The subway ride
Lenore Skenazy, an author and newspaper columnist, became associated with the phrase “World’s Worst Mom” after allowing her nine-year-old son Izzy to find his own way home on the New York City subway. As she recounted to Bob Zadek, her son had asked her and her husband to take him somewhere he had never been and let him return by himself; because the family lived in the city without a car and used the subways constantly, they agreed. She took him to Bloomingdale’s on a sunny Sunday and left him there. He rode the subway and then a crosstown bus home, arriving, in her account, “levitating with pride or joy.” Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Skenazy wrote a column about the episode, and within days she was appearing on television programs to defend herself. She described being “immediately thrown onto all these television talk shows” to explain why she had let her son do something perceived as dangerous, and said the experience became “the trip heard ‘round the world.” Her stated position was that she would not have allowed it had she believed it dangerous: she loved her son and “just didn’t imagine him in harm’s way.” The mistake, she told Zadek, was that much of America believed a parent is always supposed to imagine a child in harm’s way whenever the child goes outside, walks to school, rides a bike, or drinks from a garden hose. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Zadek framed the interview with his own account of a 1950s childhood: drinking water from a garden hose, riding a bicycle without a helmet, being sent out of the house in the morning and returning when it was dark, talking to strangers, and walking or biking everywhere. 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)
The Free-Range Kids Project
Skenazy described a school-based effort she called the Free-Range Kids Project, which began in New York City when a sixth-grade social studies teacher read the story about her son and asked her roughly 120 students to go home and tell their parents one thing they felt ready to do that they had not yet done—make dinner, walk the dog, walk themselves to school, or take a bus ride. The teacher then invited Skenazy to read the students’ essays and watch their videos, which she did over six years. Among the results she recalled were a child who made a raft, many who walked themselves to school, and one who made a cake for her mother after buying all the ingredients alone at the grocery. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
At a Silicon Valley grammar school, Skenazy had parents fill out surveys before and after the project. She described one set of parents in Menlo Park, where Facebook is located, whose fifth grader had begged all year to ride his bike to school and been refused. 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 allowed him to ride to a nearby friend’s house on a Saturday instead. When he returned happy and proud, the father proposed on Tuesday morning that they let him ride to school, and he did so from then on. Skenazy said such reversals happened “every single time,” and that the fear was chased out by the joy of seeing a child return safely. She also mentioned a television show called World’s Worst Mom, in which she took children away from their parents for an afternoon and sent them to walk to the mall, run a carnival, or play in the woods; she said she printed out parents’ emails afterward because the changes seemed too fast to be credible. Lenore Skenazy: World’s Worst Mom (2014)
Let Grow
By the time of a later conversation, Skenazy had become president of Let Grow, a nonprofit she described as a couple of months old and an outgrowth of Free-Range Kids. She said that for ten years she had lectured and written daily on her blog about why parents do not trust children to be part of the world, and about the contradiction between fond memories of a free childhood and the restrictions placed on their own children. She attributed part of that fear to the belief, absorbed “in our bones,” that the world is too dangerous—citing sex offender maps as one source. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Let Grow, she said, grew out of a proposal from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind; Daniel Shuchman, head of the organization FIRE, which she described as fighting for free speech on campus; and Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn and a professor at Boston College who believes children learn most in unstructured, unsupervised time. The aim was to make it easy for parents to let children walk outside and have free time, so that children build the social-emotional intelligence and resilience to engage with the world rather than looking to an authority for instructions. She described two projects: the Let Grow Project, in which teachers tell children to ask their parents to let them do one thing on their own, such as walking the dog or making dinner; and the Let Grow Free Play Club, in which schools stay open after hours for children to organize their own games, rules, and arguments—which she said gets them used to democracy, building consensus, and solving disputes. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
Legal consequences and the culture of fear
In the 2020 episode, Zadek described a system in which businesses sell safety products once parents are conditioned to see danger at every turn, and said he wanted listeners to understand how far the criminal justice system had become involved in parenting—how ordinary, good-faith parental judgment could end with children placed in foster care, parents accused of crimes, and lives severely damaged. He also said government had created “posses” and “spies” to keep an eye on parents without their awareness, and asked Skenazy to explain the system involving nurses, teachers, doctors, and hospitals that brings parental behavior to the attention of authorities. Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
Skenazy’s own account in that episode repeated the subway story: her son’s request, the decision to let him go, the trip to Bloomingdale’s, and his return home by subway and crosstown bus. She said she started the Free-Range Kids blog that weekend to state that she loved safety and was pro-helmet, car seat, seatbelt, mouth guard, and water bottle, but did not think children needed “a security detail every time they leave the house.” She noted that the label “America’s Worst Mom” followed because nobody takes their eyes off a nine-year-old anymore, and asked Zadek whether his mother had let him do things on his own at nine. Zadek replied that his parents would still be doing hard time in prison for what they let him do. Remember when kids were free to be kids? (2023)
Across episodes
The topic recurs in three episodes—the 2014 interview with Skenazy, the 2018 Sunday morning chat, and the 2020 conversation—and the excerpts show a shift in institutional form rather than in argument: the 2014 discussion centers on the Free-Range Kids Project and a Discovery television show, while the 2018 discussion centers on Let Grow, the nonprofit Skenazy then presided over, and its two school projects, and the 2020 episode returns to the subway story and to the child protective system. Skenazy advances the account in all three; Zadek supplies the framing about government, tort law, and the criminal justice system. A Sunday Morning Chat with The World’s Worst Mom (2018)
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any legal case involving Skenazy or other parents, nor the text or name of any statute, including the Utah law mentioned in the 2020 episode description. They do not give the founding date or full membership of Let Grow, the details of the television program beyond its title and premise, or the fate of the Free-Range Kids Project after the periods described. Where the excerpts break off—as at the end of the 2014 introduction and the 2020 discussion of the reporting system—the sources stop, and nothing further is recorded here.