The other day, the University of Michigan announced that it would stop giving grades to thousands of incoming freshmen during their first semester. The stated purpose is to improve student well-being by removing the “fear” of a “low grade” and the consequences that might follow from it.
Sadly, this is another manifestation of a deeply entrenched idea in our culture: that if we remove risk, adversity, failure, disappointment and pain from a child’s life, we will somehow make that child stronger in the long run. The implicit assumption is that children should be protected from hardship until they become mature enough to handle it.
There is a rather obvious problem with this proposition however: how does one become mature enough to handle hardship without actually enduring hardship?
Maturity isn’t some academic achievement. It is acquired through making decisions and experiencing the consequences. If something goes wrong, you become resilient through bouncing back from failure, not avoiding it. This is not only obvious, it’s biblical. In Romans 5:3–suffering produces endurance, endurance-character, character-hope.
Remove suffering of any kind, and you produce a fragile, anxious, dependent, insecure, fearful person. Perhaps that helps explain America’s growing “failure to launch” epidemic and a persistent sadness and hopelessness amongst high schoolers. (Something big pharma would love to fix with medications, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.)
Lenore Skenazy knows something about this problem. After all, she didn’t earn the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” for nothing. After writing “Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone,” Skenazy became a national controversial figure almost overnight. Her decision to allow her son to navigate New York City on his own became a story on The Today Show, where she was forced to defend herself against a clinical psychologist who regarded her decision as dangerously irresponsible.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Lenore for an hour on my podcast. What became apparent was that she was not a negligent or child-abusing parent. Quite the opposite. She understood something that our culture increasingly seems to have forgotten: children need responsibility in order to become responsible. At some point, you have to trust a child enough to let him make decisions without you. And it is often the risky and frightening decisions where development occurs (for the child and the parent).
I don’t know whether I would have allowed my son to take the subway alone at nine. If I lived in New York City, maybe. As Lenore and I discussed, context and familiarity matters. The child’s capabilities matter. When my son was five, for example, I put him on a two-seater, bar-less ski chairlift by himself and watched him take multiple rides alone. He was already an avid skier, so I believed he was ready. Was I nervous? Absolutely!!! But I also thought about the alternative. What if something happened to me on the mountain? What if he became separated from me? Was it really safer to keep him completely dependent on me, or was there some wisdom in giving him the opportunity to discover that he could handle himself?
My son wasn’t afraid. In fact, he was exhilarated. At one point, he came up with an ingenious solution to the absence of a safety bar: he put his ski pole through the side of the chair and through the back, effectively creating his own bar so he wouldn’t fall off. He was five years old. He came up with that solution. I didn’t. (Of course, his little arms were still holding tightly to the back of the metal chair.) Was I a bad parent for putting him at risk? To some, yes. Lenore, of course, would understand.
My son’s experience raises a larger question: What happens when we remove common risks from childhood?
For instance, my husband recently pointed out that it seems there is little risk of getting into physical fights at school these days. At least compared to his experience in the 80’s. The statistics bear this out. In 1991, about two out of five male high school students reported having been in a physical fight during the previous year. By the late 2010s, that figure had fallen to roughly one in four.
I’m not suggesting that children need to fight. Violence is not a virtue. But conflict is unavoidable, and learning how to navigate conflict is part of growing up. A child who encounters conflict has to figure out when to stand his ground, when to walk away, when to defend himself and when to seek help. Those experiences require judgment. And judgment, like courage, is developed through experience.
Physical confrontation wasn’t foreign to me either. When I was in elementary school, I remember running away from three kids on bicycles who seemed intent on roughing me up in some way. I barely avoided the confrontation, beyond a skinned knee, after I lunged like a baseball player executing a head-first slide to home plate to make it safely to my front door. I don’t remember the experience as traumatic. I remember it because it was an encounter with reality. There were people who might hurt me. I had to recognize the danger, figure out what to do and get myself home and into safety.
Today, safety means something different. It can mean the absence not only of physical danger, but of harmful words, uncomfortable ideas, embarrassment, failure and emotional distress. The definition of what is considered dangerous to a child has expanded so dramatically, it has turned many into walking time bombs ready to explode with rage. If parents shield their children from words, imagine how much more protective they can become—and have become—when it comes to physical danger.
That’s why for the past fifteen years or so, Lenore has devoted herself to making that argument. Partnering with some well-known psychologists, Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray, she co-founded the non-profit Let Grow, which creates educational curriculum and supports legislation to give children more free time alone. Through her non-profit and her media site Free-Range Kids, she has become one of the country’s most vocal advocates for what might simply be called commonsense parenting: giving children enough freedom to make mistakes, encounter consequences and gradually assume responsibility for their own lives.
That philosophy is behind the “Reasonable Childhood Independence” legislation that has now been adopted in 13 states. The goal is to prevent parents from being treated as criminals simply because they allow their children a reasonable degree of independence. The distinction is important. Neglect should mean placing a child in serious danger—not merely allowing a child to exist outside the parent’s immediate line of sight.
Georgia adopted the law, for example, after a mother was arrested in 2024 when her 10-year-old son walked less than a mile from their home to a local store. There was no law explicitly prohibiting the child from making that walk. But without clear legal protection for reasonable parental discretion, questions about “endangering safety” and “adequate supervision” were effectively left to the judgment of police. That is a remarkable development. We reached a point where an ordinary act of childhood independence was interpreted as parental irresponsibility.
Lenore’s organization also works directly with schools through the “Let Grow Project”, which features a homework assignment that asks children to do something independently that they have never done before: run an errand, prepare a meal, climb a tree. One teacher reported that the result was greater confidence and less anxiety among her students.
And there is a fascinating development that suggests this idea may be more than merely common sense. Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz conducted the first pilot project using what he calls “independence therapy” with anxious children. The idea makes intuitive sense when you understand how anxiety is treated through cognitive behavioral therapy and, particularly, exposure therapy. If a child is terrified of dogs, for example, the solution is slowly expose the child to dogs to discover catastrophe does not occur. Independence therapy takes a similar principle and applies it to ordinary life. The child takes a step toward independence—and discovers, through experience, that he can handle it.
As someone who has been critical of the psychological and psychiatric medical complex, I find this particularly encouraging because children are considerably more resilient than we have allowed them to demonstrate. This is the paradox at the heart of the modern obsession with safety and control: attempts to protect children from adversity leaves them less prepared for the very adversity society is trying to protect them from.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Lenore.
To learn more about Lenore and her work, visit her non-profit: https://letgrow.org/
Read her blog and book: Free-Range Kids
Watch her Ted Talk
Follow her on X @FreeRangeKids
Interview coverage:
3:17 - Parents have become much more hands-on and spend way too much time with their kids.
4:54 - How Lenore became an advocate after being a newspaper reporter writing about culture.
5:35 - Lenore talks about how her son wanted to take the subway alone.
9:00 - Studies showing broader cultural expectation that kids need to be continuously supervised.
15:34 - The result is a massive retreat from the real world.
16:30 - Context and familiarity matters when allowing kids to take risks.
21:55 - How to get from fear to trust. The only way you get to trust is by allowing kids to take risks.
22:30 - The Let Grow activities for schools and communities.
24:02 - Results of the Let Grow homework assignments.
27:09 - The Reasonable Childhood Independence law.
39:40 - How much of the independence problem is the design of the suburbs?
50:00 - Is the problem phones or lack of independence?
1:09:30 - Where is risk-taking taking place?
1:11:00 - Goals for Let Grow and Free-range Kids.
