Kids Are More Anxious. What If We Gave Them Independence?

Giving kids freedom doesn't just help children, says Lenore Skenazy, founder of the nonprofit Let Grow. It helps parents, too.

I often report on fake "crises" pushed by media.

Here's one that may be real:

Kids are anxious.

In my new video, Lenore Skenazy, founder of the nonprofit Let Grow, says it's because today's parents rarely allow their kids to experience the joys of independence.

Skenazy once let her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway on his own. For that, the media labeled her "America's worst mom." Law and Order, the TV show, produced an episode where the child riding alone is kidnapped and murdered.

But in real life, what Skenazy allowed isn't so risky. Her son told me, "I know how to get around." Nothing bad happened to him, and he gained the confidence that comes with taking care of yourself.

Skenazy argues that not letting kids take care of themselves makes kids insecure. Anxiety and depression are "spiking off the charts," she says, citing the Journal of Pediatrics.

"How do you know the cause is lack of freedom?" I ask. "Maybe it's social media."

"Anxiety and depression were going up before cellphones," she replies.

She says that the cause is the media's hyping of isolated examples of child kidnapping and "stranger danger."

"That actually points everyone in the wrong direction," she says. "The biggest threat to any child is somebody that they know, not a stranger."

Skenazy says parents should just teach kids to "recognize no one can touch you where your bathing suit covers. Resist, run, kick, scream. If somebody's bothering you, don't be nice. Resist. And then report."

"Those three Rs," she says, "keep kids way safer than 'stranger danger' because most strangers do not present a danger."

Allowing kids to experience independence doesn't just help kids, she says; it helps parents.

"It's no fun to think that the second your kids go outside, they're going to be kidnapped…and it's no fun to have to be with your kids every single second."

The U.S. Surgeon General issued an "advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents," writing, "Over the last decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress."

"It's miserable if you have to spend every second watching, supervising, entertaining," says Skenazy, "when there's so much that you could be doing with your life!"

"Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, has teachers give kids the homework assignment to go home and do something new on your own…just so parents have the experience of…watching the kid go off to the store, the park, or if you're in a dangerous neighborhood, the kitchen to make pancakes without parents there to turn on the stove."

She says kids who do this "Let Grow Experience" feel better about themselves "because they're trusted and doing something new, and it's exciting."

Again, it's not just kids who benefit.

"The parents are ecstatic," she says. "I used to think it was because they were so happy that their kid wasn't kidnapped….But then I started thinking, you have kids so that they will live on when you're not around. Until you let your kid do something without you, you don't know that they're ever going to be OK without you. So, it is this ecstatic moment of realizing, 'Hey, I had a kid who is going to be all right.'"

She says Let Grow "is exposure therapy for parents" because they "have not been exposed to letting their kids go. They think that if I let my kid out, something bad will happen, or I'm a bad parent, or I could never forgive myself."

Kids need independence for the same reason adults do; it's how we grow.

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