The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Lenore Skenazy: the importance of raising free-range kids

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Teenagers are facing a mental health epidemic. The numbers are staggering: 30% of teenage girls and 10% of teenage boys are suffering from depression, reflecting a 150% increase since 2010. Rates of anxiety and ADHD are equally alarming. On this Munk Dialogue we’re joined by Lenore Skenazy, the founder of the Free-Range Kids and Let Grow movements. Since 2008 she has been sounding the alarm about helicopter parenting and overly-supervised play, which, she claims, is robbing children of their independence, creativity and resiliency. Without these important skills, they are likely to become depressed, anxious, and unable to resolve conflict without adult intervention. Furthermore, there is a case to be made, Lenore argues, that the threat to academic freedom on university campuses can be traced back to a lack of unsupervised play in childhood.   The host of this Munk Debates podcast is Ricki Gurwitz Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, access to our Friday Focus podcast, a free Munk Debates book, and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial hierarch. And though I am, of course, an Anglo. I'm certainly not a fucking Saxon. Hello, Monk listeners.

Ricky Gerwitz here, your guest host on today's Monk Dialogue. These are in-depth Q&A's with some of the world's leading minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into some of the big issues that are driving the public conversation and shaping our future. Well, it's no surprise that teenagers are facing a mental health epidemic. The numbers are staggering. 30% of teenage girls and 10% of teenage boys are suffering from depression, reflecting a 150% increase since 2010. Rates of anxiety and ADHD are equally alarming.

Enter Lenore Skenezi, a New York mom and founder of the free-range kids and let grow movements. Since 2008, she has been sounding the alarm about helicopter parenting and over-reliqueline. supervised play, which she claims is robbing children of their independence, creativity, and resiliency. Without these important skills, they are likely to become depressed, anxious, and unable to resolve conflict without adult intervention. There is a case to be made, Lenore argues, that the threat to academic freedom we are witnessing on university campuses can actually be traced to a lack of unsupervised play in. childhood.

Lenore, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. My thanks, Ricky. I wanted to talk to you today about why you founded Let Grow and Free Range Kids. So if you can just tell us a little bit about your personal experience in 2008 when you let your nine-year-old ride the subway alone. That's what I did. And there was a reason behind it. I live in New York City.

My whole family lives in New York City. and when our younger son, Izzy, was nine, he had started, I'd say, bugging me and my husband to take him someplace he'd never been before here in New York City and let him find his own way home by subway. And the reason he wanted to do that is I think if we were in the suburbs, he would have been begging, please, can't I take my bike and go, you know, to downtown Wilmet where I was growing up, suburb of Chicago and get a cookie. You're a library book. He would never ask for a library book. It'd always be a cookie. Put it that way. Anyway, so my husband and I discussed it and we thought, we're on the subways all the time. They're not gorgeous.

They don't always smell great, but we do think they're safe. I've lived in New York for 40-something years. They've been safe. So one sunny Sunday, I said, okay, is today's the day. And I took him to Bloomingdale, a place he'd never been at a super fancy department store. We wandered around for a little. And then I said, okay, it's that time. Goodbye.

And I went out one door and came home by bus. And he figured out that, guess what? Bloomingdale's is on top of a subway station. It actually has its own subway station. That's how fanciest door it is. And he took the subway down and then he had to take a bus across town. And he came into the apartment, levitating with not just pride, but knowing that we had trusted him and that he'd done something grown up, that he was ready for it. And we knew he was ready for it. Oh, my God, now we're talking about marriage. He's 25. Now that's even scarier. Anyways, the point being that we were proud and I didn't think it was that big a deal, but I was a newspaper columnist at the time and, you know,

looking around for a topic about two months later. And I said to my editor, should I write about, is he taking the subway by himself? Is that enough of a story? Yeah, I don't know. And she said, yeah, it sounds like a nice local piece. So I wrote why I let my nine-year-old write the subway alone. And two days later I was on, I know you're up in Canada, but I think you'll know these shows. The Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR, eventually the CBC and eventually the monk debates. So, you know, it was a shock that it became, you know, I'd say an international story that's, like I said, he's 25 now. It's been reverberating for a while. But after getting sort of somewhat raked over the coals on all these interviews, I started a blog that weekend and I called it Free Range Kids.

And I said, then as I say now, our kids are smarter, safer, that I would add stronger. than our culture gives them credit for. And to, you know, to sort of see the culture and see your own kids through a distorting lens, a lens of, you know, fear and catastrophe and worst case scenarios doesn't, you know, just like if you were seeing the world through any other weird lens that doesn't reflect reality. It doesn't make your kids safer to be always thinking of the worst cases. And I love my kids and I want them to be safe, but I think that they can handle some independence. And I think we've been led astray by our culture.

And so why do you think you had such negative feedback to sending Izzy out on the subway alone? Yeah. Well, first of all, when something is a, you know, when everybody has come to agree that kids are not safe the second you let them out of your site, who would let them out of their site? Only somebody who didn't care if her kids were safe. So, you know, who wouldn't hate a mother? who's putting her child deliberately in danger. And I think that's how a bunch of people saw me, which is why on the free-range kid's side,

I said, you know, I love safety. Let's get this straight. I use car seats. We're in New York, so we dragged car seats into cabs. Do you know how hard that is? Do you know how cumbersome and kind of silly it is? But we did that. And, you know, we had mouthguards and baby, you know,

the helmets whenever they're riding a bike. And just all sorts of things that I considered reasonable safety measures, but I didn't think constant supervision was one of them. So I think the backlash was also because people had to, either I was making sense or their worldview was wrong and threatened. And nobody likes their worldview wrong and threatened. And I don't blame them because the worldview except for me, like waving my hand going, oh, wait a sec, don't you guys remember walking to school or riding your bike or taking a bus? In the couple of generations since I've grown up, the norms have changed so much that it does seem weird to think that kids could do anything safely.

Now, one of the main things you talk about in your book and through the Let Grow movement is the importance of unsupervised play. Can you explain to us what exactly that is? I think you know what that is, Ricky. You explain to me, what's the difference between getting the kids in the car and taking them to the park and bringing them to, I don't know, travel soccer league where they're in uniforms and a coach is telling them, okay, kids, we're going to start, you know, at 1202 and you're playing on this team and you're playing on that team. And when I blow the whistle, then you play versus kids, I'm busy writing a blog. Off you go. And they ride their bikes to the park and they find a couple friends and they argue

about what to do and everybody forgot a ball and they have to come up with something else to do. What's the difference? Just actually enumerate for me what you see as the difference. Well, on the one hand, there is us as parents planning everything for them. And on the other hand, it's them having to come up with their own source of entertainment. And that actually brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about. There's so much more there than that. What else are they learning when they're arguing and trying to figure out what to do and they don't have a ball? So conflict resolution in that when they're arguing and they don't have a parental figure or a

figure of authority to defer to and to intervene and make the decision for them about who the ball belongs to and they actually have to figure it out amongst themselves. Because it can't be taught. There we go. And we always think that if there's an adult there, we're teaching them stuff. It's like, actually, if there's not an adult there, yeah, conflict resolution. How about there's no ball? Creativity. Let's play with pine cone. How about, oh, my God, if I, you know, if we don't come up with a little Ricky Jr., something for her to do. She's only three and she's tagging along, then we all have to go home. So then you have to start thinking sort of maturely or like a leader, you know, or what's going on in her mind or how can we keep her, you know, occupied enough for us to

have fun. And what if I want to be the first and you want to be first too? And that's just, that's compromise as well as conflict resolution. And how about, wait a minute, I have an idea. how about we make that tree into first base and then you have to climb that other tree to win a point. So then you're being creative and you're learning how to explain things well, and you're getting buy in, and you're reading the other people who are like bored or like can't wait to do it. And so it's all these interpersonal skills, which I hate calling them that. They're social emotional skills. It's like it's so weird that we can't ever endorse anything for kids without coming up with a super important reason that it's good.

And so I'm giving the reasons, you know, you're learning all the social, emotional skills that will be required from you for the rest of your life in school, in jobs, in a relationship. And if you'd been at travel soccer, which I don't even hate travel soccer, and my kids were in all sorts of sports, but they were in, we tried to give them free time as well. But in the travel soccer, you're learning really well how to play soccer. And that's going to be part of your life, but compromise, creativity, compared. passion, you know, reading people and conflict resolution are going to be part of your life every day. And I also want to bring up that important R word, resiliency. Ah, yes, let's bring that in. Okay. So how does unsupervised play lead to resiliency?

Well, first of all, all the things I was just talking about make you more resilient. You know, the fact that you can have an argument and then come up with a solution, that makes you resilient. The fact that you had a curve ball thrown at you because there was no ball and you had to come up with the pine cone or whatever you did, squirrel, whatever you're going to play with, that's also resilient. Another thing, dealing with the little kid who's tagging along. I mean, resiliency is being able to deal with regular old life. And when there's an adult around, the adults are generally better at all these things. And so they've already figured them out. They've already figured out the conflict resolution and how to come up with something and how to get by

because they're the adults. And so they think they're optimizing the experience by getting to the play already. It's like, my God, you guys are just, you know, you're pulling up clumps of grass and, you know, and one of you was wandering off and, you know, you look like you're daydreaming. You know, let's, you know, let's have fun already, right? You're going to be on first base. You're going to be the second basement. And it's just, I mean, the difficulty of running let's grow, which is the nonprofit that grew out

of free range kids, is trying to make. people see what's invisible. You can see that kids are learning baseball when they're in their uniforms and they've had the picture taken for the team and there's maybe a trophy at the end or a tournament or something and the parents are in the bleachers. That's all stuff you can see. But you cannot see. Literally you can't see if you're not there. But it's also really hard to see even if you're watching it, what is going on that is building brains without you literally turning every moment into a teachable moment optimized by me so that you're playing the game already and that you don't waste time and that you know whose turn it is and you know when the game ends. So by optimizing the

game, you've skipped over all the stuff that looks like wasted time, you know, the arguing and the figuring things out and the going off in another direction and getting distracted. And it turns out that all those interstitial things that look like on the way to the game, on the way to the, to the important part of the day are the important part of the day. Well said. Now, why do you think parenting has changed so much? Because I think a lot of people who grew up in the 70s or 80s or 90s, they were at their friends' houses after school or on weekends. They were playing outside. at the park or on the street without a parent in sight. And there was much more independence.

So why don't we see that with modern parenting? The first reason is that the media was not as intense back then as it is now. I mean, it was in the 80s that we got cable television. It was in the 80s that in the United States, the television rules changed. And you could show before that you couldn't show anyone who was pregnant. You couldn't show people sleeping in the same bed. you couldn't show a toilet flushing. I mean, it was really rules that had been made in the 20s,

and they weren't changed until the 80s. And once they were, then I have a friend who's a television historian who said, there's not one episode of law and order that could have been shown before they changed the rules. And then, of course, law and order, of course, took off. And there's just much more gruesome, much more scary stuff in the media today. Once you had cable, you had 24 hours to fill with news, the best, you know, the most exciting story is generally the most upsetting story, and the most upsetting story is a child kidnapped by strangers. So even though that's extraordinarily rare, thank God in real life,

and even rarer up by you, it became, you know, one of the dominant themes of a lot of reality shows and a lot of fiction or whatever you want to call, just normal television shows. You know, back to law and order. Let's just blame them. And, of course, then it just became more ubiquitous. We live in a litigious culture. You start thinking like a lawyer. Is this safe enough? could I be sued? That doesn't seem right. You just get used to signing waivers. We had to sign waivers for our kids to play from the school to go to the park across from the school and play. You know, it's like by that time, everything starts being written as a potential danger that you should be considering. So that sort of changes what way you look at things. And then you have a culture,

you know, this is a study not about kids, but there's a there's some kind of interesting psychological study that you think I would be able to quote better. But it said that, the better things are going in your life, the more you think like, oh, it's all thanks to me. Right. And we are in a time of like no famine, right? And it's not perfectly safe. We've already discussed that. But it's way safer than in most of human history. And once you think you can, you're in control, then the idea of something bad happening is even worse because it's your fault. If you had been paying more attention, if you'd bought those baby knee pads, if you'd, you know, taken them by the hand and walk them to school till they're off to college, you know, nothing bad would

happen. And so if something bad happened, you were bad. And I think that goes back to why were people so mad about me letting my son ride the subway. It was, once again, it's like to trust in the odds, to trust in fate, to trust in, you know, God or a bigger plan. All of that is wrong. You're only supposed to trust in yourself. And now we have cell phones to track our kids all the time. So we are sort of God like in our omniscience. And therefore, you have these tools to constantly watch them. You feel like to ever take your eyes off them or to take your eyes off your kids is so dangerous that if something bad happens, you deserve endless hate and shame and blame because it's all your fault. So we're really living moment to moment that something bad could be happening to our kids and

it's all our fault. And as a parent, that's just a lot to take on. That's a lot of responsibility and creates a lot of anxiety. And I would add a lot of boredom, right? I mean, if you have to sit there for every soccer practice or every play date or, you know, be ferrying them from one thing to the other, it is a lot. It is a lot. And one of the things I'd like people to realize is that that's unfair to kids, but it's also unfair to parents.

So you talked a little bit about the tracking. of kids via their phones. But I wanted to ask you about specifically how kids reliant on their screens is contributing to this lack of resiliency, the lack of independence that you alluded to earlier. I actually can't say. I'm of many minds on that,

and I shamefully haven't even studied it that much because when I let my son ride the subway in 2008, this was already an enormous controversy and there was no iPhone. So it wasn't that kids were constantly online or constantly, you know, surfing, you know, on TikTok or whatever. And so I like to sort of take a bigger picture, look at this issue, which is what does it mean when we have taken the real world away from kids and not let them play, explore, run, walk, have some unsupervised time in the real world? Let Grow was founded by me and three other people, and two of them are constantly writing subtexts that sound very pointed against the other one. There's Peter Gray, who is a psychology professor at Boston College, who has been studying the importance of mixed age, unsupervised free play for most of his professional career.

And he has watched it dwindle. He was born in the, I don't know, the 40s or 50s. So from his childhood till now, he's really watched the sandlot baseball game evaporate. And kids walking to the store, kids running errands, kids home alone even. It's all, it has disappeared. And so he has been studying how the lack of independence, including independent mobility, as independence has gone down, anxiety and depression have gone up. And it's not just since the iPhone.

So he writes all about that. So one of the other co-founders of Let Grow with me is Jonathan Haidt, who wrote the coddling of the American mind. And he has a new book coming out called The Anxious Generation. And I wrote a couple chapters with him. So, of course, I love the book. But the first half of the book is, I think, sort of indisputable graphs that show that kids got way more depressed and anxious and lonely after iPhones became iPhones and, you know, cell phones in general, smartphones, becomes ubiquitous. So I actually think they're both right. I think things were going down since 60s, especially the 70s and 80s with the growing fear of crime, which by the way, our crime rate is,

our homicide rate in America, which I know is higher than yours, is lower now than the 70s, 80s or 90s, something that nobody believes. But it was in the New York Times just last week. So it's going down because of a lack of independence. And there's something about independence that isn't just like, yay, I get to go get a candy bar. There's something that psychologists call the internal locus of control. Where is the locus of control in your life? Who is controlling your life? And if you have an internal locus, it's you. You know, I can do things on my own. If something bad happens, I can figure out what to do, you know, I'll be okay. That's the resilience, right? And it comes from a feeling of there's something that I'm a human being and I can make things happen, including making

things better. An external locus of control, well, the ultimate external locus of control is literally an external control. It's a prison, right? Somebody else is determining where you live and when you eat and what you do and who you live with, everything. But today's kids, I don't say that they're living in a prison, but they have a much, they're much more likely to have an external locus of control in that, you know, get up. It's time to go to school. Here's your breakfast. Let's get in the car. And then six or eight hours of school. And then come on, get in the car again. We're going to this. Or you're staying at school for homework help, come home, and then there's dinner, and then there is homework, and oftentimes it is supervised, and I got to read 20 minutes because that one instill a love

of reading. Oh, yeah, that's how you do it. 20 minutes, okay, stop. You don't have to read anymore. Thank God that horrible chore, which is making you love reading is over. And now it's time for bed. Chop, top. So an external locus of control, you feel like a victim. Somebody else is telling you what to do. You feel depressed and anxious. And so I'd say that as we've deprived, kids of any sense that they can handle the world without us always intervening or at least supervising, their internal locus of control ebbed away and an external locus of control came in. So I think Peter Gray is right about that. And I think John Haidt is correct that when phones came along, it seemed sort of miraculous. Here at last is the, it's the wardrobe from Narnia.

You go through the wardrobe and there you are in, you know, in another land. There's There's kids to play with, even though you're not allowed to play outside, and there's games to play, even though you're not allowed outside. And there's, you know, new people to meet and new challenges ahead, even though you're not running an errand and you're not allowed in the store. So it feels like weirdly, just as we were clamping down almost entirely on kids' lives, they found this wormhole into the online world where they can, you know, chat and joke and play and defy their parents and, you know, be a little sly. And so Peter thinks, Peter Gray thinks, yay, you know, at least we haven't taken away that from them. And John says, until we take that away from them, that's where they'll be. And they are getting lonely and depressed and anxious. So whichever founder, let grow founder's side you believe in or fall on, it doesn't really matter because the solution is the same.

And the solution in John's book is the same, which is you have to give kids more independence and more unsupervised free play. for them to thrive. Well, Jonathan Haidt is someone that I think a lot of people look up to, and the coddling of the American mind is, in my view, an important book that should be required reading. Well, him and Greg Lukianoff, who is the CEO of Fire and who was the co-author of that book, they talk a lot about what's unfolding on campus today

with regards to free speech and viewpoint diversity. And it's something that really has taken center-state. over the past few months. And I wanted to ask you whether you think the lack of unstructured and unsupervised play in childhood has had any effect on the way young adults are interacting on campus or what they expect from their university experience. So I'm going to turn this around and tell you why we found it like grow. And I think the answer is in there.

So Jonathan Haidt, to whom all praises do, was talking to. Daniel Shuckman, who for 10 years was the chairman of fire, which fights for free speech on campus. They were both very concerned with what they were seeing on campus, and this is six or seven years ago already, a certain unwillingness or unopenedness to hear new ideas or even ideas that you didn't agree with, right? And so there's trigger warnings on book. There's books, there's safe spaces, there's canceling of controversial speakers. And both of them very much agree, that kids need, everybody needs to be exposed to a whole lot of ideas and to hear objections to what you're saying so that you have to even figure out why you do believe in your idea or maybe the

other side has a point or maybe there's compromise. All these things that you hope would be happening on campus because that's a place where you're supposed to stretch your mind. And Dan was saying to John, it's like they're also going to, you know, the kids on campus are not just seemingly less open-minded. They're landing in the mental health. services offices for, you know, way more percentage of them than before and sometimes for, as Peter pointed out, smaller things like a mouse in the dorm or an argument with a roommate. And of course, you don't want to stigmatize anybody going to, you know, mental health services. And I have to say here, I'm a Jew living in New York.

Do you think I've not gone to a psychiatrist? You'd be crazy. Ha ha! Like me. And everybody in my family. So I have nothing against mental health services. but you also hope that there is some ability to solve some problems without external help or without the normal external help talking to your friends, talking to your parents or whatever.

And so they were saying, you know, we can keep fighting for free speech on campus and we will, but maybe we should start at a younger age. You know, on campus, it's a late stage intervention. Kids are already anxious, already depressed and worried. So can't we start when kids are. younger and try to build in more resilience and open-minded as they grow up so that by the time they come to campus and they hear, you know, somebody that they totally disagree with is speaking on, you know, on a subject that's very important to them. They go and they listen and they raise

their hand and they ask respectful questions and there's a debate as opposed to don't listen to him. Don't listen to him or, you know, shouting the person down and throwing stones. So John said, well, you know, I love the, you know, I read free range kids. I love that woman, Lenore. And so they came to me and they said, let's start a nonprofit together that's going to try to, at a younger age, just make sure that kids grow up with a little more moxie, a little more curiosity and a little more resilience. And I said, okay, but we have to bring in one more person and that person is Peter Gray, little realizing that six years later there would be a civil war. But anyways, they met Peter Gray and Peter having spent his whole life studying the importance of free play was able to explain to the point where now John, says this John Heitz says in free play without an adult to turn to when there's an argument or there's a hurt feeling or literally a hurt you you scrape your knee. That's how kids learn to become

adults. He says that when there are adults and kids together, the adults are the adults are the kids are the kids. But when there are no adults, the kids start becoming adult. And so we decided that LECRO would be dedicated to making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back the independence that we think they need to grow up into competent, confident. I can't remember our exact slogan, but basically functioning adults, open-minded as well. So we came up with two things, and I say we, other people, I'm just popularizing them,

came up with two wonderful ideas that work in the real world to give kids back, free play, and independence. And you let me know when you want me to describe them, and I will. Well, now's a good time, if any. So here are two ideas. And by the way, all our implementation guides everything is free on let grow.org. So one thing is the let grow experience.

And this is for schools. Both of our initiatives are for schools, where the teachers give kids a homework assignment that says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents' permission, but without your parents. And it looks like it's a homework assignment for the kids, but of course, it's for the parents, right?

Because until now, we were just talking about this. This last generation has sort of, of not seeing the milestones from earlier generations where you knew that at five or six a kid could walk to school, seven and eight, they could start staying home alone, you know, 11, 12, they could babysit 13. So all those milestones are buried. And the only way to unburry these ancient, you know, important milestones is to blow the dust off them. And that's what the let grow experience does. So the let grow experience is one thing that we push. And the let grow play club is the other. And that is just keep the schools open before or after school for all the kids,

all the different age kids playing together because that's how they've played throughout history. It wasn't just the third graders playing with the third graders back in, you know, the savannas of Africa, right? So leave it open for mixed age, no devices replay. And in this case, there actually is an adult there. But I always picture him or her in the corner with an EpiPen scrolling through, you know, Instagram, because their job is only there like a lifeguard, right? if something terrible happens, they're there. But the kids have to figure out, what do you want to play? I don't know.

Let's do this. Some of them want to play with chalk and some of them want to play with balls. And some of them are building weird things out of, you know, buckets and tape, whatever they're doing. And in that, they are discovering all these interactions we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast of like how to make something happen, how to get buy in, how to compromise. And then if they have an argument and they go to the teacher, the EpiPen person in the corner and they say like, you know, that was my, I actually heard parents. two teachers talking about a bucket incident recently at their like Roe Play Club where these kindergartners were fighting over a bucket and they wanted to just go in and say, you know, there's 80 buckets here. You know, we know we bought a set of 80 buckets.

There's even another orange one. But they just stood back and they watched and the kids fought and she said it was like seven minutes. I mean, that's a long argument, right? That's like as long as kindergartners have been alive. Right? Now it's mine. It's mine. It's mine.

And then finally one of them, brilliant kid, went off and got another bucket. at which point kid number two no that one's mine that was mine and they fought and they fought and they fought and then they made it into a game and they started picking them up and making this obstacle course and laughing and playing together and think of all the amazing stuff that went on because an adult did not intervene so it's hard for the adult to stand back especially we're so used to it it's like honey use your indoor voice let's share we but i have a friend who wrote a book called the problem with parenting. And she says that we're trying so hard to socialize our kids, honey, use your, you know, what word do we use? And now how do you do this? And all the shaping

that we're doing of their every interaction is actually cauterizing their development because they're not going through that time that we were talking about, that wasted time. Look, you only have, you know, an hour and a half for a play club. And you're wasting seven minutes arguing. It's like, no, that seven minutes was not wasted because it led to so much frustration. and, you know, anger and all the bad things that we don't want kids to have to experience, it led from that to a solution. And for the rest of their lives, those kids are going to have that in their toolbox. Sign up now for a complimentary monk membership.

As a free monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and privileges, including streaming of select debates, dialogues, and podcasts on our website, a 24-hour advanced ticketing window to access seats to our in-person debates before the general public, written transcripts of all of our content, and email updates on special offers and promotions. You can grab your complimentary monk membership right now at triple W monk debates. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com. Simply click on the membership tab in the top right of our next. Navigation. Grab your monk membership and open your mind to a world of great debate. Lenore, I wanted to ask you about the two-income family and how having both parents working full-time

affects the ability to give our kids independence. And so what I mean by that is, you know, me and my husband, we have full-time jobs. Our kids are in daycare during the week. And on weekends, there's a guilt associated with that where we want to spend all of, of our time with our kids because we feel bad that we're not with them during the week. And they're not getting that unsupervised playtime that, you know, you've just indicated that they need. Whereas 30 and 40 years ago, a lot of moms weren't in the workforce. They were spending much more time at home. And they were probably much more open to the idea of not having their kids around because they were with them 24-7. So do you think that plays a role in the

overly structured play environment that we have with young kids? The era of moms not working or fewer moms working, moms actually spent less time with their kids, right? And they didn't feel guilty about it. I think that's what may be different. Actually, whether they were working or not, really from the 70s till the 2000s, the amount of time that college-educated moms spend with their kids

has doubled and the amount of time that dads spend as like gazillioned. So it's more guilt and expectations than reality. Nobody said, oh, my God, those 70s moms just aren't spending enough time, you know, with their kids. Their kids are going to feel abandoned or whatever. So first of all, try to erase some of the guilt by realizing that this new intensive idea that you should be spending all the time with your kids is new, as simple as that. Right. And before that, when the kids were outside and playing and staying out until the streetlights came on, that gave you the whole.

swath of time, you know, afternoon, evening, and weekends and summers when you think that you had to fill up the time with you coming up with like, let's go to the Museum of Natural History and we'll study evolution. It's not that. They had time with each other and that was great. And you had time with adults and that worked out fine. So don't feel guilty about not spending enough time with your kids because no matter what you're doing, you are. Secondly, the two job paradigm is also a two income paradigm. And I think one of the reasons we feel so bad is because there's so much money that we could spend on each kid. We have smaller families and two incomes. That's different from having a large family and one income. And so that has been parlayed into the culture, including capitalism.

So capitalism comes up with, get a family pass. Come every weekend. You know, don't you want to start crafting with your kid? Come to crafts or us. How about building a bear? How about building a snowman. It's all become another way of getting that dollar from a parent. And the easiest way to get any money is to make a parent feel guilty or worried that they're not doing enough for their kid, that their kid is going to be hurt, lonely, or fall behind. And so there's, that's why we have such intensive sports programs and leagues outside of school and that they don't end even, you know, at the end of it. They don't even end when it's dark. I was talking. to a young woman who was teaching a rock climbing class indoors. And it's for like eight to 11 year olds.

And I said, well, what is it? And she said, oh, it's just three days a week. I said, what time? She said, oh, from five to seven 30. So already we've just made something into a luxury good that parents think they're giving their kids when I think giving your kids free time from five to seven 30, including maybe dinner sometime in the middle without it being, you know, the drive-thru lane and eating in the car. that seems good. So try to remember that there are a lot of forces out there trying to get you to feel guilty and therefore spend, not just spend more time, but spend more money doing more things with your kids. Try to look a little skeptically at like, is this really what my kids need? Is this really important? I was just reading Emily Oster's book, The Family Firm, because I was just on her podcast. I thought

about it read, read the book. And she said, come up with what's important to your family as big values. Like if eating together is important, if eating together without the television on or without devices at the table is important, that'll make other decisions easier. Like, well, if eating together dinner is important, then we're not going to sign the kids up for rock climbing from five to seven 30 every day. Or, you know, if we want to spend Saturdays as, you know, a Sabbath or Sundays as a Sabbath, then they're not going to be, you know, going to Chuck E cheese that day or whatever. So think about what's important to you. try to build your family life around that. Try to remember that there's forces of the marketplace that are going to try to make you feel bad if you don't do or buy something expensive for your kids. And then remember that throughout history, kids were spending some time with their parents,

but they spent a lot more time in unstructured time with other kids. I mean, I'm talking about the Savannah, so you're not going to be doing exactly that. But that was fine. They didn't have to learn everything from you? I mean, we sort of think that we better give them three million words, which I think we've done in this podcast, and that we better give them three million hours. And since we didn't get it on Tuesday night, because I had to go to the PTA meeting, I better make it up by waking up early on Saturday and starting out with a game of shoots and ladders. That's not the truth. They have always learned even from the kids a little older from them, even from the kids who you don't think are so nice, but it's all part of the sweep of life.

and we have narrowed it down to the sweep of mom and dad. And that's new and unusual and unnecessary. So try to free yourself up in the guilt. Try to find some other families who feel the same way you do. Try to have fun with them while the kids have fun elsewhere, not directly with you. Try not to solve their problems except if they're one and a half and three and a half. Sometimes you have to. And try to get let grow going in your school because like I said, it's free.

And you have some of, you know, you have Peter Gray and John Height thinking about what is most important. for kids in this problem, in this era of a collective problem. We can't give them freedom and we can't give them play. Here are two easy ways to give them back and to give them back to all kids at once. And so it changes the culture in a nice fell swoop and it doesn't cost money. So that's, that's why I'm on your book and that's why I'm, I mean, it's why I'm on your podcast. That's why I keep talking about this because the answers are pretty simple. We just have to do them. Thank you, Lenore. This conversation has been so educational and informative. And you've given me and so many other parents, the tools, I think, that we need to help give our kids that

all important independence and resiliency to help them succeed later in life. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Well, you know, I'm taking you. I'm really glad when I can get the word out. So thanks and thanks for asking good questions. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Lenore Skinezy. You've given us a lot to think about. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard or any of our other podcasts, please send us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com. A reminder that our weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus, comes out every Friday. Join Janice Stein and Rudyard Griffith as they delve into the big news stories of the week.

You can access the Friday Focus podcast on our website, www.munkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of the week. public debate and dialogue one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz. The Monk debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.