Posted on 11/13/2024 12:37:07 PM PST by nickcarraway
Giving kids freedom doesn't just help children, says Lenore Skenazy, founder of the nonprofit Let Grow. It helps parents, too.
I often report on fake "crises" pushed by media.
Here's one that may be real:
Kids are anxious.
In my new video, Lenore Skenazy, founder of the nonprofit Let Grow, says it's because today's parents rarely allow their kids to experience the joys of independence.
Skenazy once let her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway on his own. For that, the media labeled her "America's worst mom." Law and Order, the TV show, produced an episode where the child riding alone is kidnapped and murdered.
But in real life, what Skenazy allowed isn't so risky. Her son told me, "I know how to get around." Nothing bad happened to him, and he gained the confidence that comes with taking care of yourself.
Skenazy argues that not letting kids take care of themselves makes kids insecure. Anxiety and depression are "spiking off the charts," she says, citing the Journal of Pediatrics.
"How do you know the cause is lack of freedom?" I ask. "Maybe it's social media."
"Anxiety and depression were going up before cellphones," she replies.
She says that the cause is the media's hyping of isolated examples of child kidnapping and "stranger danger."
"That actually points everyone in the wrong direction," she says. "The biggest threat to any child is somebody that they know, not a stranger."
Skenazy says parents should just teach kids to "recognize no one can touch you where your bathing suit covers. Resist, run, kick, scream. If somebody's bothering you, don't be nice. Resist. And then report."
"Those three Rs," she says, "keep kids way safer than 'stranger danger' because most strangers do not present a danger."
Allowing kids to experience independence doesn't just help kids, she says; it helps parents.
"It's no fun to think that the second your kids go outside, they're going to be kidnapped…and it's no fun to have to be with your kids every single second."
The U.S. Surgeon General issued an "advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents," writing, "Over the last decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress."
"It's miserable if you have to spend every second watching, supervising, entertaining," says Skenazy, "when there's so much that you could be doing with your life!"
"Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, has teachers give kids the homework assignment to go home and do something new on your own…just so parents have the experience of…watching the kid go off to the store, the park, or if you're in a dangerous neighborhood, the kitchen to make pancakes without parents there to turn on the stove."
She says kids who do this "Let Grow Experience" feel better about themselves "because they're trusted and doing something new, and it's exciting."
Again, it's not just kids who benefit.
"The parents are ecstatic," she says. "I used to think it was because they were so happy that their kid wasn't kidnapped….But then I started thinking, you have kids so that they will live on when you're not around. Until you let your kid do something without you, you don't know that they're ever going to be OK without you. So, it is this ecstatic moment of realizing, 'Hey, I had a kid who is going to be all right.'"
She says Let Grow "is exposure therapy for parents" because they "have not been exposed to letting their kids go. They think that if I let my kid out, something bad will happen, or I'm a bad parent, or I could never forgive myself."
Kids need independence for the same reason adults do; it's how we grow.
?
By the time I was 8 years old, don’t even bother to look for me when school was out before it got dark.
By the time I was 10, add a shotgun to than mix. By the time I was 16, I worked FULL TIME after school and weekends.
The feminists and nanny staters have ruined childhood.
We were taught freedom and responsibility went hand in hand. Anyone see responsibility in this article?
https://philosophy.institute/ethics/freedom-responsibility-ethical-theory/
Have you ever pondered the intricate dance between our freedom to choose and the moral weight of our actions?
And the media and social services helped with their fear-mongering narratives.
While at the same time, advocating for criminal perverts to have shorter sentences.
It’s not hard to teach kids how to be independent.
Do it under your supervision until they get to the point where they take the lead for the entire event to show you they know what they are doing.
My criteria for letting my kids be more independent was that they physically be about my size (5’ 3”). That way they’re both old enough to know better and big enough to not have to worry about someone picking them up and carrying them off. And to be able to fight back.
As if the lockdowns never happened.
I teach at the college level.
The students are such emotional/mental/intellectual basket cases that they think life must be much tougher than it’s been in the past.
It never occurs to them that they are such basket cases because they’ve had it so easy.
They’ll get abducted and find themselves sold into the sex trade. The Democrats would love this.
“they think life must be much tougher than it’s been in the past”
I’ve heard that a lot. It’s pathetic to hear. I tell them to suck it up and regale them with stories of the past going back to my grandparents time.
My gr-grandfather and his sister walked 800 miles from Prussia back to West Germany in 1945 after the Soviets told them “Be out by sundown.” 16 million were moved from the east to West Germany. Two million of them died on that diaspora back to West Germany.
Moderation,
Kids have to have a certain amount of indipendence precisely because they have to be a little anxious.
Fear is a part of life. You cannot coddle people from it and expect them to be courageous.
Ouch. Yeah.
Ouch. Yeah.
This person seems to want children allowed to run rampant with no control or regard to consequences, maybe because that makes them easier targets for groomers.
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