Home Alone

[music]

0:00:01.9 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke, I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:04.7 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m Natalie Dowzicky. John Hughes is best known for his coming-​of-​age comedies, 16 Candles, The Breakfast Club and the National Lampoon movies. But in 1990, 8-​year-​old Kevin McCallister was accidentally left home in Winnetka, Illinois, when his entire family flew to Paris for a Christmas time getaway. It seemed like he was living every kid’s dream. Here today to talk about the classic holiday movie, Home Alone, is the president of Let Grow, and the founder of the Free-​Range Kids movement, Lenore Skenazy.

0:00:34.8 Lenore Skenazy: Hello there.

0:00:35.8 Natalie Dowzicky: And the director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Michael Cannon.

0:00:39.1 Michael Cannon: Great to be back.

0:00:41.3 Landry Ayres: Is Kevin McCallister a hero in this movie? Because he does a lot of things in his treatment of the Wet Bandits, as they refer to themselves, that I think is justified as defense of himself and his home, but is there a turn to sadistic torture and sort of disturbed behavior that we might sort of look upon with shock in a child? While it might be legal, what he did, was what he did ethical, was it the right thing?

0:01:17.0 Michael Cannon: It’s hard to say whether it would be… Some of it might not have been legal. You learn in law school that if someone slips on your walk, you’re liable, and here’s Kevin out there on a freezing cold night, watering down the sidewalk, the steps, and especially the stairs to the basement door because he wants to trip up these burglars. So now there might be an exception… There might be a self-​defense exception there, but some of it is arguably illegal. But no, I think that they were always after him, and at the end, they were trying to… They were threatening to bite off his fingers and do all sorts of things to him. They weren’t just after the stuff in the house, they were invading the house in order to do harm to him as well, and so I think you could probably… And let’s be honest, no jury is gonna convict Kevin McCallister for what he did to the Wet Bandits.

[chuckle]

0:02:22.8 Lenore Skenazy: Convict him for just being too cute at that age. So, and Cannon, aren’t you health policy guy?

0:02:29.5 Michael Cannon: That’s right.

0:02:30.5 Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, so how do you know… Did you go to law school? How do you know all this liability stuff?

0:02:36.1 Michael Cannon: Yes, I did.

0:02:37.1 Lenore Skenazy: You did, okay.

0:02:38.1 Michael Cannon: Yeah.

0:02:38.4 Lenore Skenazy: Answered. There you go.

0:02:39.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Cannon, I want the expert opinion on why all of the attacks that Kevin McCallister implemented, how come they didn’t do more damage? I have seen… There are article after article… I was reading this article on Vice that went through every injury that the Wet Bandits [chuckle] had or their injuries, and then it was like, “They should have gone to the hospital. They wouldn’t have survived this.” And then people actually have tried some of Kevin’s booby traps in real life. [chuckle] That’s how much… This is like…

0:03:14.8 Lenore Skenazy: That’s like getting an anvil and seeing if you can hoist it out of a top window and see if you can crush somebody below or a piano. It’s like, I don’t think you should take your tips from anything too Acme-​like, anything with “Acme” on the side.

[chuckle]

0:03:31.4 Michael Cannon: Right. So I was… It reminded of another Christmas movie, Die Hard. If you recall in Die Hard…

0:03:40.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Stop. [laughter]

0:03:43.7 Michael Cannon: In both movies, you’ve got characters stepping on glass, and in Die Hard, there’s a very realistic portrayal of what happens when you’ve got glass shards in your bare… In the soles of your bare feet, whereas in Home Alone, one of the Wet Bandits steps on Christmas ornaments and gets these shards of glass jammed up in his feet, but then he just… Oh, and also he steps on a nail, I should also mention.

0:04:10.7 Lenore Skenazy: Rusty.

0:04:10.9 Michael Cannon: But then just walks around without a limp, without wincing in pain with every step, he got up pretty quickly after getting hit in the face with an iron that had fallen maybe 14 feet.

0:04:23.0 Lenore Skenazy: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait Cannon. It sounds like you’re suggesting that certain small elements of this movie were perhaps unbelievable or wasn’t authentic?

0:04:34.4 Michael Cannon: Oh yeah. It would be neat to see the autopsy report on someone who actually suffered all of the injuries that the Wet Bandits suffered because…

0:04:44.6 Lenore Skenazy: That would be a lot of fun, yeah.

0:04:46.0 Michael Cannon: They probably wouldn’t survive.

0:04:46.1 Lenore Skenazy: That would really make your holiday really happy. “I wonder what if these things would really happen? What would it be like in the emergency room if they had to painstakingly remove each shard of glass from the fleshy part of the foot?” Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking like a health policy guy now.

0:05:00.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Or what the bill would look like, right? We only know…

0:05:02.8 Lenore Skenazy: That’s right.

[chuckle]

0:05:03.4 Michael Cannon: Oh, it would be millions of dollars.

0:05:05.4 Lenore Skenazy: And the thing is, you’d never know before you went in, is the truth.

[chuckle]

0:05:09.4 Michael Cannon: It depends on whether it’s in-​network, out-​of-​network, whether you’re insured, whether you’re not insured.

0:05:12.9 Lenore Skenazy: And it’s a holiday weekend. That’s tough.

0:05:14.2 Michael Cannon: You didn’t know this was scripted to be… It ended up being a health policy podcast, but now it is.

0:05:18.9 Lenore Skenazy: I would guess that everything with you might be. [chuckle]

0:05:22.1 Landry Ayres: Well, Lenore, since we were talking and sort of going towards Cannon’s specialty there, I maybe will pivot more to something that you consider yourself more of an expert in. Do you think that sort of the concept of Kevin being left alone, being left to his own devices, and having free rein over this palatial mansion in suburban Chicago, is this something that his parents needed to worry about? Because you’ve got his mom on one side, played by the phenomenal as always.

0:06:00.0 Lenore Skenazy: Amazing.

0:06:00.2 Landry Ayres: Catherine O’Hara, and she’s panicked and rushing home, hitching a ride with John Candy and the polka band out of Milwaukee, and then there’s Kevin’s dad, who basically is like, “Well, you know, there’s probably some money stashed somewhere, he’ll be fine.”

0:06:17.0 Natalie Dowzicky: We’ll get there when we get there.

0:06:20.0 Landry Ayres: So is one of them more right than the other, is there a sort of line in between that is like the best thing for Kevin? What’s your take on that sort of uncertain conflict in the movie?

0:06:34.7 Lenore Skenazy: Well, let’s look at the facts. Certainly it launched Kevin’s career.

[chuckle]

0:06:40.2 Lenore Skenazy: He had a good, long run since then. I don’t actually know what he’s up to now. And what I would really worry about as the mom or the dad is government intervention for having left a child home alone. I’m dealing… Today, I’m writing a piece for Reason, just today, about another holiday incident, this was last year, a mom in Tucson, Arizona, had to go get a turkey for, guess what, Thanksgiving, and people gotta get it. It’s as simple as that. You don’t have a choice if you wanna have a big meal with your family. And she had her seven-​year-​old with her and his buddy who’s five. And it’s COVID, and so she doesn’t wanna take ‘em into the grocery, because you’re not supposed to expose them to COVID, and you don’t want them to possibly exposing anybody else if, God forbid, they have it. This was last year, there was no vaccine or anything.

0:07:29.4 Lenore Skenazy: And so she says, “Well, why don’t you guys wait here?” And she takes ‘em to a park near the grocery where she used to play as a kid. And her friend is teaching a tai chi class there, another friend is walking her dog there, and she tells the kids, “Just stay in this one little area. I’ll be back when I get the turkey.” She goes to the store, and the next thing you know, the tai chi lady is running into the store, looking for her, saying, “Guess what?” Her name is Shay. “Guess what, Shay? There’s police talking to your kid over at the park. Come on.” And so they race back to the park, and sure enough, there’s two cops, and they say, “Did you leave these kids here?” It’s like, “Yeah, ’cause I had to get the turkey, and I like this park, and it’s safe.” And they’re like, “Oh no, it’s not safe. Oh no. Forget it.” And they arrest her for endangering… What is it? Criminal endangerment of a child. And one of them says, “No child is allowed to be unsupervised until they’re 18.”

0:08:23.0 Natalie Dowzicky: I’m sorry. What?

0:08:23.9 Lenore Skenazy: Which turns out to be… Yeah, right, right, right. A bald-​faced lie. In fact, the charges are… She’s literally charged with this crime. And the rationale for it is that a child could have been, and then you go through all the things that it really sounds like almost a Home Alone laundry list. It’s like, He could have been abducted, they could have been murdered, they could have taken drugs, they could have been put in a white van. And it’s like, Are you allowed to just dream up any almost die-​hard-​like scenario and arrest me, because my mind wasn’t going to movies like that, and my mind did not immediately go to an action movie? And so they ended up doing a plea bargain, where she could have gone to jail for a year. They’re worried about her not supervising her kids for, I don’t know, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, but instead, they’re threatening to take her away from her kids for a year. That’s a year of non-​supervision. Or she could go take a parenting class.

0:09:25.2 Lenore Skenazy: And so, I think as I would, she takes the plea bargains, and says, “Okay, I’m guilty,” takes the parenting class. And the parenting class turns out to be not for parents. It’s for anybody that they arrested in recent days, including somebody who’d shaked her cell phone at a policeman in anger, and somebody else who had been in a hair salon and ended up pulling the ladies hair ’cause they got into an argument. So it doesn’t sound like a big-​time, like, This is how you express attachment, and this is how you do a time-​out. It was just a class, and all the teacher taught them, and I actually think it’s probably a very good lesson, is how to approach a policeman. How not to get in a fight with a policeman.

0:10:00.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Oh my gosh.

[laughter]

0:10:01.0 Lenore Skenazy: And so she takes it, and you’d think that’d be it. But now she is facing charges from… The police handed over to Child Protective Services, and they are saying the same thing, that she put the children in danger of this, that and the other. And unless she can prove her innocence against things that didn’t happen, she will be put on what’s known as a child abuse register, all the states have them. It’s like a sex offence registry, except it’s private. So when you talk about what’s Catherine O’Hara racing back, I would be racing back, hoping like, “Please let me get there before the cops, please let me get there before Child Protective Services,” because that’s a whole can of worms that bandits have nothing on them.

0:10:40.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Also, realistically speaking, I was wondering this watching the film more recently. ’cause remember they’re calling the police from the airport in Paris, and they’re calling all these people trying to get someone to check on Kevin at home, and they’re being…

0:10:53.4 Lenore Skenazy: Don’t call the police.

0:10:54.4 Natalie Dowzicky: They’re being… Yeah, exactly. That’s why I was like, “Don’t call the police.” They’re going through all these obstacles to try and get someone to check on Kevin. It’s almost like no one cares. But wouldn’t CPS be on this like white on rice, if someone called…

0:11:11.8 Lenore Skenazy: Actually, there is… You wanna keep hearing stories? I’ll keep telling you stories. There was a mom who was living in Texas, and she had to go, believe it or not, to Kuwait for a weekend, because she was thinking of moving the family there, her husband was deployed near there, he was in the military. And her older daughter was 15, and her son was 12. And she made exactly this thing, like a million arrangements. So in the morning when her son had to be taken to school, it would be… He’d be taken by the neighbor across the way. In the afternoon, her daughter who’s 15 and homeschools herself online, because she’d traveled around so much as an Army brat, takes care of the neighbor’s kids. And at night, the neighbors… The neighbor… The parents of those kids would sort of check in on the girl and her brother, and make sure everything was okay.

0:11:56.4 Lenore Skenazy: And the mom really trusted something, which was her friends, her community, her kids. She knew them all, and she made it work. And the kids didn’t wanna come to Kuwait. She was actually willing to take them to Kuwait. And that’s like… You’re talking 15 and 12. So what happens is the first day that she’s gone, that Friday morning, the woman across the street who’s supposed to take her 12-​year-​old can’t, for some reason. So she calls somebody else to take him. And who does she call? She calls the school resource officer. Ooh, ooh. And she takes the kid to school, but meantime, she alerts her partner, and somebody goes to the house and interrogates the 15-​year-​old. They throw her in the cop car, they take her to the school where the 12-​year-​old is, and they’re trying to get to the mom who’s still on a plane to Kuwait. And in the end, they said that she was incredibly a horrible parent and they threatened her… I can’t even remember the details, but they threatened her with arrest for having left her children uncared for.

0:12:56.9 Lenore Skenazy: But there is something about trusting your friends and community and a 15-​year-​old who’s lived around the world and a 12-​year-​old too, most recently, they lived in Japan, with being able to handle some things. And if it didn’t go perfectly, which obviously this one didn’t, that’s not the end of the world. And what grates on me is when you have a government that rather than seeing that this is a mom who’s making things work, only sees, but something bad could have happened, and goes straight to that dark place, and doesn’t realize that they’re the bad thing happening. They are involving the mom in something that will cost her… It cost her job, because while she’s fighting these charges, she’s considered a child abuser. So she was a teacher, she can’t be a teacher. And meanwhile, paying a lawyer. And meanwhile, the 15-​year-​old has been dragged from her home and traumatized. And, oh, I remember why it’s a cool story. In the end, everything was found fine with the mom, and now, they have found that they can actually sue the two people who came to the home and took the 15-​year-​old from there, because she had been asking, “Can I please call my dad?” And they said, No, you cannot make a phone call.

0:14:07.6 Lenore Skenazy: So she couldn’t even call her father, and she’s in the back of the cop car, “Can I please call my dad?” No, you may not. And then they got to the school, and once again, she wasn’t allowed to call her dad. And in the end, I have to say, some court in Texas, and I don’t know the names of courts, it might have been an appellate court or whatever, said that, “You have no qualified immunity for that. You knew that you were supposed to allow that child to call her father, and you didn’t.” And so they can sue the Child Protective Services people.

0:14:35.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Nice. Cannon, would you ever leave your kids home alone for 15 minutes while you went to go pick up a turkey?

0:14:44.3 Michael Cannon: Am I gonna incriminate myself if I say yes?

0:14:49.3 Lenore Skenazy: Disguise your voice.

0:14:49.4 Michael Cannon: Yes, we… And we have done that. And what Lenore was describing reminded me of the Thomas Paine line from Common Sense, when he said, “For when we suffer or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened, because we are furnishing the means by which we suffer.” And what people are afraid of when you leave your own kid at home alone or you see other people’s kids, is that someone is gonna come and take your kids away, that that is a fear. And that is what’s happening here, but it’s… People taking your kids away are the government, not some… Not, quote, bad guy.

0:15:36.0 Lenore Skenazy: Not Joe Pesci.

0:15:36.4 Michael Cannon: Not… Right. Not some other bad guy, I should say. And there’s an interesting thing that occurred to me when I was watching Home Alone for… In preparation for this podcast. Lenore mentioned the fear that the government would get to the kids first, or that… Don’t invite the government into this situation. This is the first time I watched Home Alone where it occurred to me that all of this could have been avoided if they had just not let Joe Pesci in the fake cop uniform at the beginning of the movie.

0:16:16.1 Lenore Skenazy: Oh, oh, that’s funny. Yeah.

0:16:18.2 Michael Cannon: This is the first time I watched it, and realized, “Wait a second, there’s a cop inside the house. Someone had to let him inside the house. Who let the cop inside the house?”

0:16:25.0 Natalie Dowzicky: That was the first time I noticed it too. I wrote that down. I was like, “Where is his warrant?” [chuckle]

0:16:30.0 Michael Cannon: Now, you might say, “Well, he’s not a cop. He’s not a cop, and so if he was… He might have come in the house without being invited in, because he’s not actually a cop.” But then, someone should have had the presence of mind to say, “Whoa, you’re a cop in our house. Who let you in?” And then if he didn’t… So that, if they had just addressed that situation correctly, then I guess there would have been… I guess there would have been no movie, and so… But the whole situation could have been avoided.

0:17:02.6 Natalie Dowzicky: My take on the situation being avoided is that had they just ordered more cheese pizza, more plain pizza at the table, then Kevin wouldn’t have ended up in the attic, getting punished…

0:17:17.2 Lenore Skenazy: They wouldn’t have forgotten him. Yeah.

0:17:18.2 Natalie Dowzicky: For spilling the milk, and he wouldn’t have been forgotten.

0:17:21.2 Michael Cannon: I don’t know about that. I’m a younger brother, and so I think no matter how much cheese pizza you ordered, Buzz would have eaten it all.

0:17:29.0 Landry Ayres: Yes. And as a fellow youngest sibling on this podcast, I do have to say, and this is very much sort of framed in the film, is everything is from Kevin’s perspective. It doesn’t seem like that at first, but…

0:17:46.9 Lenore Skenazy: And unreliable narrator.

0:17:49.5 Landry Ayres: And they don’t call… It’s not that they don’t call attention to it, but there is some distance that gets created later. But it’s very, very clear when Kevin is being berated by his family and by all of his siblings and cousins, and then when he finally has his tantrum that he throws, where he runs into his brother and knocks over the soda and spills it all over the passports that the dad then puts in…

0:18:16.3 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s milk. It’s milk.

0:18:17.5 Landry Ayres: Oh. That’s right.

0:18:19.0 Lenore Skenazy: It’s healthy.

0:18:20.3 Landry Ayres: His real-​life brother, Kieran Culkin, is drinking the Pepsi. That’s right.

0:18:25.0 Michael Cannon: But I think it’s the father who knocks over the Pepsi, and…

0:18:27.6 Landry Ayres: He puts the passports…

0:18:28.6 Michael Cannon: Kevin gets blamed for it.

0:18:29.8 Landry Ayres: Yes, and he… But he… He puts the passports in the microwave to dry them out, red flag number one.

[chuckle]

0:18:34.7 Lenore Skenazy: I would do that. No, I would do that. That makes sense.

0:18:35.8 Landry Ayres: Does it? Would that not burn out the…

0:18:38.7 Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, I think so. Why wouldn’t… You wouldn’t put them in the oven. That’d be worse right? Flame.

0:18:42.1 Landry Ayres: I’m not a scientist, but…

0:18:44.8 Lenore Skenazy: I’m a younger brother.

[chuckle]

0:18:45.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, that’s true. That’s about as… That’s my claim to fame. But all of the sort of admonishments that he then receives from his brother and his uncle who calls him a little jerk, there is this downward sort of framing from his point of view, the camera literally takes us into his point of view, and we see things through his eyes. So we’re seeing him… Everyone else is doing their own thing and running around this madcap farce of a house, as everyone’s trying to get ready for this incredibly expensive family flight to Paris that the mysterious uncle is paying for.

0:19:25.2 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah, I wanna know what the McCallister family does.

0:19:26.5 Landry Ayres: I don’t know. But you’re seeing all of this from his perspective, which is why everyone seems to be doing all of this stuff, and then when they do address Kevin, it’s only with negatives. He feels picked on. So you get very, very early on that Kevin doesn’t feel like he’s respected as a member of this family, which a lot of kids tend to.

0:19:47.1 Lenore Skenazy: He has no agency. That’s it.

0:19:50.2 Landry Ayres: Right, he has no agency.

0:19:50.9 Lenore Skenazy: Right, no self-​agency. Right.

0:19:51.0 Landry Ayres: And that’s sort of being reflected in the way that he views the world and his family, which is that they are all against him in that way. So it’s like… I don’t know. It becomes the slippery slope where you could also then say like, “Well, if there hadn’t been a snow storm, then they would have had phone lines and he could have called someone to help, or if he had just been treated right, those things…

0:20:19.9 Lenore Skenazy: It sounds like you keep worrying about the verisimilitude of this movie, it’s missing something here.

0:20:23.7 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it’s like it kind of ruins… Yeah, right. When you worry about that, it does take something away, so you can…

0:20:30.1 Lenore Skenazy: Take everything. [chuckle]

0:20:30.8 Landry Ayres: Yeah, you can parse out the messaging like that, but to a certain extent, there’s vanishing returns there, I think.

0:20:36.1 Lenore Skenazy: Right, and no chance of a sequel. So anyways, how do you…

0:20:38.4 Landry Ayres: Well, it’s true.

0:20:40.6 Lenore Skenazy: Let’s go towards the psychological take that you’re taking which is, here’s a child who feels he has no agency, other people get to do things and be grown up and he’s a nothing and a nobody. And then, of course, the rest of the movie is him recognizing just how powerful and creative and capable he can, and perhaps sadistic and crazy that he could be, and that’s the hero’s journey from nobody to success on his own terms and recognition that he’s become… I would say he’s become a man, but obviously there’s so many sequels that he couldn’t become a man quite yet, but not a man in full. But that’s what I talk about all the time. I feel like to take a turn to sort of the real world, which is where Cannon keeps seeming to wanna go, we have kids who are so over-​protected and allowed to do so little today by a culture, and then as we just were talking about people, sometimes by the government, you can’t even play in the park without somebody coming and arresting your mom, it’s… You feel terrible. You feel like the world is for other people and not you, and you’re a nobody, and you’re a bonsai tree, you’re an embryo, you’re just…

[overlapping conversation]

0:21:57.3 Natalie Dowzicky: You’re a bonsai tree.

0:22:00.2 Lenore Skenazy: Right? I always think of kids as bonsai trees, they look so perfect, they are perfect ’cause every day the parent comes and prunes them, but they never get to grow. And it’s like, “Gee, that’s nice. Wasn’t that suppose to be an oak tree?” [chuckle] And I was like, “It is an oak tree, but I need a magnifying glass. It’s my oak tree. Well, I’m not sure that’s what the oak tree wanted to be, but okay.” So Kevin [0:22:17.1] ____ he’s planted and he gets to grow. That’s the thing. They take the greenhouse off him and off he goes to become a person. And that’s all I try to do every day, is try to make the country recognize that keeping kids so safe that they’re stunted is not really doing them any favors, especially when what we’re protecting them from is sometimes a fantasy on the level of Home Alone.

0:22:45.3 Michael Cannon: So I’ve wondered, Lenore, what do you attribute… To what do you attribute the apparently growing tendency of not just individual parents, but also, I hate to say society, but other parents, other adults…

0:23:08.9 Lenore Skenazy: I like to say it’s society. It is society.

0:23:11.5 Michael Cannon: Well but that’s a little amorphous. That’s a little amorphous. There are… It’s not everybody in society, but there are other adults out there who are taking a more active role in raising other people’s kids by sounding the alarm and calling the cops and shaming parents for the decisions that they’re making. Is this a growing trend, and to what do you attribute that trend?

0:23:37.1 Lenore Skenazy: That’s so interesting. I think one of the unsung reasons that more people are calling the cops saying, “Oh, I saw a kid in a car and they were in front of the dry cleaning shop,” and it’s like, “Okay, what about it?” “Well, there was a lady inside waiting to them, but still the child was in a car,” “Okay,” and the mother came back out in three minutes, but still people are calling to shame and blame parents, but I think one of the reasons is that they have phones. Right? I have no idea what kind of a busybody culture we would have been 25 years ago before it was so easy to whip out your phone and either take a video or call the authorities because, had you seen a parent that you thought was being irresponsible, you would have to remember and get home, go straight home where there was your phone, and then call and say, “Well, she probably still not at the [0:24:30.9] ____, but in case she was, she was in front of the dry cleaner store and the kids were in the car for three minutes.”

0:24:37.0 Lenore Skenazy: So part of the reason is simply the ease with which we can insert ourselves into other people’s lives and painlessly. We can do it and not even confront the mom. You can do it and leave and see the cop car going on the way there and nod to yourself, “Hahaha,” and never even have to talk to the mom and say, “Why did you leave your kids in the car?” It’s like, “I left my kids in the car ’cause their triplets, they were asleep and I’m picking up the dry cleaning. Don’t you think that makes sense?” So anyways, I think that that’s one of the reasons, and it’s sort of forgotten often just that we didn’t used to have the ability to, basically to have the cops in our pocket. Right?

0:25:16.4 Michael Cannon: I’ve wondered… And so that’s interesting because I wondered about the role that technology plays, and we’ll stick with the phone, that same phone that… The minute you said so much easier for a person to call the cops also tells me on a daily basis about all sorts of horrors in the world that I didn’t know about before, it makes me a parent and other parents more aware of things that can happen to children, makes me think that they are more common than they actually are and makes me afraid. And at the same time, that same phone, if I’m the bad parent, if I’m the one who leaves the kid in the car, that leaves the kids home alone, leave the kid at the playground by herself, and then that blows up on social media; then I have the entire world shaming me for that, through the same phone. And so I have wondered how much of this is just a result of the plummeting cost of information and communications that sort of made a lot of people go crazy and led to some crazy outcomes. Oh, combined with our…

0:26:28.8 Lenore Skenazy: I was just formulating my answer and now you’re talking about something else. [chuckle]

0:26:32.2 Michael Cannon: Combined with the natural human tendency to want to avoid shame, which I think…

0:26:39.6 Lenore Skenazy: Avoid shame [0:26:40.1] ____.

0:26:40.9 Michael Cannon: Which I think both fuels…

0:26:41.9 Lenore Skenazy: Yes.

0:26:42.3 Michael Cannon: Which both fuels the reporting and the fear, and each individual parent’s decisions not to let their kids do the things that they might otherwise.

0:26:53.6 Lenore Skenazy: Wow, you’ve just said so many things that I have so many thoughts about, and they’re all fascinating, but I’m gonna divide them into two, okay. First was the idea that the phone brings us so much information about terrible things happening in the phone, your computer, your TV, some of us even have radios, imagine that. “Tell me more Grandma, what’s a radio”? [laughter] But we are bombarded with way more horrible stories than ever before because the media is not there to inform you, and I speak as a former daily news reporter for 14 years, New York Daily News reporter.

0:27:26.0 Lenore Skenazy: The media is there to make money, and the thing that makes them the most money is whatever gets them the most eyeballs, and the story that gets the most eyeballs is the story of a white middle or upper middle class child, hopefully as cute as Macaulay, harmed by a stranger. And so, they will go to the ends of Earth. They went to Portugal for the story of Maddie McCann because that is a story that will grip viewers, that you can show over and over again. And then the Law and Order and all of the other shows that are based on the news or ripped from the headlines just sort of reiterate them.

0:28:01.1 Lenore Skenazy: And your brain works like Google. And usually if you ask Google a question like, “Are there… Where can I stay in Washington, DC where there’s a cheap Airbnb?” up come the answers, and they’re listed and the top one is the most relevant, and then they get less relevant and you barely ever go to the second page. And you’re grateful because your mind… Or because Google has given you results that are relevant. But then if you ask your mind, “Is my kid safe home alone?” and up comes this mishmash of, look there’s Macaulay Culkin, and then there’s the story of Elizabeth Smart, and then there’s the story of Jaycee Dugard, and the easiest stories to recall are the most vivid and horrifying ’cause you’ve heard them for years and you’ve seen video of them.

0:28:47.6 Lenore Skenazy: But the idea that they’re relevant is wrong because they are the least common. That’s why you can call them up. You can’t call up all the pictures in your mind of the trillions of kids who have stayed home alone in the last… Since John Hughes made this movie, without mayhem, without anything happening, with eating a graham cracker and reading a book. So, your mind, by being exposed to these horrible stories and by being human, ends up recalibrating your sense of the odds. And Cannon, you’re the only one balding on this [chuckle] little podcast here, so let me ask you a question which is, did you play outside, or did you stay home alone when you were a kid? Or did you walk to school?

0:29:34.1 Michael Cannon: So, all of those things. Playing outside, I was one of five children, and sometimes mom would say, “Get out of the house”, and we’d all have to go on adventures on our bicycles. And I did that in a way that my kids don’t, or at least don’t yet, because… And I think about how far from home I wandered and how incommunicado I was. And right now, I’d rather my kids not be incommunicado, I’d rather them take a phone with them, and I wonder if I’m right to want that. Walking to school, I think I walked a mile or something to school, and I told my kids the other day as I was dropping them off at the bus stop, or not that I was dropping them off of at the bus stop, walking to…

0:30:25.2 Lenore Skenazy: Standing at the bus stop with them.

0:30:26.1 Michael Cannon: The bus stop and waiting for the bus with them, that the three… I rode a bus for three years in elementary school.

0:30:34.1 Lenore Skenazy: You should have gotten off at some point.

[laughter]

0:30:37.1 Michael Cannon: And I don’t remember ever having a parent be there at the bus stop. There’s never a parent at the bus stop.

0:30:44.1 Lenore Skenazy: Never, never, never.

0:30:45.8 Michael Cannon: And now all the parents are at the bus stop.

0:30:48.9 Lenore Skenazy: It’s a gaggle. I know, and they’re waving like it’s going off to ‘Nam. [laughter] Yeah, it’s very strange. You don’t wanna blame society, but I must because there’s no way that you would be doing that if everyone wasn’t doing that. And it’s not even fear of blame or shame, it’s just become the norm. And then there are schools that won’t let the kids get off the bus unless there is an adult there to walk them home, and it doesn’t matter if they’re walking ‘em home two blocks, two miles or two houses. The bus driver is not allowed to let the child off the bus without a chaperone. And so you’ve gotten to a society that’s starting to think that any time a child is unsupervised, even for the amount of time it would take for the bus to come, even with five other parents at the bus stop, that’s too dangerous.

0:31:35.2 Lenore Skenazy: So you have this, once again, this inflation of danger that is not matched by any reality. If you look at the crime stats, and if you go to let​grow​.org, my site, L-E-T-G-R-O-W dot org, and you click on crime stats, just go to the FBI, I stole them from them. [chuckle] I stole something from the FBI, [laughter] te crime stats show crime going down, down, down, down, down, down, down since ’93. It went up a little last year with COVID, but it’s still way down. And so, the idea that we have to be there because times have changed so much is… What has changed is our perception and our inability to accept the minute risk that comes with letting your kids wait at the bus stop with some other kids in a safe neighborhood.

0:32:18.6 Lenore Skenazy: I’m talking about a safe neighborhood. If you’re in a dangerous neighborhood, obviously it’s different. But I see this across the country, and it has nothing to do with actual danger, it has to do with a perception that bad parents are the ones who take their eyes off their kids for a few seconds and go get the turkey, for instance, and good parents are either with their kids physically, or like you were suggesting before, electronically, they can track them, they know where they are all the time. And let me ask you this, this is a hypothetical that I don’t even know if it makes sense, but would you have wished that your mother knew what you were doing all the time when you were off on your bike and you were off with your buddy?

0:32:58.1 Michael Cannon: No. Dear God, no. [laughter]

0:32:58.8 Lenore Skenazy: No. Why not?

0:33:03.0 Michael Cannon: Because it’s not to have someone watching you all the time. Nobody likes being monitored all the time, because it does deny you agency, it does prevent growth. In my defense, the 12-​year-​old walks to the bus stop by himself.

0:33:18.6 Natalie Dowzicky: There you go, Cannon.

0:33:19.7 Lenore Skenazy: Great. That’s really cool. Great. Alright, right on.

0:33:21.7 Michael Cannon: I’m talking about the eight-​year-​old. And it is a very safe neighborhood. I mean, look at all the parents at the bus stop.

[chuckle]

0:33:27.5 Lenore Skenazy: Yeah.

0:33:29.3 Michael Cannon: There’s so many parents there that the kid would probably be very safe.

0:33:32.6 Lenore Skenazy: I know. Like, move away, right, right, now the kids are on the street, there’s so little space at the bus stop.

0:33:36.2 Natalie Dowzicky: I don’t have children, but I’m the youngest of four, and my parents trusted my older siblings to walk to the bus stop with me ’cause we all got on the same bus since we went to a private school that was further away. And my parents never really hesitated to leave my older brother in charge, which, it can backfire in some cases, but…

0:33:58.2 Lenore Skenazy: Right, they should have hesitated. [laughter]

0:34:00.4 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [laughter]

0:34:00.6 Michael Cannon: We’ll call him Buzz.

0:34:01.1 Natalie Dowzicky: Yeah. [chuckle]

0:34:01.6 Lenore Skenazy: Yeah, really. So anyway, so all I wanna say is that by the time we are all… I walk my kids to school, I did it too, and nobody walked me to school. So it is something in the culture. I think you’re fine blaming society because it’s not like you individually decided, “I’m gonna hover.” It’s not like I said, “Oh I would never let my kid go to school alone. What kind of crazy person does that?” It’s just that everybody walks their kids to school. That’s just the way it is. I actually once interviewed a guy down at our street when I was in DC, and he was walking, he said he walks his kid like three houses down to the bus stop, and the daughter was seven, and I said, “Why?” and he said, “I have no idea.”

[laughter]

0:34:49.1 Lenore Skenazy: Right? So that is a social thing. And actually, yesterday, there was a lady from Tokyo who called me because she was doing a story about helicopter parenting, she lives in DC, and she said, “I don’t even understand it myself. My kid is 12, and when we go back to Japan, she goes all around by herself, and everybody celebrates… ” In Japan, there’s actually a television show called My First Errand, where they film a kid’s first errand, and sometimes it’s like the five-​year-​old taking the three-​year-​old… Sometimes the kids are crying. They don’t know where to go, they’re a little scared, but they have to go get that… All the makings to actually have dinner. And so you see them go to the fruit stand and they get some fruit, and then they go to the butcher shop and they’re confused, and of course, they’re also being followed by a camera crew, but at last they finally say, whatever the word is in Japanese for soup bones, and they get that, and the country loves this show because it reminds them all of the joy of when you’re first trusted to be a competent person, to be somebody in the world. That’s why people love Home Alone. He didn’t cower in the attic waiting for his parents to come home and eating rats.

0:35:57.6 Lenore Skenazy: People love see this, but we take that out of our own kids’ lives. And so she said when she’s back in America, living in Maryland, she doesn’t let her kid do anything because she’s in this other culture, and it just doesn’t allow for it. So I think you can blame the culture. And what I’m trying to change is the culture, because if a school won’t allow your child to self-​dismiss, which always sounds weird, [chuckle] it sounds like jail or something, and If people are gonna call the police when they see a child playing in a park, God forbid, playing in a park, and if the police are gonna come and child protective services is gonna be able to fantasize, what if they had been abducted, even though they’re surrounded by people who know and love them, then you’re dealing with a reality that is warped and insisting that you do strange things, and stunting the kids to the point where there’s three professors now at Georgetown who are studying whether the window…

0:37:00.1 Lenore Skenazy: Kids are supposed to play and have some experiences and be part of the world, and goof up a little and get a little hurt, and that’s how they start calibrating like, what’s safe, what’s not, who’s nice, how do you get along. “Should I do this? Is that gonna hurt?” And that’s how you become… You could call it street smart, you could call it wise at risk assessment. They’re professors, so they call it risk assessment. But what they’re worried about is that in America, the window of time that that is supposed to happen for a kid closes at some point. You’re supposed to start exploring the world as a toddler, and then eventually you’re supposed to have achieved that certain competence in understanding the world. And they’re worried that the kids are getting so little independence so late in America that they miss the window.

0:37:51.1 Lenore Skenazy: The window shuts, just like it shuts on learning a language without an accent. You can learn a language when you’re 15, 17, 22, but you won’t be as fluent or as fluid, as if you had learned it as a normal part of your life when you were younger. And they’re seeing the kids in other countries, have much more accurate sense of what is dangerous than American young men and women, because they think that everything is dangerous, because they never had a chance to start making the different gradations. And one of the teachers there was saying that… She’s a sociology teacher, and one of the things they have to do… They have the kids do is, go to another part of DC, by public transportation, get coffee and talk to a stranger. And the kids aren’t doing that. They’re taking an Uber, they’re going to a Starbucks, the stranger is just a barista, they say, “My name is Lenore, I’d like a latte.” And then they Uber back, because they’re so unfamiliar with dealing with the world.

0:38:51.7 Lenore Skenazy: So when you have a culture that is stunting the kids that way, to the point where they think everything is dangerous, except Starbucks and Uber, you have to recalibrate. And that’s what Let Grow is doing. We’re trying to make it easier and normal and legal to give kids back some independence, just like you’re giving your 12-​year-​old because obviously, you feel it is important.

0:39:10.7 Michael Cannon: There’s a lot in there. One of the interesting things about what you said Lenore is, from my perspective as an economist, is that those kids perceive Uber as safe, which is funny. If you remember the debates about Uber when Uber first launched, people were saying, “Oh but my god, you’re gonna get into a car with a stranger?” And now that is completely flipped, because people recognize that because of the branding of Uber and the liability, and the things that they do to screen their drivers that “Uber is very safe” and that it’s interesting to me how that presumption is completely flipped from Uber being dangerous to Uber being safe. I will say I was a little nervous about coming on to this podcast with Lenore Skenazy because…

0:40:05.9 Lenore Skenazy: Oh my god, that was nervous for me. I’m also… I park helicopter, and my mom side, don’t ever worry.

0:40:09.8 Michael Cannon: Because I began to examine when Landry and Natalie told me that you were gonna be the other guest, I began to examine my own parenting decisions, and I thought, “Gosh, I just yelled at my daughter for standing on top of the toilet tank. Should I have done that?”

0:40:25.3 Lenore Skenazy: That is scary. No, no, no, the only thing I’m not scared of is strangers, so anything else you do, I’m with you. No, that sounds terrible. Get her off the toilet.

0:40:34.7 Michael Cannon: And but then I also in watching Home Alone, you remember Kevin creates a zip line from the house to the tree house, which is an impressive feat of engineering.

0:40:45.8 Lenore Skenazy: And he did it by himself.

0:40:48.8 Michael Cannon: And I was thinking, “Would my kids be able to do the sort of things that Kevin was doing?”

0:40:52.5 Lenore Skenazy: Nobody, nobody.

0:40:53.6 Michael Cannon: And it reminded me that same daughter and a friend of hers from the neighborhood made their own zip line in the backyard between a tree and the trampoline…

0:41:03.2 Lenore Skenazy: Oh my God.

0:41:03.3 Michael Cannon: And I mean a functional zip line. It wasn’t safe. This thing could have unravelled that they could have lost an entire row of teeth on the edge of that trampoline, but I have… Before I told them, I thought it was so awesome that before I told them to stop, I did take video of it.

0:41:23.8 Lenore Skenazy: I was gonna say videotape them. Yeah.

0:41:23.9 Michael Cannon: Right, I took video of it… So I commend them for their engineering prowess before I said, “But no, no, no, you’re not gonna… You’re not gonna do that.” I then did go actually build a longer, more secure zip line in the backyard for them, partly out of guilt for shutting down their zip line.

0:41:41.7 Lenore Skenazy: Fair enough. Now the thing is that people think that I’m like a daredevil. I’m thinking, “Zip line! Oh my God!” I’ve never been on a zip line. Right. People have this impression of me as Athena or something, and actually I’m just a nervous Jewish mom in New York who doesn’t worry about the subway… That’s all it is. The only thing I don’t worry about is the subway, I worry about literally every other thing I’m trying to find a cheap way of doing cognitive behavioral therapy, I’m just so nervous. But not about strangers. That’s it.

[music]

0:42:13.4 Landry Ayres: And now for our favorite time in the show where we get to share all of our other favorite holiday films on this very special Pop & Locke episode. This is “Locked In” So, Lenore, Cannon. What are some of your favorite other holiday movies? They do not need to be in the Home Alone Hexalogy. There are six, I found out Home Alone’s 1, 2 and 4 are all about Kevin McCallister, even though they recast him in Home Alone 4. I could go all day. I went on a deep dive on Wikipedia. What are your favorite holiday films?

0:42:51.7 Lenore Skenazy: I’m gonna jump in here because it’s not my favorite holiday film, it’s my favorite film, period, Miracle on 34th Street.

0:42:58.5 Natalie Dowzicky: Good one.

0:43:00.4 Lenore Skenazy: We’ve just established I’m a Jew, so why is that my favorite movie? Because it’s the most fantastic movie ever… It’s “Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to” It is a… I think it gave me my whole philosophy of life, which is that, you actually are… You’re not only nicer, you’re more powerful, the more help you give to other people, “If Macy’s doesn’t have it, we’ll send them to Gimbles”, that’s just a very helpful philosophy to have in life. And I moved to New York, possibly because of that movie… I’ve done story after story on Macy’s when I was a reporter, possibly because of that movie, I went up to that floor where they were supposed to have toys and for a while they didn’t even have toys. Macy’s had fallen on hard times, and I think they had large appliances or maybe it was sofas, and what should have been the toy department, and I thought that was a travesty. And also, I let my son ride the subway and he had to take the subway to 34th Street. So to me it’s a miracle of a movie and it makes me love New York even more, and if you haven’t seen it, please don’t watch any color version of it, just watch the old black and white one with Natalie Wood. And we don’t have to talk about Natalie Wood. [chuckle] I’m afraid of getting sued.

0:44:17.0 Michael Cannon: In the category of old black and white movies about Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life takes the cake for me. I introduced my kids to that, I think that they’re probably old enough for that, I’ve been trying to… When I think about Christmas movies, I think about “What am I gonna introduce my kids to this year?” I’ve tried A Christmas Story in the past, for some reason they didn’t really gravitate to that one, although lots of childhood independence and agency and risk-​taking in that one… What I’m very excited about this year is at the ages of 12, eight and eight, I think my kids are now old enough for Die Hard.

[laughter]

0:44:58.3 Natalie Dowzicky: Wow.

0:44:58.4 Michael Cannon: And I’m really excited to show them that one, which is of course a Christmas movie, there is a lot of inappropriate language in there, we’re trying to teach them about when it is and isn’t appropriate to use those words, and I think this is the year, so I’m excited to show them that, and in addition, for myself, Christmas movies… What’s the one with all the different lives that everyone is very schmaltzy and it’s British.

0:45:32.1 Landry Ayres: Love Actually.

0:45:32.5 Lenore Skenazy: Love Actually.

0:45:32.6 Natalie Dowzicky: Love Actually.

0:45:34.3 Michael Cannon: Yeah, that thing, I keep telling myself, “I should watch that.” And maybe I will try to do that this year. I haven’t yet, but with regard to the kids, I’m excited to… I’m an aficionado of irreverent Christmas music, like all of the South Park Holiday songs and Blink 182 and so forth, and I’m very excited to slowly, gradually introduce my kids to those… That’s my favorite part of the Christmas season is all of the irreverent Christmas music, some of it, they’re just not ready for yet, but little by little. So, in fact, on the drive back from Thanksgiving I introduced them to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” ‘Cause that’s a classic Thanksgiving song. They actually took to that and I got really excited about introducing them to other irreverent holiday music as well.

0:46:31.9 Lenore Skenazy: Wait. I thought of another movie, by the way, and its own little poignant anecdote, which is a Charlie Brown Christmas, obviously fantastic. And Peter Gray, who I work with, who wrote the book, Free To Learn, who’s a fantastic professor of psychology and believes that kids learn best when they’re playing, and it’s hard to get information into them when they’re bored. But he said that he had been talking to somebody whose kid thought that everything about Charlie Brown was a fantasy; you know, there’s a dog, and he can talk, and he has a friend who’s a bird, and the kids are outside and they’re not with their parents. That’s what they thought was fantasy. They couldn’t imagine… They thought it was all made up, because could you imagine children outside either trick or treating, or making a snowman, or playing football, for better or worse, without adults there. And when we talk about society versus individuals of all societies raising kids who can’t even imagine being outside without adults thinking that that’s as made up as Rocky, whatever. I’m trying to think of… Bugs Bunny. As made up as Bugs Bunny, then you’re in a weird culture. Period.

0:47:43.5 Natalie Dowzicky: My… Landry know this. My guilty pleasure at Christmas time is the bad Hallmark Christmas movies. I watch them all, and they’re terrible. They’re terrible movies. It’s basically the same movie over and over again, just like a slightly different D level cast, but they’re entertaining. You have them on the background.

0:48:05.4 Lenore Skenazy: I just get out of rehab. I’ll work on a rehab film…

[laughter]

0:48:07.4 Lenore Skenazy: Hallmark movie.

0:48:11.5 Natalie Dowzicky: And I’m blanking on the one that I really like, but Landry likes it too. Night… It’s the one with the ghost in the end.

0:48:17.2 Landry Ayres: Oh, I’m gonna talk about it. Don’t worry. It’s called the Spirit of Christmas.

0:48:22.7 Natalie Dowzicky: But the spirit is a ghost.

0:48:24.8 Lenore Skenazy: Oh, I love it.

0:48:24.9 Landry Ayres: The spirit is a ghost…

0:48:25.7 Lenore Skenazy: Got it.

0:48:26.3 Landry Ayres: Because the young hotshot lawyer from Boston gets sent to rural Vermont or somewhere…

0:48:33.2 Natalie Dowzicky: It’s always in the country.

0:48:34.4 Landry Ayres: To oversee the… Sort of, the dispensing of a will, and to figure out what happens with this old family inn that has somehow been lost in the shuffle. That has not been given to anyone, and nobody wants to take it because it’s haunted. But it’s only haunted for the 12 days of Christmas, and it’s haunted by a sexy Canadian ghost from the 1800s who was murdered during the 12 days of Christmas in the inn. And it is the best Christmas movie ever.

0:49:09.8 Lenore Skenazy: I am writing this down, The Spirit of Christmas?

0:49:12.7 Landry Ayres: The Spirit of Christmas.

0:49:14.1 Lenore Skenazy: Got it. Okay.

0:49:15.0 Landry Ayres: It’s on at least one streaming service every year. You should be able to find it pretty easily, and it’s phenomenal. That’s my favorite Christmas film now. Every time I try and think of one, I just go back to it. I found it a handful of years ago, and nothing has topped it since.

0:49:31.7 Lenore Skenazy: Wait, wait, wait. So you’re not just being ironic, I mean it is really great, right?

0:49:34.7 Landry Ayres: Oh, I mean, I love it for all of the wrong reasons.

0:49:39.6 Lenore Skenazy: Okay.

0:49:40.1 Landry Ayres: But I do genuinely enjoy watching it because of those reasons.

0:49:45.5 Lenore Skenazy: Okay, cool.

0:49:47.5 Landry Ayres: I will also say; if we’re talking about irreverent fun Christmas songs, I don’t know, Cannon, if you know about “Father Christmas” by The Kinks, which is really fun. It’s a great sort of rock and roll son… Very similar to like, “Yeah, You Got Me” or something, but it’s about a group of English hooligan ruffian children who rough up and mug. And they rob a guy dressed up as Father Christmas outside of a store. And the lyrics are, “Father Christmas, give us some money. Don’t mess around with those silly toys. We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over. Leave the toys for the little rich boys.” So it’s a sort of fun, irreverent play on Father Christmas, and it’s got a great hook, so I don’t know if your kids…

0:50:36.7 Michael Cannon: And a really powerful statement of the class struggle.

0:50:39.5 Landry Ayres: Yeah, I don’t know if you really wanna teach your kids that it’s fun to hold up people dressing as Santa Claus during the holiday season, but it is fun.

[music]

0:50:51.0 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to keep in touch with us and get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod. That’s pop, the letter N, Locke with an e, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by Natalie Dowzicky. We’re a project of Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. To learn more, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.