Lenore Skenazy

And if like a 12-year-old ends up pitching to a five-year-old, which would never, ever happen in adult organized sports,

Well, there's no glory in striking out a kindergartner, right?

So the older kid throws the ball kind of gently, and the little kid taps it, and the older one goes, my God, it's a home run!

And the little kid is so ecstatic, right?

But the older one is too, because he's doing something new.

He is learning how to emphasize and how to be generous, how to be an adult, right?

And that's the most teachable moment of all.

When we take those experiences out of our kids' lives by always being with them to help them and high-five them, good job, good buddy, you know, they get anxious because they don't see how much they can do, how much they can handle on their own.

And we get anxious because we don't see it either.

And so we're all feeling way more anxious than we have to.

What can we do?

Here's the deal.

About eight years ago, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and I and two others got together and we started a non-profit to make it easy, normal and legal

for parents to let go and let grow.

OK?

In fact, we call our organization Let Grow.

And because a collective problem, which is nobody letting their kids do anything, needs a collective solution, everybody doing it at the same time so they don't feel guilty or weird or judged, God forbid, judged, we came up with two school programs that are free and one new law.

The law is this.

The law says that it is not illegal to let your kid play at the park with a friend or walk to the store or do all sorts of things on their own.

We call it the reasonable childhood independence law.