Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Afterschool Special (New York After Rona (part iv)

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

New York Schools were closed for most of the pandemic. Education reporter Anya Kamenetz explains why she calls it a stolen year. Plus we meet up with  Lenore Skenazy to hear what parents can learn from her classic (and recently updated) Free Range Kids.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called After School Special. As a dad, I'm often gifted hand-me-down parenting books, most of which I seem to pick up when it's too late. I mean, there's just no point in reading the book about baby mind power when the kid is no longer a baby. So in the end, I gift a lot of parenting books to other parents in the neighborhood. But a couple of years ago, my friend Tricia, who's not a parent,

lent me a book from her sociology collection, Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. This one I did read, and Lenore's ideas about resisting cultural pressure and fighting for more freedom for children totally resonated with me. It's against a culture that has created all this worry in us that haunts us day and night, and that sort of forces us, whether we want to or not, to worry and hover, because a good parent does that. If you're the parent who isn't at the bus stop, what's the matter with you? If you're the parent who's not tracking your kids, won't you feel bad if slash when something terrible happens? And so I'm mad at a culture that has made us so unable to enjoy being parents because we spend so much of our time worried.

Actually, I should back up. It took me a while to read Free Range Kids. I started it in January 2020. But then, well, I got distracted. And then, well, I ended up living in France for 16 months. But eventually, after the school year was over, my family and I returned home to New York, and Lenore's book was sitting there. And so I picked up where I'd left off. And you know what, dear listener? Lenore's ideas about child freedom and parental fear resonated even more. And so I reached out, and we met up for a recording in the park. I'm Lenore Skenazy.

I am president of Let Grow, the non-profit that promotes childhood independence. And I wrote the book and started the movement Free Range Kids. And here I am in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, which is sort of my old stomping grounds when I first moved to New York. One of Lenore's key insights is that our attitudes towards parenting and childhood freedom have completely changed. Changed for the worse over a very short period of time. There's been such a gigantic cultural shift so fast. For me, the only analogy is, you know, probably when I was born,

there was a lot of rainforest and now it's about the size of Tompkins Square Park. And, you know, it took Al Gore showing us PowerPoints saying, look, it used to be this big and now it's this big. And everyone went, ah! And suddenly, you know, global warming and climate change was a big deal. But I'm trying to say that same thing about childhood freedom. It used to be this big. Now it's the size of your block if you're a lucky kid and you're nine years old

and your parents are willing to let you walk to the mailbox. But to go from really being able to do some things on your own, hop on your bike, walk somewhere, go to the store, run an errand, climb a tree, to all of that being dicey, taboo, and sometimes prevented either by parents or social norms or child protective services coming and knocking on your door. That's that is so fast to change childhood from a time of competence and freedom to a time of constant danger and constant supervision in one or two generations is wild. Well, for me, as someone who read the book, started it before and then finished it after, I feel as we talked about the acceleration of our time and how some things, some especially things that are not great have been accelerated. I think COVID has accelerated them. I think the ambient worry and terror that so many went through this last year and a half has maybe loosened

their inhibitions about installing trackers, maybe loosen their ambitions about maybe, you know, just going whole hog on being a little more afraid and a little more wanting to manage. And then in some ways, I feel your book is almost maybe more important now to almost like combat some of the, um, some of the regression steps that you know we took for because we were terrified i mean let's face it it was a very terrifying time especially for parents of smaller children i saw it here in the park when we came back like parents like you know following two year olds with masks on like just terrified they would come close to another child like it's um and i say that not to fault them i I mean, I think people were genuinely afraid.

But I think living in a climate of fear can often lead us to make bad decisions, like installing trackers on our phones. So I feel your book is really relevant in that sense. That's what I feel. That's why I didn't stop you. So the following the two-year-old around, that was certainly happening before COVID. It's the mask part that's new. But the image of our era is of a parent standing under the slide, you know, at the bottom of the slide or under the jungle gym, expecting the worst and being there almost like the fireman or something. But it's actually playground equipment, right? It's built to have children play on it and sometimes tumble off of it.

Everything is presented as an opportunity for your child to get hurt if you're not waiting there with the open arms or tracking them. It's all the same thing. Kids are stuck being cared for as if they can't do anything on their own, and then they can't. Now, the title of this miniseries, New York After Rona, is kind of just an in-joke, a reference to my New York After Rent series that I produced a few years back. Obviously, COVID is not over. In fact, because of the decisions we made as a society, COVID is going to be around for a really long time.

But more importantly, thanks to vaccines and other medicines, the odds of one of us or one of our kids dying alone in a hospital are really, really low. So we need to recalibrate our anxiety. We need to dial back the panic. Another key insight in Lenore's book is that all the anxiety and fear parents have regarding child predators and kidnappers is also unfounded. The actual risks are really, really low. Of course, the situations are not the same.

But when it comes to keeping parental anxiety in check, the game plan is. What I learned writing about anxiety is that, A, it's ubiquitous, but also that accommodating it makes it worse. And so if you're talking about the anxiety of COVID, I stayed in my apartment for the first month. My husband's had heart surgery. I was like, I wasn't going to bring home any horrible disease to him and see him die. And then you go to the grocery and it's so normal to be at the grocery. And I love being at the grocery that you forget to leave after two seconds. And it turns out you've been there for 10 minutes with your mask on and it wasn't so bad. And then you realize, oh, and I forgot the blank. And then you have an excuse to go back to the grocery,

which is your favorite place on earth, especially in my neighborhood where we have really cool ethnic groceries. And so the only thing that I've seen that changed me in terms of COVID and that changes parents in terms of the fear of letting go and letting them have some independence, free time, unsupervised time is doing it. So you had the opportunity because you were living in France where it was normal to let your kids go to school and then kid go to school. And so you did and it stopped being the most terrifying thing on earth. And then you came back here and we hadn't had that experience. And we had to get used to it again.

But I'm guessing, here we are in October, school started in September. I'm betting that parents who were very anxious at the beginning of the year are hard-pressed to remember that terror. Well, I wouldn't say they've moved on from it. But I have seen firsthand some parents that I know kept their kids inside, you know, for the entire year last year and did remote school. And now that the schools are open, they seem a lot more relaxed about things and a lot less fearful. And I think, you know, as you write, this comes down to the fact that they were pushed to deal with this. Forget changing minds.

We must change behavior because only behavior makes any difference. You have to go through and do something before you realize it's not so bad. That's the whole basis of cognitive behavioral therapy. You're afraid of something and then you make somebody do it. And they, oh, I thought it was so terrible. I thought I would, you know, we have my arm chewed off because I'm afraid of dogs. And it's like, now I petted the dog, and now I want a dog, right? I mean, you have to just try something as opposed to thinking, thinking, thinking about it.

It really doesn't take much to absolutely change parents, kids' life it just takes a push and you know that's what I'm dedicated to do just always trying to figure out how to make that push wider and faster so that more people get this joy back of seeing their kids do some things on their own, of them having some of their own time back for themselves, and of the joy of seeing your kid blossom. You know, when you're bonsai-ing your tree, you know, and you're keeping it small and perfect, they're not blossoming. They're a bonsai tree. And then you say, what the hell?

And you go away for a month, and the tree is like what we're looking around here in the park. These gorgeous, giant, sky-reaching trees filled with birds and squirrels because they were allowed to grow. You know, first there was yellow tape on the playgrounds and then the kids are showing up at the playgrounds and then we're putting masks on our children. When I wrestle my three-year-old into a mask, she's crying, but I'm showing the parents around that I care and that I'm, I'm a good parent. In New York, we went through the shit. Okay. We had the silent streets with nothing but sirens coming out here, clapping for healthcare workers. People saw their refrigerator

trucks. So like like, we really went through it. And so when you come out with your mask on, you're saying, I belong here and I care about you. It's such a powerful signal. And it was really hard to step it back. As a New York City parent with two kids in school, Anya Kamenetz knows full well what families and children went through during the pandemic. She's also an NPR education correspondent. And so from day one, she told me, she's been focused on COVID's long-term effects on public schools. Public school, it's our only social welfare institution. We don't really have public housing. We don't have public health. We don, it's our only social welfare institution. We don't really

have public housing. We don't have public health. We don't have childcare, but we do have public schools until one day we didn't. And so when schools shut down in March of 2020, I drew on my experience from the aftermath of Katrina, where I had been on the ground there in the weeks afterwards and also in the weeks afterwards and also in the years afterwards. And I knew that when schools were closed, it has incredibly intense repercussions on children for years. In addition to her work for public radio, Anya reported and wrote a book during the pandemic. She just turned in the manuscript to her publisher. She's calling it The Stolen Year.

The original title was The Lost Year, but the feedback and the pushback that I got on that was that that's a deficit-based way of thinking about it and thinking about the children as though they're damaged, where really we need to focus on what we as adults are doing or not doing. Now, I'm not an education expert, but back in the summer of 2020, I knew that the schools were not going to open in New York in the fall. This is why we stayed in France, because in France, the schools did open, and our kid went to kindergarten in person. So on the one hand,

I spent the year reading news stories where American experts said things like, it's not safe to open schools, it can't be done. All the while, my kid and his 12 French cousins were in school, full time. And it wasn't just France. Schools remained open in Germany, Denmark, England, all over Europe. I could never understand why this wasn't more of an issue for New York parents. But when I asked Anya this, she laughed at me. I would not underestimate the myopia of the American parent. I don't think there's widespread understanding of the fact that most European

countries manage to keep their schools open. I just don't think people know that. And if they know it, they dismiss it. They think that the numbers aren't comparable when in fact they completely are. I mean, Americans don't even understand that six out of 10 schools opened here in the fall. You know, it was always a tale of separate realities. And I think the longer that you went on in a closed school or a hybrid school city like this one, the less willing you were to kind of acknowledge that there were other ways of doing it. Unless you were, for example, I mean, it's interesting because in New Jersey, it actually went district by district. New Jersey is a very purple state. And New Jersey overall was like, had the 10th fewest days of in-person learning,

but there were examples of districts where people could look one district over and see, oh my gosh, they're open and we're not. So that's where people got, you know, started to be a little bit loud. But here's the thing. The reopened schools parents who were, you know, started kind of talking about it in the fall, got louder and louder, they were so attacked. And they were attacked in the most personal and vitriolic way. They were attacked as racists, which is the worst thing you can be as a white liberal. It's absolutely the worst possible thing you can be. And so they were silenced. I mean, you hear a lot from those parents who broke from their comrades. The head of open schools in New York City is a, you know, like a fourth

generation New Yorker and a totally, you know, liberal bona fides progressive lawyer and like, completely attacked, completely pilloried for having that position. So I think a lot of other parents looked around and said, that's not the fight I want to take up right now. So let's think locally, September 2020. How would you talk about the rage at that moment when it became clear that the schools were not going to open? Because if they're afraid to join the open schools movement to be told that they're racist, but yet they're really convinced that their child should be in school, the school should be open. Where did this rage go? Oh, God. I mean, the rage is bottomless, and it has to do with a sense of betrayal. It has to do with the gaslighting.. I mean, the rage is bottomless, and it has to do with a sense of betrayal.

It has to do with the gaslighting. And I mean, that's sort of an overused word, but really people telling you that you should enjoy this time, that you should feel lucky to be at home with your kids, or that kids are resilient and they'll get over it when people are seeing their children in suicidal distress. So piecing those things together, where did the rage go? I think a lot of people let it eat them up, to be honest with you. I think there's a lot of self-directed rage. I know that, I know the numbers. I know that liver disease in women in their 30s went to like an unprecedented level,

like drinking, the weight gain, the, you know, the drugs, the edibles, like the late nights, the depression, like people really turned it inward. I think particularly, I'm going to say again, moms turned it inward because we were the ones who were the hubs of all of this. We're used to being in charge of our family's health and education and emotional well-being. And all three of those things were going completely down the tubes. And so trying to manage all of that and try to keep it together and be optimistic about it for the kids broke so many people.

It's interesting because one of the biggest dangers of this country, I feel, is conflating morality and financial well-being. You know, we're just, we're brought up to look at people who are not well off as failures. Like, or if you don't have the money to pay for the pod teacher, it's your fault. If you don't have the money to send your kid to the private school, it's your fault. But the majority of New York parents can't afford that.

And so if that was directed inward, it's self-blame. That's terrible. That's just so sad. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know any parents who didn't feel tremendous guilt It's self-blame. That's terrible. That's just so sad. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know any parents who didn't feel tremendous guilt for any number of things. The social isolation their kids were suffering, the amount of screen time that their kids were getting, the, you know, the lack of an ability to send them to some like idyllic place far off in the country if you couldn't do that.

You know, it was so many things, so much recrimination. And honestly, the coverage of it was also so blaming of the individual, always individualizing these things. Now, I should point out that while the schools were open in France, everything else was closed. From November 1st to late May, not a single restaurant or gym was open. There was even a 7 p.m. curfew for most of the winter. And all of this was done to keep schools open.

Not so parents could work. No one ever shouted about something like that. The business closings were necessary, people said, because children are the future of society. As an American, I can't tell you how surreal it was to hear things like this. Through the entire winter, there was never any move to do something that would hurt businesses and help children. That never, ever, ever happened. Parents felt more separated than ever before from the rest of the society

because it was honestly unclear how we were supposed to conduct ourselves. You know, we were keeping our kids home, we thought, to save our grandmas. And then now there's vaccinations for grandmas. So what does that actually mean for kids? And that message was completely muffled and dropped. And so for that reason, many parents continued in what seemed like an endless tunnel with no end in sight of martyrdom where they're continuing to be locked down. In terms of the rage that people feel now, I don't think people are going to look back introspectively, honestly,

about that. I don't think that people have the capacity to do some retroactive continuity and realize that they were told something wrong. I think that people are going to say, well, we didn't know then what we know now, even though some people did know. As the debate over CRT rages on... The recent election coverage in Virginia featured numerous stories about angry parents, but all of the headlines featured something called CRT. It's called critical race theories. But the root of all this anger, the root of all of these attacks on school boards, it's not anti-institutionalism or even racism. The root of all of these attacks on school boards. It's not anti-institutionalism or even racism. The root of all of this is the school closings.

I don't know how or why this would be debated. But here's the thing. This distinction matters because these angry parents are not just going to determine the next two election cycles, but the future of this country. I think the rage about school closures is very real.

And I think that the sense of betrayal is ongoing. So it's now found a different focus. Because the sense of betrayal now is, we're still quarantining kids for cases, closing entire schools. The schools got a lot of money to spend essentially as they saw fit to supposedly recover from the pandemic, but they're not doing it in the ways that parents think are the most important. And parents don't feel that they're being consulted on what their kids actually need. I mean, you see things like, I see a bunch of districts declaring mental health days next week.

Mental health day is the teacher's mental health day. The teacher gets to stay home. You got to stay home with your freaking kid for another random day and have PTSD from remote schooling. They did remote schooling on election day. Election day, a day that the teachers get off so the teachers can vote. The parents have to have the kids. The parents don't get to vote. What better example is there of the disenfranchisement of parents than election day as a school holiday? There's been a lot of lip service paid to mental health, but mental health to me is pathologizing and individualizing a problem that really is collective. We need to have a renewal of a vision of us as a society that reckons with what we did to our kids, how we failed to prioritize them,

and actually reverses that and actually commits to lifting children up. We have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called After School Special. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Anja Kamenetz and Lenore Skenazy. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at Radiotopia.fm.