Lenore Skenazy

Lenore is driving a huge parental cultural shift in the US, away from fear and over-protection and towards trust and reasonable independence for children. She coined the phrase “Free-Range Kids” and now leads a movement of parents, teachers, lawmakers, thought leaders, and healthcare professionals who are making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some independence.

Lenore is helping millions of parents move from a culture of fear-based parenting that constrains kids to a new culture based on trust, where children can be problem solvers and changemakers.

Not too long ago, most parenting was what Lenore now calls “Free-Range” parenting. Kids had lots of time out of parental earshot and eyesight, were generally trusted to move about their communities, and able to fill their days with free and imaginative play, as well as real-world activities, like going to the store or library. In so doing, they developed greater autonomy, agency, responsibility, creativity, and collaboration skills. But fear and its upshot, overprotection, have turned parenting today into a system of constant vigilance, adult supervision, coordination, and directed activities. This severely limits children’s time for self-directed play and exploration, and curbs young people’s independence. Lenore's innovative approach challenges current parenting norms by naming and shining a spotlight on an alternative. She coined the term “Free-Range parenting,” an approach that advocates for reasonable risk-taking and autonomy as essential components of childhood development. Thanks to her tireless efforts, many people have stepped into the identity of Free-Range parents and one third of Americans are familiar with the term.

But many others are still struggling. Lenore is at a new inflection point. Several years ago, she realized you can’t just change people’s minds. We must change our behaviors. So, she co-founded a nonprofit called Let Grow focused squarely on changing behaviors across whole communities of parents. Because a collective problem requires a collective solution, Let Grow works not just with individuals, but also through schools to do two things: nudge parents to start letting kids do more on their own. And creating the time and space for free, independent play to happen before or after school. This new behavior enables free play and independence to become the easiest, default choice. Thousands of schools have been engaged in every part of the US as Lenore and her team at Let Grow double down on making free-play and childhood independence a normal part of every school, every day.

Let Grow’s slogan is “making it easy, normal and legal to give kids back some independence.” So, a final element of her novel approach is to change the legal, policy, and healthcare environment surrounding parenting and childhood. Here she taps into the national network of self-identified Free-Range/Let Grow parents, professionals, and advocates for healthy childhood and – among other things - advances state-by-state legislation as well as transformations to the youth mental health sector. So far, these efforts have helped eight states pass “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws and reached more than 1,500 child therapists (with the impact of “independence therapy” published in peer-reviewed journals).

Lenore has observed a peculiar tendency: societies can become so convinced that an untruth is true that falsehoods come to be seen as obvious and indisputable. As she puts it, “one of today's great untruths is that this generation of children is in constant danger: physically, psychologically and emotionally.”

But underestimating kids and overestimating threats does them no favors. It’s actually harmful. And yet parents are more afraid than ever before. A pervasive culture of fear and overprotection stifles young people and has transformed parenting in the US (and in much of the world) with devastating consequences for the development of our children where opportunities for growth and independence have been severely limited. When a hyper-vigilant “helicopter” culture convinces parents to restrict their children's freedom to explore and learn, they undermine children's resilience and self-confidence and hamper their ability to navigate the challenges of the real world (not to mention be changemakers themselves). Children who live lives constricted by overblown fears are not only less creative and adventurous, but they also experience the world from “the passenger seat,” with external forces shaping their lives. Psychologist Peter Gray points to evidence that having a weak “internal locus control” is predictive of future anxiety and depression, the rates of both of which are higher than ever for young people today.

And yet we continue to protect… and disempower. This particular parental mindset is so fixed, widely held, and constantly reinforced because, as Lenore puts it, “it masquerades as protection.” Treating children as if they will be hurt or fall behind the second we glance away has gradually led to the “solution” of constant adult supervision and assistance – a norm re-enforced by practice and even policy. Wide-open public spaces like parks and baseball diamonds have been commercialized, turned over to little leagues and summer camps with access granted through adult-led, paid programming. Age limits, adult supervision, and overzealous policing further restrict children’s freedoms. To push back against this these days is to challenge a firmly entrenched legal and social culture of fear.

The perception that children must be constantly supervised and assisted, lest they be hurt or fall behind, is a major problem. And yet this problem persists because children – those most negatively affected – are in the weakest position to push back. They can’t vote, their voices are rarely heard, and they can’t even travel freely about our car-oriented cities.

Parents, of course, are also negatively affected. But parents who push back by offering their children reasonable independence can find themselves alone in their actions, doubting themselves, and even in legal trouble. Single parents and lower income working parents are in a particularly weak position to push for change, and more often the targets of the police or child protection services and charges of negligence or worse.

Lenore has experienced this challenge firsthand. When she let her 9-year-old ride the NYC subway alone and wrote about it, she was labeled “America’s Worst Mom.” A national firestorm followed with what seemed like every media outlet picking up the story and every pundit weighing in. But this experience in 2008 was catalytic. It helped Lenore find her calling: to push back against the norms, policies, and laws that have transformed parenting, restricted children’s independence, and strained civic life. As Lenore puts it, “a culture that worries that everyone and everything could hurt kids is also a culture that rewards paranoia and its sidekick: hate. Distrust becomes the default mode. There is no reality check, no weighing of the actual odds, no way to recalibrate. Overprotection wins every time, gradually snuffing out common sense AND compassion.”

So, while Lenore is working to give kids back some independence, her wider (usually unspoken) goal is more trust in EVERYONE. Because less trust is not making us safer or happier, it is making us suspicious, wasteful, and cruel.

The “America’s Worst Mom” firestorm that Lenore’s parenting decision unleashed in 2008 has never fully subsided, much to her own credit. Over the years, she has done hundreds of TV, radio, print, and podcast interviews. And she surprises everyone by owning the title – and using it as a strategy to raise national awareness for her work and ideas. Ok, she is the worst. Because if parenting today is about “bubble-wrapping” and overprotecting our kids, then yes, she’s terrible at that. But she’s been able to name and claim what she’s good at. In each of these interviews Lenore changes the conversation, giving herself and parents like her an identity, a label they can wear like a badge of honor: they were Free-Range parents. She coined the term and now a full third of Americans are familiar with it.

The spotlight has lingered, of course, because Lenore has also written a book and started a movement – both called Free-Range Kids. She has a website, a blog, a set of free resources for parents, and she spent a decade crisscrossing the country giving talks on how we got so afraid for our kids and why these fears are unwarranted and even hurting our kids. Yet for all these efforts, for kids and parents, things seem to be worsening.

More recently, Lenore realized that for a problem as entrenched as fear-based parenting, changing people’s minds was not enough. If one parent sends their kid to park devoid of other children their child gets bored and comes back. If they get pushback from another adult (or worse, a police officer or someone with Child Protection Services), fear creeps back in, they start to doubt themselves, and nothing changes. Lenore’s goal all along was never to just change minds, but to change behavior. To do that, she realized that parents have to actually experience what it feels like to let go “and see their kids blossom before they’ll embrace it.” Changing behavior changes everything.

So, the next logical step for Lenore was to team up with other thought-leaders in adjacent fields, all battling the belief that today’s young people are so fragile they must be constantly assisted, directed, and soothed: Dr. Peter Gray, a renowned Boston College Professor of Psychology and expert on the benefits of mixed-age learning and free play. Daniel Shuchman, the long-term chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech and diversity of thought on college campuses. And moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the New York University Professor who recently wrote the bestseller, “The Anxious Generation.” When the four gathered together in 2017, they decided to found the nonprofit Let Grow. Its mission? “Making it easy, normal and legal to give kids back some independence.”

Daniel and Jonathan have been board members and advisors ever since. In 2022 Columbia Medical School Professor of Psychiatry Samantha Boardman joined the board and in 2024, Peter stepped down. Lenore is the only one of the founders on payroll and is President of Let Grow. Much like her first organization – Free-Range Kids, which is still operational – she leads with a crisp and clear diagnosis of the problem, catchy language, and free resources. As is her nature, she’s constantly connecting dots, seizing on new opportunities, and linking people together. But Let Grow stands out from her earlier efforts given the emphasis on changing behaviors, working to shift whole parent communities, and addressing the underlying decision-making architecture within which parents operate.

One key element is the Let Grow Experience. Here teachers give students a homework assignment: “Go home and do something new, on your own, with your parents’ permission but without your parents.” Because the assignment comes from a trusted authority – the teacher -- it pushes parents to let go, to change their behavior. Teachers can assign it once or twenty times a year (which some do) -- or as often as they choose. The Let Grow Experience breaks the ice of anxiety in both generations. Kids may walk to the park, buy something at the store, fry an egg -- whatever it is, “Once they do it, WOW!” Lenore says. “It’s like watching your baby take her first steps. You don’t say, ‘Great! Now go back to crawling.’ Your heart soars, and they’re on their way.”

The companion to the Let Grow Experience is the Let Grow Play Club, which is also delivered by schools. This is another free, simple, behavior-changer. Let Grow encourages schools to stay open before or after school for an hour or two of mixed-age, device-free, loose-parts free play. A volunteer or school employee is present, but adults do not organize the games, solve the spats or even intervene, except if there’s an emergency. In the over-scheduled and over-programmed lives of kids, this respite from constant adult direction is a relief. Students report making new friends, and teachers report new empathy and problem-solving in their students.

By using the school as the “delivery method,” parents don’t have to decide to be brave, or buck the system – rather, the system is delivering free play and free time, via the Experience and the Play Club. Any school can do either or both initiatives with very little effort, class time, or expense. All the Let Grow materials are free. About 5,000 schools have downloaded these materials, including 500 in the first half of 2024, impacting over 100,000 students. To speed the spread, Let Grow just hired two new school outreach coordinators.

The Experience and the Play Club address the underlying problem – parental fear and cluelessness about how much kids can (and should learn to) handle on their own – by normalizing freedom and free play. They brilliantly address key moments in parental decision-making. Want your kids to have some old-fashioned play time like you did, but know that once they come home, they won’t budge from the couch? Sign them up for a Play Club! Afraid of cultural blowback for giving your kid some independence? Whole communities are branding themselves as Free-Range Kid Zones and Let Grow communities. Let Grow also addresses the legal and political decisions parents make every day.

Lenore knows that in our litigious, fear-based culture, laws need to shift to protect Free-Range parents. So, she and her team have drafted legislation that free-range advocates in local, state, and even federal government have used to update the law. Utah senator Mike Lee identifies as a member of the Free-Range Kids movement and sponsored a section of the 2016 Every Student Succeeds Act protecting the rights of kids to walk to school or go out alone. While a federal act doesn’t replace any state and local laws, this one did provide a legal precedent and even specific legislative pathways (i.e. walking to school, reasonable and specific enough to hold up legally). From there, Lenore worked with Utah state legislature to pass the first Free-Range Kids law in 2018, with seven other states following suit. “Reasonable Childhood Independence” laws in Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois, and Montana, usually proposed by bi-partisan sponsors and often passed unanimously, now protect parents from being charged or investigated for neglect when they allow their kids to take reasonable, acceptable risks. That means almost 70 million people are living in a Let Grow state – or about a fourth of the country. In these places parents don’t have to second-guess themselves when they feel their kids are ready for some independence. (For everyone else, Let Grow’s website offers a state-by-state snapshot of the current policies, criminal & neglect laws, and regulations.)

Lenore is also supporting framework change in child psychology and pediatrics. She cultivates and supports champions of Free-Range/Let Grow parenting as they bring to bear the research, standards, and norms of their professions, in peer-reviewed journal articles and declarations from professional societies and national institutions. For example. Dr. Camilo Ortiz is a professor at Long Island University and long-time collaborator who studies the effectiveness of independence-building via the Let Grow Experience as therapy for childhood anxiety. His free manual for “Independence Therapy” has been downloaded by 1,500 therapists, and just this summer (June 2024) the Journal of Anxiety Disorders concluded that giving kids independence as therapy "may suggest a new treatment paradigm.” Meanwhile, the Canadian Pediatric Society recently issued a statement recommending risky play for kids, with the new recommendations saying that children should be kept “as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”

Just as “Free-Range” has entered the vocabulary and given people an identity and direction, thanks to these hands-on behavior change strategies, “Let Grow” is now also entering the lexicon and – even more importantly -- reshaping community life. Virtually every parenting resource that lists different approaches will already describe “Free-Range” and its virtues, and Lenore was even a clue on Jeopardy! In 10 years, Lenore envisions free Let Grow Play Clubs before and after school being as common as recess after lunch, and teachers assigning The Let Grow Experience as the quickest, easiest, cheapest and most fun way to fight childhood anxiety. Already the parenting conversation is changing. Lenore reports having heard parents use it on their kids, “Don’t stay by me – go off with your friends. Let Grow!” As well as kids using it with their parents: “Mom, I don’t need you to walk me to the bus stop. Let Grow!”

Not surprisingly, Lenore’s own childhood was “Free-Range,” albeit in an era when almost every kid was trusted with lots of autonomy, where days were filled with lots of free time, and where children even served as crossing guards, a point that Lenore makes by saying emphatically, “in my lifetime, kids were trusted to stop cars!” She firmly believes that if she had been more supervised and structured, she would have been stunted.

Take free time. Lenore is a huge fan. There are no classes on how to start a backyard carnival and invite your friends, to make jewelry out of plants, to make funny videos with your hilarious best friend, or on how to make up your own games. Yet in all these endeavors – pursuits that young Lenore pursued with fervor – you figure out what you like, take the initiative, and make something happen. And no adult will lead you, nor should they.

Lenore brought a similar “do it yourself” ethic to her eclectic first career in journalism, chasing jobs she wanted with the same insatiable energy she had to land interesting interviews. She worked first at an advertising industry magazine (that she loved for being a “cheat sheet for the culture”) and then as a features writer and finally a columnist for the New York Daily News. She side-hustled writing humor for Mad Magazine and funny songs for NPR. Her work as a journalist encouraged her to ask questions and to meet people. Given how many people she met – most of them nice, none of them dangerous – her main question became, “How did we get so scared?” She has been particularly peeved by what she calls “worst-first thinking” -- imagining the worst-case scenario first and proceeding as if it is likely to happen. As she shared with the Ashoka team, “It makes me crazy to see fear replacing trust – as if fear is smart, and trust is naive. If we give everyone the benefit of the doubt, we will be happier, smarter, and saner than believing the worst of everyone. And yet society is training us to be suspicious of each other, of any good news, of anything our kids encounter and deal with on their own, and even of something as basic as child development.” To push back, even before her blog post about her son’s solo subway journey, Lenore was channeling her reverence for reasonable childhood independence into her own parenting practice and had written several appeals to fellow parents, sharing her experience of raising her independent young sons and imploring other parents to cut their children more slack. She was getting somewhere, but slowly. Then suddenly the spotlight landed on her, and a lifetime of experience and conviction compelled her to grab the mic.