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Hi there and welcome to the Parenting Without Power Struggles podcast.  I'm Susan Stiffelman. I'm a family therapist, an educator, and the author of Parenting Without Power Struggles and Parenting with Presence. For over 40 years, I've helped thousands of families raise kids with more connection, confidence, and ease.

And in this podcast, I get to share some of that with you. We dive into real parenting struggles and practical solutions that are rooted in attachment theory. Neuroscience, mindfulness, internal family systems, and decades of clinical experience.  You'll hear conversations with experts like Dan Siegel, Janet Lansbury, Mona Delahooke, Tina Bryson, Ned Hallowell, so many wonderful people, plus Q& A episodes where I tackle your biggest parenting challenges.

If you want to go deeper, I hope you'll visit SusanStiffelman.com. You can explore my newsletter, masterclasses on everything from meltdowns and anxiety. to chores and sibling rivalry. Now, let's get started.

Hey everyone. I am so excited to share Lenore Skenazy with you. I meant the conversation to be much shorter than it turned out to be because we went off on so many great tangents and there was there's. So much of a sort of similar sensibility about empowering kids to develop confidence and resilience and flexibility and the ability to solve problems from the inside out.

Lenore Skenazy: Hey, Susan. Long time no, see, I actually, that's very true. I was calculated. It's five years or something. Ridiculous. And

Susan Stiffelman: just for all of you. Lenora and I met when I had been hired to write a, I think it was called Parent, parent coach. Column for a OL.

Lenore Skenazy: No, a OL. Oh my God, that EQA form.

Lenore Skenazy: Did we read something for pyramids? I know. And then

Susan Stiffelman: you came on because this whole thing had happened. Will you just share a minute of that and then I'll read your bio.

Lenore Skenazy: Oh, sure. This whole thing being, I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone in New York City where I live, wrote a newspaper column about it and ended up on every possible television show defending myself.

Susan Stiffelman: Yeah.

Lenore Skenazy: Okay.

Susan Stiffelman: So Lenore Skenazy is the president of Let Grow, which is a nonprofit that promotes childhood independence, free play and responsibility. I didn't know this about you. You are a Yale and Columbia graduate you, and then sparked the Free Range Kids Movement. After this episode, this. Episode, this event, this.

Lenore Skenazy: This yeah. Earthquake scandalous

Susan Stiffelman: thing. And you've really become a leading voice for helping kids develop more resilience by doing more on their own. And now let grow champions childhood and helping kids build confidence and self-reliance. A lot about independent play and real life experience that encourages that.

Susan Stiffelman: And I know you've worked closely with Jonathan Haight, who's been in the.

Lenore Skenazy: Stratosphere

Susan Stiffelman: or whatever's

Lenore Skenazy: beyond the stratosphere kind

Susan Stiffelman: of sounding the alarm between this connection between overprotection and anxiety in kids. And I do a lot of stuff in my world around anxiety. So I wanna start with that and then start really talking about how parents can.

Susan Stiffelman: Take a page out of the Let Grow page book as well as school. So what have you learned about anxiety and with your collaboration with Jonathan and this whole thing that we're seeing in epic proportions, growing kids?

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. So John, he and another guy named Daniel Shukman, we're talking together eight years ago about.

Lenore Skenazy: Anxiety on campus. They saw kids needing more mental health services than ever before, more anxious, more mistaking whenever they felt uncomfortable with literally being unsafe. They felt unsafe when they were faced with a new idea or. Or anything difficult that they hadn't tried before. And John and Dan were both saying that trying to help them at this point is a late stage intervention.

Lenore Skenazy: They're already, 18, 19, 20. Wouldn't it make more sense to try to build kids who are resilient and open-minded and resourceful and anti-fragile from the get go and. John had somehow I'd met John, I wish I remembered, but I'd met John before and he had read Free Range kids and he and his wife were raising their kids free range.

Lenore Skenazy: And John said let's start a nonprofit with Lenore. And when they came to me, I said, okay, but let's also bring in Peter Gray. Who's a professor at Boston College of Psychology who has spent his life studying the importance of kids just playing on their own without adults watching and structuring and instructing and high fiving and trophy giving, just kids playing on their own different ages, all mixed together.

Lenore Skenazy: So the four of us got together and we started let grow. And our literal, we keep changing our slogan, but currently our slogan. Is making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some independence and free play. Yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: I, a year or so ago, I stumbled on this Netflix show called what's it called?

Susan Stiffelman: I wrote it down. Which one? Oh, old enough. Old enough, yes. And it was just, oh my gosh. You see this two and a half year old leaving the apartment building, getting in the elevator, crossing the street, going down the road, taking the money, buying sushi, getting back, now they've prepared the child.

Susan Stiffelman: They've taught her him or her, the root. And I thought so much of you. Thank you when I watch that, because I don't think that's what you're proposing exactly, but I think it's, no, I say three. You're in the same spirit. Like we are literally denying our children. It's not just that we're protecting them too much, we're denying them something so essential to becoming a balanced, confident human being.

Susan Stiffelman: So do you wanna say something about that and what you've seen?

Lenore Skenazy: Sure. Old enough is this charming Japanese TV show that's been running for 30 something years and Oh, I didn't get that. Yeah, no, it's been going on forever and it does show kids, I think they finally skewed younger just to be a little more dramatic, but basically it's kids 3, 4, 5, more four, five.

Lenore Skenazy: Running errands on their own. In Japan, it's called My First Errand. And what's amazing about that show is not just that the kids go and they're always getting something to, with sushi, I'm gonna get the rice. Oh, I'm getting the fish, I'm getting, the wasabi, whatever. I'm getting. Dad's apron so he can make sushi.

Lenore Skenazy: But what's really astounding is that you watch and sometimes the kids are psyched and sometimes they're crying. At the beginning it was like, this is a little scary. It's a little daunting. How but what they know is that the adults in their lives believe that they can handle this. And so off they go.

Lenore Skenazy: And I know that if this were filmed in another country, once the crime begins cut, we can't do it. They're traumatizing. The kid, it's too much. Obviously they're not ready. And the difference is only the adults 'cause the kid, 'cause the kids always end up rising to the occasion.

Lenore Skenazy: Once they're given trust and a task, and these are two things that we've been told by our culture are too much for us to give our kids. And in fact we just keep getting this, the message from our very fear-based and worst case scenario culture, that trusting kids to do almost anything on their own will end up possibly, potentially, probably.

Lenore Skenazy: In a disaster and it'll be all your fault. And we're supposed to be thinking that way. I call it worst first thinking. Come up with the worst case scenario first, and then proceed as if it's likely to happen. And once you've done that, you go whoa, I can't let my kid do that. I would regret it for the rest of my life.

Lenore Skenazy: And so we've really been beaten into not believing in our kids. And that means that we don't let them do much on their own. And wildly and sadly the truth is that when kids do something on their own, that is the anxiety buster, and it's not just the anxiety buster for them, it's for us too.

Lenore Skenazy: So when we founded, let Grow a bunch of us, the, we were all thought leaders, quote unquote, but thoughts weren't getting my audiences anywhere. People would go oh yes, I remembered my childhood. Oh, it was so fun. Oh, we went in the woods, or we went and got ice cream. Or my parents would die if they knew where I was.

Lenore Skenazy: All these happy thoughts and but I could never let my own kids do it. And it's if that was your best time, why are and you wanna give your kids the best possible childhood? Why is that the one thing you're taking out? But we have been drained of our belief in our kids and in our neighbors, in our own parenting.

Lenore Skenazy: And so we decided, forget the thought leadership with people going, yeah, that's a good idea. We really wanted to put it into action. Because it's only, you're a shrink. You know this. It's only action that breaks the cycle because if you're in your mind, things get scary and then you don't do it.

Lenore Skenazy: But if you're pushed gently, pushed to let go and you see your kid go get the sushi rice or walk to the bus stop or go on a play date without you, that rewires you. And so we at Let Grow, we came up with just two programs for schools because that's where the children are. Get a lot of kids doing something at the same time.

Lenore Skenazy: Get a lot of parents doing something at the same time, and you've changed the cultural norms. We've got two [00:08:00] free programs that we feel I. We'll make the change that we want to see, and that will drastically bring down the anxiety levels in both generations. As John keeps saying, now it's the anxious generation, which one is it?

Lenore Skenazy: We keep thinking it's right. But it's also the parents. Yeah. And the surgeon general found that he did a big study that found the kids today were more anxious than ever, and then he found that parents today were more anxious than ever, and it's a. There's a reason, and it's the same reason, which is if you don't see how much your kid can do, they don't know what they can do, and you don't know what they can do, so you're worried about them.

Lenore Skenazy: They can't handle anything, and they don't have the knowledge the reality of seeing Hey, that wasn't so hard. I.

Susan Stiffelman: Sort of two parallel tracks in my mind. One is exactly what you're saying, that we don't trust our kids, that we any kind of pushback from them activates this. Oh, but I wanna be a good mother and I need to, my role is to protect them from harm and from distress.

Susan Stiffelman: But the other track is this flooding that we are, that we're given. If I'm looking for a show to watch on Netflix or porn, oh, somebody's gotten killed, slashed, you know I tell right. We're so flooded with horrific imagery that, and news that, and of course that's what sells. And I think there's that too, that, but you've talked about the safety, the reality statistically.

Susan Stiffelman: Can you speak to the Yeah. Thing where we're so primed to be afraid for our children based on what we're seeing in our feet.

Lenore Skenazy: I will. And then I have to tell you the two school programs that I think change for sure, let's DNA. But yes the media loves nothing more than, murder and mayhem because that is what we watch.

Lenore Skenazy: And of course in a competitive media environment, more and more of it and your brain works like Google, you think's my kid safe at the bus stop and up pops. Aton pate taken from a bus stop 40 years ago, or JC Dugard taken from a bus stop or any number of law and order episodes where a kid disappears from a bus stop.

Lenore Skenazy: And because those stories are so easy for us to remember. I'm sure you know this. There's the availability heuristic incredibly arcane phrase for easy to remember. And therefore we think it's common. The easier it is for you to remember a story. And of course, law and order with its, great music and beautiful actors and scary storylines is a lot easier to remember than.

Lenore Skenazy: Millions upon millions of students who have waited bored and cold at the bus stop for the last 40 years who haven't been taken. And so if you think that it's hap, if you ask if my kid's safe at the bus stop, your brain brings up these images. They're bo they're all scary because we've been immersed in all these scary television shows and internet, everything.

Lenore Skenazy: You think that it's very likely that your kid is going to be kidnapped, even though the statistic that was crunched for me by a guy named Warwick Cairns in England was that if you wanted your kid to be taken by a stranger in a law and order type kidnapping, stranger takes them away how long would you have to keep them outside for this to be statistically likely to happen?

Lenore Skenazy: And you might know the answer, do you? No. Oh, good. Oh, do you wanna guess? Yeah. No. Do I wanna guess? How long would they have to be outside for it to be? It's like how many lottery tickets would you have to buy to be statistically likely? I

Susan Stiffelman: know I'm gonna

Lenore Skenazy: you're gonna grossly underestimated. So think big, huh?

Lenore Skenazy: Two years. You gotta think longer than that. Like way longer than that. 10 years? No. Udin is longer than that. A hundred years, 750,000 years. Okay. It's, wait, say it again. 750,000 years for them to be statistically likely to be kidnapped by a stranger, driven someplace, held overnight, all that kind of stuff.

Lenore Skenazy: So anyways, it's, the point is it's rare. And yet it's not rare in our brains. And some people think that's,

Susan Stiffelman: thank you.

Lenore Skenazy: Oh you're welcome. So here's the deal. If your brains are constantly giving you this bad feed of scary stories and, pre-reg regret oh, I would regret myself, I couldn't live with myself.

Lenore Skenazy: The only thing that counters, a false notion or a phobia or a fear is exposure is reality. So we recommend Highly and we have a thousand schools doing it. So far, the Let Grow experience, I don't think, I'm glad it's a thousand, but I want it to be, 750,000. So the Let Grow experience is just a homework assignment that teachers give kids.

Lenore Skenazy: Or that the school counselor comes in and gives all the kids. Doesn't matter who gives it, it's just a free homework assignment that says go home and do something new on your own with your parents' permission, but without your parents. And we have lists. I was just looking at, I was just looking at one of our lists today.

Lenore Skenazy: It's like you can ride your bike, you can make dinner, you can go to the store, you can climb a tree, you can go to a friend's house, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And. A million other things that we don't list. 'cause it all depends on you and your interest and your age and your neighborhood and what your parents think makes sense.

Lenore Skenazy: And it's, you and your kid are deciding this, so it's not like we're saying every child must take the subway. It's not that. And the thing that's so amazing, and I'd say fast acting, except it sounds like a drug, but is that when you let your kid go to the store, say, I mean I've watched this. Locally, even with some people.

Lenore Skenazy: Also in Queens. I live in Queens, New York. They were very scared. They had a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. And they, finally thanks to Let Grow, let their kids walk to the store, which is maybe three blocks away. They have to cross some streets, so you wait for other people to cross.

Lenore Skenazy: You look both ways. You make eye contact with the cars. You can teach kids to cross the street safely. And then they went to the store and they had to get they got cranberry juice and then they came back home and toasting with that cranberry juice was like. Like a wedding, like this is so great.

Lenore Skenazy: Today is such an important day. And what was so great is that I ended up talking to the family again like six months later 'cause I was, wanted to do a follow up. And I found out a couple of things. One is that after that they were letting the kids walk home from school and the 12-year-old would sometimes stop at the park and play ball for a little while before he came back.

Lenore Skenazy: And the dad. Had gone back to he was from New Mexico and when he'd grown up with his twin brother, they had been riding bareback horses in the gullies, in the desert at, 10. And here he was not even letting his 12-year-old boy walk to or from school. And so he said he went to talk to his nephew who's grownup who was a pastor there.

Lenore Skenazy: He felt compelled to tell him this story. Guess what? Now I'm letting my kids do this. And the pastor put it so beautifully, he said, you always had faith in God and now you have faith in your kids. And that has struck me because people, the opposite of faith is anxiety, right? If you believe in something, even if you believe that my kid could screw up, but it's still gonna be okay.

Lenore Skenazy: That gives you a lot of peace of mind that you know, and the opposite is thinking you must be with the kid or be watching the kid all the time for them to be okay. That becomes, it's, all the tracking is presented as peace of mind. You'll have peace of mind, you'll be able to see where they are.

Lenore Skenazy: Any second. No real peace of mind comes from peace. And peace is believing that this is gonna be okay, or even if it's not okay, it's still okay

Susan Stiffelman: and you, and that's fantastic and you can only get there. If you have witnessed your child being competent or stumbling and figuring out, there is no shortcut, there's no way to, to develop that true internal, not just thinking it, but feeling it in your bones.

Susan Stiffelman: Confidence that. If my child does hit a challenge, not that we've downloaded all the precautions and given them every kind of pepper spray and every kind of sonic device, but that we have, we fostered in them a level of assertiveness and problem solving and creativity that if the light is broken.

Susan Stiffelman: What if the stoplight's broken and you've practiced it with them, but now the light is never turning? What do they do? I remember hearing about this college kid. This kid had been so sheltered that she went to college and she called her parents from the dorm on the East coast and they were on the West coast to say there's a fire in the dorm.

Susan Stiffelman: Wow. Didn't call the fire department. Your mom didn't run. Once we give our kids at appropriate amounts and I love the Let Grow program because they support you in this then we can watch them incrementally develop that self-mastery and confidence and creativity and resilience and all those good things so that the faith is natural.

Susan Stiffelman: You come by it internally 'cause you've already. Seeing them. Function in the world without you, and do well. And then oh my gosh, what it does for their sense of self.

Lenore Skenazy: And in fact, there was a pilot study that now just got a big grant to be a bigger study. Where a psychology professor at Long Island University used independence as therapy for kids with a diagnosis of anxiety.

Lenore Skenazy: And so he met the first week with one, each individual kid's parents, and then it was just a month long protocol. So the second week he met with the kid and the parents to say kid, and rather than saying, I hear you're too scared to go upstairs in your own house, or, I hear you're afraid to walk to school, didn't say that.

Lenore Skenazy: He said what are you ready to do that you haven't done yet that you feel would be really great? And then the kids had to do something. I don't literally, I don't know if it was every day or every other day, but it was another 20 days. And all the kids in this study, which is all, it's just four, but all of them went from feeling worried most of the time to feeling worried a little bit of the time.

Lenore Skenazy: And I'm not at all surprised. I was delighted that it worked out so well, but it's like. There's a drive in kids to be competent. That's what in the three-year-old going to get the sushi. They want to be part of the world. They want to be. Helpful. They want to be successful and when we deny kids that by doing everything with them or for them, or, I would say even always tracking them they don't see that they're okay.

Lenore Skenazy: It's like denying them food, of course they're drooping, they haven't seen who they are. They haven't had that main, that, that big drive for, competence, independence mastery. Fed at all. And the other Let Grow program that we recommend is that schools stay open for all ages together.

Lenore Skenazy: Free play there. There's an adult there, but they're not organizing the games. They're like a lifeguard. And that's how kids learn how to make something happen and get buy-in. And you can't be a total jerk and still have anybody wanna play with you. And so the rough edges get a little smoothed out. And if you don't have friends in your fellow third graders, you make friends with the kindergartner by giving them.

Lenore Skenazy: A piggyback ride. And then school is not a dreary, horrible place. It's a place where everyone's saying hi. The little kids are all so excited to see you. So it's so simple. It's not free because there does have to be somebody there in charge. But yeah. Parents pay for all sorts of classes after school. And if we call this something, we call it the Let Grow Play Club, but if we called it the Let Grow executive function independence, assertiveness training future political career.

Lenore Skenazy: I mean if you call it anything about what it's teaching kids, social, emotional advanced placement class, then hopefully parents would sign up for it because we've seen kids desperately want it, they love it so much and there's no phones. Where else are they gonna get allowed? A ton of time, face to face with kids, making things happen, making friends, making jokes.

Lenore Skenazy: If not just at school where there's already a giant number of kids, right? You don't send 'em home and they get on their phones or they go to the park, there's no one there. Keep the school open or mixed age free play and you've solved a lot of problems. Can you pause for one sec? Yeah. So anyways, it's that simple.

Lenore Skenazy: If they, if schools would just offer that as one afterschool option and you can get a grant or parents can pay for it, or there could be a sliding scale or you can hire an 18-year-old instead of Yeah. A licensed teacher. 'cause really what you want is somebody who doesn't get involved. You wanna teenagers scrolling through their Instagram feed, so while the kids are playing

Susan Stiffelman: around them, that would be ideal.

Susan Stiffelman: And. How do parents, how can they lobby their school to make that happen?

Lenore Skenazy: We always recommend not being so demanding that nobody wants to talk to you, but I'd say find some other parents who think that these are good ideas. They're both recommended in the Anxious Generation. John's book, John Heights book.

Lenore Skenazy: That's a big endorsement. And then, gently presenting it as something that some parents would really appreciate to the principal or a teacher that you like, or the guidance counselor, the social worker, whoever's there who you think might be interested in it.

Susan Stiffelman: Yeah. Yeah I remember when my son was just turning 15, I took him around the world for two and a half months. We started out in Africa, we volunteered, we did a whole bunch of things, and then we flew all the way to Australia and then spent another month in New Zealand. That sounds

Lenore Skenazy: so fun. I wish you'd taken me.

Susan Stiffelman: We were wandering. We didn't have a fixed plan or anything, so we, I remember we wandered into this one little town and we ended up seeing a b and b sign on somebody's house and they had a lower level and we ended up staying there and the downstairs of their house. We ended up having dinner with them and their daughter, and then they invited us to go to their daughter's school the next day.

Susan Stiffelman: And it was a little village. It was a tiny village where these. Folks lived in and the kids were all playing like it was a village school. So they all played together, all the ages. And I asked, I, I did a little training for the teachers, just offered some support and then there you are. Yeah. Was chatting with the principal on the playground, watching the kids play and I spoke with the kids too.

Susan Stiffelman: Do you like your school? Yeah, we love our school and all the cross ages and the soccer. They were all playing soccer, with the olders and the littles and they said these are the village kids. They have to get along. They're in each other's lives, completely woven together and.

Susan Stiffelman: It is so human to have that, and then you have them helping each other out. And that level of generosity and care and that we're seeing the extreme absence of now. So coming back to this idea of sec anxiety, and I wanna apologize. To, to John. He, because I mispronounced his name at the beginning.

Susan Stiffelman: Oh. It's

Lenore Skenazy: yeah, he's tall. You and he is not filled with hate.

Susan Stiffelman: Yeah. But the idea that he's talking about that you're feeding with it this beautiful synergy that you've developed where in, when you're saturated with anxiety because you can't do anything for yourself, or you've not been allowed to believe that you can, then what are you doing?

Susan Stiffelman: You're looking at a screen.

Lenore Skenazy: Oh yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: You're mainlining. This kind of numb numbing experience and this association with digital stuff is such a direct, there's such a direct relationship. Can you say a little bit more about that? 'cause I know screens are just huge on everybody. Screens are

Lenore Skenazy: a huge thing. It's really hard to deal with screens.

Lenore Skenazy: I, I deal with them all the time. They are ubiquitous in our lives. But back in the day parents could say, go outside. When they needed some free time, when they needed like a break, and now it's go online and at let grow, we're making go outside back into normal. So if kids have experience at school playing face-to-face, if you've had them riding their bikes around or walking to the store or pet sitting or walking the dog, then they're reintegrated into the real world.

Lenore Skenazy: So the alternative, I've read crazy articles about take away the phone and then make a really fun day at the local museum and call up and figure out your plans and what exhibits are you gonna see and what essays are your child gonna write when they're done. And it's and that's good for two hours on Wednesday, you've got the rest of their childhood, right? So if you don't give them a way of having fun meeting with their friends, being social, being alive, figuring out what they like to do, that is not online. The only place they can go is online. You just. It's so obvious that the choice is, virtual world or real world.

Lenore Skenazy: We've been denying kids the real world for a long time lately. Like 10% of kids walk to school these days and the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying, oh, nobody should be a PIA pedestrian until age 10. It's like we can't live in this fantasy of complete and utter danger anytime our kids walk outside.

Lenore Skenazy: And expect kids to find their way if there's no way to be found. So wait, that's why the Let Girl experience is so great. It just makes everybody see, oh, my kid can go to the store. Oh, my kid can go to the neighbor. One lady wrote to us recently and said, I think her kid was, I can't remember. Her kid was eight or 10 boy, and I literally don't remember.

Lenore Skenazy: Oh, she lives somewhere in California. And what she did is she created a friendship club. What's a Friendship Club? Just a, a name. Four. She found some other moms in the neighborhood who would be happy to have her kid or the other kids come over there and vice versa. And so now it's a friendship club.

Lenore Skenazy: Her son can go knock on the door of these three or four other kids and they can knock on his door and nobody's gonna go did your mother say you could come here? Or, my kid is very busy. If your kid is very busy, say, I'm sorry, he's practicing piano. You can come back in an hour.

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. But if they're not very busy, suddenly you have people in real life. In each other's homes again. And the easiest thing in terms of phones, I think in a home we just did this recently at a holiday, is you have to put your phone in a basket or on the table as you walk in, on the end table.

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. And so just make it a. A thing. It's not a, it's not an argument, it's not a philosophical treatise. It's just oh, phones go in the basket when you come in. Yeah. And there's, there's Pop-Tarts in the cabinet. Yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: It's routine. It's routine and ritual. I go offline. I try to go offline Friday, Saturday and Sunday, at least Saturday, Sunday.

Susan Stiffelman: Wow.

Lenore Skenazy: Wow.

Susan Stiffelman: I email, I, I might text with somebody, but I decided I was so overloaded that yesterday, Sunday. Yeah. I. I didn't even look at my phone the whole day. Wow. And I just watched my nervous system relax. I've learned, been taking art classes and one of my, two of my neighbors, sometimes we paint together.

Susan Stiffelman: Oh, nice. But I didn't wanna text, I didn't wanna look at my phone. Else was gonna come. So I actually was just gonna go knock on her door and I thought back and the car wasn't there. But I thought back to my childhood, that's what we did. We didn't call like. The neighbor, down the road, right? The

Lenore Skenazy: neighbors were neighbors.

Lenore Skenazy: That was what neighbors were for, right? So yeah,

Susan Stiffelman: going down to Sue, if she's not there, I might be at Judy's. And, auntie, it's I just love what you're doing and I encourage parents to get aligned with Let grow and work with the parts inside that are. Struggling with this. I know.

Susan Stiffelman: Are you aware of the self-driven child by Ned Johnson and Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we've done some classes together. I love and adore them and they just came out with a workbook. Oh wow, okay. They're in the same milieu,

Lenore Skenazy: yeah. I've met with Ned. I had coffee with Ned. He's so nice. Oh, you did?

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Stiffelman: Great humans and also trying to revive this feeling in kids. 'cause they like me and all of us are seeing the detrimental effect of depriving our children of these. So what are a couple of things parents can do? Oh, right now.

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. Okay. So first of all, think back on the feeling of, I did it myself.

Lenore Skenazy: I just gave a talk and an older man came up to me afterwards and he said that their grandkid says every time she does something, I did it myself. And he said, so that he and his wife started saying, when they made, they opened the wine or they made a casserole, I did it myself.

Lenore Skenazy: And he said, what's interesting is that doing it jokingly made them keep wanting to do more things. So there's a real momentum to this feeling of competence and independence without, it's not like rejecting other people, but it's look what I could do. So first of all, try to get in touch with that and then of course you can do.

Lenore Skenazy: If any of these things on your own, and if you go to let grow.org, we have an independence kit. We have a Summer of Independence thing that's about to come out with a list of all sorts of ideas for your kid. Lemonade stand, skateboarding, whatever it is. But it's even better if you do it with somebody else.

Lenore Skenazy: So that's why we recommend to, to see if your kid's teacher or school or church or library, if somebody else wants to take it on to just, social norms mean you need other people to make making it normal. So that's what we recommend. But even if you can't find anybody else, you can always do these things on your own.

Lenore Skenazy: And then same with try to get your school to stay open for a let role play club, which is the free play after school mixed stages. But if not, start one yourself. One of the things in the Anxious Generation is. Think about a free play Friday, keep Friday free of organized activities. And it's a great, it's the beginning of the weekend and if your kids are playing together from four to six, chances are they might wanna play from six to nine, and then they might wanna wake up the next morning and go outside and play some more.

Lenore Skenazy: Yeah. So just try to build independence and free play. Oh, and also Jennifer Wallace wrote a book about mattering. It's called never enough. And so try to think of ways that kids can feel like they matter to the family. It's, I know we call 'em chores and I'm, I was terrible at this, so I'm like the last person to talk about it, but I do believe that if the kids are, they help take the garbage out or they walk their little brother to kindergarten or whatever, it's a great feeling because you're part of a unit, right?

Lenore Skenazy: And you're not just taking, you're giving. And that's a great feeling.

Susan Stiffelman: I'm a huge fan of that. And I like the idea of mattering. Yeah. Chores. I have very mixed 'cause there's chores. Sounds so

Lenore Skenazy: yucky. Yeah. To me.

Susan Stiffelman: But just contributing,

Lenore Skenazy: like being part of contributing is exactly it. Yeah. There's a great book by a woman named, you probably know her, Michelin Dule.

Lenore Skenazy: She wrote a book called Hunt Gather Parent. I would recommend her for your podcast. And she had a kid who was like, like you could see the hand marks on Michelin's face because the kid had hit her so hard at age three or four. And so then Michelin, who was a NPR reporter, went to all these indigenous communities in Alaska and Africa and South America.

Lenore Skenazy: And watched what the parents did there. And it's it, the idea is not just that, that oh, the ancient wisdom or whatever, or that indigenous is always smarter, but that the way that these people were raising their kids was probably, had been refined over the millennia as opposed to ours, which gets refined and newly changed every six months when somebody comes out with another book.

Lenore Skenazy: The one thing that she learned that made the most sense to me is that kids desperately want to contribute. They wanna be, not only do they wanna be, like older and they wanna be, part of this family. And so as much as you can let them help you, even when helping you at the beginning is no regret, not great because they spill or they, they screw things up.

Lenore Skenazy: But. You're a unit, together you're making this family work and that's a great feeling. So if you can do that, which I couldn't, I recommend it.

Susan Stiffelman: That's great. Great. Thanks, Lenora. Covers so many different angles in this. This is the root of so many other things that I'm interested in and I know matter so much to parents. So thanks for transforming what started out as this sort of benign, weird thing that happened that really very strange, your offer to the world. So thank you. Anything final that you wanna say? And certainly, where can people learn more?

Lenore Skenazy: First of all, I just wanna say thank you for having me on this particular platform, and you can go to Let Grow, not Let It Grow, not let's go, not whatever, let 'em grow, whatever.

Lenore Skenazy: It's just Let Grow LET grow.org and all our materials are free.

Susan Stiffelman: Great. That's huge. Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed that episode. I loved our conversation. I love what Lenore's been doing for a long, long time now with Free Range Kids and now with Let Grow and lots of ideas for you to put into practice just to help your kids develop that all important sense of autonomy and inner confidence and agency and problem solving and all the good stuff.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a comment or a rating or a review that really helps. And check out SusanStiffelman.com for all kinds of classes, programs, and ways that we offer support to parents.

Susan Stiffelman: And now as we wrap up, I always like to say, no matter how busy life gets.

Susan Stiffelman: Look for those moments of sweetness and joy. Stay well, take care, and I'll see you next time.