Lenore Skenazy

They can go to the park.

And that just sort of re-knits the neighborhood too.

And I also think one of the things Peter Gray always says is that kids are not attracted just because there's a sidewalk and a tree outside.

They're attracted by other kids.

And once you have some kids playing in the neighborhood, and I've seen this, then other kids start joining them.

Once you have a couple of kids walking to school, other kids start joining them.

So you just want to sort of reseed, S-E-E-D, the neighborhood with kids, right?

And you do that with a little bit of planning with the other parents.

I feel for grandparents because a lot of us can remember this free-range childhood, and then we see the kids scheduled within an inch of their lives.

I'd say maybe you just happen to leave the... Peter Gray had a great TEDx talk about how free play is just so formative for kids.

So maybe if you help the parents see without lecturing them, like this free time is not stupid wasted time, interstitial time between the important time, you know, chess, soccer, and school, but it's when they're learning how to make a friend, how to compromise, how to explain an idea, how to be creative.

If, you know, parents are very concerned about every aspect of their kids' lives, and if they see

that free play, unsupervised free play is actually educational and will get their kids ahead, then it becomes something that's sort of speaking their language.

Another thing that's really helpful is when we did this Harris poll, we were asking kids about their phone use as well as their independence.

And it turned out that

you know, parents are very, very concerned about phones and screens.

So this is a way to speak their language about that, which is that when the kids were asked, these are kids eight to 12, given the choice of how to hang out or play with your friends, would you rather just play with them old fashioned way, you know, outside, no agenda, no adults watching, just figure out what to do, have fun that way.

Or would you rather be in an organized activity like soccer or travel baseball or piano recital ballet?

Or would you rather be online with them playing games or just socializing or scrolling together?

What would you prefer to do?