Rachel Flynn, a professor of child development and therapist, recently testified in support of Nevada’s “Reasonable Childhood Independence” bill, saying that over her 23 years in practice she has seen kids in decline as their unstructured, unsupervised time evaporated. This, she testified, was across the board: The decade prior to my doctorate I was a director of youth development programs working closely with children and families from diverse backgrounds — ethnicities, socioeconomic status, urban and rural populations. The children I’ve worked with also range in their cognitive abilities — the gifted and talented as well as those who are…
Author: lskenazy
Kids and parents — rejoice! Both Texas and Oklahoma passed laws yesterday that ensure parents that giving their kids the freedom to do things like play outside, walk to school, and wait at home will NOT BE MISTAKEN FOR NEGLECT! If you’re a Free-Range fan, you may recall when Utah passed its first-in-the-country Free-Range Parenting law in 2018. Having two states follow suit is culture-changing news. Even better: A similar bill has already passed the state senate in Nevada and now looks likely to pass in the assembly, too. Let Grow, the non-profit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, is…
A woman’s spidey senses went wild on a Target run, and she was ABSOLUTELY SURE she was about to be trafficked. How could she be so certain? She saw three different men, all shopping and not smiling. They looked so evil, her blood ran cold. When she went outside (accompanied by store personnel, at her request) they even had a WHITE VAN. I leave it to you to guess whether it had a whole lot of windows. Yahoo put that story on their home page today. Here’s my essay about it, over at Let Grow. FOR SHAME, Yahoo. For…
A British study confirms something that you may have been feeling: Ten is the new two. More precisely, 11 is the new 9. Parents who played outside at age 9, on average, now don’t let their kids go outside, unsupervised, until age 11. This is not in response to an actual rising crime rate — crime today is lower than then ’80s and ’90s when today’s parents were growing up. (And it’s not down due to helicoptering — crime is down against adults, too, and we don’t “helicopter” them.) The higher age “floor” is in response to a sad…
And if you like the whole Free-Range Kids gestalt, come visit LetGrow.org, the nonprofit that grew out of it and promotes childhood independence right and left! https://twitter.com/i/status/1385012305813905410
Becky Diamond is a reporter who has spent years and years in actual war zones. But now she’s really scared. She’s worried about what is happening to childhood. The scheduling, supervising, intervening, optimizing — and the psychological issues those can engender. So she wrote a letter to her son reminding him — and herself — that resilience is a muscle that you need to build. The building begins in childhood. When you’re trusted to roll with some punches, it doesn’t really matter whether you pop back up or pause to lick some wounds, because either way you have gotten a…
When you feel ready to let your kid use a sharp knife, or bike around the neighborhood, or go on a stone-cold, old-fashioned, Nerf and Sprite-fueled playdate, you might want to have the wind at your back — that is, some other parents cheering you on, or helping you let go, or simply eager to learn from your liberation. Where are those folks? They gather at “Raising Independent Kids,” Let Grow’s Facebook Group. As I explain on the Let Grow blog: After a mom “confessed” that she was scared to let her 5-year-old use a knife, but then thrilled when…
Harriet the Spy. Encyclopedia Brown. Meg and brother Charles Wallace, Ramona, Beezus, Pippi, and that My Side of the Mountain Kid (what WAS his name?). They all shared something other than spunk. Freedom. Freedom of movement was a given in mid-century children’s literature. Of course the kids starring in books did more than most of their human peers. They solved crimes, befriended beavers, saved parents stuck in other dimensions. But the NORMAL stuff they did — hopping on their bikes, walking into town, playing outside — THAT has become almost as mythic as the ability to fly or cast spells.…
Gym teachers don’t have to have kids doing specific sports or skills all the time. When P.E. teacher David Benay decided to devote some class time to free play, outside, he was amazed by how active his students were, and how many lessons — physical and social — they were getting. When a tiny game of Capture the Flag organically grew to 23 kids, Benay noted that the students: …used their knowledge and understanding to organize the game. They showed great confidence and motivation to become the needed leaders at the time. Lastly, the students showed their physical competence and…
“I think this school is making a mistake,” tweeted Jonathan Haidt, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind.” What school? The Hackney New School in London that I write about over at Let Grow. (Click here to read.) “A school without bullying sounds like a utopia, but it is achievable,” Hackney’s head of school announced. But the way she eliminated bullying was by replacing recess with geography quizzes and poetry recitations. “We want every second at school to count.” I’m sure the kids are counting the seconds, too. As Haidt, a co-founder of Let Grow, put it in his…