ZadekpediaThe subway ride and the “World’s Worst Mom”
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, traces the movement to a decision she and her husband made in New York City, where the family lived without a car. Their nine-year-old son asked to be taken somewhere he had never been and to find his own way home on the subway. They agreed, and on a sunny Sunday she left him at Bloomingdale’s and he found his way home. Skenazy, a newspaper columnist, later wrote about it; two days after the column appeared she was on The Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News and NPR defending the decision, and the episode earned her the label “World’s Worst Mom.” Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014) Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
Skenazy described the reaction as a mistake in the eyes of much of America: parents are expected to imagine their child in harm’s way whenever the child goes outside, walks to school, rides a bike or drinks from a garden hose. She said that if she had thought the ride dangerous she would not have allowed it. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Host Bob Zadek framed the subject through his own childhood in the 1950s — drinking from a garden hose, riding without a helmet, being sent out of the house and coming home when it was dark — and said that raising a child that way today would put the parents in jail and the child in Child Protective Services. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
The Free-Range Kids Project and Let Grow
Skenazy described a “Free-Range Kids Project” begun in New York City by a sixth-grade social studies teacher who read the story about her son and asked her 120 students to tell their parents one thing they felt ready to do on their own — make dinner, walk the dog, walk themselves to school, take a bus ride. Skenazy read the students’ essays and watched their videos for six years. At a Silicon Valley grammar school in Menlo Park, she had parents fill out surveys before and after; one set of parents who had refused to let their fifth grader ride his bike to school relented first for a Saturday trip to a friend’s house and then, the following Tuesday, for the school ride. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
By 2018 Skenazy was president of Let Grow, a new nonprofit she described as an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids. She said it came about through a proposal from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind; Daniel Shuchman, head of FIRE; and Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn and a professor at Boston College. Let Grow ran two projects: the Let Grow Project, in which teachers tell children to ask their parents to let them do one thing on their own, and the Let Grow Free Play Club, in which schools stay open after class for children to organize their own games. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Legal exposure and the Utah law
Zadek told Skenazy he wanted listeners to understand how far the criminal justice system had entered parenting, describing everyday, good-faith parental judgment ending in children placed in foster care and parents accused of a crime. He asked her about the system by which nurses, teachers, doctors and hospitals bring parental behavior to the attention of authorities. Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
Zadek also tied the subject to tort law and to schools: he cited a newscaster’s account of Weber Middle School on Long Island, which in 2011 banned balls except a Nerf ball and banned cartwheels, and said Richland, Washington had gotten rid of swings. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Across episodes: the same argument, extended
The topic recurs in three episodes, and what changes is the institutional vehicle rather than the argument. In 2014 Skenazy was the author of Free-Range Kids and promoter of the Free-Range Kids Project; in 2018 she was president of the newly founded Let Grow, which she described as the “let’s get something started” arm of Free-Range Kids; in 2020 she was identified as founder of Free-Range Kids and president of Let Grow, and the discussion added the Utah law and the child-protective reporting system. Zadek’s framing — government overreach, tort law and media-inflated fear — is consistent across all three. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014) A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018) Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)