Free The Children. Lenore Skenazy

How Do We Fix It?

"Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone" was a 2008 newspaper column that turned into a national campaign to help parents raise their children with less anxiety while pushing back against our culture that has become obsessed with kids' fragility.

Our guest, Lenore Skenazy, founded free-range kids in the years after she first described making the decision to let her son, Izzy, take the New York City subway home alone. Her column resulted in a flood of media coverage and mixed reactions from parents— from accusations of child abuse to fond memories of childhood freedom. She hosted a TV series, "World's Worst Mom".

This week, the second edition of her best-selling book, "Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow", is published. In this episode, we discuss how parents and educators can step back so kids step up. We also look at the resilience of children and why the rest of the world is laughing at us scaredy-cat Americans.

"There's so much intelligence and cognition building going on when kids are figuring out rules, and trying to figure out who's going to play with them," Lenore tells us. This form of learning about the world "doesn't look like learning because it's playing. We really have a hard time believing that you can be playing and learning at the same time."

Lenore believes our kids are stronger and smarter than our society assumes. Her work with the Let Grow Project and Let Grow Play Club is built on the principle that children think and act for themselves when adults don't get involved every step of the way.

Recommendation: Richard is watching two seasons of the Israeli TV series, "False Flag" on Hulu.

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