As a parent—and, I rush to add, a former child—I’ve always had an interest in the way we talk about childhood. For all sorts of reasons, kids are screens upon which society projects so many of its hopes, dreams, and (especially) anxieties. In my early days at Reason in the 1990s, I wrote often on that decade’s roiling (and mostly forgotten) moral panics about kids (as a recurring character on The Simpsons was known to interject regardless of the topic at hand, ‘What about the children?’). In a 1997 cover story titled Child-Proofing the World, I noted that by basically all available measures—ranging from every possible health indicator to years in school to criminal victimization to accidents, kids were doing better than ever. And yet, I wrote:
The threats are everywhere, we are told: If children are not hounded by ritual satanic child abusers at day care or by perverts on the Internet, then they're sucking in too much asbestos at school, or chewing on too much lead at home; if television, purportedly the babysitter of choice in the overwhelming majority of American homes, hasn't transformed kids into underperforming, slackjawed dullards, it has overstimulated them into feral children who must be tamed with Ritalin and Prozac; if we haven't failed the kids by not spending unlimited amounts of tax money on them, then we have transformed them into shallow consumers who can only measure affection in terms of dollars spent; if they're not at elevated risks of brain cancer from eating hot dogs, then they're likely to become punch-drunk from heading soccer balls; and on and on.
Egged on by the movie director and former actor Rob Reiner, a major donor to the Democratic Party who had entered therapy in midlife, First Lady Hillary Clinton held a seemingly endless number of White House events aimed at protecting kids from mostly phantom menaces. Her controversial book, It Takes a Village (controversial partly because she needlessly lied about using a ghostwriter), is filled with statements like: ‘Everywhere we look, children are under assault…from violence and neglect, from the breakup of families, from the temptations of alcohol, tobacco, and sex, and drug abuse, from greed, materialism, and spiritual emptiness.’ These problems, the First Lady admitted, ‘are not new, but in our time they have skyrocketed.’
But literally none of that was true—or at least not the measurable things, like divorce rates, which were down after peaking in the early ‘80s. Child poverty rates also declined. Kids throughout the ‘90s were drinking, smoking, using drugs, and having sex at lower rates than previous cohorts. But that didn’t matter, because the one thing all the big wigs in D.C. knew for sure was that cable TV and rap music and video games and the internet and crack cocaine and Satanism (!) were alive and well and living on planet Earth. Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al, published Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated World (1987), where she warned darkly that Dungeons and Dragons led otherwise good kids to “experiment with the deadly satanic game, and get hooked.” Black Sabbath frontman and bat-biter Ozzy Osbourne was treated like a great head of state when he died recently, but in the ‘90s, he was part of the problem, penning songs like Suicide Solution and possibly encoding secret devilish messages on his recordings.
In Child-Proofing the World, I chalked up the panic over kids to a number of factors, including a bastardized form of Freudianism that had pervaded the culture and made kids seem overly fragile; Baby Boomer guilt about two-income households that meant putting their kids in institutionalized settings; and the impact of having higher expectations on fewer and fewer kids (we were getting wealthier as a society, after all). At the end of the article, I wondered about the effects of thinking that our kids (my older son turned four in 1997) were growing in a Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome scenario:
What sort of message, we might ask, borrowing a favorite phrase of child advocates, does it send to paint the world in the most horrific terms possible, to see danger and disorder lurking everywhere? Do we best prepare our children for responsible, engaged lives by seeking to child-proof the world? What are the costs (to adults and minors alike) of thinking of our children as little Buddhas who must at all costs be prevented from living in the world they will one day inherit? Will kids imbibe such an ethos and respond by shrinking from the world in all its dangers and opportunities alike, seeking first and foremost to avoid the confrontations, negotiations, and possibilities entailed by a robust life? Or will they rebel against overprotection and take more and more unmeasured risks?
Which brings me to the most recent guest on The Reason Interview. Lenore Skenazy is a journalist and activist who earned the ire of the world back in 2008 when she let her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway by himself. She wrote a book arguing in favor of ‘free-range kids,’ by which she meant letting youngsters emulate the childhood that many Boomers and Gen Xers had rather than being raised like human veal in tightly controlled, anxiety-heavy environments. Lenore started contributing to Reason, penning stories and making videos about all sorts of outrages—parents being arrested for letting their kids play in their own yards alone, or for walking home from school unaccompanied. She also wrote about all manner of bizarre surveillance technology that more and more parents were using to keep track of their kids. In 2017, she coauthored The Fragile Generation, which for years was the most-popular story in Reason’s history (based on pageviews at our website). That same year, she formed Let Grow, a nonprofit that encourages schools to adopt programs and legislatures to pass laws that give kids more autonomy and parents more leeway to loosen up (Lenore has chronicled dozens of cases where parents run afoul of the law for doing nothing more than letting kids play outside, for instance). Her Let Grow cofounders include psychologists Jon Haidt and Peter Gray who, interestingly, are somewhat at odds lately over the role of technology in the lives of younger Americans.
Lenore did a TED talk this year, explaining “Why you should spend less time with your kids.” Given that—and a bunch of wins Let Grow has had recently in various state legislatures—I decided to sit down with her to talk about the state of free-range parenting. It’s a great conversation that really touches on so many current issues and controversies regarding kids.
Here’s Reason’s writeup of the podcast, followed by links to YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and SoundCloud versions.
The Reason Interview goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and visionaries who are making the 21st century more libertarian—or at least more interesting—by challenging old, worn-out ideas and orthodoxies.
Today's guest is Lenore Skenazy, a journalist and activist dubbed "the world's worst mom" for letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway alone back in 2008. Since then, she's become a regular contributor to Reason and the co-founder, with psychologists Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt, of Let Grow, which pushes for laws and school programs to restore independence to kids.
She talks with Nick Gillespie about why kids today are more anxious and less free than they used to be, how fear and over-parenting took over American childhood, and why the free-range parenting movement is finally on the rise.
How can we make The Reason Interview better? Take our listener survey for a chance to win a $300 gift card: http://reason.com/podsurvey
0:00–Intro
1:14–Spend less time with your kids
4:57–Childhood safety myths
10:50–Parental fears of failure
17:05–Generational divides on parenting
20:18–Criminalizing childhood
26:16–Politics and parenting
29:09–Let Grow and local legislation
41:14–What do children actually want?
45:17–How Skenazy became the "World's Worst Mom"
48:12–Childhood autonomy in pop culture
Previous Appearances:
Are Your Kids Too Fragile? How to Make the Next Generation More Resilient, October 26, 2017
Stop Criminalizing Parenting: Free Range Kids' Lenore Skenazy on Our Irrational Fears over Child Safety, September 10, 2014
Helicopter Parents vs. Free Range Kids: Q&A with "America's Worst Mom," October 5, 2012Upcoming Reason Events
The Soho Forum Debate: Melanie Thompson vs. Kaytlin Bailey, September 15
Reason Versus—Mass Immigration Is Good for America, October 2
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