Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Ep 1: Are We Over-Parenting Our Kids?

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

When Emily was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms.  That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking a mile home from school in kindergarten—is very different from her own children’s experiences, even though they’re growing up in a very similar environment, with very similar parents. They aren’t leaving the house every day after dinner. If Emily had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it’s only a couple of blocks, there’s no chance that would have been met with the school’s acceptance. Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to engage in free play, away from adult intervention and control. In 1969, 47 percent of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12 percent. How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting? On kids’ happiness? On their well-being? Their mental health? And on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And, maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it’s too late? *** Resources from this episode: Timothy Carney: Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Bookshop)) Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Bookshop) Lenore Skenazy: Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow (Bookshop) Let Grow  Free Range Kids Jonathan Haidt in The FP https://www.thefp.com/t/jonathan-haidt 

Hi, everyone. Emily here, and you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with The Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb. I think I'm currently holding like six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family, and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode.

For now, on to the show. More than ever before, kids and teenagers are being diagnosed with anxiety disorders. You may want to do a check-in on the young people in your life. The CDC has released some disturbing new information. The agency says more kids than ever are depressed. The CDC data suggests that mental health disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or anxiety are common among school-aged children. Tens of thousands of preschoolers in this country are on antipsychotic medications, a number that's doubled in the last decade. The fact that 30 percent of U.S. kids are now being raised outside a two-parent home

more than in any other country in the world is not good for U.S. kids. Global population is declining. Birth rates fell by more than 4% last year from 2022, and that could be a problem for the global economy. New international test results show U.S. 15-year-olds lost ground on a recent exam, while scores for reading and science remain flat. We've all been there. We've seen the scrolling, the games, the videos, the texting, all of it. And simply put, a lot of children struggle to even put their devices down. And when that stimuli is removed, the phone, the video game system, you have a crash. You're basically getting a drug hit, an internal drug hit every single time. And I'm

concerned that social media is an important driver of that youth mental health crisis. To fully address the dangers of an increasingly screen-aligned social media, 22% of high scores in the state of California persistently sound. Our health is early in quarantine. It's officially the biggest health crisis in American history. Hello there. I'm Emily Oster. And to be honest, I'm worried about our kids.

Now, I know I'm not the first parent to be concerned about our children. In fact, I'm entering a very long and proud tradition of parents who think that the youth today have gone off the rails. Youth is a happy time and a carefree time. But sometimes in these troubled days, the very thoughtlessness of youth has led to a living nightmare. Addiction to drugs, too often acquired with tragic carelessness. Tonight we begin with a story about make-believe adventure and real-life violence. And what some critics fear is a connection between the two in a game called Dungeons & Dragons. For two years now, the rock music industry has been, well, rocked by controversy over lyrics, themes, and onstage acts that many parents of the children who flock to the concerts find offensive. In the nation's capital last week, the Beastie Boys, the latest rage in rock,

were forced by concerned parents... But while having a moral panic around kids' well-being isn't new, here is the new thing. Kids are worse off today than 30 years ago by many of the measures that parents care about the most. Kids are more anxious than ever. They're more depressed. Kids have more diagnoses than 30 years ago. They're more medicated than before. More kids are being raised without

two parents in the home today. Fertility rates have dropped at an alarming rate. Kids reading and math scores haven't recovered since their decline during the COVID pandemic. Childhood obesity has risen to 19.7 percent. And on top of everything, kids are grappling with unprecedented news stressors, like screen time overload and social media. All of this leaves me and many parents wondering, what's going on with kids today? How worried should we be about our kids? And what should we be doing as parents to change course before it's too late?

I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents. Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have like a lot. Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do

and by collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen. What kind of reaction did you get to that? I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist, you're not a doctor, I mean what do you think people are gonna take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really

show women here is what the evidence is and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself? Some of you may know me as the data lady or as the person who told you it's OK to drink wine and coffee while pregnant in moderation. Also, you're welcome. You might know me as the crazy economist who had unpopular opinions about COVID policies for kids during the pandemic. I mean, I basically just said what every parent in America was thinking and got crucified for it. Others may not know me at all. So let me introduce myself. I'm a professor of economics at Brown University, where I focus on health economics and statistical methods. I teach classes about data and write papers with

titles like unobservable selection and coefficient stability, theory and evidence. You'll never guess what the twist was at the end of that one. In 2013, while I was pregnant with my first baby, I wrote a book that, based on the available data, challenged much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom. I wrote it mostly for myself because I was so frustrated with the lack of clear information during my own pregnancy. But to my surprise, it resonated with a lot of other parents too. So I kept doing it, evaluating data behind all kinds of accepted rules and norms of parenting, from childhood to elementary age. And I wrote a few more books. In short, those books say so much of what we're told as parents is wrong, or at least incomplete. My career as an economist

shifted, and now I'm at uncharted territory, analyzing data behind choices in parenting. And every day I get asked a lot of questions. Hey, Emily. Hey, Emily. Hi, Emily. Hi, Emily. Some of which are easy, like will breastfeeding make my kid a superhero? No. Or can I get Botox while pregnant? Yes. Or will sleep training harm my baby forever? No. Are timeouts bad? No. Is green poop bad? Also, no. Should I really feed my six-month-old baby peanuts and eggs? Yes. But you know how they say little kids, little problems, big kids, big problems? That's true. And it's not just that they're bigger. It's that there's a lot more of them, and they're harder to untangle. The questions I get about bigger kids are thorny and uncharted and confusing and really, really important, especially for parents

who want to raise great adults but are having trouble separating the signal from the noise. And that's what this show is all about. Are we over-medicating kids today? Are iPhones bad? Should I ban screen time? Are we too soft on kids these days? Why do so many kids have an ADD diagnosis? Why are so many teen girls unhappy and anxious? And how can we make them happy again? Is old-fashioned discipline ever a good thing? Should I control what my kids eat? Is marriage important for raising kids?

Do boys and girls need different things at school? Should you even have kids? These are the kinds of questions where the information we have is often imperfect, possibly misleading, and usually provides more questions than answers. But over the next eight episodes, we're going to get into it all. We will do our best to get to the bottom of all of the burning questions about raising kids in a changing world, even if it's taboo, even if it goes against conventional wisdom,

and even if, maybe especially if, it makes people uncomfortable. We'll talk to a range of experts. You may not always agree with what you hear, but one thing you can always be sure of, I am unapologetically data-driven, which means I will always show you the numbers, the best data we have, so you can make decisions for yourself.

It's a radical idea, but I think people armed with the best information can be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves and for their families. Parents, we're taking off the training wheels. Episode one, are we over-parenting our kids? I promise I'm not some random stranger. That's okay. I've kept her for sparing the time. Oh, good. Okay. So we're prepared. Good. How often do your parents let you, like, walk alone, maybe run errands by yourself?

How often do they let you do that? So I run errands for my parents, like like a lot. This is Daphna. She is 11 years old. I walk home from the bus stop every day. I'm allowed to go to the big market if it's with my brothers. And in her neighborhood in Los Angeles, she's one of the only kids her age who is allowed to walk around by herself without parental supervision. But I'm the really like only one that's that's able to go places other than home from the bus stop, so I can do other errands that a lot of kids my age can't.

People are jealous of me. Oh, thank you more. They're jealous? No, because everybody wants to do that, you know? My brother and I walked to our friend's house. It was the first time. We were in the third grade. This is Nafna's brother, Rafael. He's 13. He too was allowed to start walking by himself at a young

age, but again, he was the odd one out in the neighborhood. We didn't really know exactly where to go, but we had seen the area and we knew roughly where to go and we found our way there. And we told all our friends how we walked and it was fun for us because we got to see the shock on all of the friends' parents' faces. Like, oh my gosh, why can't I let my kid do it? And so how did your friends react? It was more my friends' parents who reacted.

Like, whoa, I let my other child, but I'm not letting this child in your grade because there were more car crashes. And they just gave excuses like that, I guess. I think they're just more protective of their kid, so they don't want to let go of their kid. Because it's scary to them, I guess. When I was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, I grew up on a block with a lot of other children. And down the street was a church. And every day after dinner, around 630, everyone would empty out of their houses and go down to the church parking lot, where we would do all kinds of unsupervised activities.

Throw balls at each other in front of the church wall, climb up trees and sometimes fall out of them, ride hot wheels until people skin their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms. One thing I remember very distinctly was this one kid in the neighborhood whose mom was extremely concerned about safety. And she made him wear a colored plastic mouth guard when we played. He was teased mercilessly,

as you might imagine, because children are awful. When I think back on this, the thing that strikes me is that that mom would be considered a free-range parent by today's standards. After all, it's true that she did make him wear the plastic mouth guard, but he was allowed to go out, wander the streets after dark with no adult supervision at the age of seven or eight. And when I think about this now, my experience of playing in the dark unsupervised and other experiences, like walking home from school about a mile in kindergarten, I think about how different my own children's experiences are, even though they're growing up in a very similar environment with, in many ways, very similar parents. They aren't leaving my house every day after dinner. If I had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it's only

a couple of blocks, there's no chance that that would have been met with acceptance from school. And I'm not alone in noticing this shift. A generation ago, children walked to school by themselves and enjoyed hours of unsupervised play. When it comes to keeping kids safe, parents will do whatever it takes. But these days, some parents say safety has gone to extremes and they wonder if we are overprotecting our kids. We're basically robbing our children of the chance to take risks, the kind of physical risks, emotional risks, the kind of risks they need to become independent adults, basically. So what does the data say? Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children's opportunities to engage in free play

away from adult intervention and control. Take the simple act of walking to school. In 1969, 47% of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12%. Parental concerns about stranger danger and heavy traffic, coupled with poorly designed urban spaces, are reported as key factors stifling children's freedom to roam and explore independently. Moreover, kids today are in school for more hours, in extracurricular activities, and doing homework for more hours, and their time is overall more structured and less free relative to earlier decades. Kids are also engaged in less risky behavior, climbing a big tree, for example,

out of the sight of adults. And many researchers are coming to the conclusion that the lack of childhood independence is actually contributing to the rapid decline in kids' mental health today. We'll go into the specifics of kids' mental health later in this series, but just for some table setting, kids' anxiety levels and suicide rates increased threefold from 1950 to 2005, and another twofold from 2005 to 2020. In the most recent CDC data, 40% of high school students indicated that during the previous year, they had experienced sadness severe enough that it impeded their ability to do their normal activities for at least two weeks. How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting on kids' happiness,

on their well-being, their mental health, and on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it's too late? We'll be right back. Raising Parents is proudly supported by Airbnb, a company that has made trips with my family time and time again so exciting and memorable. In Japan, I found an Airbnb in the middle of a small town called Goat House. We were the only tourists for many miles. And in addition to goats, the house also had a samurai sword. It was amazing to feel, even briefly, like we were living a normal life in a totally different place. What's amazing about Airbnb hosts is you're getting all the local experience instantly. At an Airbnb in Maine, our host recommended a particular swimming pond

where you could walk on a hidden path and jump off cliffs. Needless to say, we were alone there and we couldn't have felt more like locals. And here's the really cool thing. While you're away, your home could also be an Airbnb. And yes, that means you can actually make cash while you're on vacation. It's really a no-brainer. Or maybe your in-laws made you build that back house when the baby was born, but now that your cute little newborn is an angsty, stinky teen, they only visit three times a year. Definitely consider hosting on Airbnb. Your home may be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host.

And now, back to the show. I remember once going to my kindergarten daughter's ballet recital and being a little peeved that the quality of dancing was so low that she was basically just running in circles around a room. I thought, we signed her up for ballet for a whole semester and this is what it turned out? This is Tim Carney. He's the father of six children and the author of Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. I found myself going to the sporting events and coaching from the sidelines and worrying that my son was falling behind because he wasn't as fast as the other kids.

I even started to think, oh, I should have him play right field because the high school where he'll probably go has a short right field and he doesn't have to cover that much. And one parent just told me, you're overthinking this. So I had sort of unthinkingly become a very intensive parent. And a couple of those moments when my oldest were around nine or 10 made me start to realize, OK, wait a second. We know that they're happier when we give them more freedom. We need to actively resist the tide, resist the norms of upper middle class suburban parenthood. You say in the book that you want to return to old fashioned parenting. So I'm Gen X.

I did not have the Internet until I got to college. That's how I define Generation X. I didn't have a cell phone until after college. And so we had tons of freedom. And for most of us, our parents weren't constantly thinking that their parental inputs would have a direct correlation to what our life outcomes would be. Basically, you know, don't do drugs. That was actually a much bigger thing in the 90s was just say no, et cetera. Don't drink and drive. But there wasn't massive tutoring. Nobody was playing us Mozart when we were newborns. I don't think parenthood was thought of as this deliberate, intentional, massive thing that we decided to undertake. So we need to undertake it right. I think it was more thought of as adults are going to get married

and married people are going to have kids. And I think that for parents who are our generation, it is more, you really have to think hard. There are so many life choices. There are so many forks in the road. Is this something you want to undertake? And once it became more of a deliberate choice, an intentional, almost lifestyle, people became more intensive about it and started to think, okay, I'm now responsible for all the outcomes. So what I think is lost is a more natural approach, a more natural understanding. Kids are normal.

They're going to run around, they're going to get dirty, and who knows how they're going to end up. Tim says that these intense parenting styles, the lifestyle of parenting overall, is connected to kids' loss of independence. Helicopter parenting, when I say that, I mean constantly worrying that something is going to happen to your kid.

One writer I cited used the image of a secret service agent, that you have to be protecting your child at all moments from kidnappers, from falling off the slide. It means dialing them back, making sure that everything's totally safe and just constantly being there. And so that's mostly about parental sort of physical proximity

to the kids. I think overambitious parenting, what I call the travel team trap, that's definitely related. And it does also eat up parents' time because you have to drive to a lacrosse tournament in Delaware. But that is more about assuming that, A, massive inputs into your kids will turn out the right outputs. B, that these sort of measurable outputs are the point, that the point of youth sports is excellence or dominance or a scholarship, that the point of high school is getting straight A's. And so they are two different things, but they both are antithetical to childhood independence because the time that gets used up by the kids playing the travel sports is time they could be walking around the woods, skipping stones in a creek. But I do think that the helicoptering, worrying about something happening, and the intensity, I think there's a common philosophy under both of them, a common parental worry under both of them. But the other thing that's in common between them is that they undermine independent play by children. According to Tim, whether it's about keeping kids ultra safe or pushing them to excel at all costs, both approaches eat into the freedom that's crucial for kids just to be kids. Exploring,

learning, and playing on their own. You know, finding out what happens if they take their pants off at the grocery store, seeing what a bug tastes like, convincing their sister that bunny poop is chocolate, learning what happens when you put a stick into a hole in the ground. Spoiler, it's bees. In all seriousness, these explorations are core to how we develop as humans.

We are mammals and we have big brains and we have a long attachment to a parent. This is Jonathan Haidt. He's a social psychologist and a professor at New York University. He wrote Coddling of the American Mind and more recently, The Anxious Generation. All mammals are attached to their mother for milk

and some, including humans, you have attachment to fathers as well. And the point is not that we like raise the kid and teach them everything. The mother gives them a secure base, you know, nutrition, but then they have to go out away from the mother to learn. That's where most of the learning happens. They go a little further out each time. As they get older, they go out of sight. They walk across the street to visit a neighbor. And what are they doing? The main thing they want

to do is play. This is a total mammal thing, is you play. That's what mammals do when they're young. And we let kids play all the way up until the 90s. So I grew up, I'm older than you, I'm 60, but, you know, I grew up during the peak of the crime wave in the 70s and 80s. There were drunk drivers everywhere. It was crazy, but we were all out and we had independent experiences and we developed normal adult competence. What we did in the 90s is we freaked out. We said if we ever let our kids out of our sight, even in a grocery store, they might be abducted. Jonathan says that throughout the 90s, fear began to spread, in part through the media, after a few child abduction cases began to gain a huge amount of attention on cable news. On average throughout the 90s, there were about 115 true child abductions in America. That's something like 0.0002% of kids. But that didn't matter.

The media had really blown up these stories, and they gave parents an incredible amount of fear and anxiety. Because even if it was just 0.0002% of kids that were kidnapped, these stories play into parents' worst nightmares. Then there were the milk cartons with photos of missing kids. And with all of it, childhood started to change. So let's keep our eye on them all the time and let's not let them take any risks because they'll get hurt. But the thing is, independent play is critical. It's not just about having fun. It helps kids pick up new skills, boosts brain development, strengthens their ability to handle stress, and nudges them towards independence. John's experience with play in the 1970s echoed mine in the 1980s. But then came the 1990s.

Kids need a lot of play, and beginning in the 90s, we deprived them of that play. So the little kids, let's say the elementary school kids, they should have a lot of independence. They should be meeting up after school by third or fourth grade and hanging out each other's houses or going and doing things or walking down to get ice cream, you know, if that's walkable or whatever it is. So they're already play deprived by the time they reach sixth grade. Elementary school is the most important one for the play deprivation. So already by the time they're making that transition, by the time they're in fifth grade, before sixth grade, they're already play deprived. They're not as competent. We haven't let them build up their anxiety resistance by doing things that are a little bit frightening. What is the root of this fearfulness? An important thing about all this is that the exact same stuff that's happened in the

US, exact same in the UK and Canada. So you can't point to any one thing in the US. This is actually a trend around the English-speaking countries. And a couple of things, our families get smaller, so there's fewer kids around. Mothers are going back to work, but in the 90s, they actually start spending more time with their kids. And the reason is that we had what's called the collapse of adult solidarity. So in all generations before the current ones, parents trusted other adults that if my kid got into trouble, adults would help them out. If you see a kid in trouble, you help them out. But in the 90s, we had all these scandals about sexual abuse

and some were real, but a lot were fake. So adults lost trust in each other. And when that happened, then who has to be supervising? Well, it's usually the mom, not even the dad. It's like now moms have to take up so much more of this. So you have moms working a lot more than they did, but taking on constant supervision, except when they can pass it off to another trusted adult. And so we get this idea that a good mother, a responsible mother is one who's always there supervising and protecting. And if you're a mother who says, you know, go out and play, I'm busy, you're a bad mom. Like, no, the opposite is true. But, you know, we respond not to reality. We respond a lot more to social pressures. And

sometime in the 90s, as attitudes turned towards, you know, a responsible mom is, you know, is always there and playing Beethoven in the womb and everything. Like we put everything on moms to give the kids the right experience. You get this overprotective, concierge, paranoid parenting. And that's really bad for kids. Parents want the thing that is best for their kids. Like that is not changed.

Because I think part of what happens here is that you get the impression that the protective option is the safe option. And why wouldn't I want to be safe? And it's very difficult to see the kind of lack of safety associated with not giving the freedom. It's easy to have in your head what would happen if my kid was walking home by themselves and they get hit by a car.

It's not easy to see what happens if my kid doesn't develop those coping skills and then is depressed as a college student. And I think that's the tension. That's right. So that's called the availability heuristic. We can all imagine our kid being kidnapped because it happens extremely rarely in the US. But when it does happen, it's a major news story and we can't help but see it. And it's our deepest fear. For what it's worth, the FBI notes that from 2010 through 2017, the number of people under age 21 who were abducted by strangers ranged from a low of 303 in 2016 to a high of 384 in 2011, with no clear directional trend. That's a range from approximately 0.0003% to 0.0004% during the years 2010 to 2017.

The neuroses of other parents are, you know, ubiquitous. They're all around and you kind of feel them. They're in social media and on your WhatsApp channels and all the conversations and dinner parties and cocktail parties and everything you're at, you're hearing constantly about fears of what might happen to your children. This is Peter Savotnik. He lives in L.A. with his wife, nine-year-old daughter and six-year-old son. He's also an editor at the Free Press. And I guess my feeling has always been, but what's going to happen to them if we turn them into like little kind of like bubble children and like confine them to like little prisons?

They'll be safe, but they'll be shadows of themselves. So the bad things happening if you give your kid freedom are incredibly available and evocative. Whereas the mental health problems that happen if you don't. I mean, everybody knows people whose kids have threatened suicide or made an attempt. Again, Jonathan Haidt. So that's pretty vivid, but it's not quite as clear that, you know, if I don't let my kid go to the store, she's going to do like that connection. Whereas if I take my eye off my child, she could be abducted. That's very easy to make. So that's the first thing.

Second thing I'd say, I'm not sure that your statement was 100% right. We all want what's best for our kids. Yes, but we want many things. We also want prestige for ourselves. Women are more concerned perhaps with what other women are saying. Men are more concerned with what other men are saying. Whatever it is, we really care a lot about our own reputations. And so I want to do the thing that will get me respect as a good parent. Because we, you know, look, we're complicated creatures. We don't just want what's best for our kids. We also want what's best for us socially. And as long as being a good parent is being an overprotective parent, well, that's what we're going to do, even if we know it's bad.

If you're listening and nodding along, as I certainly was while talking to John, you might also be thinking, but how can this change? How can I stop hovering and give my kids more independence? I am certainly not a free-range parent. This is Benjamin Clerkin. He's a parent in Brooklyn who has been struggling with these exact questions. Rose has recently started walking to school, which was something of a struggle, really. And it's not something that I would push myself into doing, to be honest with you.

In fact, it was something I was pushed into by Rose. He thought this was a good idea. And, you know, it probably was, actually. It probably was a good idea. My name is Rose Clark, and I'm 10 years old, and I live in Brooklyn. And that is Benjamin's daughter, Rose. When I walk to school every day,

my dad always gives me the advice to look out for cars and idiots. She walks for, like, 5 to 10 minutes to school, which just costs a number of rates. I'd be perfectly happy for her not to be doing this if it weren't for other people. I do worry about rates whenever she walks out the door, actually, which is probably always going to be the case, right?

But it says my fear as well. Road traffic accidents, you know, terrible people. When I walk to school, I'll walk around and sometimes I'm like, oh, no, I'm going to get kidnapped. No wild animals, but I don to school, I'll walk around and sometimes I'm like, oh no, I'm going to get kidnapped. No wild animals, but I don't know, it's a fairly full spectrum. But then I walk out onto the big street and like the main street and I see a bunch of if I feel like better now because there are so many like parents and kids around me that I'm like phew if I'm definitely not going to get kidnapped in this. Yeah but she loves it yeah Rose loves walking to school a lot of her friends do it's perfectly honest with you

I think it's probably quite safe. She picks up friends along the way you know. Sometimes I'll stop by my friend's house and say hi to them. There's lots of kids walking at the same time. It gives her that sense of freedom without really there being a lot of freedom because there are so many other parents and kids around. It's certainly not something that we're looking to replicate going forward. Maybe stop by the cafe sometimes and get a croissant. I don't know what the next step is, but hopefully it's a long way off. I have a sense that many parents would like to give their kids more physical freedom.

But a lot of people I talk to will bemoan the idea that my kids aren't able to walk home from school by themselves. And they'd like to do more of that. And it's somehow that they don't know how or that socially it's too complex. And I'm just curious what you think the barrier is there and what's the way over it? Some of the barriers to being more free range as a parent are imaginary. Some are self-imposed. Some are cultural. Some are actual sort of, you know, physical and real. Again, Tim Carney. And so the physical real thing is where I live now, I don't have a sidewalk on my side of the street. And so my seven-year-old needs somebody to walk her across the street. She can't just

run up and down the sidewalk. So right there, she already needs a sibling if she's going to go and leave our front yard. And in some places, crime is a problem. But even now, after the post-COVID crime wave, crime is much, much lower than it was when I was a kid in New York City in the 1980s. So a lot of it is a false perception that it's less safe now to let your kids run around. Some of it has to do with that it's less safe now to let your kids run around. Some of it has to do with the idea that parenting is supposed to be intensive and you feel like a slacker if your kids are wandering around the neighborhood. I know lots of parents who have gotten comments. Oh, well, you know, I saw your kid just walking around the neighborhood. And it's a negative comment.

But certainly a lot of people get pushback. Where I used to live in Silver Spring, Maryland, there were parents who got in legal trouble for letting their 10 and 6-year-old go to the park down the road. When our younger son was nine, he had asked me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before here in New York City and let him find his own way home by subway. This is writer Lenore Skenazy. She became quite well known after a decision she made in 2008 sparked an internet firestorm. So when he wanted to get home by subway on his own, it was sort of like me saying, mom, I want to ride my bike to the library, which I don't even remember asking because it was just so normal back then. Did you find this scary? Him riding the subway

that day, I don't recall it terrifying me or I wouldn't have done it. I mean, I really do love my kids. I really want them to outlive me. That's the whole point. But I don't think you can be not scared sometimes and be a parent. And I think the idea that there's some way that you can always feel calm and always have your kid be safe is ridiculous. It's not gonna happen. So part of our job is to prepare our kids for the world and prepare ourselves to be a little nervous. And the more you do it, the more relaxed you become.

So he gets home and what is that like? Well, he was happy and so was I. And that was that. But that was just the beginning. A few moms from school asked her about it, wondering why and how she did it. She ended up writing an op-ed called Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone. It really got people talking. And she went viral.

When New York mom Lenore Skenazy wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son ride the subway by himself. She never could have imagined the reaction. International outrage. A woman in New York has been dubbed the world's worst mother. You could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner. What is the same experience is going on the subway. And that is safe. It's safe to go on the subway.

It's safe to be a kid. It's actually safe to ride your bike on the subway. And that is safe. It's safe to go on the subway. It's safe to be a kid. It's actually safe to ride your bike on the streets. We're like brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn't safe. But those are the exceptions. That's why they make it to the news. This is like boy boils egg. I mean, he did something that any nine-year-old could do. Lots of parents cheered her on, and lots of them also expressed their disapproval. The first one says something like, you fucking asshole, or something like that. So that was a bad one. And then one that stood out is that somebody somehow found my phone number and called me

and told me that they thought that Child Protective Services should take my children away. But what was, in a way, more interesting to me and less upsetting, maybe equally upsetting, was not being yelled at, but having all the people I was interacting with, especially like before I'd been on many TV shows. I was on these, I was on like Today Show and MSNBC at the beginning and Fox. And they put you in a makeup room, as you probably know, and they make you look way more glamorous than I look. And all the people were talking about, what are you in for? And I'm like, oh, I put my kid on the subway. It's like, oh, wow.

And they all remembered their own childhoods and how they felt independent and how exhilarating or how normal or even how boring it was. Or I got to school and it was the 70s and it was way more dangerous than which it was. Or I got school in the 80s and it was way more dangerous than or the 90s and there were crack files everywhere. And yet they would never do the same thing with their own kid. And that's when I started realizing this is seismic, the change from one generation to the next. And even people who appreciated their freedom and were swaggering because of it and wanted to give their kids the best of everything, weren't giving them

what they remembered as the best of their childhood, which was some independence and trust. I said to Lenore, you need to be out there not just giving book talks, but really changing America, changing schools, changing childhood. Again, this is John Haidt. Almost a decade after Lenore wrote her article, John found out about her story and he reached out to her and said, you have to do something about this. Because it was around the same time that John also started to notice something strange going on with his college students. Whether it's the school nurse, the track coach, the principal, anyone who works with kids, and this is all the way up to college students, is saying things really change at some point in

the mid to late 2010s. And the kids are much more fragile. They're much more needy. My job is much riskier because if I offend one, I could get reported. Something is going wrong with our kids. This is what you hear from everyone who's working with kids. John wondered if this had something to do with the experience of growing up with a lack of unsupervised play and freedom. He didn't yet have the data to back this thesis up. Still, he approached Lenore, and together with Daniel Schulman and Peter Gray, they started the nonprofit Let Grow.

We started this small organization, LetGrow.org, and we have such simple programs. They cost nothing, and they're incredibly effective, much more effective than therapy or almost anything else that people are doing. So the Let Grow experience is basically that. You assign it, it's homework, assigned in like, let's say,

second, third, fourth grade, anytime. Go home, take the sheet to your parents. You and your parents figure out what's something that you wanna do that you've never done on your own. Walk the dog, go shopping, make dinner. You know, what's something that you've never do that you've never done on your own. Walk the dog, go shopping, make dinner. You know, what's something that you've never done that you think you can do yourself? And then you and your parents, you agree, and then you do it.

And then even if you fail, you do it again. And then you come into class the next week, and you just write it down on a little leaf, and you put it up on the wall. And you do this 10 times, let's say, over the course of a semester. Amazing things happen. I mean, it's like it makes you cry, these stories. You know, kids, they do such simple things. I wanted to go across the street or, you know, down the street to my friend's house by myself. And they're nervous and they're anxious about it. And the parents are nervous and anxious

and they wave goodbye at the door and the kid goes four houses down on his own and he makes it. And he's so excited. And then the amazing thing happens is that then the next day, the parents are less anxious, the kid's less anxious. And before you know it, the kid can walk around the neighborhood. I love these stories, but also I find them depressing in some ways because... Oh, incredibly depressing that we have to do this. Whereas if once we can get across the idea that if you're overprotecting, you're never letting your baby bird take flight. You know, you have to help your kid take flight,

but the kid has to take flight over and over again. If free range parenting becomes prestigious, then I think we'll see this change very quickly. For me, it's not just the prestigious, it's respected. This is why I think that the approach of doing, of encouraging these kinds of things in a group is so crucial because when it's just my kid walking home from school, it's like, I'm out on a limb here. But as soon as a few of the other parents are like, oh, could my kid walk home with your kid? Now we're all doing it. And now we're all on the same limb. It's a bigger limb. Bingo. So let's actually bring up the collective action. If I do the right thing and send my kid outside to play, well, she's the only one.

I'll be arrested. I could actually literally be arrested for sending a nine-year-old outside. So I can't do this on my own. But as you said, if you can coordinate with the parents of three of your kids' friends, now you've got a group. And what's more fun when you're a 10, 11, 12-year-old kid than hanging out with a group of other kids, especially if you've got independence, you're doing fun things. When a school does the Let Grow experience and they assign it, let's say they assign than hanging out with a group of other kids, especially if you've got independence, you're doing fun things.

When a school does the Let Grow experience and they assign it, let's say they assign it to everyone in the school, first through fifth grade, let's say, you go home, do this project. Well, now what happens? The parents, it's not just like, oh, can I let my kid go to the store? Well, everyone's doing it.

So, you know, everyone understands. And guess what? By the time that they've all done it five or 10 times, everyone in the town has now seen eight-year-olds, seven-year-olds outside doing things, which nobody in America has seen since the 1990s. Like, yeah, can kids do this? Like, yes, they can do this. So it's a collective action problem. And the way to solve a collective action problem is collectively. So so yeah we all feel stuck as individual parents we feel like this is terrible but how can i change it well by teaming up with others nine so she'll go to the bookstore she has her money that she saved up she can buy a book and there's a cafe that's at the bookstore so she can

get like a cookie there and then we'll tell her she's got to be home by whatever, 1230 or one for lunch. Or maybe it's in the afternoon. So it's before dinner or whatever. And so she doesn't have a phone. So she'll have to ask somebody who works there. What time is it so that she knows when she has to leave the cafe so that she gets home on time? Because she doesn't want to get home late because she gets home late. She won't get her allowance the next week. So we like all that because it inculcates, I think, a certain responsibility,

but also an independence. And then of course, she's very proud, you know, when she gets back to our house, you know, alive and we feel like mission accomplished. So where does this leave us? It seems that focusing too much on safety due to fearing potential dangers is severely impeding our kids' ability to become independent and confident adults. Kids are naturally inclined to learn.

They can grasp safety rules and even set their own limits. By letting kids be kids, allowing them to ride their bikes on their own, scrape their knees, and yes, make a few mistakes, they autonomously discover aspects of their surroundings that adults might overlook. A simple walk to the end of the block, out of sight from parents, yes, completely out of sight, no cheating, no tracking, that can offer a taste of freedom and feel like a real adventure, which actually makes our children stronger and more resilient down the road. And those are the very qualities that may keep our kids from sliding into depression and anxiety

and other mental health disorders that are rising at an alarming rate among teenagers. In other words, this isn't just about different parenting styles. It's about raising the next generation of healthy and happy kids. So maybe it's time that we as parents work together to give our children the kind of freedom we cherished in our own childhoods. Why are we, as parents who are willing to do almost anything for our kids, hesitant to give them this one thing that will help them thrive, especially in an era widely recognized as safer for kids than ever before. Can't we join forces to revive some good old-fashioned free-range parenting? We need to give our kids space to grow, to learn, and define their own way without hovering over their every move, even if it makes us as parents a little bit uncomfortable.

I want to end with a little story that relates not just to the question of giving your kid more independence, but to pretty much all of the topics and questions about parenting that you could ask me and that we're going to cover in the show. Someone once asked me, what is the best parenting advice I've ever gotten? Here it is. When my daughter Penelope was two, we planned a vacation in France with some friends. We had been to this location before, and I knew that there were a lot of bees. So at our two-year-old well-child visit, I therefore had a set of questions prepared for Dr. Lee. Here's what I'm worried about. We're going on this vacation, and there are bees. It's kind of isolated. What if Penelope is stung? She's never been stung before.

What if she's allergic? How will I get her to a doctor in time? Should I bring something to be prepared for this? Should we test her in advance? Do I need an EpiPen? Dr. Lee paused. She looked at me and then she said very calmly, I'd probably just try not to think about that. And that was it. Just try not to think about that. She was right, obviously. I had built up this elaborate and incredibly unlikely scenario in my head. Yes, this could all happen, but so could a million other things. Parenting cannot be about thinking about every possible eventuality and every possible misstep.

Sometimes you just need to let it go. Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with The Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Janssen. Thanks as well to producers Tamar Avishai and Sam Deer for additional production support. The executive producer is Candace Kahn. Last, thanks to my guests today, Little Daffodil and Raphael, Tim Carney, Lenore Skenazy, and Jonathan Haidt. John's new book is called The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And Tim Carney's new book is called Family Unfriendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be.

And I highly recommend you check them both out. I'm Emily Oster. See you next time on Raising Parents. Hi, listeners. My name's Candice Kahn, and I'm the executive producer of this show. And before you turn off the podcast, I just wanted to pop in to say that we are so excited for the series to finally be out, and we want to hear from you.

If you liked this episode, if you maybe disagreed with something you heard, if it made you think differently about your choices as a parent, or if it made you think about something we didn't cover, if you have a story about it, please, please write to us at parentingatthefp.com. That's parentingatthefp.com and share your thoughts with us. We can't wait to hear from you. Okay, now you can go get back to your little rascals.

See you next time.