Smart watches that listen in on children’s conversations… Parent-teacher portals that provide real-time updates of what a child is up to at school… Kid-sized trainers fitted with GPS tags… In the modern world, there is no shortage of ways for parents to monitor and track their kids, should they ever be allowed to leave their sight in the first place. There is now a culture of hyper-vigilance when it comes to parenting. But has it actually made children any safer? Or has it merely added to the worries and fears of the so-called anxious generation?
Lenore Skenazy – founder of Let Grow – warns that we are coddling children too much, robbing them of the independence they need to become confident young adults. She was propelled to fame (or infamy) in 2008, when she allowed her nine-year-old son to ride the New York Subway alone, earning her the moniker ‘America’s worst mom’. Skenazy joined spiked’s Georgina Mumford to discuss this infamous incident and her philosophy of ‘free-range parenting’. What follows is an edited excerpt from that conversation. You can watch the full thing here.
Georgina Mumford: A parenting decision you made almost 20 years ago garnered nationwide attention in the US. Can you explain what happened, and what the fallout was like?
Lenore Skenazy: My family and I live in New York City, so my two sons grew up riding the Subway. My younger son, who was fascinated by public transit, started asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he’d never been before and let him find his own way home by Subway. Long story short, we said yes, and he did it. He was very excited. He came back to the apartment so proud that he’d done this grown-up thing and that we had trusted him. Afterwards, I wrote a column about it, titled ‘Why I let my nine-year-old ride the Subway alone’.
Two days later, I was on every possible television show in America and had earned myself the label ‘America’s worst mom’. This was partly because if you don’t live in New York City, it’s really scary to think about a subterranean journey – but also because societally, we’ve arrived at a point where we’re extremely reluctant to let kids do anything unsupervised. That’s why the decision I made for my son became such a flashpoint of a story.
Mumford: You’re known as the antithesis to the ‘helicopter parent’. What is helicopter parenting and what kind of an effect does it have on children?
Skenazy: Helicopter parenting got the name because it represents a parent who is constantly hovering, always overseeing whatever their kid is doing. I don’t speak out against helicopter parenting as such, because in this culture of fear we live in, we have to realise that many parents don’t have a choice but to ‘helicopter’ to some degree.
Recently, a mother in Michigan told me that when her seven-year-old gets off the bus in the afternoon, he has to walk past four homes to get to theirs. It takes him a couple minutes, if that. But his school won’t let students get off the bus until second or third grade unless there’s an adult physically waiting there to walk them home. This illustrates how even those who don’t want to be helicopter parents are often forced into that role.
Over the summer, Let Grow conducted a study which uncovered some pretty shocking statistics. Most kids aged eight to 12 have rarely or never walked around their own neighborhoods without an adult. In that same age bracket, most don’t even think that they’re allowed to be in public on their own. Around half have never even walked to another aisle at the grocery store without a parent.
Another survey, from about 10 years ago now, asked American parents at what age they thought kids should be able to play by themselves at the park. The average answer was 14. I mean, they can’t even fit on the swings at that age. It has become so abnormal to allow children to do anything independently.
This overprotective, wildly terrified culture certainly has an impact on kids. In the US at least, there is a big mental-health issue among young people. Kids are really feeling passive in life, almost glum. There’s a lot of anxiety and depression. You can say it’s because of Covid or phones or social media, but the reality is that over the decades, as kids’ independence and free play has been going down, their anxiety and depression have been going up. I believe that it’s not just correlation, but causation. If you don’t get a chance to run to your friend’s house after school, or go to the park and find some buddies to play basketball with, or just hop on your bike and go for a ride – if instead, you’re always in the car, always being taken to something by an adult – then you don’t have much control over your life, no matter how enriched it may be. It’s missing the joy of exploring and figuring things out on your own.
Mumford: Just a generation ago, things were very different. Growing up, my parents’ generation played in the streets with their friends all the time – sometimes until late. Were they being reckless? Or did something else change?
Skenazy: The most obvious reason is that the media played a smaller role when your parents were growing up. They didn’t have a 24/7 news cycle. When cable television came in during the Eighties, the concept of ‘stranger danger’ took hold. Here in the US, we started putting pictures of missing children on milk cartons. As a result, parents began to believe that children were being snatched off the streets right and left.
On top of that, the marketplace knows that there’s no easier target to extract a dollar from than a worried parent. There’s a lot of ‘parenting experts’ publishing books and articles nowadays, constantly telling mothers and fathers that they’re doing it all wrong, and that their kids are going to end up dumb, fat, slow and unemployed if they don’t fix it now. Skechers now sells shoes for kids that are called ‘Where’s My Skechers’. You can lift up the insole and insert an AirTag in your kid’s shoe, so you can always know where they are. That implants in us the idea that a child who isn’t being tracked is less safe than one who is.
We have so many touch points with our kids these days – so many ways of knowing exactly what is going on in their lives, whether we’re tracking them through their shoes or through their phones or through a number of other devices. There’s a kids’ watch called Gizmo available in the US, which allows you to press a button and listen in on whatever your child is doing at any given moment. It’s effectively a bug. Between things like that and the portals that schools have that tell you instantly the grade your kids got on their most recent Spanish quiz, or what their behaviour was that day, or what they ate at lunch, or even the exact minute they went to the bathroom in some cases, parents have a tsunami of information coming at them where it used to be just granular. Of course they’re in worry mode all the time. They’ve become so used to surveilling. After that, the idea of your child wandering in the woods for an afternoon seems unthinkable.
Mumford: What sort of advice would you give a parent or teacher looking to facilitate children’s independence?
Skenazy: First, I would point them to letgrow.org. We have two free programmes for schools aimed at reintroducing independence and free play into kids’ lives. The way we introduce independence is a homework assignment that teachers can give kids called the Let Grow Experience. The objective is to go home and do something new on your own, with your parents’ permission, but without your parents. You can climb a tree, make pancakes, go to the store, visit a friend, babysit your sibling, walk to the bus stop – the kid and the parent decide together what they think makes sense, then the kid does it.
For the kid, it’s an experience in the real world, dealing with other human beings and testing what they can handle. But the impact on the parent is just as important. The school is not only giving mothers and fathers the permission to let go, but a little push to do so, aided by the fact that everybody’s doing it at the same time. They can stand back and have a little breathing room. It also gives them enormous pride to see what their children can do, which makes their child proud in turn.
The other Let Grow programme that we recommend for teachers is just to keep the school open for free play. To allow kids to organise their own games, have their own arguments, figuring things out. Yes, there’s an adult there, but they’re acting more like a lifeguard than a manager. If a kid comes to the teacher and says, ‘It was my turn, but she went first’, the teacher says, ‘Is that a kid problem or an adult problem?’. To which the kids say: ‘Well, it’s a kid problem.’ Then they go and figure it out.
We’ve heard from school after school that at first, the kids keep coming to the adult in the room with their problems, complaints and frustrations. Then after a while, they realise it’s up to them. That’s when kids overcome that initial anxiety and start thinking things like ‘I can handle that’, ‘look at what I started’, ‘I’ve made a friend’ and so on. These are fundamental parts of childhood. Let Grow’s aim is to help teachers and parents bring that back for them.
Lenore Skenazy was talking to Georgina Mumford. Watch the full video interview below:
