing something.

So all I can suggest for any couple is: sit inside, get a cup of coffee — or maybe that will make you more nervous — get a cup of gin, and send your kids outside. Lock the door from the inside and tell the kids, "You can come back in half an hour." And that's it. Do that. And I'm talking about kids ages 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely. Right.

Lenore: It makes it more fun.

Lukas: Very fortunate to have a back gate into the bushland at my house. So it's good. Sometimes I'll look out from the back of the house and I was like, "Oh, they're up that tree. I can see them. They must be okay." For a mile away.

It's such an interesting revelation you shared there, but these — I love that saying that these fears are as thin as ice. Because I think so many of us know — innately know — that these experiences were great and that's what created these beautiful memorable experiences of childhood. But at some stage we've just put this little veil of fear over the top.

And is leveraging on that nostalgia something you utilize as well?

Lenore: I try. You know, I give lectures and — hint, I sure loved giving lectures in Australia, it was really fun. I do a couple of different questions I ask the audience at different times. And one of them is: "What did you absolutely love doing as a kid that you don't let your own kids do?"

And there's like a moment of silence and then there's this burst of chatter, because I actually say, "Let's turn to the person next to you," right? Question, little groups of two or three. And people cannot stop talking about how much they loved their treehouse, their fort, their baseball game that they had, or riding around on their bikes. I mean, it's extremely deep and it's extremely powerful.

And then they do feel bad that they're not giving it to their kids. But once again, they still need a push. I mean, really, I gave my lectures for 10 years before starting Let Grow, and I was always thinking like, "Well, isn't this interesting? And don't we feel bad? And look at my statistics. And we don't want anxious kids."

You need something that pushes the parents to actually do it, because otherwise there's this fear, there's the guilt that if something does go wrong, there's the social norms — nobody else is doing it, there's no other kids outside for them to play with. I mean, there's a lot of stumbling blocks in front of actually getting it done. And so you just have to remove them. And the only way you can remove them is by saying, "You must."

Lukas: Yeah. And I think another contributing factor is the fact that parents' plates now are just so full. They're like, they're at such a capacity. So the thought of adding a little bit more stress to the full bucket —

Lenore: I'm sorry, Lukas, you can't! You see, that this is the opposite of adding! Parents' plates are full because for baseball — I don't know if you guys play baseball — four, whatever, football practices a week. And sit there and sign them in and sign them out and drive them there and drive them back, and better get a snack, and don't forget to, you know, bring the homework so they could be doing something in the car and you could be practicing vocabulary words.

Yeah, your plate's full if you're stuck doing that. But if you could send your kids outside every afternoon with their friends and a bike and a dog, you know, your plate is — I don't want to say your plate is empty, that sounds weird — but you have free time given back to you.

And there was once a story about Sheryl Sandberg. She wrote the book Lean In and was telling women, you know, if you want to get ahead, lean into your job a little. And the New York Times, our paper of record, said, "Nobody can do that." And they quoted one mom saying, "I have two sons, which means four soccer practices a week. I can't lean in."

And I'm like, that's the point! I mean, I almost think that our plates are full with this — it feels sometimes like this anti-feminist plot to keep us so busy that we can't get further ahead. I mean, women were liberated and they started into the workforce. And just as soon as they're getting someplace and they're succeeding at college and everything is parity, suddenly it's like, "Well, I hope you're not letting your kid just walk to school! Of course you should be there with them and wait at the bus stop." And there's 15 minutes in the morning, and then there's 30 minutes waiting for the bus in the afternoon, and then there's those four soccer practices. And pretty soon you have no free time.

So this is the opposite of giving parents something extra to do. This is letting them go back to being a 1970s or 80s parent who had free time because their kids were not with them every single second.

Lukas: Yeah. It's good for the wellbeing as well. Like to create space, create margin, to have that independence. Individually, that independence as a parent to go, "I'm just going to do this for me right now." And equally for the child to go, "I'm not going to get directed."

And I call it seagull parenting.

Lenore: Oh yeah, why?

Lukas: Because they come in and go, "Careful, careful!" They swoop in, they make a mess, they squawk, and they fly out again when they find the French fries.

Lenore: Right! There's always a French fry involved. Yeah, it's ready to swoop in at any option, right?

And here's where I have to make my asterisk and say: and yet I don't blame parents. Because they're living in a culture that expects you to be at the bus stop. I mean, really, there are — I heard from a mom in Kentucky where they weren't allowed to let the kid walk home from the bus. There had to be an adult there. And so her grandpa — her grandfather was there, but he missed one day because he was in the bathroom, and he missed another day because he didn't think the kid was coming home, he thought he was going to some other activity.

And then the mother was terrified because if there's three days in a semester that the kid doesn't have somebody waiting at the bus stop, they call up child protective services and you get investigated for neglect.

So when you're living in a culture like that, the idea that you can blame parents who are told from every direction, you know, "If you're not reading with your kid every second, if you're not making their homemade food so that they have the best organic food every second, if you're not with them" — how can you not be a seagull, right? I mean, everybody's telling you, "Oh, you're a good parent, you're a seagull."

Lukas: Yeah. And then you have to do — "Oh, you're such a seagull!"

And to extend on that point — you've also been personally involved in lobbying some of these laws in states across America and reversing —

Lenore: Lobbying? Because if you're a nonprofit, you can't be doing much lobbying. So we do education. But we have offered that —

Lukas: Yes, that's right! If the IRS is listening, it's all education.

Lenore: It actually is! I mean, basically, we try to find states where people have had bad experiences — being investigated because they let their kids play outside at the park or whatever. And then what we're trying to do in these states is that we don't want children who are neglected. Neglected children are starved. There's nobody home for them. They're lonely. They're fearful. They're abandoned, right? That's a neglected child.

A child who I think is ready at age seven to walk to the park or go run an errand for me — that's not neglect. But the way the laws are written in most of our states, it doesn't distinguish between those. It just says, "A child should be properly supervised." And depending on what I think a properly supervised kid is — a person who's, you know, seven years old and is allowed to go to the Dairy Queen — but if somebody sees a child outside, and now everybody has a cell phone, and so it's way easier to call 911 or whatever you guys call, basically the cops.

So what I — what we — want the law to say is: okay, but if they're, you know, if somebody calls and says, "I see a child outside," well, what's happening? "Oh, they seem to be walking home with an ice cream cone." It's like, okay, thank you very much, that's the end. That's not neglect.

You're only allowed to pursue a call of neglect if there's something that's seriously wrong. What's happening? "The child has a black eye." "You know, I haven't seen a parent at that home for four days." "You know, the child came to my house and asked for food." I mean, that's — please investigate that. I want children to be safe. But I don't want every parent who trusts their kid to be investigated simply because we haven't narrowed the definition of neglect more.

So in three states now, including Texas, which is huge, they've changed the laws to what we call — we used to call it a "free-range kids law," now we call it a "Reasonable Childhood Independence" law.

Lukas: That's so impressive. And what's the outline of that law?

Lenore: That law says that when a parent feels a child is old enough for some independence, it's not against the law for them to give it to the child, as long as they are not placing the kid in obvious and statistically likely danger.

Because one of the things that we were talking about before — the "what if" culture — is, okay, like, we talked to one dad who let his kid walk home from the grocery, and the kid was fine, and it's the same route that he takes basically to and from school. But the police picked him up and said, "Well, what if he was attacked by a homeless man?"

It's like, yeah, well, what if you're in the house and you fall down the stairs? Should I not have stairs? I mean, you can't go to the very worst case scenario and use that as an excuse to say, "Therefore it was a dangerous situation." It's a normal situation that once in a very long while is dangerous. But so is eating solid food. You just can't say, "Because something bad could have happened, he should have never let his kid do that."

Lukas: Let's base all our practices on an anomaly.

Lenore: Thank you! I feel like — that's exactly how I usually say it, but I've never had this — he knows what an anomaly is, which is unusual!

Lukas: And you've moved with Let Grow, and through my observations of what the Let Grow movement is about, it's like children are smarter, stronger, and can be safer than we think they are. But you've got a lot to do around activating schools now within that program. So how did that come about? Because in my observation, it started off with more of the parents' role and then moving to school. What was that evolution?

Lenore: So Let Grow started — so I did Free Range Kids, I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone, wrote about it, ended up on all the television shows, got labeled "America's Worst Mom" and started Free Range Kids as a blog.

Lukas: Can I jump in there? Anyone that wants to just — the — it will be in the show notes — but to look at those videos from so many years ago about you on morning shows with your son and then a child psychologist telling you like, "Oh, but they can get independence by picking up after themselves."

Lenore: Yeah, it's some of them — and I was thinking of stuff like — it's great to watch.

Lukas: It is!

Lenore: I mean, you know, really, like I said, I really am more interested in the culture. It's like, how did it get to the point where we'd say, like, "Well, picking up a sock..." And I think that there is something good about picking up a sock. And it took me a long time, but now I pick up my socks. You know, there is something both liberating and adult about it. But it's not the same as going outside!

Anyway, so the psychologist on the show who was grilling me at that point said, "He could have had the same experience if you went with him." It's like, I know. I think so. You know, if you followed him, you know, and if he saw you following, whatever.

Anyways, so for those 10 years for Free Range Kids, it was me doing exactly what we're doing tonight — which is talking about this interesting phenomenon, our own childhoods were so different, it changed so fast, kids seem to be anxious, what can we do? You know, we have to reject this culture of fear. Let's look at this — is it legitimate? No, actually crime is at a 25-year low.

I enjoyed doing that, but I didn't see change. I didn't see change happening. And so when these other people came to me and said, "Let's start a nonprofit, because we think the kids are falling apart in young adulthood. They're anxious and they're hypersensitive. They're having a hard time at work. They're having a hard time on campus. They're going to mental health services a lot." They said, "We need an earlier stage intervention."

And that's what you're talking about — it's like giving kids independence so they grow up a little less anxious, a little more confident. We decided that rather than trying to change any minds anymore, we were just going to change behavior. And so that — because, as I said, once again, you need this push. I mean, once in a while a parent will be able to do this by themselves, but we were just talking about all the cultural impediments to giving your kid what we would call an old-fashioned childhood.

So we decided — where Willy Sutton went where the banks are, like, "Why do you rob the banks, you know, Willy?" "It's because that's where the money is." And that — so that's where the kids are, in school. And if you get a class of students — like one class of kids doing the Let Grow Project — that's 30 kids at once. That's, you know, anywhere between 30 and 60 parents, let's say. And if you get the school, that's 300 kids and all their parents. And then if you get the school district, that's thousands of kids.

And it's even better if you're doing it in a whole community, because one of our favorite stories is a kid who was doing his Let Grow Project went to the store in Connecticut, doesn't matter. And bought something. And the staff was worried, you know, he's fifth grader, what's he doing here by himself? And somebody asked him, "What are you saying? What are you doing here without an adult?" And he said, "I'm doing my Let Grow Project." Like, "What are you talking about?" "Oh, Let Grow Project — we have to do things for school on our own." "I'm like, all right!"

But then after that, as kids came in, nobody thought about it twice. Because everybody was used to the idea that of course kids are independent here. They're doing their Let Grow Project. So it's to re-normalize the idea of kids out and about.

And so we're doing a lot through the schools, although boy, what a terrible year to work with schools, I have to say. Kind of tough.

The other thing that we're doing — was Peter Gray's idea. Peter Gray is one of the founders with me of Let Grow. It's to have the school stay open before or after school for free play. And that's all the ages playing together. And I'm sure you've talked about mixed-age play a million times. And no devices, lots of loose parts. And there's a critical mass of kids, which you wouldn't necessarily get on a block where mostly, you know, one kid's at violin and one's at chess and two kids are home playing Minecraft. You don't see any kids.

But if you have all the kids already at the school, it's safe — even if you're in a dangerous neighborhood, they're all different ages, mixed together. And you have an adult there basically for legal reasons, you know, who's there in case somebody breaks an arm. But otherwise they don't organize any of the games.

And that's what's kind of radical, except it's not radical, because if it was at a park, that would just be happening. And we've heard — you know, people have studied this — and kids end up problem solving and they end up with better language skills and they end up with different friends. And so it's just so simple. And that's at school too. So our things are through schools because there's a lot of kids there.

Lukas: Yeah. And one of the schools I'm thinking about to talk to about Let Grow, he has implemented loose parts in a very low socioeconomic area — like 60 percent of the school is in the lowest category of risk, or the highest category of risk, rich, probably?

Lenore: Yeah, yeah.

Lukas: And has implemented loose parts in nature play, and it can't be taken away from the children as punishment. And in one year he had a 70% drop in violent incidents in school.

Lenore: I need to talk to him! What — you just have to —

Lukas: Yeah, I'll do an email.

Lenore: Drop in violent incidents? I mean, he's had a 30% increase in attendance. And I think the children that were engaged in that initial program, I think, like, roughly 20 or 25 — I can't remember precisely — but 20-25% of children were getting C's and A's. And then from within one year, 60% were getting C's and A's.

Lukas: Wow.

Lenore: And he was doing the Let Grow Play Club, not Let Grow, but loose parts, free play — which sounds very similar to what you described just there. But I want to talk to him about doing the Let Grow Play Club as an extension.

Lukas: It sounds like the same thing. Yeah, yeah.

Lenore: Outside. Oh, that's really good.

Yeah, so what we're studying this year, hopefully after school, is — there was a speech pathologist at a school where they were doing the Let Grow Play Club. And she didn't really know what's going on, but she said, "What is happening?" Because the kids started coming in with like this explosion of language. It's like, something is happening here.

And it turned out it was the Play Club. And what happens in play is that it's automatically communication. Even if I pick up a ball and I raise my eyebrows as I point to you, you know that I'm saying, "I want to catch." And you go, you sort of nod, and then suddenly we're playing. But then I want us to do it backwards, or I want us to only use our left hand.

So even if I'm not that good at speaking, I am so motivated, and I'm like — and you're like, "What?" Like, "Left!" You know? And then suddenly I'm talking and I'm unself-conscious, because really I'm focusing on playing. I'm not focusing on, "Am I moving my tongue correctly? Am I making a diphthong?" It's just, I want to play left-handed baseball.

And so she is going to be studying — we're going to have — there, because of COVID, we can't have all the ages together, but we can have second, third, and fourth graders together. And in one class, the second graders, they'll all have the Let Grow Play Club, you know, the unstructured play. And another class, I don't know what they'll have — either reading or maybe phonics lessons or something like that.

And then we're gonna see at the end of the year, with two afternoons of Play Club each week for a year, whether there's a big difference in the language skills. And I can't wait to see the results.

Lukas: Yeah. And I know where that's heading, and I'll just think about my first thing — he's like, "Oh gee, I would hope to be in that playground." If I would say, "I know!"

Lenore: I know! Even if they're just happier!

And we actually have another study, because sometimes it seems like — so, action changes things. But I think that to get to the action point, some people say, "Show me the money," you know? Prove that this is not just making kids happy, because who cares about that, right? Let's prove that — if they're not making new friends and have a will to live — show me that their grades are going up or that their actual anxieties are going down.

And so we've seen these amazing results in terms of anxiety, but we haven't studied it with numbers. And so we have a professor of psychology who's also a clinical psychologist who is going to take three or four families — pilot study — where a kid has a diagnosis of anxiety and treat them only with the Let Grow Project. Only with independence.

Because there is something in psychology that's similar — it's cognitive behavioral therapy. "I'm afraid of dogs." "Okay, well, today you're going to look at a picture of a dog. And tomorrow you're going to be across the street from a dog. And then the next day you're going to be in the same room with the dog." But you're always dealing with the dog fear.

He thinks that the dog fear might be treated by, "I need you to go to the store and get me a pound of salami." Actually, the dog will come right after you! Maybe that's wrong.

"I need you to go to the store and get me Pringles," right? And just by going to the store and having to talk to an adult and figure out whether you got the right change and maybe you got in the wrong line or somebody — you know, or you can't reach the Pringles or whatever — all these things are real life. You know, slight problems that you have to deal with.

And in dealing with each of them, I think of it as each one is just this tiny little 3D printer of confidence. It's like, okay, you know, I had to ask somebody to reach me down the Pringles and they got it. Okay. I looked at my change, it was the wrong amount, I told the lady. Okay. Leaving the store, I forgot to get my receipt, I was a little embarrassed, and then I went back to get it.

And each thing is a little layer of confidence. And it's quite possible that that confidence breaks the spell of anxiety without you having to be looking at a picture of a dog.

Lukas: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I've — I put it down to even when children are playing in a challenging environment. And being a playground designer, saying environment can create behavior.

Lenore: Oh, sure.

Lukas: And so if I want to — if a child's being brave physically and they can have a tangible risk experience doing that, it's going to make it — it's going to transcend social interaction. Which could be the most risky thing some children do within social interaction, not necessarily climbing a tree. But just to go up to that group of children and engage in play is much scarier. But it's that tangible learning that manifests into the intangible experience and creating a courageous culture internally in that.

Lenore: Yeah. And that's not going to come by someone saying, "Oh, now go join in," or "Hold on, I'll organize the game so you'll be part of it, because everybody gets a turn."

Lukas: Yes. And that's something I had to overcome as a parent. And being like this outdoor educator — fun — my daughter's calling me "the children's adult." So if we're at a gathering, she's like, "You're the children's adult. You have to come and play with us."

But then I quickly went — I was kind of proud and I was like, "Yeah, I'm the children's adult, that's my thing, I'm the play guy." But then I'm so much more fun than everyone else.

Lenore: Yeah!

Lukas: It got to the point was like, "Well, this is about you, isn't it?" Oh! Okay!

And being pulled in to be that director, to be the coordinator, to be the conductor of play. So then I had to rebrand that and just constantly give that independence. I'd still use very — when I would play, I'd still encourage, use the language around not to direct and try to be a participant. But by being there, still being that authoritarian figure. Especially being like five times the size of a lot of children. So yeah, I had to learn how to step back and be like, "Okay, they've got to learn these skills for themselves."

So an example of where I've gone with that now — if the children want me to play, like building a treehouse, that they can't do some things — I just refer to myself as like, "I'm the robot, and I'm just a tool for you to use." I see. So I'm not going to take charge, I'm not going to do it, you've got to do these decisions. And then I'm out.

So a little insight into my own journey. Mix things up a bit.

What are you most excited about within this movement? You've been doing it for a long time now. Looking forward, what excites you most with the direction of Let Grow and the development and evolution of Free Range Kids?

Lenore: Well, first of all, I have a new edition of Free Range Kids out, and I'm excited about it because there's a whole chapter on anxiety, because I've learned so much about that.

And one of the things that does interest me that I haven't pursued very much is asking people to think back on their childhood and whether there's something that they did as a kid just for fun — maybe it seemed stupid, or maybe it just seemed quirky — that they found was the key that unlocks their future.

Because I've just heard so many interesting stories about, like, I was talking to one lady and she said whenever she played Barbie, they would like never get to the Barbie part because she was always like making a water bed out of a water balloon and then making a house out of popsicle sticks or whatever. And she ended up as a stage set designer!

Lukas: Yeah!

Lenore: And there are cool stories like that. There was one lady — one of my questions sometimes in a lecture is, "What did you see doing — what did you do as a kid that you still see yourself doing today?" And one lady said, "Nothing." I was like, "Really? Okay, what'd you do as a kid?"

She said, "Well, as a kid, you know —" she wraps, you know, exotic about — "Oh, I had all the kids in the neighborhood would come over to my driveway and we were going to put on a play, and I'd give everybody their parts, and then, you know, then they would put on a play."

And I said, "Oh, okay. So what do you do now?"

And she said, "Oh, nothing like that. I'm the HR director at Clif Bar."

It's like — give people their roles and then make something happen! Okay!

So it's just — I would like to do more of that, because it's a fun sort of parlor trick. Because my guess — I mean, like you — you sort of don't count because you're probably playing as a kid, you're still sort of interested in play.

But there are a lot of people who — I talked to one guy who was — he was a white guy, he was bused to a Black neighborhood for school. And one time he missed the bus and he decided to walk there. And it was three miles away — which is, you guys have miles, you're doing kilometers? — so it's like, you know, five kilometers away, whatever it is.

And he's walking and he's walking. It goes from his neighborhood and then it transitions into an all-Black neighborhood. And there were some guys sitting on a stoop, Black guys. And he's like, "Son, what are you doing here?" And he's like, "I'm walking to school." And they're like, "What school are you going to?" Just like, "I go to, you know —" and he pointed towards the direction. "They're like, oh, okay." You know, people were nice.

But he felt like he was an, you know, like an amazing experience for him — an explorer. And what did he do? He was like one of the directors of SpaceX!

And so I did feel like there are these really cool connections between what you do when you feel the most free or interested or yourself. And if we don't have that for kids — if they just have these prescribed activities where somebody's saying, "Okay, we're all gonna draw a turkey," or "Okay, let's take out our violins" — you know, some of them will end up as, you know, bad artists and some of them end up as violinists. But I'm not sure they'll ever figure out the cool thing that really turns them on.

Because you find that when you're just scooping around, you know. Not that you shouldn't take any classes — I, you know, I took art classes and stuff like that — but you do need some un-you, you need some unstructured something in your life.

I mean, you've got the kids in China who are at school from six in the morning till 10 at night. And we had one as an exchange student. He said at the end of the year, they tear up their textbooks and throw them out the window. So like, that didn't sound like a happy culture to me. Like, psyched about learning, you know?

Kids need some independence. And, you know, and of course some structure and some responsibility. But not only things that are created for them and supervised and done with them.

Lukas: Yeah. And I think the theme, as we discussed this, and something I've been exploring lately is the necessity of freedom. Especially within COVID times. And a lot of people from within uncertainty and the need to create freedom when they don't have it. And that can manifest unhealthily as well into certain destructive views.

And but it comes down to — like, if we're free, are we going to feel anxious? If we feel freedom within our own spirit, are we going to feel anxious and anxiety? If we have freedom within our own agency over our exploration, freedom over our own gifts, is there going to be a level of wellbeing? And I just keep coming back to — it seems very easy, but if we fill that freedom cup to the brim, I think that could put us on a track to recovery, if you will.

Lenore: I guess this is a podcast so people can't see me nodding, but I am nodding. Yes.

Lukas: That's a common theme that I've read through Let Grow as well. It all comes down to that freedom of children. But I see what you're doing also is giving permission for parents to have that freedom and say, "Go outside."

Lenore: What I'm trying to do is unlock doors that I feel like our culture has locked. Not that I'm giving people something new. I feel like something has been stolen from us. Which is our trust in the world. Our belief in children. Our understanding of child development. And our confidence in ourselves and our neighborhoods and our kids.

I feel this has been sucked out of us. And all I'm trying to do is make things stop sucking.

Lukas: [Laughs] Well, what's your life mission?

Lenore: I'm just trying to stop stuff from sucking! That's right, right!

Lukas: What I mean by — yeah, I could actually spend a very, very long time chatting to you about these things. And it's been lovely to chat and just have this beautiful conversation. I feel very inspired.

Thank you for all you do with Let Grow. I'll put all the links in the show notes, as well as the second-ish edition of Free Range Kids, which I'm excited about. I'll also put in a link in the show notes — a story done by the ABC here in Australia around street activation and families taking back their neighborhoods, which is very exciting. My neighborhood has a clay street.

Lenore: Yeah, right up here in Queens! Yeah, they blocked off the street because there wasn't enough playground.

Lukas: Yeah, that's awesome.

Thank you so much. I look forward to you joining us again in the future for the next season. That would be phenomenal, extending on our conversation. But thank you once again for all you do. Thanks for the inspiration. And it's nice to finally meet the person that I read about in my journey, like, almost 10 years ago into education.

Lenore: Ah, she's so old.

Lukas: Oh, full of wisdom! Granny, tell me more!

Lenore: Okay, well, thank you Lukas. And have a lovely day, even though for me it's nighttime.

Lukas: I'm going back. Thank you. Have a lovely evening. Chat soon.