What a thrill to watch CBS Mornings today and hear Amazon Books’ Sarah Gelman recommending…Free-Range Kids! Here’s the clip (with an ad before it — so it goes). Legitimacy at last! And speaking of last…mine is the last book Gelman recommends, about four minutes into the segment. BUT the other four books sound great, too! […]
Here you go! This is a Let Grow Play Club at a Title I (high poverty) elemetary school in South Carolina. Note how the kids are having…what’s that thing called again? FUN. No adults shouting, “Be careful!” No adults asking, “Are you okay?” No adults suggesting things like, “Next time, try to make it a […]
What works when it comes to making folks think twice about constantly hovering, helping, supervising and scheduling their kids? The message they mostly hear is that constant intervention is good, and anything less is lazy or dangerous. So below, please find my very basic attempt at a little culture-nudging video. Can you please let me […]
Samantha Boardman is a psychiatrist, professor, mom, author of Everyday Vitality AND an executive board member at Let Grow. We brought her in because of posts like this, snatched from her blog, Positive Prescription (which I highly recommend!): According to a recent paper published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, many parents assume incorrectly that teaching their […]
A dad whose 6-year-old wanted Nutella for her pancakes on a recent Saturday morning made a deal: I’ll drive you to the grocery if you go in by yourself and buy the stuff. This is about a straightforward an activity as can be and I posted the dad’s brief write-up of it over at Let […]
Oh ye of icy hearts, beware! This little girl in China is going viral not just because she is so sad and sweet, but also because she could put Socrates to shame! (Or at least get him to assign less homework.) Hers is a cry heard ’round the world. Let’s hope some schools and parents […]
This graph, from a suburban elementary school, represents what after-school club kids chose as their first choice. There were a bunch of options like chess, music, art — all of which I had my own kids enrolled in at some point in their childhoods. But as you can see from that big, green wedge […]
Chopping, hopping, shopping, sewing, mowing, going, GROWING! Check out the winners of this year’s Third Annual Let Grow Independence Challenge! It continues to surprise me just how much kids CAN do and how little we LET them do. This video shows how competent (and helpful, happy, proud ‘n’ persistent) kids can be. “When adults step […]
Folks, here are the descriptions of Let Grow’s two, FREE independence-fueling initiatives for schools. IF YOU ARE A TEACHER, ADMINISTRATOR, SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST, HOMESCHOOLER, or PARENT of a school-aged child, please consider downloading our implementation guides and getting started. The kid you save may be your own. At the bottom of this post you’ll find videos […]
Great grandma Joanne Ward of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, read my piece about the fastest, cheapest child therapy — FREE PLAY. Then she emailed us this worksheet filled out by her pride and joy, Emma, a second grader. Emma is wiser than many an adult, when it comes to what kids NEED THE MOST. In case […]
