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!
POST UPDATED July 22
3 Comments
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.
Just so you know, we used ‘Free Range Kids’ as a textbook for nannies working with the kids here in San Francisco. My partner and I decided, along with the kids, that they were going to be doing a lot of things around town via public transit on their own. The first kid was riding transit on her own in both SF and LA by the time she was 8. We explained to each nanny what we were doing, but having your book to let them read through, including all the ‘this is really ok’ statistics was very, very useful. Thanks Lenore!
“Notorious Rambunctious Provocateur”
I see an elegant logo polo coming soon. And “….on Board” car stickers too.