Lenore Skenazy

What was it?

It was 50% of parents.

No, when asked what would happen if there were two kids age 10, 10, double digits, playing at the park together, what is likely to happen?

And 50% of the parents said they were likely to be kidnapped.

That's wildly out of whack with reality, thank God.

But that's the result of this constant drumbeat of terror and despair that we are marinating in thanks to the media.

Well, let's talk about kids first.

And I feel bad because my TED talk was really funny and now we're getting really somber.

But the sad thing for kids is that they are sad.

They are getting anxious and depressed.

And we all know this, but people think it's since COVID or since phones or whatever, since No Child Left Behind.

It's really been decades in the making.

One of my Let Grow co-founders is a man named Peter Gray.

He's a professor of psychology at Boston College.

And he did a big, long study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics two years ago.

And it showed that over the decades, like from the 50s to now, as kids' independence, ability to roam, problem solve, play on their own has gone down.

their anxiety and depression have been going up.

And he argues that it's not just correlation, it's causation.

And you can sort of understand that because if you were in a job and you were micromanaged all the time and somebody was saying, Whitney, why don't you try it this way?

Whitney, that's good.