Lenore Skenazy

But maybe you want to think about this.

Whitney, will you have this to me?

This is, you know, by 502 today, you know, nobody wants to be micromanaged and childhood has become micromanaged.

And

The other thing Peter Gray explains, which I think is really right, is that there's something called an internal locus of control versus external locus of control.

And when external is when somebody else is deciding how you spend your day and whether you're doing it good enough and gives you all this feedback and tells you what you're going to do next.

And internal is when you feel like, you know, I really feel like going and looking for bugs today, or I just want to get better at my free throws, or I'm going to go on my skateboard.

When you have an intrinsic...

internal locus of control means an intrinsic, so hard to say, desire to do something and you go and do it, you feel like you can handle things, even if you fall off the skateboard, even if you don't find a bug, which would be odd.

So when you have this feeling like I can handle things and people trust me and if things go wrong, I'm going to be able to figure out how to make them better.

you feel great you're on top of the world and we have taken most of that out of children's lives because we're so worried about them that we do everything with them and for them and as a result they're sort of there's you know they're like they're like in the passenger seat of their lives while we very smart helpful people are driving them to something that's going to be really important for them especially if they're trying to get into college

I'd say it plays a huge role.

And you probably remember this from your own childhood, something that you did yourself that you thought was a little scary or you're still proud of to this day.

Sometimes I ask people, what did you do as a kid that went really wrong?

And I'll just tell you one quick story, which is I was at an education conference of some sort.

And one of the ladies told me that when she was a kid,

She and her friends were riding their bikes down this, I'm sure it seemed like an incredible mountain.

It was probably just a little hill, but it was covered with pine needles.

And when she went down, you know, it was really slick and fast.

And so she's going down and she's holding onto the handle brakes and she goes to break because she's at the bottom and the handlebars came off the bike.