This week's article summary is A Conversation with a Free-Range Parenting Pioneer, and it's a follow-up to an earlier summary on helping students develop self-efficacy.
To me, Free Parenting suffers from poor brand naming—the term implies parents being overly lax with their kids.
Most parents conceptually understand the importance of children having unsupervised opportunities make decisions, to solve disputes with peers, and to figure out how to entertain themselves without adults or technology.
Yet parents also worry about the potential dangers of the world. Jonathan Haidt in his popular book Anxious Nation bemoans that parents give their kids too much freedom online but not enough in real life.
Throughout the country, schools have been tightening their technology policies to limit or ban student-owned devices at school. Yet for the most part, schools and parents have ignored Haidt’s other major recommendation: letting kids play with other kids without adult supervision.
Parents today are fearful of what could happen to their child in real life even though Haidt reminds us that the world today is actually very safe for kids. I fault the 24-hour a day news cycle for this: highlighting the dangers and violence of the world is good for ratings but adversely skews our world view.
While technology plays a role in the rise of loneliness, anxiety, and depression in kids, I also feel children’s lack of unsupervised play time is a critical factor as well. The positives of giving kids opportunities to do things by and for themselves include building self-confidence, self-efficacy, and independence.
I have a vivid memory of one particular night when I was eight. I was in my pajamas watching TV in the living room. My dad’s car wouldn’t start at his office, so he called my mom and asked her to come pick him up (a commute of 15 minutes each way). My mom told me to put on a coat and jump in the car to pick up my dad. I asked if I could stay home by myself as it was only going to be a half hour alone in the house. Somehow I convinced her and she let my stay by myself for the first time.
It was pitch black outside and after about 10 minutes I was scared. I had the TV to keep me company but I heard all sorts of noises inside and outside the house. Thirty minutes felt like an eternity. My parents finally got home, and I remember being nonchalant about being by myself for 30 minutes. But, as this memory is deeply etched in my brain, it clearly had an impact on me. I had accomplished something and felt more confident for it.
I know it’s difficult for parents today to be less hovering over their kids, yet as the article recommends, they can start by doing little things to give their kids opportunities to build their confidence.
Joe
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Lenore Skenazy was once reviled as the worst mom in America for letting her 9-year-old son Izzy take the subway by himself.
The newspaper columnist has since become a champion of the “free-range kids” parenting style and helped spark a national movement, Let Grow, which encourages parents to gradually give their children the kind of small freedoms they were allowed as children, such as walking to school or to the park.
Skenazy recently took a few moments to chat about what she sees as the serious developmental impacts of curtailing the natural impulse for free play and how we went from a country where it was normal for children to ride the bus to a nation where parents try to manage all aspects of their child’s schedule.
Amid the deepening youth mental health crisis, Skenazy suggests that free play is a serious matter for human development. She suggests that coddling our kids may limit their cognitive potential, holding them back from peak educational experiences, pointing to research showing a link between lower independence and higher anxiety. Independence, she says, is the key to developing happy, well-adjusted children.
Do you think that giving kids more independence can help fight anxiety?
We’ve taken out opportunities for kids to practice becoming independent. You were allowed to play outside as kids, weren’t you? We were allowed to have free time after school. Kids today aren’t. You were allowed to be unsupervised sometimes, and our kids aren’t. This has resulted in a massive downturn in child mental health, We need to give them back some independence and free play
Why do kids need time interacting with their peers face to face?
You want kids to be off their phones, learning how to interact, learning how to make things happen, learning how to deal with frustration because you can’t all be first. And also learning empathy, the older kids helping the younger kids and learning a little bit of maturity, because the little kids don’t want to look like babies. These cool older kids, you need to have them interacting like humans. Playing. That’s how they have always interacted and that’s how they make friends. We’re worried about loneliness. How do kids make friends? They make friends because they play with them. This is the way kids used to spend their entire childhoods.
How do you convince parents to let their children do the things they took for granted?
There’s something called the Let Grow Experience. It’s a homework assignment that teachers give their students, and it says, go home and do something new on your own without your parents. They could do anything from making pancakes to walking to school to walking the dog or using a sharp knife.
Does that help parents feel empowered as well as kids? Does it give all of us more agency?
The reason we love this project so much is that once your kid goes and does something on their own, parents are generally so excited and so thrilled that that rewires you. You are excited to send them out again. And then the kid gets rewired because, instead of my mom loves me, but she doesn’t think I can go to the store, she knows I’ll screw it up, or I’m too shy or whatever. Then the kid says, wait, no, my mom believes in me. I can do this. And knowing that somebody believes in you turns out to be the greatest gift to a kid’s psyche because, sometimes, somebody has to believe in you for you to believe in yourself.
How do you feel about the proliferation of ed-tech in the classroom? A lot of schools are deeply invested in ed-tech as a way to make kids smarter. This is the opposite of that. Is it hard to make an argument for the relationship between free play and intellectual development?
It’s really easy to make the argument. It doesn’t necessarily land, but the argument is this: The brain comes ready to be wired, right? How do you learn to deal with somebody who’s annoying? How do you learn to come up with an idea? How do you learn to innovate? How do you learn to solve a problem? You have to do all these things to learn how. People love solving problems and love coming up with ideas and love playing. Ed-tech did not get us to this place in human history.
The rub is that taking the screens away is a really hard thing to do.
You can’t just take the screens away and leave them staring at blank walls. But if you have become the entertainment center, you’ve goofed. The world is actually more entertaining than the phones because you can smell it, taste it, feel it. So you just have to give them back the real world. Take away the phone and open the door.
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