Free-Range Kids is the term associated with Lenore Skenazy, the author of Free-Range Kids and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, who appeared on The Bob Zadek Show to discuss the modern culture of overprotection and the “helicopter parenting” phenomenon. The episodes discuss the legal and social consequences of allowing children independence, the role of media in inflating fears, and the importance of fostering self-sufficiency in the next generation. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Origin: the subway ride
Skenazy told Bob Zadek that the story took place six years before the 2014 episode. Her son, then nine, began asking her and her husband, in New York City, whether they would take him someplace he had never been and let him find his own way home on the subway. She said the family did not have a car and lived in the city, that her son was familiar with the subways, could read a map and speak the language, and that the subways were safe and full of people. On a sunny Sunday she took him to Bloomingdale’s and left him there, telling him that was the day he would find his own way home; he did. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Skenazy, a newspaper columnist by trade, wrote about the episode a few weeks later after her editor called it a nice local story. She described the result as the trip heard ‘round the world: she was immediately thrown onto television talk shows, from The Today Show on down, to explain why she had let her son do something perceived as dangerous. Her answer was that if she had really thought it was dangerous she would not have let him do it, because she did not want her son in danger. She said the mistake she made in the eyes of much of America was not imagining him in harm’s way—that parents are supposed to see a child going outside, walking to school, riding a bike or drinking from the garden hose through the lens of danger and answer yes to kidnappers, trucks and cancer, then prevent the child from doing anything. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
In the 2020 episode Skenazy gave the column’s title as “Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone,” and said that two days after it appeared she was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR, defending the decision to take her eyes off her son and let him go into a subterranean world without a cell phone. She started the blog Free-Range Kids that weekend, saying she loved safety and was pro-helmet, car seat, seatbelt, mouth guard, extra layers and a bottle of water, but did not think kids need a security detail every time they leave the house. That, she said, got her labeled America’s Worst Mom. Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
The culture of fear
Zadek framed the issue through his own childhood in the 1950s: he drank water from a garden hose, rode a bicycle without a helmet, was sent out of the house alone and required to stay out playing until dark, talked to strangers, rode buses and subways, and walked or biked to school and to the bowling alley. He said that if his parents had raised him that way today they would be in jail and he would be in Child Protective Services, and asked how bureaucrats had come to raise children with parents as the obedient servants of governmental bureaucrats, the cops and Child Protective Services. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Skenazy extended the argument to institutions. She described a mentality permeating the school system, illustrated by a newscast clip about Weber Middle School, which she said was in Long Island and banned balls in 2011 with the exception of a Nerf ball, and banned cartwheels. Zadek added that Richland, Washington had just gotten rid of a bunch of swings, and said that in every frame of his home movies from 1947 to 1955 his parents would go to jail. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
In the 2018 episode Zadek drew a parallel to political fearmongering, saying that Donald Trump, when trying to persuade Americans that immigrants mostly from south of the border were evil and a threat, had them labeled as rapists and robbers and drug dealers, and that you take no data whatever, create a threat, and use the scariness to generate public support for an otherwise untenable position. He said all of this started with the fear that children were somehow at risk. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
In the 2020 episode Zadek described an economic system in which businesses see an opportunity to sell safety once parents are conditioned that there is danger at every turn, producing many products for parents and encouragement to buy them. He said government—and specifically the criminal justice system—had become involved in parenting, with everyday and innocent activities reflecting good-faith parental judgment ending in children placed in foster care, parents accused of a crime, and lives severely damaged. He also said government had created posses and spies to keep an eye on parents without their being aware of it, involving nurses, teachers, doctors and hospitals. Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
The Free-Range Kids Project and Let Grow
Skenazy described a “Free-Range Kids Project” that began in New York City when a sixth-grade social studies teacher read the story about her son and wanted her own students, who were 11 years old, to have similar experiences. The teacher asked the roughly 120 kids she saw through the day to go home and tell their parents one thing they thought they were ready to do but had not done—make dinner, walk the dog, walk themselves to school, take a bus ride. Skenazy was invited to read the essays and watch the videos the children made, and had done so for six years. Among the results she cited: one child made a raft, many walked themselves to school, and one made a cake for her mother after getting all the ingredients herself at the grocery. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
At a Silicon Valley grammar school in Menlo Park, Skenazy had parents fill out surveys before and after the project. She recounted a set of parents who had been afraid to let their fifth grader ride his bike to school despite his begging all year; after hearing her speech and reading her materials—which included the line that all the worry in the world does not prevent death, it prevents life—they let him ride to a friend’s house nearby on a Saturday. When he came back happy, flushed, hungry and proud, the father proposed on Tuesday morning that they let him ride to school, and he did, ever since. Skenazy said this happens every time, and that the fear has no space when the joy floods in. She also mentioned a television show coming out in January on Discovery called World’s Worst Mom, in which she takes kids away from their parents for an afternoon—walking to the mall, having a little carnival, playing in the woods—and said parents as nervous as one who still fed her 10-year-old and one who would only let her eight-year-old stand on a skateboard on the grass all changed quickly. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
In the 2018 episode Skenazy described Let Grow as a new nonprofit she was president of, started a couple of months earlier as an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids, which itself grew out of letting her son ride the subway and the blowback that followed. She said that for 10 years at Free-Range Kids she lectured and wrote daily about why we do not trust kids to be part of the world, and why we talk about our own free childhoods while believing our kids cannot have the same adventures or exercise the same judgment. She attributed part of that belief to sex offender maps and the message that the world is too dangerous. Let Grow, she said, came from a proposal by Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, Daniel Shuchman, head of the organization FIRE which fights for free speech on campus, and Peter Gray, who wrote Free to Learn and is a professor at Boston College and believes kids learn most with unstructured, unsupervised time. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Let Grow’s two projects, as Skenazy described them, are the Let Grow Project, in which teachers tell kids to go home and ask their parents if they can do one thing on their own such as walk the dog or make dinner, and the Let Grow Free Play Club, in which schools stay open after school for kids to play on their own, organizing their own games and rules and getting used to democracy, building consensus and solving arguments. She said Free-Range Kids would direct listeners automatically to LetGrow.org, and urged them to get their schools to do the Let Grow Project. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Across episodes: the same argument, extended
The topic is treated in three episodes—2014, 2018 and 2020—and the excerpts show development rather than a static repetition. In 2014 Skenazy’s account is retrospective and personal: the subway ride, the television appearances, the Free-Range Kids Project in schools, and the surveys of parents in Menlo Park. In 2018 she presents the institutional successor, Let Grow, naming Haidt, Shuchman and Gray as the source of the proposal and describing the Let Grow Project and Free Play Club, while Zadek supplies the comparison to political fearmongering about immigrants. In 2020 the framing shifts toward law and state power: Zadek previews a segment on the criminal justice system’s involvement in parenting, foster care and accused parents, and on government posses and spies watching parents, and the episode summary refers to Utah’s “Free-Range Parenting” law protecting parents’ rights to allow reasonable independence. Skenazy’s own account of the origin story remains consistent across the 2014 and 2020 episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the text or holding of Utah’s “Free-Range Parenting” law beyond the episode summary’s description, nor any case name, bill number or constitutional amendment. They do not give the founding date of Let Grow beyond Skenazy’s statement that it had started a couple of months before the 2018 episode, nor the date of the Free-Range Kids blog beyond her statement that she started it the weekend after the column appeared. The excerpts also do not report the outcome of any child-protective or criminal proceeding against a parent, and the 2014 excerpt breaks off before Zadek’s question at the criminalization segment.