Hey, guys, Josh here and for this week's select, I chose our April twenty nineteen episode on free range parenting. This was an episode that I initially approached with some preconceptions, and they turned out to be quite wrong. I was raised with quite a bit of freedom, and I assume that parents still kind of raise their kids in that manner. But it turns out that they don't, and even more
to the point, that's basically illegal these days. Fortunately, there's a movement pushing back against that, and I'm all for it. See what you decide in this great episode of Stuff.
You Should Know.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff you should Know about kids.
Can I CoA right off the bat here?
I presumed you would.
All right, there's a couple of coas I want to issue.
One, we are not telling anyone how to parent their children, indeed, And two we realize that the whole concept of free range parenting that will follow is comes from a place of extreme privilege. Yes, to be able to entertain the idea of free range parenting comes from a place of extreme privilege.
Okay, Can I amend that or should I wait until we talk about that part to kind of amend it.
No, you can amend it.
So to me, free range.
Parenting, having the freedom to free range parent is what I saw it ties in with parenting that's already being done by people who might not have a choice.
Are you saying that the.
Ability to choose whether you want a free range parent or not is privileged?
Yes?
Okay, yes, agreed, I gotcha.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and again we'll get into that, but we'll get into that at the end.
But I just want to just go ahead and.
Lead that off because it's a lot of privilege involved with being able to say, you know that you want a free range parent.
Are you going to Are you going to land one way or another on.
It on whether or not I support free range parenting?
Yeah?
Yeah, I mean, Emily, and I don't title it or say hey, I think we should do this as a style, but we, as it turns out, are sort of dabbling in free range parenting a bit as much as you can for a three and a half year old.
So you're listening to your instincts.
I've never read a parenting book, not knocking them, but I've never read one. Parent by instinct, and our daughter has always had a lot of room to free play and explore and figure stuff out on our own and fall down and get back up and all that stuff.
Okay, I'm reading between the lines. You guys haven't decided yet.
All right, so ready pre range parenting.
Go Okay, So do you remember when we were kids, Chuck, Yeah, back when we used to hang out when we were kids, and we would go ride bikes together at like sunrise. We had no idea where we were going to go, but it might involve a swamp, could involve a glacier. There may have been like rail riding hoboes that we shared lunch with. Who knows what the day was going to bring, but we were up for all that and may or may not have engaged in any of that
during that day. And then at the end of the day, around sunset, maybe a little later, depending on whether it was summer or not, we'd ride our bikes back home, say see you tomorrow, go to our respective houses, and then talk the night away on our soup cans that were connected by a rope.
And that was our childhood, right we turned out me.
Sure, I have talked about my childhood some growing up, but you know, I grew up in the woods basically on like a couple of acres of land with a creek and forest. Not in a subdivision, but on a street with like seven houses in the woods, right, And my mother had a we had this giant iron bell, probably about eighteen inches across on a mounted on a big like a telephone pole.
Yeah, kind of right beside our driveway.
And she would at the you know, when it was dinner time in the evening, she would go pull that bell and you could hear it from like a mile away, this the bell tolling. And that's when Scott and I were like, all right, you know it's time to go eat after having been out all day long with zero supervision. And I had a great mom, Like, she wasn't neglectful. This is just how it was done.
Yeah, were you a latch key kid? I know your mom was a teacher, but did she stay at home with you?
She didn't go back to teaching.
She'd quit teaching to raise kids and then started up again when I was like, I feel like eighth or ninth grade or something like that.
Okay, Yeah, my mom took off until I was.
Like six seven. I guess, like kinder No, maybe she's still around in kindergart. I guess about first grade when I was when I started school and she was like, okay, I'm going back to nursing. And then after that point, I was a last key kid for like the rest
of my life. But I had like older sisters who would be home around the time I would, and but I had like my own key to my house that was just a couple of blocks away from my school, and I would walk myself or ride my bike myself, and then I would be home by myself if my sister was and something else for a couple hours until either my mom or my dad showed up. And I think I turned out pretty well.
Too, so that I even had a house key.
Ever, well, you guys probably didn't lock your doors. If your mom rang a bell on a telephone pole to call you in for dinner.
You know, I don't think we locked our door.
Okay, But but you were.
You had free range literally of your your house, your yard, the woods around you. But here's a really big caveat from what I've seen, I think a lot of people who are like who aren't familiar necessarily free range parenting, assumed that we could have done anything we wanted and gotten away with it because we were we had overly permissive parents. That's not the case for me, and I would dare say that wasn't the case for you as well.
That we actually had plenty of rules and structure. We were just also given a lot of freedom to do things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom.
Right for sure.
Okay, yeah, so that is what I thought all kids had up to this time. And I knew that there was like such things as piano and mandarin lessons or Mandarin classes, that kind of stuff, like things that kids were taking more and more and they were really busy and stressed out, and they had like like iPhones at
age seven, that kind of thing. But I still thought that this happened, And I was really shocked, about as shocked as I've ever been in researching an episode of stuff you should know to find that that is not the case. That not only does has this been kind of squeezed out by other activities, it's actually become criminalized behavior by society at large, among the parents who are raising children today. I was blown away to find this out. I really legitimately didn't know.
Yeah, I mean, and getting back to the activities, you know, I played some soccer in high school, and then I did.
Like church sports, which there's not a lot of.
I mean, I think we did like maybe one basketball practice a week, so it wasn't like every day practice and stuff like that. I never took lessons of any kind. Uh, Like I taught myself guitar and all that stuff. So like, I don't think I literally ever had a structured post school activity in my life.
Yeah, did you say church sports.
Yeah, I played church softball and basketball.
Did like everybody win every game?
No, it was actually fiercely competitive.
Oh okay, I'm just kidding.
No, no, no, it was. It was.
It was legit like we had a pretty good basketball team in the league. Was pretty impressive too. But yeah, I don't, I don't. I never signed it. I never had a single class. Like the idea of my mom having been like, all right, I'm going to take you to your violin lesson, and then on the weekends we have gymnastics and uh, whatever else.
People are doing these days, was just it, just it. We didn't do that. She was just like, go play.
Right.
So, so there has been and we'll talk about all the reasons why, but there has been a movement away from the kind of childhood we had, a very pronounced one. If you, if you look at you know, culture is a pendulum swinging one way or another. It has swung very far the opposite way to where kids' lives are structured down to the minute, where they have actual calendars and schedules that they have to keep up with because
they have so many things going on. And there has come about, in reaction to that, an antithesis basically, and it is nothing more than letting kids grow up the way that you and I did that. And it has become so novel in the face of the world. And the culture that we have in raising kids in the United States, now that it has its own name, it's a movement. They have to go to court to defend themselves.
It's so weird. But really, if you strip it down and look at it, all they're doing is raising their kids the way.
You and I and Jerry I'm sure was raised.
Well, yeah, I mean to a certain degree, but the whole idea, and it's not just like I want you to grow up the way I did. It's what it really is is an argument that says, you know what, kids will grow up healthier and happier if they have freedom to play and they have freedom to fail and freedom to get in a playground scrap and to work it out with another kid on their own and figure things out for themselves. They will end up better people because of this. It's not oh, I'm lazy or I
have nostalgia for my childhood. It's and you know, there's a lot of research into this now or some research that says, no, what we're doing is is trying to make better future adults by not hovering over my child scheduling them to death. And you know, every time they fall, run over, pick themselves up and like and you know, rock them to sleep, you know if they get a booboo.
Right, So I sound so judging.
I don't mean that.
Well, let's let's just take a second. Let's take a break real quick and like collect ourselves and then we'll come back and we'll really get into what free range parenting is.
Well, now we're on the road driving in your truck.
I want to learn a thing or two from josh Am Chuck.
It's stuff you should know.
Should all right, thanks, shot, shot stop?
Okay, Chuck.
So, I think you demonstrated something that is has made free range parenting very unpalatable to a lot of a lot of parents who don't raise their kids that way. And then it seems to be a react, almost in your face to some people, reaction or judgment of that helicopter style parenting where you're always kind of around your kid.
Their entire life is very structured and supervised, including playtime, and that free range parenting is meant to be a reaction to that, and in some ways it is a reaction to that, but it also stands on its own and if you step back and look at it and look at free range parenting not as a reaction to helicopter parenting, but as its own thing, is its own philosophy for how to raise a kid, and you strip away like.
The judginess and all that stuff. It holds up to me.
And like you said, there's been a lot of a lot more study recently, but the whole thing really started back in two thousand and eight by a journalist. It wasn't a child psychologist. It wasn't a child development psychologist. It wasn't a child development, child analyst, psychologist, none of those things that made that last one up, by the way, it was a journalist named Leonora Skenazi.
Yeah, so she is a New York mom. In two thousand and eight, she wrote a column for The New York Sun called Why I let my nine year old ride the subway alone. She was in a store one day in Manhattan and her son had been badgering her to be able to ride the subway and bus back home by himself. And finally one day she said, all right, great, let's do this. Here's a subway map, here's a subway card, here's twenty bucks, here's some change for a payphone.
Have at it.
The kid made it home, and she said he was quote ecstatic with independence.
What great.
Yeah, And like she got a lot of blowback from this from like the judgment goes both ways. I mean there were people that said it was neglect and abuse for her to do this and let her kid ride the subway alone.
Oh oh yes, Yeah.
If you had to divide the two sides up and start weighing which one was a little judgi or you would definitely your hand would be much lower holding the helicopter parents side, for sure. Yeah, if you're a free range kid proponent or you raise your kids following that, there's a whole burden, whole social burden that you have in addition to the burden of raising your kids that you have to put up with, for sure.
Yeah, and I should point out too real quick that it all depends upon your kids too. I don't think there are any sweeping generalizations. Sure, my daughter has always been very just instinctively kind of safe and smart about stuff. Ye other kids in her class are just like little wild banshees, And I would probably be a lot more worried if she was the kind of kid who has an instinct to like jump out of a tree instead of like back down very slowly out of a tree.
So right, it's all different depending on your kid.
Or a kid who like can't seem to shake being totally fascinated with matches or knives.
Or something like that. Yeah, I think that was a.
Really good point, Like it's you shouldn't sweep or generalize, But I think that's an even larger point too, people should be left to raise their children how they see fit.
Yeah, given a.
Certain amount of.
Trust invested in the parents, that the parent isn't going to harm the kid or let harm come to the kid because it's their parent, right right. Okay, So this whole thing started with Lenor Skins, and like you said, she got a lot of blowback, but she also got a really positive response too, and actually parlayed the whole thing from that New York Sun article into a blog that she called Free Range Kids. So, from what I understand, she coined the term free range kids and started writing
about this stuff. And at first a lot of it was just like it's it's good. It's on its face, it's obvious that this is you should raise a kid. You know, kids need play, they need to learn how to pick themselves back up when they fall down. And not only that, you're doing a disservice to your kid when you pick them up after they fall down, because
they're not learning how to get back up themselves. And over time it kind of went as people became more and more enamored with her philosophy or this whole free range kids idea.
More child psychologists.
Started weighing in, and the whole movement kind of took the shape and they figured out that for a parent to kind of see the light as they as far as they were concerned, they had to first change the mindset about what kind of world they were raising a kid in, because if you're a free range kid parent, you probably don't feel as threatened by the world in general as say a helicopter parent would.
Ounce for ounce, Yeah for sure.
I mean when parents have experimented with this, the changes that they've seen in their kids has been pretty striking, if anecdotal. There's this one woman, Dana Bloomberg. She's a school counselor in suburban Chicago. We should also point out depends on where you live as well. If you live in a very safe suburb or way out in the country, it's a little different than a kid like in the
middle of the city or something like that. But she gave her kid a lot of free range starting in the second grade and got some neighborhood parents involved in letting their kids do it. And they said, before you know it, they had this little, you know, little gang of kids kind of touring around the neighborhood, are on their own and she's getting all these texts from these different parents saying like, what a big change has happened
in their own kid. One parent even said it was life changing for her daughter, gave her a nuisance of confidence, and that's sort of what the free range thing can look like. But like you were saying, it all comes down to assuaging appearance fear, the biggest fear, which is my child will get abducted, or my child will get there will be a sexual predator to target my child, or heaven forbid, my child will get kidnapped and murdered.
Right, because you can understand and it's really tough to fault somebody who doesn't want their kid wandering around by themselves because they're afraid that something really bad is going to happen to their kid. So kind of the first step to adopting like a free range kid attitude is to adjusting how you see the world. And they think they think that with that, there are several things like
if you it's really fascinating to me. I love cultural changes, especially when we can point to different things, seemingly unrelated things that all kind of converge and has changed the world in ways you never think of that seems to have happened to produce today's helicopter parents, at least, to produce the level of fear, the climate of fear that the world is an inherently dangerous, brutal, sadistic place where
children have no call to be wandering around themselves. That that is actually you can trace that back to a convergence of things that have happened starting in like the late seventies and early eighties, and in particular there was some high profile child murder cases basically that all kind of took place between nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty one, and those really changed a lot of parents' minds about things.
Yeah, in New York, the very sad story of six year old Eton Pats disappeared and was later found out to have been murdered. John Wall very famously his son Adam. He's the one that does all the TV shows now, I think he's on the Hunt on CNN now and really made this his life's work. But his son Adam disappeared and died in nineteen eighty one. Obviously, the Atlanta child murders from seventy nine to eighty one, and this all converged around the same time, Like you were talking
about these strange things aligning cable news coming out. CNN was launched in nineteen eighty, so all of a sudden, you have parents that are getting this kind of constant flow of fear from the news about their children.
Right, Because so if a prior to cable news twenty four hour news, if something happened to a kid somewhere in some state, maybe if it were just particularly egregious or outrageous or everything was kind of set up in just the right way, it would capture the attent to the national media and you would hear about it around the country.
But that was really really rare.
And then second to that, the other place that you would hear about child abduction's, child murders, horrific like accidents that befell a child would be locally right like on your local news that maybe maybe expanded to a region, maybe the state, but it was pretty localized. And so if statistically something like that happened fairly rarely, you weren't going to hear about it very often, and so in your mind it was a pretty rare thing, and you
weren't afraid of the world in general. But what a lot of commentators and a lot of well some of the people I ran across in research propose is that with cable news, that potential pool of horrible things that befell kids to talk about expanded to the entire nation, not just local, not just a regional or even state, but the whole nation. So now all the bad things happening to all the kids around the nation was potential
news fodder. And so when you were watching CNN, it seems like every other story was about a kid who had been abducted and killed, or sexually assaulted, or any number of horrible things. And there's really no way to put it other than that that kind of stuff keeps people glued to their televisions, and so it's really in the best interests of news networks like CNN to feed people that, because while you're glued to your television, you're
also glued to the ads that they show too. And so from this model came a climate of fear that a lot of people point to is like, this is the source, and it's not just CNN. CNN gets pointed to because it was the one that started it all. That was Ted Turner, who came up with this and
started the first twenty four hour cable news network. But all cable news is guilty of this, and became guilty of it pretty quickly because that's the model of cable news, and because cable news laid that foundation and showed like, oh you got that kind of you can really.
Make some revenue.
Nightly News tried its best to resist that kind of thing, but it kind of had to follow suit a little bit too, so it would become more sensational from the eighties onward as well, not nearly anything like cable news, but compared to how it had been before, it was much more sensationalized because it was following that cable news model.
And all that put together created the foundation of why people are just scared to death about the world because we think that it's way more dangerous than it actually is, because the statistics are inflated by hearing about this stuff all the time.
Yeah, and there's another couple of things that contributed that Skinnesy has pointed out. One, we live in what she dubs an expert society. So again on cable news or on social media, like everywhere you turn, there's another expert coming out with a new book they're trying to sell basically telling you how you're doing it wrong as a parent, how you should do it, and then the whole fact
that we live in a very litigious society. Now, so what if I want a free range parent my kid and they go down and get their friend out of the house and they're riding bikes and one of them gets hurt, Like, are their parents going to sue me because my kid went and lured them into the mean streets?
Right?
Well, yeah, that was another thing that happened, Chuck. In the seventies, the idea of negligence became really big, and there's what's called like a torte revolution to where you went from well you know your kid was your kid didn't know the other kid's arm was gonna get broken, so you can't get sued for that, to no, that was negligent and we're going to allow that and more and more case law expanded to to make people think like lawyers because of it too.
When you were a kid, was I mean that must have been a thing, because did you ever have the lawsuit threat from another child?
Yeah, that was such a.
Thing, Like, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna kick your butt or whatever.
You're like, Oh yeah, well, my dad's gonna sue you for all the money you got.
That's right, he's a dentist.
It's so funny, man, to think back in the seventies, these children threatening lawsuits.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about that, for like ripping their shirt or something. Oh yeah, any number of things could could generate a lot to you.
Yeah.
But in the end, Scanesy says, and this is I think a pretty relevant quote. She said, all of this stuff combined has convinced parents that they have to be both omniscient and omnipotent because of fear, and monitor every single move.
That your kid makes.
So let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the the facts about whether or not your kids are really in danger out on the streets. Right after this, well, now we're on the road, driving in your truck.
Want to learn a thing or two from Josh Pam Chuck.
It's stuff you should know.
Should all right, shoe stop, shine.
All right, Chuck.
So, like we were saying, to not be just scared to death because you're letting your kids, say, walk home from the park or something like that. Unsupervised, you you have to go through a change of mindset, like you have to stop seeing, Uh, the world is a very very scary place, and sometimes statistics can be actually kind
of comforting. So the Free Range Kids movement has really, you know, made one of its foundational support polls, and you think I would actually be getting better at this all this time, but no, you.
Stumble through something like that.
Anyway, they talk a lot about statistics and crime statistics related to kids in particular, and when you look at them in the cold, hard light of the day, it doesn't seem like it's a very dangerous world after all.
Right, if you look at the numbers, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that just one percent of the twenty seven thousand missing children cases are non family abductions, and that also includes like friends and acquaintances. So if you're talking about literally a stranger targeting your child and plucking them off a playground, it is exceedingly rare that that happens.
Yeah, And so one percent is non family, right.
Right, But that also doesn't even break down like if it's a friend or an acquaintance of a family or something like that. So little strangers snatching your kid rarely, rarely, rarely happens.
Yeah.
So even that, even including like friends of the family, somebody who's not a direct family member but known to the kid, a non stranger, that's two hundred and seventy kids that that happened to in twenty seventeen out of twenty twenty seven thousand, I think, which is that's awful for those kids that they were kidnapped right there. That's another thing too, is when you throw out statistics like this, it's really easy to be like, see, that was it, But you don't want to do that because to those
two hundred and seventy families, that's all that matters. And that's really important to remember as well when we're kind of tossing out these statistics too.
Yeah, and not to make light of family abductions, which is sure, you know ninety one percent of abductions, those are horrific and traumatic as well. Yeah, we're just talking about the bare bones of like the fear that if I let my kid go to a park, is strangers going to pluck them?
Right right?
So so even that even if you look at it's twenty seven thousand out of all the kids in the United States in twenty seventeen, twenty seven thousand of them went missing in twenty seventeen, and the vast majority of them ran away.
So if you're worried.
That your kid is going to get plucked by a stranger, specifically out of a park somewhere, because you let them go to the park with the free range parenting, people are saying, if you look at the statistics, the chances of that are so small that it's actually not worth limiting your kid's freedom of movement because of that outlier possibility. It just doesn't It's a disproportionate response to that risk, is what they're saying.
Right, If you want to talk about the worst thing that you can imagine, which is a child murder, from nineteen eighty to two thousand and eight, statistics about murders of children under five years old, sixty three percent of the time the parents are the ones who did it, followed by twenty three percent, so that's eighty six percent total. Twenty three percent are male acquaintances like you know, mom's boyfriend or something like that, right, uh seven percent, or
other relatives. So only three percent of all murders of young children are strangers, right, So again and again dressing we're addressing the fear of strangers doing something to your child, not making light of these other statistics.
And there are parents out there who are like, good, that's enough. That's the fact that it happens to one kid makes me want to protect my child and make sure that they don't do that. Okay, you're the parent, You're you're raising your kid in that way.
I understand.
Yeah, But again, what the what the free range kids people are saying is like, like, is it really worth that? Like what what about that is?
Is?
I mean, is really worth that kind of a response? And we'll get to we'll get to that, because you could say, like, if there were no negative aspects of completely ensconcing your kid and protection, then the free range kids advocates didn't have anything. They could be like, Okay, well whatever, that's what you're doing with your kid. But there's suspicions that they that actually is detrimental to the development of a kid, protecting them from everything at all costs.
And I think that's one of the big other foundational platform post tenants of the free range kids thing.
That one was for showing off.
All right, So building on that, like you were saying, there, there has to be like in order to get a parent on board with a free range parenting lifestyle. It's not just I want to be lazy or I want to go back to my childhood. It's a parent who thinks there are actual benefits to doing so right and that that outweighs the risk, like you were saying, of the three percent chance or the one percent or the point five percent chance that something's going to happen to
my kid if they're on their own. There is evidence, and it's growing and growing evidence that all these efforts to schedule all these activities for your kid are overlooking one big fundamental element of raising a healthy, well adjusted child that seems to be getting lost more and more, which is something called free play. The American Academy of Pediatrics has to report out that said that free play promotes social sorry, social.
I like it. That's the new way of saying.
Social, emotional, cognitive, language, and self regulation skills that build executive function and a pro social brain. And play is fundamentally important for learning twenty first century skills like problem solving, collaboration, and creativity and executive functioning.
Skills that are critical for adult success.
Right, And they threw that last one in to be like, well, okay, maybe plays good, but it's not going to help them in life, and they're saying, yes, it will actually help them in life, and that by keeping them from playing,
you're basically creating a little adult from the nursery. Which is interesting to be Chuck, because prior to the nineteenth century, when you were a kid, starting around age five or something, you had a job, if it wasn't around like your family's farm, maybe you were helping out with the wash that your mom took in who knows, But then you like, there was no such thing as childhood really, and then
we moved away from that and we developed childhood. And now it seems like we're moving away from childhood now and we're taking kids and they're not working on the farm. We're making them little CEOs and marketing directors and brand managers and stuff like that. But they're they're losing their childhood in that bargain, as I think what they're saying and from play specifically, play helps, but it helps also like just in and of itself for its own sake,
but it also helps eventually down the road. It's an investment that will pay off, I think in terms that helicopter parents can understand.
Yeah, there's another guy named Peter Gray. He's a developmental psychologist. He has a book called Free to Learn and founded a nonprofit I Believe with Yes Scannesey called let Grow.
A little play on words there.
Yes, and he basically says that, you know, if you look back through human evolution, children.
Their education was through play with their peers.
And if you look at societies and cultures in the world today that I mean, how would you classify these.
Cultures traditional societies.
I'm not sure maybe, but they say that that children of these cultures that still play and explore freely, if they're left to do that, they will do so into their teen years. Like that is their natural instinct is to be among their peers, free playing.
Right, and so, like, I think one of the problems that helicopter parents have with the idea of play is that like, it's a waste of time. The kid could be learning like cello or you know, doing math flash cards, or like creating a better foundation for a better future for themselves, and that if they're not doing that, they're falling behind. And so what Peter Gray and some of his ilk are saying is like no.
No, no.
Play helps develop a child in ways that no other thing you could possibly come up with their supervisor get them to do can because this is what we've done all this time, and this is how we've built society is letting little kids play and figure things out on their own. And he says that if there's a parent around, if it's supervised, if there's a parent even within like eyesight or earshotter, you know there's a parent watching, it's
going to be different. It has to be unsupervised, unstructured play so that the kids can be left to make up their own rules, can be taught by the group that you know, actually, no, that's not really fair, or it's not really cool to take the ball and go home because you aren't winning. That's how you learn that stuff, and those are good things to learn. That makes you a more socially well adjusted kid. Then probably learning cello is going to.
Well yeah, I mean you can try and teach your kid by showing and by telling as much as you can as a parent, and that is all valuable, but nothing will teach a lesson to a kid, like learning it through experience with their peers, right, Like I remember myself, you know, when I was a kid, Like the biggest lessons I learned were lessons that I learned among my peer group, you know, like tough, hard lessons that a lot of parents, I think try and even shield their
kid from because it's tough stuff sometimes. But and you know, you don't want your kid to suffer traumas and things like that. But and not to sound like a parent from the nineteen fifties, but that stuff does help build your child's character. And I mean, I guess that sounds old school. What it does is it helps them learn how to regulate their emotions and how to fit in with their peer group, which is in turn going to be eventually just society at large.
Right.
It's funny you say that that sounds kind of fifties, because this whole idea of like free range kids is kind of based on that philosophy of doctor Spock, who was like one of the first experts, one of the first child experts that America ever really paid attention to.
And he wrote a book in nineteen forty six called The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child, And he basically is saying all the stuff that free range kid's parents say is like, let your kid play, let your kid like learn through their own their own way of like exploring the world, like, let them take risks, let them be themselves. Trust your in stinks as a parent. And so that's what Frewen's parents seem to be kind of getting back to, is like the doctor Spock school
of thought. Benjamin Spock, not the other.
Spock, not live long and Prosperouspock.
Did he have a first name?
Oh? I don't know, man, I didn't watch a Star Trek.
I didn't either.
Just lay it on a million people who are going to send the email.
We're waiting.
There's something called the internal external Locus of Control scale. It's an odd name, but this has been around since the nineteen sixties. It's a psychological indicator scale. And these days, since the nineteen sixties, there's been a big shift in the scale and how teens report themselves and their internal control. And today teens report very little internal control over their
own lives. And Gray believes and I think he's really onto something here that these high levels of anxiety and depression among kids these days has a lot to do with that, and nethings is directly related to the decline and free play over the last you know, forty or fifty years, right.
Which I want to say, like, this is like one psychologist's opinion. It makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm sure it does to a lot of people. But there's you know, this is not necessarily like like
gospel truth or set in Stone. It's the jury is still kind of out, but there's a lot of evidence out there that does seem like overprotecting your kid can stunt them emotionally or developmentally, and then letting them go be themselves and learn things on their own and learn that they can pick themselves back up and still survive and failure is not the worst thing in the world,
can actually help them develop. This is It's just like we routinely shoot holes in social psychology stuff all the time, and we do it gleefully. So I don't want to like go the opposite way and just be like, but this one's right because we agree with it. Yeah, that's not necessarily the case, and I'm sure a lot of people disagree with it, But I tend to kind of favor that mentality, probably because that's how I was raised.
Yeah, and like I said, it does sound like I'm from the nineteen fifties say that failure breeds character, but you know, it really does, is sort of a simplistic way to say it. But when you fail, you hopefully learn something and build on that, and that does build character.
Right.
So one of the really.
One of the things they call that is the dignity of risk, where you are showing your kid, I'm I'm letting you go figure this out on your own. And another big misunderstanding with free range parents is that that you just go from like zero to walking, you know, taking the subway in New York, at the flip of a switch. That's not how it works. You slowly build your kid up for this, you know, the big thing
that you write an article about. But there's you know, dozens or scores or possibly hundreds of little little interactions that you're having to kind of make sure that your kid is up for this when they're finally when you decide they're finally ready to And it's not just like flipping a switch. It's very kind of thoughtful and protracted and planned, but not necessarily shared with the kid. That's planned paying out of trust so that the kid can show you, Yeah, I'm ready for this, I know what
to do. I'm not just going to like ball up on this on the ground in the subway and start crying until someone calls nine on one and the cops come get me.
Well.
Yeah, And I'm sure when she sent her kid on the subway home that very first time, it wasn't just like all right, here's the stuff, see you later. I'm sure there was a very serious talk like all right, dude, I trust you. I'm letting you do this. I know you know the way. We're going to give this a shot. If I see you on the news in the middle of Times Square like you're going to be in big trouble. I'm sure there was a lot of thought and talk that went into that.
And you know what.
I'm saying, Yeah, totally.
And kids get that stuff. You know, for sure.
Kids are smarter than people give them credit for a lot of times. I think it's interesting when it comes to the law because it's such a new thing in Utah. Last year in twenty eighteen, it became the first state to pass what was called a free range parenting law where it basically was just sort of redefining what child neglect was. And in Utah, I thought it was going to go the other way when I was reading this, but it actually went the way of sort of encouraging
or being behind free range parenting. The new definition a parent cannot be accused of neglect just because their kid is going to a store by themselves that's down the street, or playing outside alone, or biking to school on their own, or at home without a parent there if they're a minor, which is pretty interesting.
Yeah, I thought so too, but most free range parents are like, well, we don't want to live in Utah. So hopefully our states will all come up with similar laws that decriminalize free range parenting because in a lot of states, things like latch key kids are illegal, like you can have your kid taken from you if they are a latch key kid under a certain age. I think in Washington you have to be fourteen to be left at home alone, like you could.
Lose your kid.
And so there's a real problem with trying free range parenting because part of this helicopter parenting society is also helicopter villaging. But rather than picking up the phone and calling the parents whose kids you see wandering alone down the street like you used to.
Would have done.
Now people just pick up the phone and call the cops, and then the cops respond and they take the kid to child protective services and the parent has to go down and explain that they will never do this again and they're very very sorry, or else child protective services will take their kid from them because most states rule on what's called the best interests of the child, which is totally subjective, is completely not based in any actual
case law. Necessarily, it's just does the child protective services person think that that the kid is smart enough to walk from the playground to the house. No, okay, well we're taking your kid, maybe permanently. And so it's really risky to raise your kid this way because people will call the cops if they see your kid walking down
the street and real trouble. Your parent ship of your kid is in jeopardy at that moment, which has got to be one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a parent.
Yeah, and this is where kind of we get back to the place of like this is a privilege, has a lot to do with this because when it comes to the law and children and child protective services, you are way more likely to get a visit from child protective services if you are poor, or if you're a person of color or minority, like they may write an article about you in the local magazine praising you if you're like a white suburban parent of middle or upper
middle class for letting your kid free range around. But in the case of like Deborah Harrel in twenty fourteen in South Carolina, she wasn't like, oh, I want to be a free range parent. She's like, I am a working mom, and I work at McDonald's and I'm finishing a shift and my nine year old daughter is playing in a park nearby until I'm done. And they sent her to jail for a night and took her daughter for two weeks away from her.
Yees seventeen days.
Yeah, so it is very much a case of privilege to even be allowed to do this without getting a visit from child protective services.
Right, So Scanazy and some of the other free range parents say, right, this is why we need laws that are much more common sense and decriminalize this kind of behavior and put the trust back in parents to know that their kids are smart enough, or if they think their kids aren't smart enough to be trusted with that
kind of stuff, they wouldn't let them do that. They argue that this would benefit everybody, whether no matter you know, whether you're a minority or whatever socioeconomic status you have, which is which is true, that's a pretty it's a pretty sensible it's sensible. But I think that that kind of underscores a larger problem, which is, you know, like some people don't have the choice to to get childcare. If the school suddenly cancels class, like you just.
Can't afford it, what are you going to do?
And then your your work says, well, you can't bring them here, this is work.
You know what, what can you do?
Hopefully you've raised your kid to a point where you can trust them to go play, you know, next door at the playground or something like that. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to end up in trouble with with the So it's a sticky, sticky situation that we're in.
Two it is, and you know, again, it depends on your kid, It depends on where you live. Like in my brother's neighborhood, if I live there. I would let my kid go out and do what she wanted when she was like seven. It's just so safe, and kids are everywhere on their own doing stuff, very much like it was when we were kids.
At my house, I.
Live next to a super scary busy street. Like I would never let her out of the front of my house. But even at three and a half, we let her go in the backyard by herself and do stuff all the time, right, I mean, just this past weekend, she was out in the backyard and with the dogs, and I went out. About half an hour later, she was walking through the garden with a watering can, singing we will rock you. And I was like, all right, everything's fine.
But again, she's in my enclosed backyard. I wasn't sweating it.
I would.
I would never just open the front door and be like, go have fun. Memorial drives right there, cars are going sixty miles an hour.
But that's the point.
It's all context, you know, Like you would have had to have worked up to that point. She would have had to have shown you that she was able to be trusted with that busy street. And maybe she'd be sixteen before you would. But that's that's the point. It's all it's context, you know.
Yeah, you know again, just do the best you can. It's hard.
There are a thousand ways to do it, and everybody thinks their way is the right way.
That's right.
Also, just before we sign off, I want to say I didn't mean to pick on kids who take cello lessons. Cello is, by the way, my favorite stringed instrument, which means it was the one that was easiest called to mind. That's why I kept bringing up the cello. So all of you out there learning cello, hats off to you because that's my favorite string instrument.
Yeah what if? What if yo Ma had just been free playing?
Right?
But I'll bet Yoyoma did free play. I'll bet he did both. And if he didn't, I'll bet he regrets it. If you want to know more about free range kids, we'll just go on the internet and start reading because there's a lot about it. And since I said that, Oh, also, there's a pretty good article on how stuff work you can read too. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this desert flooding. Hey, guys, listen to the podcast. This morning on Desert Survival. And I live here in Phoenix, Arizona and have for nineteen years. And the flash flood issue is real even in Metro Phoenix. They have a stupid motorist law here and that's capitalized and end quotes. She said, and she said after and during her heavy rains, a lot of washes fill with running water. A lot of the washes have been paved. Barriers will be put up when they flood, even if
the water is only a few inches deep. But there is always someone who decides that their suv or truck is hepty enough to get through, and their rescue is always on the nightly news man because they have to pay for it. They actually have to pay for the cost of their rescue. Sometimes these dare devils don't fare too well. Actually, lives have been lost and less than a foot of moving water in a watch.
Yeah, I believe that I've heard six inches.
Yeah, And Teresa Henberry closes by saying this, I do so enjoy your podcast.
Nice, Thank you, Teresa. We do so enjoy your emails too.
Yes, I like the way she put that.
Yeah, if you want to be like Teresa and impress us with your verbal or written dexterity.
We love that kind of stuff.
You can go to stuff youshould Know dot com and you can look us up on the social links. You can also send us a podcast like Teresa did to stuff podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.