Overparenting & Bad Public Policy (with Lenore Skenazy)
If you try to prevent every possible danger in your child’s everyday life, they will never get a chance to grow up.
Lenore Skenazy let her son ride the metro by himself at the age of nine after studying the map with him in order to prepare. Unbeknownst to her, this caused great unrest and scrutiny from a variety of parenting groups, so much so that she decided to write a book and start a project on letting your kid grow to be self-reliant.
Should children ride the NYC subway by themselves? When did children stop having unsupervised and unstructured time? What did ‘strange danger’ do to change the way we parent? What are the consequences of over-parenting?
Further Reading:
Let Grow Website, founded by Jonathan Haidt, Peter Gray, Lenore Skenazy, and Daniel Schuchman
The Fragile Generation, written by Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), written by Lenore Skenazy
Jonathan Haidt Lets His 9-Year-Old Daughter Walk to School Alone for the First Time
Let Grow project
Related Content:
The Coddling of the American Mind, Free Thoughts Podcast
Conformist Students Fear Disagreement, written by Natalie Dowzicky