"America's Worst Mom" Explains Why We Need More Free-Range Parenting & Less Helicopter Parenting: Let Them Grow

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, these things happen automatically when kids are playing together and there's nobody organizing their game except them, and there's nobody solving their spats except them. So how do you get that to happen? Considering so many activities are run by adults now, it's pretty obvious. You give them some free time and free space and an adult who's not going to get involved. And then you just watch these kids blossom like little sunflowers because finally they're back in the soil they were meant to be in, which is free play.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

Well, folks, it was, gosh, I think several years ago when I, I sat transfixed reading a newspaper article entitled why I let my 9 year old ride the Subway Alone. This was an article that kind of like created a media firestorm and got the author the nickname America's Worst Mom. And I remember making mental notes to myself at the time. I think my kids were just little toddlers, but I was already kind of interested in things like rites of passage and creative free play and letting kids kind of engage in what I think kids should be engaged in, which is creative free play. And as my guest on today's podcast alludes to a more free range style of education and upbringing. And so fast forward several years down the road and I'm working on a parenting book. And a big, big part of the parenting book is about creativity and free play and kind of doing things a little bit differently when it comes to the way we educate and the ways that we, we raise our kids. And today's guest is the actual author of that article. Yes, I have America's Worst moment on the podcast, Lenore Skenazzi. Do you pronounce your name Skanazi or Skenazzi?

It happens to rhyme with crazy. So there you have it in a nutshell.

Literally, America's worst mom. Crazy Skenazzi, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Ben. Happy to be here.

Yeah. And you may have seen Lenore on the Today show, on the Daily show, on her own reality show, the World's Worst Mom. And she's lectured all over the place since that original article came out and also founded something called Free Range Kids. So I would actually love to hear this story from your mouth. Lenore, why were you, you dubbed as America's worst mom? What actually happened this whole subway story years ago.

And I have to say the nine year old subway rider is now 23. So it's been quite some time. But he was our youngest son. Still is, thank God. And he started asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before, here in New York City, where we live, and let him find his own way home by subway. It's one of those subway kids. I'm sure in the suburbs there's scooter kids or fire truck kids or whatever. He just loved the subway. And so we talked about it, my husband and I, and we decided, yeah, you know, he's ready. We're on the subways all the time, so we get around. He speaks the language. He can read a map. Let's do it. So one sunny Sunday, I took Izzy, our son, to Bloomingdale's fancy schmancy department store in a fancy schmancy neighborhood, and I left him there. And sure enough, the reason happens to be that the subway is right underneath. There's a subway stop right underneath Bloomingdale's. And he found his way down there and he took the train a couple of stops and then he took a bus across town and he came into our apartment levitating because he had done something on his own that he knew he was ready for. And we trusted him. That's also a key thing, parents trusting their kids. And I'm a newspaper columnist by trade. So literally, a couple months later, because I didn't think it was such a big deal, but a couple months later, when I had nothing to write about, I said, how about I write about this subway ride that my son took by himself? And my editor said, sure, sounds like a nice local story. And. And so that was the story. You know, 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. And that was just the beginning of me getting to the Ben Greenfield Show. So it's just been this wild ride. People were so sort of divided. A lot of people remembered that the childhoods they had had with a lot of independence and freedom. And if they were in New York, they remembered their subway ride. If they were in the suburbs, they remembered being on their bikes. Everybody remembers staying out till the streetlights came on and nobody else allowing their own kids to do that. It's been my life's work to figure out why not considering that most parents today do remember that not only fondly, they think of it as the formative experience of their childhood was that free time that they had with their friends. And that's the one thing that most kids don't get anymore.

What was going through your head when you were at Bloomingdale's and you have the subway station underneath? Obviously you're ridden the subway before. Was this intentional for you? Were you, like, kind of familiar with the tradition of rites of passage and the idea of a young person doing a hard thing is emergence into adolescence? Or is this just like, hey, let's see how he does?

Well, I'm as familiar as anyone, I guess, with the idea of rites of passage. You know, you take anthropology at some point, and I'm Jewish, and we have a rite of passage at age 13, which is the bar or bat mitzvah, when a child becomes a man or a woman and they have to do some tough stuff, they have to learn some Hebrew, and they have to be in front of a big crowd and give a speech. And so I love the idea of rites of passage, and I'm happy they don't involve tattoos or flaying of the skin in our culture. But I hadn't thought of this as a rite of passage when I was letting Izzy do it. It just struck me as a sort of maybe a New York thing, but not that everybody has to do something at age 9 that proves that they're ready for the world. I hadn't thought of it that way.

So for you, when you did that, were you at the time engaged with education or with. I know that you have this website now called Free Range Kids. Was this an interest of yours, or was it more the controversy that. That created for you as a journalist to kind of pivot and begin to really focus on this idea of creative free play and what you call free range kids.

At that time, I was a newspaper person, and so I was writing about something different every day. But years later, when I went back and looked at earlier columns of mine, I found a couple that seemed like, oh, my God, these are the breadcrumbs leading to the. I guess to the evil witch. Maybe we'll forget that metaphor. The point is that I had written a column when they were. When my sons were, I don't know, 5 and 7, about. Yes, I let them go to the bathroom by themselves when we're at a play. They're boys, I'm girl. So I just stand outside. And I didn't think that was terrible. A lot of people dragged the kids in with them to the ladies room.

And.

And then I found a column of mine from a few years later that said, yes, I let my kids go downstairs and play in the courtyard. We Lived in a skyscraper basically with a big courtyard down below where there were no cars. And I was like, don't arrest me just because I trust my kids outside. So I did see a thread of this idea that our kids are safer and smarter than our culture gives them credit for. And I did see that culture had changed, obviously, since I was a kid walking to school and today. But I started Free Range Kids, that blog the weekend after I'd been slammed on all of those television shows for letting my 9 year old ride the subway. Because most of the time, and subsequently, I mean, years and years of interviews, there'd be a little bit of banter and then at some point the interviewer would go for the kill and say, okay, it sounds great, your son looks happy, but how would you have felt if he didn't come home? And it was a response to that, the idea that I didn't care about safety. I do. And so the Free Range Kids blog and Free Range Kids has since become a nonprofit called Let Grow. And that's what I'm head of now. Let Grow. But the whole idea was that I love safety. Free Range Kids and Let Grow believe in safety. We believe in helmets and car seats and seatbelts. Would be stupid to drive without a seatbelt. They're right there. They don't change your experience. We just don't believe that kids need a security detail every time they leave the house.

What I've been writing about and thinking about for many years is how did we get so afraid for our kids considering crime rise? I realize we're in a little bit of a weird moment now since COVID but since the 90s, crime had been going down. And so parents who weren't letting their kids play outside in the 90s or the 2000s or the 2010s were actually those kids were safer than we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. And so it wasn't that crime was so dangerous or so off the charts. It's that our fear had grown. And that interests me because there was a sort of mismatch between our perception of what our kids could handle handle and our memories of what we could handle ourselves as children.

Where'd that idea come from that emerged, you know, as you alluded to, like in the 90s and beyond, that our kids are not safe, that they're going to be in constant danger from like kidnappers and germs and bullies and baby snatchers. And you should know when we go to our sleepover and you know, God forbid that you not Be able to see every last bite of food that goes into your mouth. Like, where'd that actually come from?

Well, there's a lot of reasons, as you might guess. The easiest one to understand, and I'm sure everybody sees this and agrees, is that the media really didn't focus on predators and child kidnapping until the 80s. I don't know what age you are, but you might have grown up with the milk carton kids. There were two really high profile kidnappings in the late 70s, early 80s. Etan Pates here in New York City and Adam Walsh in Florida. And after a miniseries was made about Eitan's disappearance and murder, which is the worst, horriblest thing you can imagine, I think in a move to try to help the world, people, the national center for Missing and Exploited Children started putting pictures of missing children on the milk cartons. I'd say that was sort of a good idea, but sort of a bad idea because they neglected to mention that most of those children were not snatched by a stranger off their bikes or off the street. They were generally runaways or taken in a custodial dispute between divorced parents. But the impression we got, or you got eating the cereal or your parents did, was that all these children were being snatched right and left by kidnappers. And in fact, there was testimony in front of Congress that was absolutely wrong that said that 50,000 children are stolen every year. It's not the case, thank God it's about 100, which is still horrible. But really we got the magnitude wrong and it sank into the fibers of our bones because we're parents and we want our kids to be safe. And then the tv, having made this miniseries and broken all ratings records about Adam Walsh's disappearance, said, let's make more of these. These are great. You know, TV exists to make money and the more eyeballs you can get, same was with the Internet now, the more money you can get for whatever, you know, for your station. And so we, you know, was the birth of Law and Order, which we see is just coming back again. I mean, 20 years of every night some horrible murder and then they Law and Order svu, some worse murder of a, you know, a child or disabled adult. I mean, just the scariest, most enraging, saddest stories. And your brain works like Google. And if you ask your brain, you know, name some cereals, it will come up with, you know, the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes and eventually it gets to the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. But. But they're relevant answers to your question. But if you ask your brain, is my kid safe waiting at the bus stop? Up comes the picture of Eitan Pates. Up comes the picture of JC Dug. The horrible stories are the easiest for us to remember. You can't remember stories of the millions of kids who waited at the bus stop and were just bored and got on the bus. So your brain also thinks that if something is easy to retrieve, if a result appears on the first page of your search results in your brain, it thinks it's relevant. By having these stories so easily reached by our brain and so vivid and we all share them, it started to feel as if children were in constant danger. Even though if children were always being snatched, it wouldn't be a story, we wouldn't be able to remember them. So it's sort of like the most weird, sad story comes up easiest for us, even though it is a story because it is so weird and sad and unusual.

Yeah. How much is. It's kind of funny. I was explaining to my children the other day, I have twin 13 year old boys. I was explaining to them what an ambulance chaser was. I made a joke when an ambulance went by about the ambulance chasers and had to explain to them this idea of, you know, a lawyer in waiting following the ambulance to help the family sue based on the accident. How much of this do you think is based on kind of the fact that we seem to be living in an increasingly litigious society where, you know, there's safety precautions that need to be put up for, gosh, not just kids, but, you know, the people who spill a hot beverage on themselves at McDonald's. How much is driven by this?

It's a lot. I mean, I was going to go into that as my second reason. When you have a litigious society like this, you start thinking like the lawyer. Actually, I was speaking today with some educators who want to start a, what we call a Let Grow Play club at their school where the school stays open before or after school for free play, like you were just talking about at the beginning of the show where kids of different ages are there and there's, you know, there's balls and jump ropes, chalk and cardboard boxes and kids just play and they really want this, but they're worried that what if a kid trips.

And then does the school get sued? Does Let Grow get sued? It's so strange that we started thinking like lawyers, all of us, whether we have to or not. And I would say schools probably have to, although they generally have a policy that covers recess and that also covers Let grow. But to frame everything in terms of what could go wrong and what could we be blamed for? It's a new way of looking at life, but especially looking at childhood. I mean, there's almost no product you can buy. I would never go into the business of making products for children because they keep getting recalled. I was just looking through the Consumer Product Safety Commission recall list the other day to see what's going on, what's the latest crazy thing. And there was some little outfit for some small outfit for a small child, and it was recalled because a snap could fall off, thereby posing a choking hazard. I'm wearing, you know, I'm wearing a shirt. It's got buttons. These could fall off. I've got pants on. There's a zipper tag that can fall off. I have a watch on. The watch face could fall off. I mean, once you start looking for danger, you see it literally everywhere. And once you're, you know, you're forced to think that way because there's this looming fear of a giant lawsuit. You know, you start really mistaking everyday life in the safest times in human history. You know, we're not making. We're not drinking from lead pipes anymore. And, you know, we're not subjecting children to child labor. And there's, you know, there's squishy stuff on the. On the playground if the kids fall. And yet we're seeing it like a hellscape of choking hazards and tripping hazards and fall hazards and hazard hazards. And I think you're exactly right. When you start having a litigious society, it warps our. Our view of reality.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the playground was a perfect example. I think it was an article in the Atlantic that I also read a few years ago that was showing a playground place. And it was like an old tire and some boards that were planked over a ditch, and there was, like, an old person's walker that the kids were using as a prop. That would be a litigious nightmare right now in America, where we've, like, stripped away merry go rounds and slides that go around with, like, the gravel, where we'd always kind of step up our knees, you know, growing up. Or kid would go flying off of it or the swing set with the hard rubber. Remember the slides that burnt your bottom? The silver slides that burnt your bottom?

Yeah. They were like frying pans that happened to be long.

Yeah. God forbid we learn that metal things in the sun are hot. And so. Yeah, I mean, a playground is a perfect example of a soft Culture, you know that. I mean, this might be controversial, Lenore, for me to say this, but I think it extends out to a lot of the rest of culture too. Like, you know, for example, there was that Twitter thread going around a few months ago comparing like the. And I guess this is relevant for our times. Like the R. Russian army recruiting video versus the US army recruiting video. And the US Was like this fun, cartoony, you know, I'm, I'm going to go be in the army. And it was just like this like girl doing, doing push ups and stuff. And the Russian one, it was just like epic. Like, oh, we go, we go to battle now. And you know, it was kind of like this idea that, that America for the most part is getting kind of soft. And I think part of it is we're raising our children in a very, very soft sort of way. And I also. And this is probably a little bit contro. I think part of it is we really clutch at life very, very intensively now. I think there's almost like this fear of death or.

This dishonor around death where I think Covid was a perfect example of that. We shove our elders into nursing homes and hospices and watch them die via zoom while we shut down the world's economy to keep anyone at all from getting injured or dying, when in fact death and injury, and not only learning from those, but also honoring them as portals to a better place. Either a better life or becoming a better person is something that we almost totally deny nowadays as a culture. The value and existence of when we just run in fear from death and injury and failure. Period.

The story I want to tell is that in Germany they're starting to build playgrounds that are three stories high. You have to climb up them. You know, they're made out of ropes. You could, you know, you're 10 meters. Can't remember, it's 10 meters or 30 meters, whatever. 30, you know, three stories is above the ground. And sometimes when you're climbing the slides, the slides don't have the steps exactly, you know, like six inches away from the next one, the next one, the next one. They're, they're misaligned and imperfect. And they were being made this way now at the request, request of the insurance industry in Germany. And here's why. They were getting sued so many times. And the cities actually are insured by themselves or something. So the cities were getting sued by all these young people who weren't watching where they were going, were tripping and falling. Oh my God, this is somebody else's fault. I should never have tripped. How come this wasn't perfect and safe and fine? The insurance company did a little study and it turned out that when kids are young and start paying attention to their surroundings more and feel like they have to rely on their own selves more because it's not perfect and it's not somebody's always helping them. It actually made them into sturdier, smarter, more savvy adults who didn't trip as much. And so the whole idea of making life, quote, unquote, risk free has this unseen risk that we never talk about, which is that if you, if you've raised kids to think that nothing should hurt them and that somebody else should always be there to assist or solve or assuage or soothe, then they don't have to develop those skills on their own. That's something that's missing later on. At Georgetown, there are three psychology professors who are studying whether American and Canadian children get their freedom so late that the window that Mother Nature thought kids would be playing, running around, goofing around, climbing trees, tripping and falling, and learning some risk assessment that happens so late in kids. It's too late. That window has shut. And it's not too late like they're going to be crippled forever. But it's sort of like if you learn language, the older you get, you're going to have a harder time learning it and you're going to be a little less fluent. You're going to maybe have an accent or get the grammar wrong. That's young people today who are getting their freedom and their responsibility a little too late. The preliminary study they did on this little pilot study was they gave college students in Turkey and Russia, those were like the other side versus America and Canada, a list of some very simple situations, like you're in a cafe by yourself and it's dark out or something like that. Is this safe or unsafe? And the Turks and the Russians said, of course it's safe, but the Americans thought it wasn't safe because there'd been so little that they'd been doing on their own, so little independence that they'd had that they thought anytime they weren't under direct supervision of some kind of adult or coach or teacher or helper, they were in danger. So to me, that's a danger in and of itself. You want to grow up kids who are going to feel at home in the world and capable and confident and. And right now you look at charts and the childhood anxiety and depression and icky things like that. Are going up. And that was even before COVID and then during COVID even more so. And so those are actual dangers that we ignore because they are not bleeding.

Yeah, I think there's biological implications, too. You've probably heard of the hygiene hypothesis, this idea that if you do get exposed to germs, maybe don't have all their bottled nipples boiled and who get to dogs licking their face or maybe have some extra pets or hanging around other kids, even other kids who develop stronger, more robust immune systems. It's almost, though. It's as though you give their biology a chance to fail. You know, kind of using this concept of hormesis. You know, things that don't kill you, make you stronger, and then they bounce back.

That's called hormesis.

Yeah, it's called hormesis. You know, that whole idea of saunas and cold baths and exercise, all that stuff would kill you if you did a whole bunch of it. You know, as with germs. But in little doses, they actually make your body have to adapt and become more resilient and become stronger. And that actually leads me to something that I wanted to ask you about. And that's this idea of failure in general, right? Like if you packing down the road with 18 training wheels and two helmets and full armor and they fall off their bike, they can't tell boating experience and just like letting them fail and maybe even, God forbid, get a little scrape or injury.

Well, let me tell you a story, because here you are, you're a fitness guy, and I was once talking to Jesse Ventura, who was a wrestler turned governor of Minnesota. And as people are want to do, when they talk to me, they think back. And he was telling me a story about when he was 10, he'd ridden his bike like two miles from home, and he fell off it and he got everything. It was like some accident. He got mangled. The bike was mangled. And, you know, before cell phones and I guess it was before his friends, because he was there by himself. And so how did he get home? He had to ride his bike with his mangled foot. So he only could press down on, like, one pedal because the other foot wasn't working. So you'd have to wait till the pedal came back up and then press it down and wait. And this took him a long time to get home. And actually it turned out he had broken his foot. But here he is. He must have been about 60 when he was talking to me. So he's remembering something for half a century. And I think it's because.

It was formative, right? Here was the guy who had, you know, here was the kid who triumphed, right? He's the boy who lived. He fell off his bike, he mangled his foot. He was far from home. He had nobody to help him. And the injured warrior made it home. It's sort of the odyssey in Minnesota. And so I feel like when you're asking if you fall off the bike and there's so much padding or you don't fall off the bike because somebody's holding it or cause somebody's driving you and you're not riding your bike, of course there's something that's missing. And earlier we were talking about rites of passage, and I wouldn't say that Jesse Ventura sent set out that day for a rite of passage, but clearly it was otherwise he wouldn't be bragging about it in a way or thanking it 50 years later.

I haven't told you this, but like my sons, you know, they're 13 now when they turn 13, and granted this wasn't just like totally random and unplanned, but they had a knife and a wool blanket and a backpack and had to go off on a solo five day wilderness trip, you know, on their own without dad and mom surviving in the wilderness. And it was facilitated by a, by a camp called Twin Eagles that facilitates adolescent rites of passage. But you know what, I have to admit, because I think a lot of parents are going to wonder this and I want to hear how you advise parents to go to deal with kind of like going crazy and worrying. But mom and I were like, like crying. We were like, gosh, I hope they're okay. I hope they're not getting eaten by a bear. We can't do anything. They're like 200 miles from our house. It was super hard for us mentally. We got through it and our kids obviously survived. But it's hard on the parents when you stop protecting and then you open up the floodgates to worry over what could be happening to them. Because whatever, they're out riding their bike or they're out past dark, or they're out in the forest or, you know, maybe they're getting kidnapped. Like, what's your counsel to parents who just get all these worries going through their head?

Well, first of all, I am one of them, which is too bad. I'm a worrier myself. My kids are older, they're in their early 20s now. And I'm so sorry that they drive cars. I worry about that. I worry about a lot. So I don't have a cure for worry. And I think that expecting to both be a parent and not worry, that's like, does not compute. You can't be here and in China at the same time. Worry is part of, of your life as a parent. But so is what I'm hearing from you as you tell this story, which is this excitement and pride that they did it. And I would guess that maybe you see them a little differently and they see themselves a little differently since then. Do they?

Oh, my gosh, yeah. Like the way they carry themselves. Even when we went to pick them up from that experience and they came wandering out of the forest just like they were proud, they were tall when we brought them home, they're more honest, more responsible. Like, you know, the. The slight unwillingness or hesitation towards, say, going out to milk our goats at, you know, at 3am when it's, you know, under zero degrees Fahrenheit and they got to trudge through the snow and, you know, they just woken up. Like they had this sense of autonomy and responsibility that I hadn't witnessed before in them.

Yeah. So that's weirdly, my solution for the fear problem requires doing things backwards, which is you can't wait till you're not afraid to let them go. You have to let them go, and you will be less afraid afterwards. You need the experience of letting go and seeing them come back taller, prouder, or scraped and scared, but they still went through something. And knowing that they. Knowing first of all that you trust them to do something is an enormous part of a healthy childhood. I think kids don't want to just be loved. They want to be trusted. And then also you get this surge of pride and excitement because you are hardwired. Why do you have kids? You have kids so that they'll be around when you are, not to put it bluntly. And so until you see them do something successfully or at least come through something without you, you don't have any proof that your grand experiment has worked or is going to work. Like I worked a lot of parents where it was a television show called World Worst mom, which nobody's seen, where I would sit with parents who were extremely, extremely overprotective and anxious while I sent the kid out to get milk or to climb a tree or to ride his bike around the neighborhood or whatever. And the neat thing is that when the kid came back, the parent would be so excited and so thrilled. At first I thought they were just happy because the kid hadn't died. I really thought that that Was, you know, okay, so he lived because he went to Target, he got a pillow, and he came back, and he's alive. But now I think it's because they realize, like, this is my budding young, blossoming young adult. And it feels existentially. Right. I can't tell you that. I mean, I can tell you that, but it doesn't change you. The only thing that changes you is you seeing your beloved child do something without you and then come back and it's, you know, even when your kid is young and they go, you know, have dinner at a friend's house, and then the friend's mother calls and says, oh, it's so nice that Benny put his plate in the sink. What a polite young man. And you think, benny put his plate in the sink. He never does that here. But it's when you start seeing who your kid is in the real world, you get this feedback loop. But unfortunately, the loop only begins with this difficult thing, which is why Let Grow, which grew out of Free Range Kids. Free Range Kids. Everybody agreed with me and listened to my lectures and thought I was great and bought the book. And then things weren't changing. And so Let Grow is devoted to making behavior change. And one of our big initiatives and everything we do is free, so I'm not selling anything, is to have schools do the Let Grow project, which you can download, and it just has kids bring home this homework assignment that says, mom. It says, I have to go home and do something new on my own without my parents. What? Yeah, I got to do this for school. Oh, well, what are you going to do? It's like, well, I want to walk to Cindy's house. Well, that's too far. Well, can I walk to Jenny's house? Okay. So the parents and the kids discuss this, but because everybody else in the class is doing it, which means all the other parents are letting go, you've taken out the weirdness and the how dare that, Mom Ness. And so the kids go and do something, and they can do it together with a friend. They can do it by themselves. They can, you know, run an errand, walk the dog, do anything. Go get a slice of pizza here in New York. And when they come home, then the feedback loop begins. I'm so proud. I'm so happy. Mom, can I do that again? It was so fun. Sure. What do you want to do next time? And I've talked to so many parents where the first time it's terrifying, and the second time it's weird. And the third time it's like, oh, you're going, okay, could you also pick me up in a carton of milk or whatever? So action breaks the cycle, and until you take action, you can't break the cycle.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. Like, part of it is understanding that statistics, despite perhaps indicating to us that the world is a much more dangerous place to be. Really, it's not. There's just more reporting about the dangers and media is, of course, in our faces a lot more than it used to be. In addition to, as a parent understanding that, I think that a big part of it is what you've just explained. Like, you have to at some point just go do that scary thing one time. It's like, even for me, like, let's look at this from a fitness standpoint, right? The first time I raced a triathlon in the ocean, I'm gonna get eaten by a shark. I'm gonna get eaten by a shark. I know I'm eating by a shark. I'm not even gonna be getting to just nibbled because I'm gonna be inside of a shark's tummy. And I got through the swim. You know, I was out there in the open water, like, maybe 45 minutes came out, it was safe. I kind of just. Just had to do it because the starting gun went off and everybody left. And I didn't want to be the odd man out standing on the beach. So I just did it. But then after that, there was zero mental block whatsoever after that, after I did it, once I realized, oh, the ocean is not a big, dark, scary place full of sharks. It's a fun place to swim. Yeah. I mean, granted there's sharks in there, but they're not running around eating triathletes. At least not last time I checked. I would love to shift focus here for just a little bit into, like, some practical tips. Whether people whose stories that you've been able to experience through let go, free range, things you've implemented with your own son or had implemented with Izzy, or ways that parents can literally just start to defy the status quo and in their household or school develop free range kids. Do you have any, like, practical tips?

Yeah, like I said, we're totally devoted to action and not just pondering or thumb sucking. So as you heard, I put in a word, first of all, for the Electro project, and it's let grow, not let go. Everybody thinks it's let go or it's L, E, T, G, R, O, W, let grow, which is actually sometimes we've heard of parents telling their kids, you know, it's time to go out, let grow. You know, they let them do things or the kids whine to the parents, mom, I want to go out let grow. So we're hoping that someday. It's a catchphrase. So the project is really good because our whole goal is to make it easy, normal and legal to give kids some independence. So the easy part is if the school is telling you you have to, that's really easy. You don't have a choice. And then normal is the other parents are doing the same thing. So aside from the Let Grow project, we also recommend that schools do something I was talking about a little earlier, the Let Grow play club. And I know we're obsessively putting our name on it. Just think about the idea. It doesn't matter if you call it this. So what's been going out of kids lives for the last couple of generations is something that you alluded to earlier, which is like creative free play or just free play. Like when you get together with a bunch of kids and they're all different ages and you're trying to figure out what to do and somebody says, let's play tag and it's like. Or you have to decide the teams or whatever. So with free play, as opposed to an adult organized activity like soccer or lacrosse or whatever, a lot of things are going on. Kids are figuring out what they want to do, they're making it happen. If there's older kids with younger kids and they're playing ball, while the older kid will generally throw the ball a little more gently to the young kid. Actually, I talked to one guy who remembered when he was a kid like around 15 years old, playing soccer with these little kids, the kid would hit a ball and he was the goalie, he'd go like, oh, oh. As if it was, you know, as if he was hit so hard by so much force and the four year old be like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it was fun for the older kid to see how happy he could make the younger kid. And of course, that's the beginnings of empathy and leadership. And the younger kid doesn't want to look like a baby to these gods who are in the double digits. And so they, instead of having a tantrum if they miss a goal or it's not their turn anymore, they hold themselves together so that they can look like they're big kids. And that's the beginning of executive function. And these things happen automatically when kids are playing together and there's nobody Organizing their game except them. And there's nobody solving their spatula except them. So how do you get that to happen considering so many activities are run by adults now? And the way you get it to happen is by sort of setting aside a time almost like there's a wildlife preserve where the animals are still living their old fashioned lives. Right? This is like a childlife preserve. You save some time in the morning or before school or after school for the school to stay open for mixed age. No devices, no electronics, loose parts, balls, jump ropes, chalk, cardboard boxes, free play. And then there's an adult there, just like a lifeguard, you know, if something goes really wrong, okay, but otherwise they're not solving the arguments, they're not suggesting a game, they're not making the teams. It's all up to the kids. And this is like having so little free play time in kids lives is crime. It's like taking all the wheat germ out of bread and saying here's perfect white bread. Just live on this kids. And you realize like wait, that was wrong. We took out all the nutrients, we made things so safe and so pure and so soft that we actually deprived kids of something they need. So if you do a like, if you go to Let Grow and you click on Play Club or you click on school programs, how to run one, our little implementation guide is there, but it's pretty obvious you give them some free time and free space and an adult who's not going to get involved. And then you just watch these kids blossom like little sunflowers because finally they're back in the soil they were meant to be in, which is free play.

Yeah, it's kind of funny that you brought up the food too because it's almost like that similar mentality. And it's interesting the research that's been done on feeding your baby extremely processed or blended or pureed or mashed food all the time, as well as your toddler, they actually develop a weaker jaw, a weaker airway, more sleep apnea, and into their teenage years, which was unheard of before because they don't develop strong teeth and jaw and bone density in the face. And so you get like this recessed jaw, a need for braces, dental decay. And part of it's just because in the same way that we're parenting softly, we're feeding our kids softly. And it's just like a perfect, almost like biological example of what happens when you coddle your kid, in this case your kid's mouth too much. I think that the idea that you had of having your kid ride home on the subway was really interesting. But one other thing that I think is because nature in the outdoors is obviously great because it's so unpredictable, and a kid has to learn how to deal with snow and mud and rain and trees and sticks and rocks and none of this the special bright yellow, spongy material on the playground you alluded to earlier. But, for example, sometimes we'll go on a hike and the kids find their way back to the parking lot using a trail that's different than the trail that mom and dad is taking. And again, like, if you're a parent, you're like, I could not deal with that. Trust me. When Jessa and I are hiking back three miles to the car and our kids are on a different trail, the main thing going on in the back of our heads is, I hope they're okay. I hope they're okay. I hope they're okay. What if they get kidnapped?

I hope they make it.

There might be a cougar, but you know what? That's kind of it's life, and it's better than having weak kids. It's better than not being able to send some free thinking, creative, resilient adults into the world. So in terms of the other part of this that we kind of started talking about early on in this conversation, this whole idea of a rite of passage, is that something that you guys do at all or write about at all or have researched at all in Let Grow or via your free Ranch kids website, like, anything regarding, like, you know, how kids used to have, like, some type of a remarkable or ceremonial recognition of them becoming responsible young adults and maybe even doing something hard as part of that.

You know, that's interesting. We haven't. And I think it's a really good idea because it will resonate with a lot of people because people are, you know, they're. They're cognizant of the idea of a rite of passage, and there aren't a lot of them, you know, people think it's a rite of passage. Oh, now you're going to middle school or something? That's just sort of going with a lot of kids to something that isn't that. But whatever. It doesn't sound like it's a challenge of another sort. Let's just put it that way. So I love the idea of a rite of passage. And I have to give you. I was talking to a guy in California who had started in middle school and ran it for 10 years, and he had a list of cool Things that kids could do to feel older. And I loved one of them so much that I want to take it for my own. And so here it is. And you can take it too, which is go someplace you stick out. I just. I love that because, you know, one of the things that we're, you know, what is a rite of passage. You're going from something that is comfortable, where you fit to a new level, right, to a new world, maybe the world of adulthood. And so going someplace where you stick out is. Requires leaving your comfort zone, being the thing that is hardest to be, which is embarrassed and obvious, and knowing that people are looking at you and thinking about you and maybe talking about you, all that stuff that's so painful and surviving it. And the example he gave of a kid who had done that from his middle school was a boy who went to the Y, and he was at his swimming lesson fine. And then his lesson ended and he stayed in the pool for the next group, which was the senior citizen swimming class. And, you know, you're going to stand out if you're a 13 year old among the retirees. And it was great. What are you doing here?

Who are you?

Oh, that's great. You can swim with us. And. And it's so freeing when you realize, okay, I'm someplace new, and I'm a little embarrassed, I'm a little awkward. I'm the one who doesn't know what's going on. Everybody else does, because they're, you know, it's their place. And it feels great. And I have to say, here I am, old as I am. I started exercising only recently. Ben, you should forgive me, but it was Covid, and I live sort of near a Chinatown here in New York City, in Elmhurst, New York. And I went to the park and I saw these ladies exercising. And they looked old enough and slow enough that I could join them. And I did. And this became my new place. And it's me and the Chinese teacher and a bunch of ladies in veils from Bangladesh. And boy, do I not fit in. And boy, do I fit in now. I mean, it was my rite of passage. And I'm so grateful for, I don't know, for trying something new and not being so bored with my life.

It'd probably be incomplete on this show to not mention the fact that there are, like, some child protective services, juvenile court issues here, because I'm familiar with something called neglect laws. Is that something we need to be careful about as we go down this road of, like, I don't know, Letting our children walk home from school by themselves. Like, can we get in trouble? Or how can you find out what you can and can get away with in your state?

Well, what a perfect segue. If you go to let grow, remember letgrow.org and you click on laws and advocacy, I think is the name of the tab. And then you click on maps or state laws. You can look up your state laws right there. The laws are generally very vague, and so even though you can look them up, it really won't give you much guidance. And in a way, that's good because it doesn't say, you know, no child under nine shall be walking alone. But it also leaves everything sort of a little ambiguous. And so what. One of the things that Lick Rowe is working on and has been for a couple years, is getting states to narrow their neglect laws to say specifically that if a parent is letting a kid do something independently, unless that parent is putting the child in obvious, likely and serious danger, then nobody can say anything. So that means that if somebody calls and says, I see a child outside, you know, Child Protective Services can say, well, are they. Do they have clothing on? Yes. Are they screaming and crying? Do they look like they're covered with bruises? No, no, no, no, no. Okay, well, thank you very much. And click. So it doesn't go any further than that. And I have to say, we've been having. We passed the law in Oklahoma, Utah, and Texas. So far, it's one vote away in Colorado anyway. So the point is, work on these laws with us. We have about six states that are going to pass these laws, hopefully very soon. Right now, most of the time, you don't get in trouble.

I'm looking at this on my phone right now. A reasonable child independence law. So they're actually. The states are, quote, allowing, unquote. And look at, like, Oklahoma here, you actually are allowed to travel to and from school, including by walking, running, or bicycling, to travel to and from nearby commercial recreational facilities, engage in outdoor play, remain at home unattended for reasonable amount of time, remain in a vehicle if the temperature inside the vehicle is not or will not become dangerously hot or cold, and engage in similar activities alone or with other children.

Part of me is like, great, we're allowed to do that. And then part of me is like, wait, we had to pass special laws that we wouldn't get in trouble if our kid does want to ride their bike two miles down the road to school? Like, you could actually get your kid taken away from you or get into Trouble for something like that. To me, that's just ridiculous.

It is ridiculous. That's why we're trying to change them. I mean, there is a sense of.

Here that I share. It's like, how dare the government tell me what makes sense for me and raising my kids. You think I don't love them way more than you and know them way better than you? And so that's what the laws. That's why we're trying to change the laws. But the fear of getting your children taken away is usually, you know, unwarranted. Sometimes you might, you know, the worst thing you might have and is like to take a parenting class or something like that. And also, so it's very rare that even that happens. But we don't want parents to have to second guess themselves because they're worried about the cup. You know, I'm guilty of this. I publicize almost every case I hear of because I can't believe that anybody could have to be investigated for letting their kid walk outside or play outside. But generally those are very rare. It's sort of like I'm the Nancy Grace of that. Like she's the Nancy Grace of kidnapping and I'm the Nancy Grace of, you know, parent investigated for letting child walk to school. You know, generally you're not going to get in trouble and especially if you try to change the laws in your state or even try to get your neighbors together and discuss like, we believe in this. Right? And so you're supporting each other and you're not going to say, you know, I saw a child outside, how come? And, and also on our site, there's the let grow kid card that kids can carry with them that say, I'm not lost or neglected. I'm a let grow kid. If you don't believe me, you know, call my, call my lawyer. No, it says call my mom or dad. And there's a place where you can call, call the number and just that the parents know the kid is outside and that they've taught them how to cross the street, et cetera.

When you actually look at what happens to a kid's brain and the actual evidence and I'll link in the shownotes. So I'll put the shownotes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Freerange BenGreenfieldFitness.com Freerange in terms of what happens as far as emotional reactions and physical capabilities and coping skills and even changes in the way that like amygdala, the stress center in the brain is hardwired when kids do things like play on high objects or play speedily like, like riding a bike fast downhill or playing with tools or loose parts or rough and tumble, play where they're getting scraped or play where they might disappear or get lost. Like literally like hide and go seek or getting lost in the forest. Like the way that kids brains respond to this in terms of like their emotional and mental health and their physical health is profound. Like, it's actually pretty crazy. We can develop little like, I don't know if you watch that movie Wall E where everybody's just like, you know, rolling around Slurpee, electronic wheelchairs. So you could have that kid or you could have the kid, you know, who's, I suppose, you know, the antithesis of that. Like I don't know, loincloth, running around the forest, throwing a spear or something. I don't know about you, but kind of weird, kind of dangerous, kind of edgy, kind of non status quo. I'd rather have the latter kid than the former.

Well, I think you do. I think you got two of them. They're twins.

Well, I don't know about the loincloths, but you know, they still wear their teeth.

That might be against the law. Right.

Well, look, I know that there's the website Free Range Kids and then there's the website letgrow.org I will link to those in the show notes and if I could let people know. Lenore has a book called Free Range Kids and I read it, I thought it was really good. There's another guy named Peter Gray who has a really good book called Free to Learn, which I also think is really good. There's a book called the Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, also really good. And there's actually a few other books and I'm going to link to some of the better ones in the show notes because when I made a decision to unschool my kids five years ago, I read all these books. So I have a whole list of them. I'll put them in the show notes for people@bengreenfulfitness.com Freerange and also link to some of the other podcasts that I've done on unschooling and kind of a more independent education. Lenore, thank you so much for being America's worst mom for coming on the show.

Thank you for being America's fittest dad, if that's what you are. But this was really fun and people can always drop me a line. Infoetgrow.org, happy to answer questions.

Awesome. Cool. Infoetgrow.org okay folks, I'll put everything@BenGreenfieldFitness.com FreeRange until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Lenore Crazy Skenazy signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. So there's two events coming up. You go to both of them. I'm going to go to both of them. Obviously I'm going to fly to Texas, then fly over to Lexington. The Texas event, called Runga is October 13th through the 15th. The wild health one is October 22nd. Go to both. I am. Obviously you can also check BenGreenfieldLife.com calendar for all of the events that I'll be teaching at this year. So I hope to see you there. Are you ready to be empowered? A Remote Working Career at Ben Greenfield Life is made for those who desire to live life to the fullest. Those who explore and enjoy every nook and cranny of God's great creation, and those who want to discover how to achieve full optimization of mind, body and spirit. Those that desire boundless energy to equip them to go and conquer every mountain they've been called to climb alongside a supportive community of fellow lovers of life who have a deep desire to make maximum impact with their lives, loving others fully and savoring every step of the journey with with authenticity and curiosity. If you want that, then a remote working career at Ben Greenfield Life is for you. At Ben Greenfield Life, we passionately empower people to live a bold, purpose filled and adventurous life infused with health, hope, happiness and love. We hold to these core values and their applications. Purpose At Ben Greenfield Life, we seek to provide value to each other, our community and our world. We're passionate to pursue our purpose in life. We know our purpose within our company and how each role is vital to fulfilling the Ben Greenfield Life mission and vision. Growth At Ben Greenfield Life, we are focused and intentional on growing personally and professionally. We support one another in our individual growth and development. We strive for excellence and we're always improving. Adventure At Ben Greenfield Life, we remain curious about life and are open to exploring it. We're bold and courageous in our own unique ways. We explore different ways to add adventure to our life and our work. Authenticity At Ben Greenfield Life, we respect each other's right to be our own unique selves. We expect the highest levels of radical honesty, integrity and transparency from ourselves and each other. We're human, we make mistakes, we forgive and we seek to improve joy At Ben Greenfield Life, we celebrate in fun and creative ways the accomplishments of ourselves, each other, our tribe and our company. We savor life by celebration, parties, laughter, drinking and eating with others and exploring and savoring all of God's creation. Finally, love. At Ben Greenfield Life, we're willing to sacrifice and go the extra mile to help our team and our tribe. We're good stewards of our spirit, mind and body and know that caring for ourselves is the first step towards being able to care for others. We embrace faith and our own internal belief systems to guide how we demonstrate love to ourselves and others. So you can now become a part of this movement and join our remote team. Your decision to be here right now could be the start of joining us on this journey. There's a whole bunch of other great benefits to joining our remote team like medical, dental and vision coverage which is available to full time employees, a gym, fitness and phone stipend, continuing education support and reimbursement to facilitate growth and learning for employees in an area related to your current position or that may lead to promotional opportunities, an emphasis on volunteer projects in your community that Ben Greenfield Life will help support and give you resources for a home office, reimbursement to support you working remotely in a healthy way, and a fully remote team that comes together for an annual retreat to connect and grow our personal and professional relationships. So you can check out BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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