Am I insulted? Miffed? Mad that I am called a “rambunctious” provocateur compared to my friend and Let Grow co-founder Jonathan Haidt’s gravitas?
I AM THRILLED! Who wouldn’t love their ideas repackaged and recommended by one of the world’s leading brainiacs…er…public intellectuals?
Here’s the juicy paragraph from a New Yorker article by Mollie Fischer that ran a week or so ago about a new book on kids and phones:
Part of Haidt’s appeal to terrified parents is his willingness to provide a stern and confident prescription: no smartphones before high school, no social media before sixteen, no phones in schools, and more independent childhood play. His guidance draws on the work of a former journalist named Lenore Skenazy. After winning media notoriety with a 2008 New York Sun column about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway alone, Skenazy reinvented herself as an activist against helicopter parenting, and published a book called “Free-Range Kids.” Haidt read it when he was a parent of young children, and subsequently partnered with Skenazy to help found Let Grow, a nonprofit that advocates for increased childhood independence. He credits her with shaping his thinking, but he’s also repackaged her ideas in a way that’s enabled them to be taken seriously: where Skenazy offers advice with an air of rambunctious provocation (for a time, she hosted a reality show called “World’s Worst Mom”), Haidt projects sober objectivity.
It’s called synergy and I LOVE IT!
1 Comment
As if the way you present your ideas can’t be taken seriously. As if you needed to be “repackaged”. The New Yorker is a pretentious, ultimately worthless rag.