The texts started coming thick and fast on Friday: “You’re a clue on Jeopardy!” “This is the big time!” “What more can you achieve?”
The clue: “LENORE SKENAZY, WHO WROTE OF LETTING HER 9-YEAR-OLD RIDE THE NYC SUBWAY LONE, MOVED THIS TERM FROM RAISING CHICKENS TO RAISING KIDS.”
If you don’t know the answer…I’d be surprised. The contestant knew the answer, too. So this was, indeed, a pinnacle. But THE pinnacle of my career?
Well, it has a lot of competition. There was the pinnacle of getting my first real job. (Thank you, Fred Danzig, RIP, at Advertising Age!) The pinnacle of becoming a reporter and then columnist at The New York Daily News. (Thank you, Gil Spencer and Michael Goodwin.) The pinnacle of getting another columnist job when The News dumped me. (Wasn’t the fault of Spencer or Goodwin, and thank you, Seth Lipsky at The New York Sun for taking me in! And letting me write, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old…“) And then cam the pinnacle of publishing Free-Range Kids (Thank you, Alan Rinzler at Wiley!) And doing the reality TV show I’ll bet none of you saw, “World’s Worst Mom.” (Thank you, Jon Sechrist! The show was popular in Brazil and Poland!)
Then, in 2017, after about 10 years of helming Free-Range Kids –including this blog — I got a call from Daniel Shuchman, the long-time chairman of FIRE, and Jonathan Haidt, now best known for “The Anxious Generation” and “The Coddling of the American Mind,” but then a professor/dad worried about kids growing up fragile. They wanted to start a nonprofit together. I said great — provided we loop in Peter Gray, the Boston College Psychology Professor who has spent his life studying the importance of mixed-age free play and wrote the book Free to Learn. Together the four of us founded Let Grow. Our mission: Making childhood independence easy, normal and legal. And since then, the pinnacles just keep on coming:
Pinnacle: Getting 8 states to pass our law saying it’s legal to take your eyes off your kids.
Pinnacle: Getting hundreds of schools to implement our free independence-building programs.
Pinnacle: Inspiring a pilot study of independence as fun, fast therapy for childhood anxiety.
Pinnacle: Hearing from the parents and kids themselves!
If you’re one of them, I’d love to hear from you, too! Please drop me a line: Lenore@LetGrow.org. – Lenore Skenazy, President, Let Grow — and Jeopardy clue
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