Zadekpedia

Ask BobAsk a question of every episode, 2009–2023 — answers cite the minute

Lenore Skenazy

5 min read

Lenore Skenazy is the author of Free-Range Kids and the founder of the Free-Range Kids Project. She appeared on The Bob Zadek Show in two episodes: a 2014-12-06 episode devoted to her parenting philosophy and a 2018-02-11 episode focused on public sex offender registries.

On the show

3 appearances, 2014–2023.

Their books discussed on the show

The subway ride

Skenazy recounted that six years before the 2014 episode, her nine-year-old son Izzy asked whether he could find his own way home on the New York City subway. She and her husband agreed, and she left him at Bloomingdale’s on a Sunday, telling him to find his own way home. He did. A newspaper columnist by trade, she wrote about the episode weeks later when she had nothing else to write about; her editor called it “a nice local story.” The column led to television appearances “from The Today Show on down,” two trips to Australia, a television show, a blog, and a book. She said she was “immediately thrown onto all these television talk shows” to explain why she had let her son do something “perceived as dangerous.” Her stated position was that if she had thought it dangerous she would not have allowed it, because she loved her son and did not imagine him in harm’s way. That, she said, “turns out to be the mistake I made in the eyes of much of America”—the expectation that a parent must always imagine a child in danger when the child is outside Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).

Criminalization of parental judgment

Skenazy argued that the safety picture had changed: crime rates had returned to 1963 levels, so children today are safer than their parents were when their own parents let them out. What she said she did not expect was that the belief that an unsupervised child is in danger would lead busybodies to call police upon seeing a child waiting in a car or walking to school. She described cell phones as having “deputized all the ‘good Samaritans’ in America,” with the result that police sometimes treat a parent as negligent rather than as exercising judgment. She offered the case of a New Jersey mother who left an 18-month-old asleep in the car for a five-to-ten-minute errand at a mall; a mall cop alerted police, the mother was arrested, found guilty of negligence, and the appellate court ruled unanimously against her, writing that it did not have to list all the horrors that could have attended the child. Skenazy noted that she had never heard of a child being stolen from a car while a parent shopped, and cited Andrea Peyser of the New York Post for the finding that more children die in parking lots and driveways than while waiting in cars Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).

Worst-first thinking and media

Skenazy attributed parental fear partly to media coverage, citing the months-long deployment of camera crews to Portugal when Maddie McCann was taken from a hotel room, and the Jaycee Dugard story, which she noted happened 20 years earlier and 3,000 miles away. She called the reasoning she opposed “worst-first thinking”: coming up with the worst-case scenario first and proceeding as if it were likely. Under that logic, she said, nothing is safe—a child could fall down stairs or scald himself—yet the number one way children die in America is as passengers in cars, a risk parents accept without hesitation. She said she did not blame parents for being afraid, and did not think children are crippled by overprotection, since kids are resilient and rise to the occasion when they go to college or get a job. What she said is wasted is childhood itself: children get one chance to be kids, and the independence of riding bikes and playing outside is being taken from them Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014).

Sex offender registries

In the 2018 episode, Zadek framed the discussion as one about government exploitation of scare tactics to compromise liberty, and introduced Skenazy as the person who had done more than any other to call attention to the topic. Skenazy embraced the formulation “Not in favor of sex offenders or sex offenses, but against the public registry,” and thanked Zadek for devoting an hour to a topic she called not popular A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018). The excerpt of that episode ends before she develops the argument.

Across episodes

The two episodes are separated by roughly three years. In 2014 Skenazy’s subject was the criminalization of ordinary parenting and the media’s role in inflating risk; by 2018 Zadek introduced her as having moved from “The World’s Worst Mom” to leading the attack on sex offender registries, and she described herself as against the public registry while not in favor of sex offenders or sex offenses. The later excerpt breaks off before she explains the registry argument, so the episodes show a change of topic and of framing but not the reasoning behind it.

Backlinks