The Peaceful Parenting Podcast

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In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, Corey and I explore the pressure of intensive parenting and the idea that “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” We discuss burnout, productivity culture, and how letting go of unrealistic or unnecessary expectations can help us be the parents we truly want to be.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Intensive parenting and unrealistic expectations: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”
* 03:00 — Cultural expectations and productivity mindset and the “perfect parent” standard
* 06:00 — How parents get overwhelmed: Sports, activities, food, and overscheduling
* 09:00 — Choosing what actually matters- “Does this spark joy?” and letting go of unnecessary tasks
* 13:00 — Doing less to feel better
* 15:00 — Productivity, burnout, and rest
* 17:00 — Letting go of control and accepting help and why independence isn’t everything
* 21:00 — Questioning parenting norms
* 25:00 — Why care and interdependence matter
* 30:00 — Corey’s injury story + the cost of overdoing it
* 34:00 — The importance of receiving care
* 36:00 — Rethinking what it means to be a “good parent”
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Rejecting Impossible Parenting Standards: What Disability Teaches Us About Care and Community with Jessica Slice: Episode 220
* Ditch Special Time? Connecting with complex kids when connecting is hard: Episode 212
* Episode 60: Hunt, Gather, Parent with Michaeleen Doucleff
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Strong-Willed Kids Workshop
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
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* YouTube
* Website
* Join us on Substack
* Newsletter
* Book a short consult or coaching session call
xx Sarah and Corey
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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today, Corey and I discuss an idea we’ve been thinking about a lot lately and talking to each other about: intensive parenting, the choices we make, and the impossibly high standards we’re up against, and how these things affect our mental and physical health as parents and as humans.
After I interviewed Jessica Slice, disability activist and author of the book Unfit Parent, who talks about these things and what she’s learned from disability culture and being disabled herself, Corey captured all of these complicated ideas about productivity, care, and how we can sometimes drive ourselves too hard as: just because you can.
I’m going to say that again: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Listen in to our conversation about how this idea can inform the choices we make as parents and how we can make changes to make life feel easier and more connected and fun.
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Here’s our conversation.
Sarah: Hey Corey, welcome back to the podcast.
Corey: Thanks for having me again.
Sarah: Do you remember last year when that report came out from the U.S. Surgeon General that said that parents are suffering from intensive parenting?
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: Yeah, and I think people consider peaceful parenting intensive parenting, right? And we do often say this kind of parenting is a lot of work. It requires a lot of us. But I wouldn’t say that it necessarily has to be intensive parenting in all aspects.
Corey: I agree so much. I had a lot of mixed feelings when that report came out.
Sarah: Yeah, me too. I felt like writing some sort of a defense of peaceful parenting after I heard that.
So let’s tease this apart a bit. We started talking about this after I interviewed Jessica Slice. If you all didn’t catch that, she is a disability activist, and she talked about disability culture and what it tells us about the impossible standards of parenting, and I guess the impossible standards of parenting in general, not just intensive parenting.
And you said it reminded you of one of your favorite quotes. So tell us your favorite quote, and that’s the anchor of our episode today.
Corey: One of my favorite quotes, though I’m not even sure if it’s technically a quote, is from one of my favorite movies, Jurassic Park. I recently actually read the book because I was talking so much about how I love the movie. The big theme is: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Now, when you and I were talking about this, honestly, we could have a really long conversation about the way they were talking about it in the book, which was maybe questioning science and where we want to take that, but it actually applies really well to parenting.
Sarah: Yeah. And the idea that Jessica Slice brought in, and we’re going to play a quote about this, is that there were things that she couldn’t do as a disabled parent, and she felt a lot of guilt about that.
So let’s just take a second and listen to that quote.
Jessica: Yeah. I do sometimes feel self-conscious when I see the way my peers parent, when I see them making these perfect little lunches and these divided-up lunch boxes or doing Elf on the Shelf, these kinds of versions of parenting that I just don’t have the energy or capacity to have as part of our lives.
And I can feel like, are my kids missing out from this type of parenting? And maybe in some ways they are. Nothing is simple. But I know I would have done those things. The version of me in my twenties would have done those things, but she would’ve also been a lot less patient. She would’ve had a lot less time for just sort of wasting hours and being together.
I have an ability to be present with my kids that I wouldn’t have had before.
Sarah: Okay, so one thing that’s interesting to me in that quote is that she talks about how she probably would have done all the things if she could have, like herself when she was in her twenties. She didn’t become disabled until she was in her late twenties, and she said the person she was in her twenties probably would’ve turned into the mom that was trying to be the perfect mom.
The example she used was the little bento box lunchboxes. And just to be fair, if that brings you joy, then that brings you joy, right? The bento box lunches. But if you’re doing it because you feel like you should do it, and you can do it, that doesn’t mean you should do it.
So what are your thoughts on what she was saying?
Corey: This really struck me because I think, gosh, I have made lunches that she would consider the little bento box ones, and not because it made me happy. I did feel like this is what I was supposed to be doing in order to be sending an appropriate lunch for my children because of that pressure.
That really, really stood out to me, and I couldn’t help but just feel the weight of all those pressures we are handed as parents. And because, for most of my parenting journey, I have been able-bodied and can do endless amounts, I often find myself doing way more than I should because I feel like that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
And then when you take a step back and you try to question it, you just get crushed by the weight of those expectations of, well, what are the reasonable ones? What should I be doing? What is intensive parenting, and what is taking a step back?
Sarah: I think also there’s so much value in our culture, and this is one thing that Jessica talks about in her book and in the podcast, is how much of what we do is informed by the values of capitalism. If we don’t feel that we’re being productive, and what’s one more thing? When is it enough? When can you just sit down and rest? Or when do you think, I’ve got to make those bento box lunches?
Now I am done for the day, and I could go to sleep and get some rest, or I could read or watch a show with my partner or whatever, but I really should. So that’s a perfect example of I can, but should I? Where do you draw that line? How do you question yourself about what you should do, what you can do, and what you shouldn’t do, even if you could?
Corey: Yeah, it’s true. And I think every stage that I’ve been through in parenting, and honestly any stage of life, whether you’re a parent or not, you’re going to be hit by this list of conflicting advice that’s coming at you for what you should be doing.
I typed out a list of what I’m experiencing right now. I have a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old, and right now I’m getting this conflicting stuff coming at me, telling me what I should be doing. And it sounds something to the extent of: you should have your kids in sports because kids are on too many screens and not getting enough exercise, but don’t push them too hard because then they won’t love movement. Register them in music lessons or get them extra tutoring. They must have a second language, but not too much because after-school activities can drain your children and then they’re not getting enough free, unsupervised time. And don’t even get me started on food.
With the whole bento box thing, I ended up there because of all the conflicting advice about not letting them have too much of this, but needing to have that, and you don’t want to give them an eating disorder. It’s just all of this. How do we find that line of what we should be doing and what is too much?
Sarah: I think some of it is asking what actually brings joy. Sometimes it brings joy to you, and sometimes you’re willing to do it because it sparks joy in your child. So just looking at the sports thing: does it spark joy in your child to play hockey? Does it spark joy in you to be involved in that? Maybe this is one of those things you do for your kids because it sparks joy in them.
But the whole idea of “you should do it because it’s good for kids to be in sports,” yes, that’s true. It is good for kids to be in sports. But that’s a perfect thing of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. You’ve got to look at your own life and how it fits into your life and what your kids want to do and what their interests are.
Corey: That’s so true. And when you think about what we do when we’re coaching, almost always we have this discussion with our clients of, okay, what does your daily schedule look like? What does your week look like? And then we’re like, okay, now what can you take out?
We’re almost always telling them this message of: just because you can manage all this doesn’t mean you should. What of this can you take out so that your life does feel less intense? I think this is something naturally that we do end up spending a lot of time coaching, because everyone does end up finding that they can’t find that line for themselves.
Sarah: For sure. And there’s also the things that people think they need to do. One thing I hear parents talking about is arguments with their kids about putting their laundry away. You know, “I folded all their laundry and put it in their room, and all they have to do is put it in their drawer.” And my first thought is always, oh my gosh, why are you folding their laundry?
And I don’t mean that in the sense that they should be folding their own laundry. I mean, who cares if the laundry’s folded? Maybe that’s your own personal thing, that you love a neat drawer, and okay, do that for yourself. But is it worth the battle to get into that with your kid? Plus, when they go and look for things to wear, they’re just going to be rooting through the clothes anyway and throwing them on the floor and unfolding them.
Sometimes there are just these shortcuts that people feel really guilty about taking, and they think they’re not living up to the North American perfect family standard. Another good example of that is baths every night.
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: In the summer, maybe your kid needs a bath every day because they’ve got sunscreen and sand and they’re sweaty. But in the winter, at least where we live, it’s cold and kids don’t get that dirty. A bath a couple of nights a week is totally fine. But parents have this idea, well, shouldn’t I do the same thing every night because that’s part of the routine? Well, maybe that’s good. Maybe that works for you, or maybe you can let it go.
Corey: Yes. And I’ve heard you say this so often too about food. Just because you can make these amazing, crazy meals doesn’t mean you should be. It’s totally acceptable to be eating scrambled eggs and baby carrots every night.
Sarah: Yes, unless it sparks joy for you. And then you might want to do it. And even if it sparks joy sometimes, and you can do it, it doesn’t mean you should do it because it might make you too stressed.
There were things that I had to give up when my kids were small that I really liked doing, that did spark joy, and that I could have done, but the tradeoff was too great because it would’ve made me too tired. So that’s another thing. Sometimes there is something that sparks joy that you could do, but then you think about the tradeoff: how is this going to make me show up as a parent? Can I be the parent that I want to be?
An example I’m just thinking of now is I really wanted to homeschool my kids. Philosophically, that was super aligned for me, and I loved the idea of it in theory, of all of us learning together and doing all the things. But when it came down to it, I could have done it, but I decided not to do it because it wasn’t letting me show up as the kind of parent that I wanted to be. Being with my kids 24/7 was not good for me. I just thought, I shouldn’t do this because it is not making me show up as the kind of parent that I want to be.
Corey: Yeah, exactly. I felt the exact same way about homeschooling. Hats off to people who find ways to make it work for themselves. It truly does work for some families. We just have to look at our individual resources, literally and figuratively, and what that is going to look like in practice for our family. And just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Sarah: Yes, and please check out our podcast that we did about how I decided to ditch special time.
Corey: Yeah.
Sarah: Because that’s also a really good example of this.
Corey: I agree.
Sarah: Of course I could do it. I just realized it wasn’t working for us, and instead I chose following what made my family feel joyful. We’ll put a link to all the episodes we mention in the show notes. So that’s a really good one if you want to hear practically how I followed what made my family feel joyful.
Corey: Yeah, I love that.
Sarah: So we talked about that sort of drive for productivity. The drive for productivity tries to convince us that if we can do something, we should do it—that more and more and more, like we’re always striving to get all the things done and check all the things off the to-do list.
One thing that Amanda Diekman talks about—and she’s also been on the podcast; she talks about low-demand parenting, and she had a podcast where she talked about something she learned from what she called her superwoman self. And I think that’s what we’re talking about, like the push, push, go, go, go. “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.” But can you? And should you?
I’m going to read a quote from her. She says, “I’m newly trying to actively love on my amazing superwoman.” This is us appreciating, not beating ourselves up for that go-go-go part, but appreciating, you know, this has probably gotten me to where I am, and there’s a lot of life squeezed out of having those sorts of impulses to do more. But also it causes what she calls extreme exhaustion.
So she says: “Because it turns out that superwoman holds both my vast trying and my extreme exhaustion. She’s trying to protect me from how very tired I am by hyping me up. But when I make her feel safe and tell her that she can let go, she can slow down, I can see how very tired she is and how long she’s been hustling to keep me safe. She melts into my arms. She’s my most hardworking part, and it turns out she needs a rest too.”
Corey: While you were reading that, I got full-body goosebumps.
Sarah: Yeah, I love that. So really appreciating that part of us that wants to do more and get stuff done, not villainizing it, but recognizing the good in it and also holding that part of us and recognizing how exhausted it makes us too.
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: I think there are some things that do exhaust us that we don’t feel we can let go of. I remember I was talking to a client, and she was saying how she was feeling so exhausted and sort of resentful by her 4-year-old’s bedtime routine. She said, “First I help him get his pajamas on and I brush his teeth, and then I read him stories, and then I lie with him, and it’s just so exhausting.”
And I said, “Totally. That does sound exhausting. And you don’t have to do any of it.”
She was like, “What? What do you mean?” I said, “You don’t have to do any of that stuff. You could just let him fall asleep on the couch whenever he falls asleep, without his pajamas on and without brushing his teeth. And you don’t have to lie with him, and you don’t have to read him stories.”
And she was kind of like, “What are you saying?” And I said, “You don’t have to do any of it, but you’re choosing to do it because it’s important to you to do that nurturing in that bedtime routine.”
So I think that’s another thing to think about too, is that when there are things that we’re doing, there’s this sorting mechanism: what am I doing because I feel like I have to do it, when I really could let go of it? What am I doing because the superwoman is driving me to do it because I’m trying to attain this impossible standard of parenting? And what am I doing that might still be hard, but it’s just really important to me?
Maybe it doesn’t spark joy. Probably no one’s bedtime routine sparks joy, but maybe it’s just too important to let go of.
An example of that for me, and I was just reminded of it this morning, is with my daughter. As you know, Maxine is now in college and she doesn’t have to be at school every morning at nine the way she used to. But when she was still in school, she had to get up at seven and get out the door by 7:45 to get to school on time.
And I am not a morning person. I may have mentioned that before, but I really hate getting up early. Like, 7:00 a.m. is just way too early for me. But I got up every day of her high school years at 7:00 a.m., and I did with my sons as well.
And all of them were like, “Mom, you don’t need to get up. We can get out the door on our own.” But I felt like it was supportive to get up, and it was important to me to be supportive of them. If they had to get up early, I wanted to be supportive and get up early with them.
I make Maxine a cup of tea in the morning, and she pretty much gets her own lunch now, but I used to make lunch for them when they were in high school. I was doing it even though it felt intensive to get up early when I didn’t have to. But it felt important to me to show up and nurture like that.
Corey: Yeah, that makes so much sense. It’s interesting—as you were saying that too, I was thinking about how every day when all the kids are getting off the bus, my son used to throw his backpack on the ground. Then instead I started just asking him, “I’ll take it.”
And now, to this day, he would never throw it now because he’s not this tiny little kindergartner who can barely get himself back home again. But I still naturally love that moment of being able to be like, “Hand me your backpack.” I don’t know, something about it. I take it and I put it on my back, and I feel like I’m letting him know, you can let those weights go for the day.
There are these moments where I’m choosing to do that, and I can, and I’m happy to do it. It’s very different than that feeling of resentment as I’m trudging along.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s something you’re choosing to do because that nurturing of taking the load off of him, literally and figuratively, is important to you.
I think the theme we’re coming to with “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” is looking at what are the outside forces that are making me think that I should do something—cultural forces or capitalist forces or the parents-next-door forces—that are making you feel like you should do something, and really questioning, what is the reason? What’s the drive underneath this thing? Is this something that I believe in and something that I can get behind?
And sometimes there may be things that you look at and say, well, maybe I would drop this if it was just up to me, but it sparks joy in my child, or it’s a nurturing that I’m choosing to do, or it’s a way that I’m choosing to show up. Sometimes you might choose to do something because it does spark joy in your child, even if it doesn’t in you. That’s something where you have the resources to give them.
So just not taking everything at face value of what a good North American bedtime routine looks like or what the other people are doing. I remember when my kids were little and there was always, are you putting them in soccer? Are you putting them in tennis? And I was like, I’m not putting anyone in anything. Partly because they didn’t want to, but partly because I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like going to all those practices when people weren’t begging me, “Please, please, please, can I join a soccer team?” I’m fine with not doing that stuff.
Corey: Yeah, that’s so true. This is all reminding me of—please go back and listen to one of my favorite podcast episodes you’ve ever done—with Michaeleen.
Sarah: Oh yeah, yeah.
Corey: Did I say her name properly? The Hunt, Gather, Parent one.
Sarah: Doucleff.
Corey: She’s the one I first learned about the idea of North American parents being weird.
Sarah: Right.
Corey: I can’t remember—do you remember what she meant by that?
Sarah: That weird is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. It’s sort of like we have all these ways of parenting that are very much the intensive parenting thing again.
One thing she talks about is having your weekend organized around kid activities, going to the special science center and birthday parties and all that. She really encourages parents to live their lives and involve their kids in their lives. So instead of going to the science center, you might go to Home Depot and your kid helps you get the things you need for the little mini bathroom renovation you’re doing, and then they work with you.
Which of course, in itself, is another way things can feel intensive, having a child helper. But she really talks a lot about the benefits of involving your child in your life. One benefit is that they turn out to be good helpers because you’ve let them help when they want to. But really, it’s about living your life as opposed to trying to arrange your life for your child.
Corey: Yes. And if I’m honest, I didn’t necessarily agree with everything I read in that book, but I think it might be one of the most influential parenting books I’ve ever read in that it really fundamentally informed how I show up. I just decided that I don’t have to do what everyone else is doing.
And I think that’s a big theme we’re saying here too. Look, if we’re peaceful parents, if we’re being honest, our listeners are already choosing to parent in a way that’s different than a lot of their society around them.
Sarah: That’s true.
Corey: So we’re basically saying, now take it a step further. Just keep questioning everything. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.
Sarah: Yeah, for sure. Question everything. Is that like a sixties slogan?
Corey: I don’t know, but I feel like I would’ve done really well living in the sixties.
Sarah: “Question everything.” Okay, so another thing that came up from reading Jessica’s book and the interview with her was how, if someone is disabled, they often automatically need a level of care that a non-disabled person—and I was going to say doesn’t need, but I’m going to change that to doesn’t think they need.
Yes, there is often physical care that a disabled person needs that a non-disabled person doesn’t need, if they have legs that can walk and so on. But the care part of caring for each other in community is something that Jessica talks about disability culture as being really good at, and that community care that we need to choose is in itself going against the sort of rabid individualism of capitalism that is encouraged around us.
I think that’s why so many parents are so uncomfortable with doing things for their kids, because our culture is so hyper-focused on individualism and independence. Like, why should you carry Big C’s backpack if he can carry it for himself? Aren’t you just coddling him, and he’ll never learn to be independent if you carry his backpack for him?
People have probably heard me tell this story before, but I had the same thing with Maxine when she was little, carrying her backpack. And now, when she’s 18, she won’t let me carry anything. We’ll be coming from getting groceries and coming from the car, and she’s carrying like five bags of groceries and I’m carrying nothing. I’m like, really? I can carry that. And she’s like, “No, Mom, I’ve got it. Let me carry that for you.”
My middle son, the other day, offered to carry my purse for me. I was like, “It’s okay. I can carry my purse.” He was like, “Mom, do you want me to carry that?” I’m like, “No, it’s okay. I can carry it.”
I got a little off the tangent there of care and hyper-individualism, but that’s one thing that Jessica said non-disabled parents can learn from disability community: that we all actually need care, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we don’t.
Corey: Yes. And okay, I have a story I really want to tell about this. It just happened recently. Keep in mind, I had been planning this podcast with you. I had listened to this. I knew all of this academically.
Last week—once again, we chose something that we really love. My son entered ski racing this year, and it has been the most joyful thing for everyone in our family. We’re like, wow, look at us in a big organized sport and loving it.
So it’s been wonderful. And last Sunday was the last one of the season. My son had been off the entire week with the flu. I hadn’t slept properly in about seven days. And he still was sick on Saturday, but by Sunday morning was full of beans and like, “I can go do my last race.”
This is the definition of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It was also daylight savings time.
Sarah: Oh goodness.
Corey: So we lost an hour, or however it works. Daylight savings time should be banned as far as I’m concerned.
That morning, as we’re all so exhausted and struggling, my husband goes, “Did you know more accidents happen on this day than any other day in the year?”
Anyway, race days are chaotic. I had all these 7-year-olds all over the place. They were running out to go do their last run, and I realized in the chalet they’d left some garbage. I was like, I’m just going to clean up after them. I don’t want to leave this mess.
I pick it all up, walk over to the garbage can, and suddenly I’m on the ground. It was a huge scene. Everyone stood up. People gasped. People ran over to me. I threw garbage in the air, almost had it land in the garbage can, which would’ve been amazing.
It was just a total scene. I’m actually laughing because I didn’t realize anything serious had happened, but within a couple of minutes I realized that I was actually hurt.
So after my son’s next—I still waited for him to finish his race—we went home, and I realized by that evening I had to be taken to the emergency department because I could not walk.
Sarah: Oh my goodness. Before you get to the part you want to get to, do you think this all happened because you probably shouldn’t have gone to ski racing that morning?
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: Okay. So this is like a two-moral story. There are two morals to this story. The first moral is: just because you could go to ski racing with all those things that were happening doesn’t mean you should have gone, and maybe you wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
Corey: Yes. And then part two. I could have not gone because we have a wonderful community there, and they all would’ve helped all those little 7-year-olds if I hadn’t been there. So I should have also just let people help me.
After not sleeping for a week, and then at the emergency department, I could barely walk. I was limping everywhere, and every turn, someone was offering me a wheelchair, and I kept saying, “No. I’m fine. I’ve got this.”
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Corey: By the time I had just been limping all over the place, a mom there with a teenager literally forced me into a wheelchair.
Sarah: Mm.
Corey: She was there with her sick child, and she was like, “You know what? You need this.” She got me in the chair and started pushing me around until a nurse noticed and was like, “Oh, I can do this.” The nurse had been offering all along. It wasn’t their fault, it was me. I would not accept help.
And then while I was there, I was texting with a friend, being like, “I’m just sitting here bawling by myself in the emergency room because I’m really hurt. I’m supposed to be going on a ski trip next week.” Spoiler alert: it’s next week. I’m not on a ski trip.
And she offered to come and be with me, and I told her, “No, I’m fine.” She offered to come pick me up at the end of the day. I told her, “No, I’m fine.” I just kept telling everyone I was fine, and I wasn’t. I could not accept anyone helping me.
Sarah: So you didn’t end up letting her come or letting her pick you up or anything?
Corey: No, nothing.
Sarah: Aw. And she told me afterwards that she was like, “Corey, this is a sign that you need to slow down and accept more help in your life.”
Well, and also ask for help. It’s really hard for a lot of us to ask for help. People listening have probably heard it said, we weren’t raised—people listening have probably heard it said that we didn’t evolve to raise children in the nuclear family. We evolved to raise children in a village, or at least in a small community of people—grandparents who could help, cousins, younger and older siblings helping with younger siblings.
This hyper-independence, small family, nobody else helping, is such a recipe for burnout and exhaustion and all of the physical and mental health problems that people have. I think those things really could be healed if we did what we’re talking about in this episode: asking for help, accepting help, and not doing everything just because you can.
Corey: Yes, and it’s interesting because we talk to people about self-care. Self-care is a big buzzword now, but I often think it gets turned into just another thing that we’re expected to do. Instead of what I think is at the heart of self-care, which means just being honest with yourself about capacity.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
There was some research done about problem-solving, and I forget what book I read this in, but when there’s a problem, people often want to add things on—do this, add this, add that. There actually was research done about this, about what people tend to do when there’s a problem.
What the research showed is that often the answer to a problem is to take something away or stop doing something. If anyone knows what that study is, shoot me an email, because I don’t know where I heard that. But actually, taking something away is often much more effective than adding something in.
Corey: Yes, that makes so much sense. Honestly, until I sat down this morning to write some notes for this podcast, I didn’t even realize what I was doing.
I couldn’t get over it. I’ve been going to physio now for a week, and I can walk right now, which is nice. But literally, she gave me a giant list of stuff, and I’m like, I will do all of this. I’m going to add all this in. I am going to be the best rehabbed-knee person that ever existed.
Then I realized that’s actually probably what got me into this jam.
Sarah: Yeah. And I think sometimes we like to be in control too, right? It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel it’s familiar. Especially if we grew up with that sort of push to be independent, not needing people is the safe alternative, or not letting people help.
Just on Sunday, two days ago, my middle son and his girlfriend were over for dinner, and I had made this fancy dinner because it was her birthday, and I really had been cooking for the whole day. At the end of the dinner, I had piled all the dishes in the sink, and my son was like, “Let me do the dishes.”
And I was like, “No, that’s okay. I’ll do them tomorrow.”
And he was like, “Mom, I’ll do the dishes before I go. You’ve been cooking all day.”
And I had to force myself to let him do the dishes, because I’m so used to “I’ve got it, I’ll do it, I can do everything.” And not necessarily in this case, because my kids are grown up and I could have done the dishes tomorrow or whatever, but I just noticed how uncomfortable it was in my body to let him do the dishes.
And also I was really proud of him for insisting. I was like, oh, he’s such a nice boy. He’s such a sweetheart. And he did the dishes, and he did a good job, and I was grateful.
Corey: Yeah.
Sarah: Well, any last thoughts about this “just because you can doesn’t mean you should”?
Corey: Go read Jurassic Park. It’s fascinating. It was a fascinating book. It made me think a lot about AI.
But no, when it comes to this, definitely check out the podcast we did with Jessica. This would be another one of the landmark podcasts that I think you’ve done where I just can’t stop thinking about it. I really think what we need to start doing is realizing we just can’t do this all on our own.
Do you have any last thoughts, Sarah?
Sarah: Well, I was just thinking, I want to leave people with—maybe we’ll leave them with a quote from the Jessica Slice podcast.
Again, if you haven’t heard it, go back and listen to it. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But we’ll let her close out with some thoughts about care.
I think it’s just a really nice thing to think about, that aspect of care and what it means to be a good parent, and what it means to think about all of the things that we’ve just talked about.
Corey: Absolutely. I think she’s the way to end this.
And just in case anyone’s wondering, this week my children all cared for me without me ever asking them to. So many times when I got myself too low, they were coming over and helping get me back up again. They were running up and down everywhere in the house to get me everything.
So just remember that you are modeling beautiful caregiving, and they’re going to just give it back to you, and they’re happy to give it back to you.
Sarah: Yeah. And I just also want to say that I think this quote we’re going to end on from Jessica talks about how the care things that we’ve talked about don’t have to mean that we are living up to these impossible standards or doing the intensive parenting that leads to burnout.
I think everything we’ve talked about in this episode are the antidotes to that burnout and intensive parenting and impossible standards. And I think the last piece of it is just giving yourself compassion for when that’s hard because you feel like people are judging you, or that people aren’t going to think you’re a good parent. So just giving yourself compassion around that.
Thanks, Corey. We’ll let Jessica close it out.
Jessica: I think for all parents there’s this sense that you should be able to provide what your kids need without assistance, and that there is a distinction between people who give care and people who need care. And that a mom, in particular, is a person who gives care and doesn’t need it.
And I think what disability forces to the surface, particularly for those who have some care needs like me, is: I give care and I need care, and that is part of my daily life. Needing care does not hinder my ability to be a valuable member of my family or a good mom.
I think it dispels that myth that you have to be one or the other. But I think if all parents could reject that binary of caregivers or care receivers, then it would mean that parenting didn’t feel as impossible or didn’t have such an impossible standard—that weakness were allowed, or dependence weren’t allowed, or interdependence.
I think it would just change how we think about parenting in general, because there’s this feeling, I believe, that particularly moms have to be all-powerful and limitless and perfect, and that it is a failure in the very definition of what it is to be a parent to start to need support and care.
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In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang about self-regulation, co-regulation, repair, and what realistic emotional expectations look like for children ages five to eight. We discuss why parent self-regulation matters so much, how to support kids through big feelings, and practical strategies families can use together.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Meet Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang
* 03:00 — The book and self-regulation. What self-regulation is and why it starts with parents
* 06:00 — What’s realistic for kids (ages 5–8) and why big emotions are normal at this age
* 11:00 — Co-regulation: What it is and how parents support it
* 15:00 — Supporting kids through big feelings: Why feelings shouldn’t be rushed or shut down
* 20:00 — Revisiting hard moments and why conversations after the fact matter
* 23:00 — Repair: How and why to repair after conflict
* 29:00 — Practical tools and simple regulation strategies
* 35:00 — When strategies don’t work: Why practice and flexibility matter
* 38:00 — Where to find the guests
* 39:00 — Final reflections: Advice to their younger parenting selves
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* The Self-Regulation Workbook for Ages 5-8
* Kahlila’s website and IG @kahlilarobinson
* Sarah G’s website
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Strong-Willed Kids Workshop
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* Website
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Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guests are Kahlila Robinson and Sarah Gerstenzang, who wrote The Self-Regulation Handbook for Kids ages five through eight. Although their book is aimed at parents of kids these ages, the truth is that so much of what we discussed applies to parents of kids of all ages, toddlers to teens.
A lot of the themes we discuss today will be familiar to you as listeners because you’ve heard me talk a lot about self-regulation, co-regulation, and repair. Listen into our conversation to learn why these are important for us as parents and why they are so crucial for teaching kids self-regulation no matter what age they are.
Let’s meet Kahlila and Sarah.
Sarah R: Hi, Kahlila. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the podcast.
Kahlila: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for having us.
Sarah R: Yeah. We’re going to be talking about your book, The Self-Regulation Workbook for Children Ages Five to Eight. But before we dive in, maybe if you could each introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Kahlila: Sure. I’m Kahlila Robinson. I’m a licensed clinical psychologist based in New York City. I have a private practice where I see kids, families, and adults. I’m also a mom myself of two kids, and I’m very happy to be here talking about the book and sharing more about our process and some of the highlights from the book.
Sarah G.: Yeah. Thank you. So I’m Sarah Gerstenzang. I’m a licensed clinical social worker here in Brooklyn, New York. I also have a private practice, which focuses on adoptive families and complex developmental trauma. I’m also the board chair of the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York, and the parent of three children, two by birth and one who we adopted through foster care.
Sarah R: Welcome. Yesterday, when I was doing my preparation for this podcast, I came across an online copy of your book, Another Mother: Co-Parenting with the Foster Care System, and I started reading it, and I kept having to go, stop, stop, go back to the—it seems to—I kept it open on my laptop. I’m really looking forward to getting back to it. It seems really interesting. I grew up with some foster kids in my house when I was really young.
Okay, so back to the book that we are here to talk about. Maybe just tell us a little bit about your book and, just while we’re all on the same page, what’s your definition of self-regulation?
Kahlila: Our book is written for parents of kids age five through eight. So it’s called The Self-Regulation Workbook for Children, but it’s a slight misnomer. It’s more directly written for parents and focuses on the importance of parents being able to self-regulate so that they can be calm on behalf of their kids, and really teaching parents strategies for how to do that through really stormy times with their kids.
Because what we’ve seen, time and time again, is when parents are able to remain calm, for the most part, it benefits the child. It provides a model for the child. It supports a child’s own self-regulation. So there’s a lot in there in terms of parent guidance on how to support themselves when their child is having a hard time or when they’re having a hard time. And then there’s also a lot of strategies in the book for kids and parents to use together to support self-regulation in both of them.
So that’s the overview of the book.
Sarah R: Yeah, it’s a really helpful book. I notice that just in my practice of coaching parents, parents always come with this idea of, in short, “fix my kid,” right? So we kind of talk about that as the inroad, but then after a session or two, parents always say to me, “This isn’t even about my kid. This is about me.” And I think that’s—yeah. Nobody, though, wants to come into it thinking that. They always want to come into it thinking, “Fix my kid.”
Kahlila: Yeah.
Sarah G.: It’s kind of confusing for them also, because most parents parent the way that they’ve been parented, and they can’t really take that bird’s-eye view and see, often, how they are impacting their own child’s sense of safety and calm and capacity to be in charge of their own emotions. So yeah, it’s confusing.
Sarah R: So self-regulation—just give us a definition, what you think of as self-regulation, so we’re all on the same page.
Kahlila: Yeah.
Sarah G.: Throwing yourself.
Kahlila: Yes. In short, yeah. It’s the ability to identify feelings that you have within yourself in terms of how they come through. They could come through physically, they can come through as thoughts and as emotions. So, being able to identify those feelings and then find ways to contain them within yourself so that they don’t end up spilling out and creating more disruptive experiences for yourself or others. So: identifying, managing, and containing your own emotions.
Sarah R: Yeah. And that’s hard for kids, though. I guess that’s, you know—hence the book, right? It’s hard for kids, and it’s hard for adults too sometimes. I think that’s why you spent so much time on different—we’re going to get to that—but strategies for parents to use themselves for their own emotional self-regulation.
Before we talk about sort of what we’re working toward, what do you think typical self-regulation in kids looks like? Because what I find is that the parents I work with have higher expectations than kids are capable of, you know, sort of—we’ll talk about the under-eight set—in terms of what is a realistic expectation for how kids can manage their feelings?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think there can be a slight range, right, in terms of variability, as human beings. Five- through eight-year-olds are going to be expressing emotion. A lot of times it’s a full-body experience for them, right? So they’re sad, they’re mad—they’re going to feel the charge in their system, in their full physical system. It could come out in ways that are more physical than it would be for an adult. They actually feel the emotion physically in a way that I think is more powerful than adults.
They also, like we were saying earlier, don’t necessarily have that perspective on what’s a big deal, what’s not a big deal, what can be fixed, what can’t be fixed, how to solve certain problems. Things can feel much more overwhelming to kids because they don’t have that experience and perspective on how to solve problems, why certain things are certain ways, much less of an understanding around things like time and how things function and all of that. So a lot less information on how things run. And because of that, they can have bigger, stronger reactions to things than adults.
Sarah G.: And I would add to that, actually, that most children live in environments that are not very natural anymore. Kids five to eight—humans were meant to spend many, many hours, most of the day, outside in a natural environment, which is calming: walking, exercising, playing, learning from adults just by watching. So, number one, that would help their regulation. And if they did become dysregulated, I don’t know if you’ve ever been outside with a 6-year-old screaming, but it’s not nearly so terrible as it is with one in the grocery store.
So, yeah, I think that also contributes to the misalignment of expectations and capacity.
Sarah R: That makes sense. And I think it’s a tricky age too because, in my experience, both as a parent and a coach, I remember with all three of my kids, I think the hardest time for my husband with them was when they were around six. It was because they were so capable in so many other ways. They could learn how to play chess, they could talk to you about the stars, they could—you know, in some ways, intellectually, they’ve made a big leap and they seem so mature in some ways, but they also could have a meltdown where they’re a crying mess on the floor because they wanted to press the elevator button and you pressed it instead, right?
So there’s, I find, especially in this five- to eight-year-old set, a real asynchronicity between how developed they are in some areas and how emotional regulation is still super tricky for them in other areas. And I find that hard for parents. It does raise their expectations for how regulated it’s possible for their child to be in those difficult moments.
Sarah G.: Especially when HALT—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—comes into play. I remember getting so annoyed at my husband. I had one child who’s super vulnerable to being hungry, and I’d be like, “What? You forgot the snack?” So they don’t have the capacity to overcome those things yet.
Sarah R: Yeah, and I love how you brought that acronym in, and you talked about the “L” as being—the “L” for an adult might be lonely, but for kids as seeking connection or feeling a lack of connection. I think that is really important to think about.
We’ve already talked a little bit about parental self-regulation. I want to just touch on that again, and also co-regulation. So self-regulation—when we can manage our own big feelings—can you talk about what co-regulation is? Listeners to this podcast hear me talk about it all the time, but because you do talk about that a lot in your book, if you could just talk about what co-regulation is, and also why parental self-regulation and co-regulation are so important in the context of kids’ self-regulation.
Kahlila: Yeah. So co-regulation happens in infancy, right? When we are an infant and we are hungry or sleepy or need soothing of some kind, ideally a calm, available, consistent parent will meet that need for us, and we have a way of calming our body down. So that’s when we first learn that a high-arousal, really active, really uncomfortable bodily state can actually shift. It can actually shift to something calmer. We figure that out. We learn that over time as infants, and that’s our first experience of co-regulation. It comes from outside of us, and then we learn that’s something that our bodies and minds can actually do.
Sarah R: So that’s like soothing a baby. That movement, holding them, making those calming noises. That’s something we do, I mean, a lot of us do that intuitively with babies. Maybe that’s not fair to say, but we’re—it’s easier for us, I think, to do it with an upset baby, a lot of the time, than it is with an upset five- to eight-year-old. Why do you think that is?
Kahlila: I think it has a lot to do with what you just said, Sarah, about the asynchronous development, which is typical, right? We’re supposed to be asynchronous at five through eight, but I think it’s that false sense of, like, “They’ve got it.” They have these capacities. They are in school. They’re on a sports team. They’re learning how to read. They’re making friends. They’re doing all these things that you’re amazed by and that show this type of emotional maturity and growth and development. So maybe there’s a false security there around, “Well, they can do it themselves.” And so it can be frustrating, right?
Sarah G.: Also, they can talk and babies can’t talk. There’s a great documentary called The Dark Matter of Love about some kids who are coming in from an orphanage into a family. Early in the film, there’s a lot of chaos, the kids acting out, but the dad can’t understand because they’re speaking in Russian. And you stay so calm—these kids are shouting—and they have the translation at the bottom of the film.
And I think when you have a five- to eight-year-old, they seem bratty sometimes because of what they’re saying and the way they’re saying it.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm.
Sarah G.: Whereas a baby—we’re biologically programmed, I think, to have that—it makes the back of your neck feel uncomfortable when you hear a shrieking infant, right? “Somebody pick that baby up.” But with a five-, six-, seven-, or eight-year-old, it’s more like, “What’s that kid sounding so bratty?” Obviously they need stuff too. They need to be co-regulated, but—
Sarah R: Yeah.
Sarah G.: That’s part of our natural need to, as Kahlila was saying—it’s totally natural—our need to get these kids in order so they can be functional adults someday. But they also need to learn.
Sarah R: I think that’s one of the reasons why every day I teach, “Kids are doing the best they can.” And I think it’s hard—it’s easy to remember that with a baby, but it’s harder to remember that with a five- to eight-year-old.
So what does co-regulation look like for a five- to eight-year-old with a parent? What would you do to co-regulate with a kiddo? Because that’s how they also learn self-regulation, right? Through co-regulating with us.
Kahlila: Yeah. So in our book, we talk about co-regulation starting with the ability to self-regulate as a parent. So if you notice yourself getting activated in relation to your kid, that’s fine. That happens. An awareness of that is really helpful—like, “I notice myself getting kind of frustrated right now,” or just a tightening of my chest right now, or a furrowed brow. Just being able to have some awareness of where you’re at, what your baseline is, is a good place to start so that then you can take care of yourself a little bit and keep yourself contained.
That can be saying something to yourself like, “Okay, here we go. This is not a big deal. This is something we can do.” Or, “My only goal right now is to keep calm myself. Let me see if I can do that.” Or, “This is temporary. We’ll get through this.” So a little bit of self-talk you can do with yourself if you notice yourself getting a little bit heated and wanting to co-regulate.
If you need something a little more than that in terms of self-regulation as a parent, you could do a little bit of deep breathing. If you practice breathing when you’re not upset, when you’re calm, it can be really helpful in those moments that are more intense. It can be a strategy that’s actually really effective if you take a couple nice deep breaths in.
And if you have more time and you can do something else to calm yourself down in the moment, you can do many, many other things. Sarah talks a lot about strategies to use in the kitchen, right? Like washing dishes. If you have a window in your kitchen, or a window somewhere, staring outside—something sensory-based. Smelling something calm. We like to talk about sticking your head in the freezer, getting that blast of cool air, chewing on a piece of ice. Anything that you can do if you notice yourself getting a little too agitated to then engage with your child.
Because if you’re trying to calm your child—think of a conversation you have with an adult when you’re upset, right? If you’re upset and you’re talking to an adult that’s annoyed with you for being upset, or that is upset themselves, that doesn’t tend to help calm you down. So you want to use that same model and idea for yourself: see if you can calm yourself down, make yourself feel as present and emotionally contained as possible on behalf of your child. So that’s kind of step one.
After that—Sarah, do you want to add in anything about co-regulating?
Sarah G.: Yeah. So step two would be really a variation on what we do with infants. It could be patting on the back: “Hey, what’s going on?” Or, “You need a minute? Do you want to go get your stuffy? Do you want to…” Just kind of calm down—what’s going on? But using that same body, as Kahlila said. You need to be in a calm place. No child’s going to calm down with their parent very agitated.
Then I think just using your words. I make a lot of eye contact with my child who had the hardest time—I actually had two kids who had a very hard time regulating—so I’d say, “Look at me. Look at me.” And I’d start deep breathing and look in their eyes. I wasn’t angry, just like, “Let’s calm down together.” Around those ages, that was super effective for them.
Sarah R: I love that. “Look at me” as a grounding technique, not as a “pay attention to me while I’m talking to you” sort of “look at me.”
Sarah G.: Yeah, no. It was like, “Let’s get back together here.”
Sarah R: Yeah.
Kahlila: I think you also want to frame it a little bit—maybe we’ll talk more about this—the idea of co-regulation is to prevent as much as you can and contain a more disruptive, explosive thing. But it’s okay for the child to feel upset about something, right? It’s not like you want to say, “Stop, let me co-regulate this child so they can stop being upset because this is so annoying to me.” Maybe this is a very legitimate, healthy emotional expression that they’re having, and you’re just there to contain it and guide them and help them ride that wave of emotion.
So I think that’s the other thing that gets a little tricky sometimes for parents. Co-regulation is not necessarily about stopping the child from feeling what they’re feeling and stopping the emotional expression. It’s more about containing it and supporting it so that it can actually flow out of the child, right? If there’s a legitimate hurt or upset feeling that the child’s feeling, you don’t want to co-regulate so that it goes away. You want to co-regulate so the child can actually have their full wave of feeling without it being super disruptive or overwhelming.
Sarah R: Yeah, that’s a great point. Sorry, Sarah, did you want to say something?
Sarah G.: I was just going to say what our point is—what I remember saying to my kids many times—is, “I want to hear what you have to say, but I can’t do that right now because of this.” There’s too much emotion going on.
Exactly what Kahlila is saying. And I think we can use our words to co-regulate too. “Wow, you’re so angry right now, and I’m really sorry you’re so angry. I want to hear what you have to say. Let’s take a few minutes.” So acknowledging what they’re feeling—your words really do matter. “I want to hear what you have to say, but I can’t in this situation that we’re in.”
Sarah R: Yeah, in Peaceful Parenting we call it welcoming feelings. You talk in the book about how that’s a really important part of kids learning self-regulation. Maybe you just mentioned it, but can you expand on that a little bit?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think it’s very important to understand that in order for kids to learn self-regulation, they actually have to feel the full extent of their feelings. Kids age five through eight pretty much don’t have a chance—they don’t have a choice—but to feel their feelings fully, for the most part. And as parents, we can unintentionally sometimes cut them off from the full extent and breadth of their feeling because it’s annoying or disruptive or we don’t want to deal with it.
In that way, they don’t necessarily get to learn how to fully contain it and understand it themselves. If they’re getting prematurely kind of cut off by a parent saying, “Stop,” or even just a parent that’s trying to use distraction—sometimes distraction is effective, but sometimes a parent that’s just like, “Look over here. Stop feeling what you’re feeling”—then it cuts off a little bit of learning for the child to say, “Oh, this is how deep the feeling goes. This is how long it lasts. Okay, this is what it starts to feel like when it starts to go down.”
They get more of an internal knowing and understanding around what the intensity of the feeling feels like. So if you cut that off prematurely, then they don’t get the full extent of that kind of learning.
Sarah R: Yeah. I think sometimes we don’t have the bandwidth for it as parents necessarily every single time they’re upset, but I always talk about thinking of that as an intention. Your intention is to always welcome the feelings, but sometimes you do have to distract because you’ve got to get out the door for work and you don’t have 15 minutes—or 45, or whatever—to sit with them while they go through the feelings. So I think it’s just, over time, our intention is to welcome feelings whenever possible.
Sarah G.: And I think one thing we talk about in the book that I think is just crucial is revisiting. I always say to parents, Saturday morning’s a perfect time. You have pancake breakfast, whatever, if you can. Then you say, “Hey, on Wednesday, when you got so upset and we did get to school, but I was wondering—why were you so angry?” And just revisiting that time so you can understand what happened and then make different plans.
I think that matters. It’s great if you can do it in the moment. That’s often very challenging. I have the same thought as you, Sarah. Time these days for parents is really, really rough. The pressures on them. But to actually go back and touch on that moment, that really matters.
Sarah R: I love what you say about—you don’t have to address it in the moment. You can address it later. I often tell parents, you don’t have to address it in the moment, and often it’s not even as effective because kids are not in their learning brains or their thinking brains, and they can’t learn when you’re trying to address whatever the situation is.
Another thing you talk about is repair, and that goes on the heels of what we were saying—addressing something that’s happened that’s difficult for you or for them or for both of you. Can you just talk a little bit about repair? Whether you’ve kind of messed up or you’ve had some conflict with your kids, why is it important? And what are some best practices around repair?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think this is probably one of the most essential places to go as a parent. It’s such an important parenting tool, actually.
And I think it can be foreign to a lot of parents, the idea of repairing with your child, because that wasn’t how you were raised. You didn’t have a mom or dad come to you after yelling or losing their temper and say, “Hey, you know what? I think I lost my cool.” So it’s kind of like, how do I do this? This doesn’t seem right, to apologize to your kid. There’s all this discomfort that parents can have around it.
But I think it’s so powerful, and one of the reasons it’s so powerful is because we really have to acknowledge that our children are some of our most important attachment relationships, right? There’s a huge importance to how we are feeling about ourselves depending on how our relationship is going with our kids. So repairing is not only healthy and good for the relationship and for the child, but it’s also healthy and important and good for the parent to feel like, “I’ve done the best I could in repairing a situation with a child.”
So we’ve all been there. We’ve lost our cool, overreacted, done something that we regret with our kids. And so when we talk about repair, the first thing that we suggest is just taking some moments of reflection for yourself and repairing with yourself. So that means whatever the shame or the guilt or embarrassment or sadness that you have around what happened, be with that. Be gentle with yourself. See if you can self-soothe a little bit. Parenting is a really hard job. I do the best that I can. Even good parents make mistakes. So really, again, that self-regulation around calming yourself down, trying to contain your emotions before you engage with your child.
So the first repair is really with yourself.
Then you want to be the, in terms of secure attachment, bigger, wiser model of things emotionally for your child. So you go to your child and you talk about it as simply and directly as you can. “Hey, I apologize for yelling. I actually think I overreacted. And I’m sorry that my voice got so loud.” And that’s pretty much it.
Then you see how receptive your child is to that. If they’re open to a hug or a high five, that’s another way to affirm the repair. And then you see what it’s like to move on. But you try to handle it pretty directly.
Again, in terms of the timing of things, it’s nice if you can handle it kind of the same day that it happened, shortly after the event happened. If that’s too hard for some reason, I think there’s no wrong time. There’s never too late to say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about what happened to us last week, last month. It’s been on my mind, and I want to let you know that I apologize.”
Sarah G.: Yeah. And I think then on the other side of that is that children make mistakes as well, right? And that we can give them—some kids are very natural, “Oh, I’m sorry, Mommy,” and explain whatever happened. But at this age, it’s also unusual for them to do that. And so what one can do is give them an opportunity.
If they spilled, “Get the sponge.” Or say they had a big fit and the juice went everywhere—“Let’s get this cleaned up. You can help me by wiping up the floor.” Because we don’t want them to be stuck in that shame state of, “I’ve made this big mistake and my parent’s mad at me.” Even if you’re not yelling, you can be silently really angry. So you can just give them an opportunity to repair. If they’ve hurt another child, “Take this ice pack and go…” You can apologize by bringing over the ice pack, or drawing a picture, or something. I think it’s really helpful too to help them do it. It’s not like we just wait until they’re old enough to do it.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm. I always say repair helps the kid—when you invite them to make a repair, it helps them feel like a good person again.
And it’s an invitation because we’ve all heard that, “Say you’re sorry,” and then the kid’s just like, “Sorry,” and runs away. That’s not actually a repair. I always say, ask them, “What do you think you could do to help your brother feel better?” Which somehow is easier for kids, I think, than “Apologize” or “Tell them you’re sorry.”
But I love that you highlighted that it makes the person doing the repair feel better too.
And I just want to go back to what Kahlila said about doing your own repair with yourself first, because I think it’s really important that a parent making repair doesn’t turn into asking the child for forgiveness. That’s really what we have to do for ourselves first, because it’s not their job to say, “It’s okay, Mommy,” or whatever.
Someone in my life, who shall remain nameless, still has a hard time with doing repair because his mother did the “I’m seeking forgiveness” kind of repairs, and he just feels they’re empty because of that.
Kahlila: Yeah, yeah.
Sarah R: So you talk about tools. A lot of your book is really practical. You share a lot of self-regulation strategies for both parents and kids. So maybe you’ve mentioned a few already, but what’s your favorite strategy for parents from the book—one that you haven’t mentioned yet?
Kahlila: Yeah. I think my favorite strategy for parents—and this is kind of in the first half of the book, not in the strategies part, but you can think of it as a strategy—is actually playing with your kids most days when you can. It doesn’t have to be for a long time, but kids five through eight love to play, and it brings them so much joy and feels so good to them. I think it can be very regulating for kids, and I think it can be really supportive of the relationship.
Even with my older child, yesterday we had a day where it was parent-teacher conferences, he had a half day from school, and afterwards we did errands and it was kind of more relaxed and we had more time to hang out and chat. We just had an easier time with each other and enjoyed each other’s company. The evening routine was really smooth, and there was a lot of goodness between us and connection. The rapport was made even more solid between us.
I see that happen all the time when parents are able to devote even five minutes of undivided, no-screen, no-phone attention with their kid—playing with them, talking with them. It really builds this ease to the connection such that giving directives or following the routine just makes things smoother. So for me, an effective strategy is having a bit of play and fun connection time with your kid once a day, even if it’s only for five minutes. It really lubricates the whole system and makes things easier. It makes kids more motivated to keep that good feeling with you. So that’s one of my favorites.
Sarah R: Your book is really practical, and you do have strategies that parents can teach kids—things they can use in the moment. So what’s your favorite strategy? We’ll just call one out for the podcast here.
Sarah G.: Yeah, I would say, actually, taking a walk. Doing it with your child when—it’s a great way to regulate. Often once you’re calmer, you’re walking, you can repair. And it’s also something kids can really do themselves as they get older. It’s so simple. If things are really chaotic, it’s just like, let’s just start walking. Let’s walk around the—
Sarah R: I love that.
Sarah G.: Walk. Love that.
Sarah R: And that calls back to your “getting outside.” Everything feels better outside.
Sarah G.: Yes, exactly. And it’s funny—I just saw an article in the newspaper this morning about how now, having the phones that we have compared to not very long ago, landlines, people are actually spending so much more time on the phone. So if you can turn off that phone and take a walk—it’s really interrupting the parent-child relationship in a lot of ways. So we have to be very conscientious about doing that. So: a walk with no phone, I should say.
Sarah R: Yeah. I’m so glad that we didn’t have phones when my kids were little because I think about those hours and hours spent at the playground where, frankly, it can get a little bit boring sometimes. And there was nothing to do but interact with the other people or watch your kids. There were no phones to pull out and see what’s going on on Facebook or whatever.
Kahlila: Yeah. Can I have one more?
Sarah R: Oh, sorry. Yes.
Kahlila: Maybe for, you know, it’s a little harder for five-year-olds, but more for seven- or eight-year-olds: the idea of the child asking for a compromise when they are frustrated about something. You’re setting a limit and they’re not happy with the limit, and their response is frustration or anger.
To really help kids practice this as a strategy—it’s like a parent-child strategy—they can feel a lot more empowered when they say, “Okay, well this is the limit, but may I have a compromise?” And you can have a conversation with your parent that often gets you more into the thinking and speaking part of your brain versus the emotional part of your brain. You’re engaging and you’re trying to collaborate with your parent. That in itself calms things down a little bit. Again, it can be empowering for kids to say, “Wait a minute, I have a right to speak here and see if I can ask for a compromise here and work with my mom or dad and talk it through.”
So I really like that one too.
And then it’s not exactly a strategy, but we have this section in our book where we have, I think, about eight kids talking about a time that was hard for them and how they dealt with it emotionally. Kids seeing other kids deal with big emotions and learning from how other kids do it is actually really helpful too. I’ve seen kids really want to absorb that and use it for themselves when they see another kid using a breathing exercise or pretending to blow bubbles or doing something. A lot of kids are learning calming strategies at their school, and so a parent could also say, “Well, what have you been learning at school that helps with you feeling calm at school?” and have the child teach the parent what that strategy is—another nice way of integrating self-regulation practices for kids.
Sarah R: Yeah. I love that you brought up those calming strategies, like the ones that they’ve often learned at school these days, which is great—like blowing on a cup of hot chocolate, or pretending you’re doing that to do the deep breathing.
I love that your book is really more focused on the parents and what the parents can do in terms of self-regulation and co-regulation, because what I hear over and over from parents is, “Yeah, my kid can tell me five calm-down strategies that they’ve learned at school, but in the heat of the moment, they’re not interested in using it.”
So are there things that you suggest for parents when you have a kid who is resistant to those strategies that they know, maybe when they’re calm, they know they can use, but then when they’re upset they are refusing?
Sarah G.: Practice. They need to practice ahead of time. Then the parents have to catch them doing it, even a small amount. Like, “Oh, I saw you started the breathing, but then I guess you got so overwhelmed. That was amazing.” And so—but also, you know, the stop, drop, and roll that they do in schools for fire—you need to do the same thing with these strategies.
Sarah R: Mm-hmm.
Sarah G.: Practice ahead of time. Talk about, “This is going to be a really hard day for you. You’re so tired and we have these events, and what are you going to do when you’re feeling so overwhelmed? What do you think is going to work for you?” So forth.
Sarah R: Yeah, so prep ahead of time. And even afterwards, like, “Oh, that was so tough. You know, maybe next time we can try to do that calming strategy X that you learned at school when you’re feeling that way.” I think that probably reinforces some of the patterns too, just even talking about it later.
Kahlila: Yeah. And if you feel like there’s something that’s not working for your child and it—don’t use it, right? Think outside of the box. Try new things. Do some trial and error. Every kid is unique, and something that may work for one child may not work for another. So discover that over the years and kind of accept the reality of what works for your child and what doesn’t.
Some children may want a very tight bear hug. Other children might want to chew on a piece of gum or something like that, or take a walk. So be attuned to what is happening for your child and believe them when they say, “This doesn’t help.”
Sarah R: Yeah. Love that.
Thank you so much. This is really—I think your book is really great, and we’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Any place you want to send our listeners before we let you go? Any best place to learn more about you and what you do?
Kahlila: I have a website. It’s kahlilarobinsonphd.com. So that’s my website. I have an Instagram account with the same name, Kahlila Robinson PhD. So you can find a little bit more about me and my practice there. We’d be excited to get feedback from people on the book and see how they’re using it and what’s been helpful. So we are so open to hearing back from people.
Sarah R: Awesome. What about you, Sarah?
Sarah G.: Yeah, so anyone can find me at sarahgerstenzang.com. And I echo Kahlila’s request. If people find something useful in the workbook, we just love to—we’re proud of the work, and we’d love to know how it feels to actually use it.
Sarah R: Wonderful. We’ll put those links in the show notes.
Before I let you go, there’s a question that I ask every guest at the end of the podcast. So maybe, Kahlila, you go first, and then I’ll ask you to answer the same question, Sarah. Which is: if you could give some advice to your younger parent self—go back in time and give yourself advice—what advice would you give yourself?
Kahlila: I would probably say: enjoy it more. There’s something about the intensity and the demands of scheduling and routines and pressure and all that kind of stuff. See if you can not sweat the small stuff as much and be a little bit more relaxed about things and enjoy it more.
Sarah R: I love that. That’s so important.
Sarah G.: So we used to have very long dinner hours, and I was just thinking as we were talking about repair today: I should have done more repairs after some of those dinners didn’t go—sort of erupted. We had a nephew living with us for a while, so had four teenagers at a table. Anyway, lots of it was fabulous and wonderful, but also sometimes things happen. So yeah, I think, “Oh, I should have done more repairs after those dinners.”
Sarah R: Well, take your own advice. It’s never too late.
Kahlila: That’s right. That’s right.
Sarah R: Let me know.
Sarah G.: I’ve apologized for everything. Don’t worry.
Sarah R: Oh, good, good.
Well, thank you both so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for all the support you’re giving parents out in the world.
Kahlila: Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you for having us. It was so nice to be here today.
Sarah R: Thank you.
Sarah G.: I really—
Kahlila: Appreciate it.
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Strong-willed kids can be some of the most challenging — and the most incredible — kids to parent.
In this bonus mini-episode, Sarah and Corey talk about what makes strong-willed kids unique, why they can feel so hard to parent in everyday moments, and why their determination, honesty, and sense of justice are traits to be celebrated.
They also discuss how small shifts in how we communicate with strong-willed kids can dramatically reduce power struggles while preserving connection.
If you’re parenting a child who pushes back, refuses to be bossed around, and stands firmly in their beliefs, this conversation will help you see their strengths and learn how to work with their temperament instead of constantly fighting against it.
Sarah also shares details about her upcoming workshop on parenting strong-willed kids.
You can find the workshop at https://reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop
00:00 — Strong-willed kids: a blessing and a challengeWhy Sarah and Corey both love working with strong-willed kids.
01:00 — What makes strong-willed kids specialTheir sense of justice, independence, and willingness to question authority.
02:00 — Why strong-willed kids can make everyday parenting harderWhen kids won’t “just put their coat on.”
03:00 — A real-life example of strong-willed determinationSarah’s story about her niece tying her shoes while holding a fidget spinner.
05:00 — The nervous system reaction to being told what to doWhy strong-willed people resist being bossed around.
06:00 — The surprising realization Sarah’s son had at age 13Why he thought one parent was “better.”
07:00 — Power struggles and how to avoid themWhy connection matters so much with strong-willed kids.
08:00 — Workshop announcementParenting Strong-Willed Kids: Tools to Reduce Power Struggles Without Crushing Their Spirit.
Sarah: Hi, Corey.
Corey: Hey, Sarah.
Sarah: Let’s talk about strong-willed kids. Are your kids strong-willed?
Corey: Absolutely.
Sarah: Yeah, both. What about you?
Corey: Both of them. And yes—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I am extremely strong-willed.
Sarah: Me too. And my kids— all three of my kids are strong-willed. And me and my husband. You should see us play board games together.
It did make it harder to parent them. And I also love how I am, and I love how my kids were and are. What do you love about strong-willed kids?
Corey: I love so much about strong-willed kids. I actually think some of my favorite clients to work with are those who have strong-willed kids.
Sarah: For sure.
Corey: Because these kids are just… what I love about them is they’re going to change the world. They’re not going to just go along with the crowd. They’re not going to just do things because you said so. They’re going to really think deeply about things. They have this deep sense of right and wrong.
Sarah: Justice. Yeah.
Corey: Yes—justice guiding who they are and what they want to do in the world.
Sarah: Yeah. What I love about strong-willed kids is that they speak their truth. You know how they feel. They’re not afraid to speak their truth about what they like and what they don’t like.
Corey: Yeah. You always know where you stand with them. There’s no guesswork involved with a strong-willed kid.
Sarah: Yeah. And they’re so willing to stand up for what they believe in—even if it comes at a cost to them.
I love how they won’t be bossed around. Because they’re little and they’re still learning, sometimes they don’t realize it’s at their own expense.
Corey: Yes.
Sarah: I think it’s something to be admired. And also, as a parent, it makes it tough sometimes to work with them.
Corey: Absolutely. There have been so many times where I look at my kids, or I’m talking to clients, and we’re just like, “Why can’t they just go put their coat on now?”
We have these busy schedules we’re trying to get through, and sometimes when you have these little strong-willed kids, you feel like you can’t get through the schedule because they won’t just go do what you ask them to do.
Sarah: Yeah.
One time when I was teaching a workshop on strong-willed kids—and another one’s coming up; we’ll get to that—I looked up the dictionary definition of strong-willed. It was something like: tends to do what one wants, even if others advise against it.
And I love that.
It reminds me of something that happened recently. As you know, I was visiting my sister and my niece, who’s eight. I was helping get my niece ready for school. She was tying her shoes, and she had a fidget spinner in one hand while trying to tie them.
Of course, tying your shoes is already tricky when you’re still learning, and trying to do it with a fidget spinner makes it even harder.
I casually said, “Let me hold that.”
She said, “No.”
I started laughing, and she looked at me.
I said, “Have you ever heard the expression cut off your nose to spite your face?”
She said no.
I explained that it basically means making things harder for yourself just to prove a point. I told her, “I don’t care if you hold that fidget spinner while you tie your shoes, but it’s making life harder for you. I love that you don’t want to be bossed around, and I admit I kind of gave you an order to let me hold it. I love that you’re standing up for yourself and not letting anyone boss you around. But holding onto that fidget spinner while tying your shoes is making things harder for you.”
She didn’t say anything.
She finished tying her shoe with the fidget spinner still in her hand.
Then when she moved to the next shoe, she handed it to me and said, “Will you hold this?”
I said, “Sure.”
And she tied her shoe without the fidget spinner.
That’s such a good example of how strong-willed kids can be. If my husband tells me to do something I was already planning to do, I can feel my nervous system activate—like, He can’t tell me what to do.
But because I’m a grown-up with experience, I don’t shout “No!” when that happens.
So that little tweak can really make things easier for strong-willed kids—and for us.
Corey: Absolutely.
And we were saying off camera too—obviously you are also my boss, and you are the only person in my life who can tell me what to do, and I happily do it without that nervous system response.
So all those tweaks that you’ve taught me over the years—how you manage me—show that there really is a way to work with strong-willed people, whether it’s a little kid or a grown-up, to make them feel empowered when you’re working together.
Sarah: Totally.
My middle son is extremely strong-willed. He’s 21 now, but growing up he absolutely would cut off his nose to spite his face so he wouldn’t feel bossed around.
My husband tends to be a bit more traditional—still peaceful, but a little more direct and demanding.
One time when my son was about 13, he said, “Dad’s a better parent than you are.”
I said, “Really? Why do you say that?”
He said, “Because I always do what he tells me to do.”
I knew what he meant. My husband would say things like, “You have to do this,” and my son would comply.
So I asked him, “Have I ever asked you to do something that you didn’t do?”
He stopped and thought.
Then he said, “No.”
The difference was that he didn’t feel bossed around when I asked him to do something.
And he usually did follow my husband too because he felt connected to him—which is another really important thing with strong-willed kids: connection.
But it was funny watching his face as the realization landed. The ground shifted for him.
He realized, “I do what my mom asks too. I just don’t notice that she’s telling me what to do.”
I thought that was hilarious.
Corey: That shows you worked with him so effectively that he didn’t even notice directions were happening.
Sarah: Yeah, exactly.
Well, there are so many fun things to talk about with strong-willed kids. I love them so much.
But I also see parents every day—and I know you do too—who feel really stuck. They feel like they’re constantly battling and getting into power struggles.
That’s why I’m teaching a workshop on this.
It’s on Wednesday, March 18th at noon Eastern time. You can go to reimaginepeacefulparenting.com/workshop to sign up.
If you have a strong-willed kiddo, this workshop is for you.
If you’re in our membership, it’s included, so don’t sign up separately.
It’s a live workshop on Zoom where we’ll talk about how to work with strong-willed kids so you can get through the day without feeling like you’re constantly fighting with them—while still preserving connection and getting the things done that need to get done.
If you can’t make it live, you’ll get the replay and a cheat sheet afterward.
If you’re listening to this on the podcast, we’ll put the link in the show notes.
If you’re seeing this on Instagram, the link is in my bio.
I hope to see everyone there.
Thanks, Corey.
Corey: Thank you.


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I am so excited I was able to interview a parenting thought leader I greatly admire. Lenore did not disappoint! So much wisdom, and so much fun! I think you’ll love this podcast episode.In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, I interview Lenore Skenazy, author of “Free-Range Kids,” which grew into the Free-Range Kids movement. Now she is president of Let Grow, the national nonprofit that is making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back independence. We talk about screens, anxiety, free play, and why childhood independence matters more than ever.
👉 Also- just announced- I’m teaching a workshop next week: “Parenting Strong-Willed Kids: Tools to Reduce Power Struggles without Crushing Their Spirit.” All the details HERE.
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We talk about:
* 00:00 — Introduction to Lenore Skenazy
* 03:00 — The disappearance of unstructured childhood and why kids need risk, boredom, and problem-solving
* 06:00 — How independence builds confidence
* 08:00 — The social pressure parents feel
* 09:00 — How communities can bring back free play
* 15:00 — What kids learn through unsupervised play
* 19:00 — Why kids prefer real-world play to screens
* 24:00 — How fear reshaped parenting
* 29:00 — The rise of tracking and constant surveillance
* 34:00 — Independence and mental health
* 37:00 — The Let Grow Experience
* 41:00 — Kids are not actually addicted to screens
* 42:00 — Bringing back the teenage babysitter
* 46:00 — How giving kids independence reduces the pressure of intensive parenting
* 49:00 — The value of “kid world”
* 50:00 — Lenore’s advice to her younger parent self
Resources mentioned in this episode:
* Lenore’s Book Free Range Kids
* Two free independence-building programs for schools
* The free “Four Weeks to a Let Grow Kid” program
* Yoto Screen Free Audio Book Player
* The Peaceful Parenting Membership
* Evelyn & Bobbie bras
* Strong-Willed Kids Workshop
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
* Instagram
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* Website
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* Book a short consult or coaching session call
xx Sarah and Corey
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Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Lenore Skenazy. You might know her as the author of the book Free-Range Kids and the founder of the movement of the same name. Now she’s president of Let Grow, the national nonprofit she co-founded with Peter Gray, Daniel Shuchman, and Jonathan Haidt. Their mission: making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some old-fashioned independence.
Lenore says our kids are smarter, safer, and stronger than our culture gives them credit for. If you’re worried about the ubiquitousness of screens in your child’s life and/or about the rise of childhood anxiety, you’re going to want to have a listen to this episode. Lenore and I discussed the importance of unstructured, unsupervised time in childhood, why it disappeared, how to bring it back, and what happens when we do or don’t.
She was so much fun to speak with, and her message is one that all parents need to hear and that all kids want them to hear.
I just loved this conversation with Lenore, and I know you will too. Okay. Let’s meet Lenore.
Sarah: Hi, Lenore. Welcome to the podcast.
Lenore: Thank you, Sarah. I am happy to be here, wherever here is.
Sarah: Well, I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ve followed your work since you were called the Worst Mom in America, back in the beginning of your Free-Range Kids days. I’m so excited about your new project that you’ve been working on. So maybe, if you could just introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do.
Lenore: Sure. I am Lenore Skenazy. I live in New York City. I have two grown kids—growing, grown, whatever you want to say. When are they done? I don’t know. But I wrote the book Free-Range Kids, and I am now president of Let Grow, which is the nonprofit that’s promoting childhood independence.
Sarah: I love it. I was recently—this, I promise, is going to make sense when I get back to it—but I recently listened to the memoir of Patti Smith, the artist and musician, and she talked a lot about her childhood growing up in the fifties, and how unsupervised and unstructured it was, and all of that. She had really great memories of playing in the woods, and the games that she would make up with her brothers and all of the neighborhood kids and the things that they would do. And I really wondered: is that kind of childhood why she became such a creative person and, you know, a successful person in that way? And it made me feel sad for that kind of childhood that’s lost to kids today.
So why don’t kids have that sort of unstructured, unsupervised play, like maybe you and I even grew up with? Because I know I did, for sure.
Lenore: I did, for sure, too. And everybody did. Some people ended up being Patti Smith, and most of us didn’t. Nonetheless, I’m sorry to see it evaporating too.
One of my recent analogies is that the rainforest was sort of disappearing, but we didn’t notice until we looked at pictures from before and after, from 1970 till now, and it’s like, oh my God, that’s the earth’s lungs, and look how small they’ve gotten. And I feel that same way about unsupervised time in childhood. It’s this natural resource. It’s something that all kids thrive on having, and we just keep shrinking it and replacing it with organized and supervised activities that we think are better, that we think, oh, now they’re learning chess, or they’ve made it to the travel lacrosse team—that has to be good. You’re up in Canada: made it to the travel hockey team. That’s gotta be good. More time in the luge—that’s wonderful, right?
But in fact, what kids really need, and what their whole innards are programmed to expect, is all sorts of time when they’re making up their own games, when they’re dealing with some fears and some squabbles with their friends as they figure out, what are we gonna do today? And, you know, is that tree gonna be too hard to climb? Let me try.
Without those everyday experiences of a little bit of fear, a little bit of risk, some exhilaration that nobody is there to give you credit for or a trophy for or a grade for, there’s something called the internal locus of control.
Internal locus of control is when you feel you can handle things. Things will come at you and you’ll deal, because you are confident and competent enough. An external locus of control is when you feel others are both manipulating you and taking care of you, that your fate is in someone else’s hands.
We’ve sort of swapped the internal locus of control of Patti Smith’s childhood and our childhoods for this external locus of control where somebody’s saying, okay, it’s three o’clock, I’m gonna pick you up, and then we get you to dance, and then we got Kumon, and then there’s homework, and then there’s dinnertime, and 20 minutes exactly of reading, because that’s how you’re gonna turn into a kid who loves reading. “Okay, start. Stop. I really love that. Really fell into that book.”
What I’m trying to say is that Mother Nature expected kids to get all of this give and take and excitement and confusion, and when we take it out, kids end up drooping because it’s like they haven’t gotten something very necessary for their development, sort of like food, except it’s independence and it’s free play. And we keep looking around saying, oh, it must be COVID that’s making kids so depressed. It must be phones that are making kids so anxious. And I think it’s just the fact that they have this very strange childhood, unlike what the system expects. And when you’re missing something foundational, you droop.
Sarah: Our mutual friend Ned Johnson, who’s a co-author of The Self-Driven Child—
Lenore: Love it.
Sarah: They talk a lot in that book about how we want our kids to be self-driven, but that self-drive and autonomy are correlated, in that when autonomy goes down, so does self-drive.
Lenore: They are the same thing! It’s so funny because we say we want self-driven kids, and then we drive them. Literally drive them to the Kumon and the Jazzercise.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s—I mean, I want to come back to, when kids have time on their own, they learn that they can figure it out. But just on a funny note about that self-driven and driving them places, it’s really hard to raise your kids this way—with unstructured, unsupervised time—when nobody else is doing it.
I remember, I live in a big city, and from the age of 12, when my kids were—I thought 12 was a good age for them to start getting around the city by themselves. They did. And of course, it wasn’t just like, okay, all of a sudden you’re going on the subway by yourself, but we worked up to it. So by the time they were 12, they were capable.
But I got so much judgment from other parents. My middle son played baseball, and he would get himself to practices and get himself home. And there were parents who would insist on giving him rides because they were concerned about him going on the subway by himself. And then I kind of had to give myself little reassurances, like, it’s okay, it’s okay if they’re judging you for having your kids be out and about by themselves. But how do you—maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, because we could talk about some ideas first—but when you are doing this on your own, say you’re letting your kids do things that you think are age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate, and then other people aren’t, what are some ways that parents can kind of give themselves some self-talk? What should I have told myself back then?
Lenore: Okay, I’m not going to talk about self-talk. I’m going to talk about changing the culture that you’re in so that you’re not the only one sending your kid to the park. And then also what Let Grow, the nonprofit I run, suggests in terms of giving kids back an easy way to give kids back some of this free play that we’re talking about.
First of all, if you want your kid to be playing outside, it’s no fun for them to play outside—whether people think you’re the worst mom or not—if they go outside to the park and, let’s see, I can keep going down the slide. That’s a lot of fun. You know, you need somebody to play tag with. You need somebody to talk to. You need somebody to swing next to or to push you.
So how do you get that? You talk to some of the other parents in the neighborhood and you say, let’s set up Free Play Fridays, right? I know everybody’s really busy, but a Friday afternoon before the weekend begins—how about from three to five, we all let our kids just play at the park together?
And I’ve heard about this working in many communities, including one 12-year-old who was so bored—I don’t know how he found out about it; I guess his mom must have known me or something—who went and put postcards in all the neighbors’ mailboxes, and he ended up with like 20 or 25 kids playing on Friday afternoons because he said, hey, let’s all meet, and parents, you don’t have to come. It’s not impossible to renormalize the idea of free play in a neighborhood.
And if you can’t get a bunch of kids coming together at the park, another idea somebody once sent to Let Grow, which I love—she called it a friendship club or friendship camp because she did it during summer. And it was simply this: in your neighborhood, there are probably some families that also would like to see their kids playing more, especially during the summer perhaps. And so what she did is she sort of made a pact with three or four other families that, look, my kid can knock on your kid’s door, your kids can knock on my kid’s door, and if my kid’s available, then that’s it. They’ll play. I won’t supervise them. I’ll know that they’re there. They can play outside, inside.
And that way you’ve sort of made it like the fifties. So now there’s kids going around the neighborhood knocking on each other’s doors, and that way you don’t have to worry about planning a play date, and you don’t have to have a phone involved. It’s just going door to door and finding these three or four friends who’s around.
People have started swearing by the landlines that you can buy now, or these pseudo-landlines. There’s one called Tin Can. And so kids can call up each other and set up a play date without falling into a phone and then never coming out again.
So those are all ways that you can sort of make free play happen again in your neighborhood. But what Let Grow recommends on top of all those is trying to get—we have something we call a Let Grow Play Club, but we might change the name for middle and high school because play sounds so babyish. And really what we’re talking about is the—
Sarah: Hang club. Call it the Hang Club.
Lenore: The Hanging Club. I was thinking of calling it the third—I can’t remember if it’s called a third space or a third place—but like when Starbucks started, everyone was excited because now there’s a third place. It’s not work and it’s not home. We can go and hang out.
So this would be having schools stay open for mixed-age, no-phones free play.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And it solves so many problems. First of all, if you send kids home to play, we just discussed that oftentimes they won’t end up at the park because there’s nobody else at the park. So they’ll be back in their room on a phone, or you’re paying a lot of money and spending a lot of time driving them someplace else to be on an organized team, league, whatever. But at school, all the kids are already there, right? So it’s just a question of them staying a little longer.
If you’re in a very dangerous, scary neighborhood, you’re not sending them to the park. You’re just saying, you know, how about from three to five, four days a week, there could be a play club where there’s an adult supervising, but like a lifeguard.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Right? So they’re not organizing games. They’re not solving the problems, the arguments. They’re just watching and they’re there in case of a shark or some other emergency.
And then the kids—and then you leave some stuff out for the kids. And actually, you’ll see this particular idea recommended in The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, who’s one of my co-founders of Let Grow. And one of the coolest things I found out, because I was helping him on the chapter for schools, was if you’re having a Let Grow Play Club after school, you should always have some really big sandbags there for the kids to play with. And do you know why?
Sarah: No.
Lenore: Take a guess. What’s the good of a sandbag?
Sarah: Like, how big are the sandbags you’re talking about?
Lenore: Like the size of a pillow.
Sarah: Okay.
Lenore: Like a filled pillow.
Sarah: For bases.
Lenore: Yeah, that’s something you could definitely use for bases.
Sarah: For some, any kind of markers and games.
Lenore: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And for building. And the sort of sneaky reason for having sandbags is that a kid can’t carry them by themself.
Sarah: Oh, it involves cooperation.
Lenore: It automatically creates cooperation, which is what playing in the woods does, which is what organizing a game of baseball does. And you want kids to have these easy ways of interacting and getting to know each other, the non-awkward ways.
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: And saying, hey, help me with this. Or like, look, we gotta bring this over here, it’s third base. Yeah, you’re doing something together and you’re automatically starting a relationship without any kind of like, “Will you be my friend?” Right. Or “I’m so lonely, Lily.” It’s not that.
And that’s what play has always done. Who are your friends? As Peter Gray, who’s another one of my Let Grow co-founders and a professor of psychology, says: when you’re a kid, a friend is defined as a kid you play with.
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: You know, “I’m going to Julie’s house.” What are we gonna do? “We’re gonna play.” Okay. I’ll see you at seven.
And so you want to have a bunch of stuff that—the technical term, I guess it’s not that technical, is loose parts.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: You want to have loose parts out there, and kids can bring them from home. And I’m talking remote-control cars and old suitcases and fabric and some rope or PVC pipe. Kids just figure out what to do with it. And so they’re being creative, and they’re explaining, “No, we’re gonna build it this way.” That’s communication. And then they’re cooperating.
“We’re gonna drag this bag over here.” And all the social-emotional skills that kids are getting now in worksheets on the rug during their social-emotional-skills-building time, you know, or little cards that say, “Remember, you’re not alone. Remember, people like you. You are good. You’re kind.” It’s like all this sort of fallacious confidence and connection happens automatically through play.
You play with the kids you like, and frankly, if you’re a total jerk and nobody wants to play with you, you start recognizing that and adjusting.
We’ve seen this in a play club. My favorite story about a play club was a kid who—everybody was jumping into a leaf pile. It was down in South Carolina. And they’d jump in the middle, and it’d be really fun, or they’d do a cartwheel into the middle, whatever, and then they’d leave and then it’d be the next kids. And they were organizing themselves.
And then one kid jumped into the middle of the leaf pile and would not budge. He was just there. And everyone’s like, “Hey, get out of the way. Hey, you’re in the way. Move already. Hey, it’s my turn.” And he was just like, “I can’t hear you.”
And so finally the kids said, “Well, let’s just jump around him. There’s enough leaves.” And so they started doing that, and then the kid—the middle-of-the-leaf-pile kid—walked off.
And what’s wonderful about this is that the kids saw a problem, tried a solution—move, move, move—that didn’t work, and then came up with another solution: ignore him.
And had there been an adult who was jumping in to save them, to save the leaf-pile day, first of all, the kid would’ve gotten all the attention, because the other kids would just be waiting while the teacher says, “Now, you know, Aiden, we don’t sit in the middle of a leaf pile. There are other children. You see them there.” And then the kids—that would’ve been completely nothing. They just would’ve been waiting for an adult, as always, to solve the problem.
And they wouldn’t have been creative and they wouldn’t have been working together to solve a problem. But instead they did. And so that’s why you need free play, so that all those skills come into play. And by the way, it’s fun and it’s what kids should be doing.
But if you have a school starting a play club, all our materials are free, and they basically explain the philosophy behind why loose-parts free play is good and why it’s great to have different ages together because, you know, the older kids sort of are nicer to the younger kids.
Peter Gray always says, if you have seven-year-olds trying to play a card game together, it’s a disaster. It cannot work. But if you have nine-year-olds with the seven-year-olds, the nine-year-olds are so cool that the seven-year-olds want to be like them. And then the nine-year-olds are saying, like, hold up your hand. We can see your cards. Don’t put the—you know, don’t put an ace down. And they take the ace and they put it back in the kid’s hand. You don’t throw the ace down until the end.
And so it sounds like maybe some yelling or whining or complaining, and yet it’s education. And the older kids are learning how to explain a game, and the younger kids are learning how to be the older kids. And we keep segregating kids by age so that it’s only seven-year-olds against seven-year-olds in baseball or soccer or hockey, and all you know is who’s the fastest and who’s the best.
Sarah: I love it. I was watching some of the videos on your website, and there was one, a free play after school video, and the loose parts in this video were cardboard.
Lenore: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: And it actually—it’s going to make me cry—it moved me to tears, watching these kids. And there was this one scene of all these little kids, the game was two kids hold up the cardboard and another kid runs through it. And there was this clip of them working out whose turn it was and who was going to go next. And then they’re just doing the activity, and all the other things they were doing with the cardboard. It was so—they were all so immersed and at times joyful, and it was just so great to see, like, so wonderful to see. I really think it’s so great what you are doing.
And I think, you know, a lot of Jonathan Haidt’s book was about screens, and everyone’s worried about screens, and I think you talk about this too: the reason it becomes this vicious cycle, like a chicken and egg, is kids don’t have anything to do, parents don’t have anything for them to do, so they are on screens. And then they’re on screens and then they don’t get out and play. So it sounds like part of the answer here is doing the—getting the play going first.
Lenore: Yeah. First of all, I love that video too. And what I love about that game they’re playing with the two kids holding a piece of cardboard, and they’re all arguing like, who’s gonna go first to punch the cardboard? Which doesn’t seem like the funnest game in the world, but they were so eager. It’s like, “You’ll go first, then I’ll go.” “No, no, he’ll go and then I’ll go and then you’ll go.” It is just such a beautiful thing to see. And it’s all the different ages, it’s all the different races, and it all seems to be boys because who’s stupid enough to—
Sarah: The girls don’t want to punch cardboard. My kid one time was telling me about her two friends who were boys who were doing this thing as they were riding their bikes down the street, and they were spitting up into the air ahead of themselves and then trying to ride through the spit. And she was like, “Only boys would do that.”
Lenore: That is just weird.
Sarah: It works. It’s so much less waste in a milk bag.
Lenore: It sounds really smart.
Sarah: So anyways—
Lenore: No, no, I did grow up here, but we also don’t have milk cartons. We have milk bags. That sounds really smart.
Sarah: It works. It’s so much less waste in a milk bag. Everybody in—at least in Eastern Canada—we have like a plastic pitcher that’s got an open top, and the milk comes in a big bag with three smaller, like liter-and-a-half bags in it. Just picture a bag of milk.
Lenore: A bag of bags.
Sarah: You put your bag of milk in the pitcher and you snip a little hole in the corner. And then you pour it from the pitcher in the bag, and it’s far less waste than four gallons.
Lenore: Be Canadians. What can I say? We’ve got it all.
Sarah: So anyways, no, no, I did grow up in the US though, and we did have the pictures on the milk cartons.
Lenore: Right. So those pictures on the milk cartons did a number on us because, first of all, they said, like, “Have you seen me?” or “Missing,” and they never had a little asterisk that says, “I was taken in a custodial dispute between my divorcing parents.”
Sarah: Right.
Lenore: Because that was the vast majority of the kids, or they were runaways. But it felt like, since nobody explained this, that these were all children who were kidnapped by strangers off the street while riding their bike or walking home.
That’s also the era we got cable television, which gave us the 24-hour news cycle, which had never been part of anybody’s life until then.
And then there was when Adam Walsh was taken—it was a horrible story—but his dad was John Walsh, and he started America’s Most Wanted, and he went around the country and in fact ended up testifying in front of Congress that 50,000 children are kidnapped and murdered every year, which was off by a factor of about 50,000. Because it’s extraordinarily rare.
And so it just started seeming like, you know, you open the door and you let your kid outside and you’ll never see them again. Ann Landers or Dear Abby—or one of the advice columnists of the era—said that you better take, you know, try to write down or take a picture of your child before they leave for school, so you know what they’re wearing, because you won’t be able to give the information.
There was just a lot of panic about something that is extraordinarily rare.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And so it just became the norm to not let them out of our sight. And then a couple of other things happened in tandem with this. One is, of course, we’re in a litigious society, and so schools thinking like, well, what if something bad does happen, even though it probably won’t? We don’t want to be sued. Let’s just say that no kid can get off the bus, or that no kid can play on the monkey bars, or that we can’t have any swings.
And then you have experts, and experts are always trying to tell you something really scary that they’re an expert in, that if you don’t do this, you know, something terrible will happen. Parents magazine would come—like, you gotta give it to those editors at Parents magazine—they had to come up with something terrifying every month.
Sarah: Well, it sells, right? And headlines, you know, clicks today and headlines.
Lenore: Right. And then there’s a marketplace, and the marketplace is always trying to figure out something that can sell, and sell a lot. And the best thing you can do is sell parents a product that’s going to save their kid from something horrible.
I was just reading a study that was done about tracking devices, and I think at this point it was like 86% of parents track their kids. And, you know, some tell them that they’re being tracked and some don’t.
There’s the Gizmo watch. If you buy it for your kid, it’s a tracking device and a phone. And if they don’t pick up the phone, what happens?
Sarah: 911.
Lenore: No, that’d be really terrible. I mean, I can—
Sarah: I can picture it.
Lenore: I could picture it too, but right now what happens is that it turns into a bugging device.
Sarah: Oh gosh.
Lenore: So that you can listen to see, is your kid like, “No, get away from me, stranger”? Or—you know—but it also allows parents to hear, like, “I hate my sister,” or “I’m mad at my teacher,” or “I ate a candy bar.” I mean, it just gives kids no life outside of constant surveillance, which is what we used to do with prisoners on work release. They had this kind of monitoring, right? They had an ankle monitor and you could see if the guy was going to work and then coming right back home. And even the prisoners knew that this was better than prison. Beats prison, right? But it’s not freedom.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: What does a lack of freedom do to kids? I think the biggest thing is that it tells them two things. One is that the world is so scary and bad that you better not just be out there on your own, and also that your parents don’t think you can handle being out there on your own.
And I’ve been trying to grapple with this for a while. I was talking to these teenagers, and it was about eight years ago at this point, because at that point not everybody was tracked yet. But one of the kids who was tracked said to me something really strange. He said, “I just wish that I”—he was over 16—“I wish I’d get pulled over for speeding.”
I was like, that’s a very strange wish. Why?
And he said, “Because I would have to deal with it myself.”
He was longing—I mean, I think there’s this human longing to see what you’re made of and to prove to yourself and to the world that you can handle something on your own.
And with the ability to always be tracked by your parents and always press a button and be connected to your parents, your parents are on call for you in a way that was never possible until just now.
And it’s nice to help. You know, you want to help your kids. So if they call—my kids to this day, they’re in their twenties—if they call, they’re having a problem, I will help. But the instantaneousness of it means that without trying to figure out an answer, solve something on their own, kids can reach you and then you solve it. So you don’t know what they’re capable of and they don’t know what they’re capable of.
And so then you answer the next time, and the next time, and the next time, and you track them. And nobody ever gets the peace of mind. You know, the tracking devices say they’ll provide peace of mind, but they provide the opposite because, yes, it’s nice to know they’re gonna be home in time for dinner, but you also don’t know that, like if they were on a trip or even walking home or riding their bike and their chain fell off their bike—it’s a point of pride if you make it home with a broken bike or if you fix the chain, and it’s not a point of pride if you call your dad and say, can you come help me?
The dad feels proud, but he thinks, oh, my little girl can’t do anything yet. And the little girl thinks, oh, my dad—I can’t do anything yet.
So I think it changes a lot about the parent-child relationship, and it changes the child’s relationship to themselves because it’s not just themself. It’s themself plus this squad.
Sarah: I think it also reduces community. The example that you just gave—I could picture if that happened to one of my kids and they couldn’t figure out how to put the chain back on, they might stop somebody and say, can you help me with this? Or, you know, go into a garage and ask for a screwdriver from the mechanic to put their—you know—and just their interconnectedness that we all have with each other. I think if there’s just a direct line between parent and child, we lose out on that sense of community.
Lenore: That is so true. And it reminds me of a piece I haven’t run yet about a mom whose kid was sort of radicalized online and ended up in a locked ward for a little while, and then came out and gradually got better through doing music and through having friends.
And then he called her one day and he said, “Mom, the greatest thing—” Oh no, he came home and he said, “The greatest thing just happened to me.” And she’s like, what? Because she’s so grateful that he’s doing much, much better now. He’s in high school.
And he said, “I got a flat tire on my bike.”
She’s like, okay, that sounds just great. What do you mean?
And he had done exactly what you just said. That’s why it reminded me. He had found a bike shop and he’d gone in there and asked for help, and they fixed it. And he got back on his bike, and they didn’t even charge him because he is a nice young man and they were helping, and everybody felt great.
But for him it was so important to solve a problem, a real-world problem, on his own, that he regarded it as one of the highlights of his life to date.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And his mom, in talking to me about the dire darkness that he’d been in and climbing back out to light, felt that this was one of the things that was crucial.
And I know that we keep racing to help our kids, and we’re doing this out of love and wanting to help them, to provide for them. And it’s really hard to see that stepping back is also a gift.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Right? You’re giving kids this gift of trust and independence and time when they can figure stuff out on their own. And I think it would go a long way to solving a lot of the anxiety crisis and the depression crisis that we see in young people because, of course, you feel depressed if you don’t think you can handle anything, and you’re anxious if you think, what’s gonna happen? I can’t handle it.
So with us being there all the time, out of the goodness of our hearts, we’re really preventing some growth from happening.
Sarah: Yeah. And you make a big—in your TED Talk and other things you’ve written—you make a big connection to that stuff and childhood anxiety, which you’ve mentioned a few times, but maybe you could speak directly to how you think that this is related to anxiety, which has certainly spiked in the last few years.
Lenore: Well, it’s not just me noticing that anxiety is going up. I know that right now the focus is all on the phones, but the anxiety was going up for decades, long before there were phones. And so our colleague Peter Gray, who’s the psychology professor at Boston College, did a piece in the Journal of Pediatrics that came out now three years ago, and it just showed that over the decades—not just since COVID, not just since the iPhone—over the decades, as children’s independence and free play have waned, their anxiety and depression have been going up. And by the way, their creativity has also been going down.
And it’s not just correlation, it’s causation, for all the reasons that we’ve just been discussing. It’s when you figure out what you like to do and you make it happen, and it doesn’t work, and then you work harder and you make it happen now—we all know that the triumph of like, oh my God, the cake didn’t rise, and now I made it and it did. That’s what kids need day after day after day.
And instead they’re getting lessons. They’re getting school, and then after school they get more school that just happens to be school about lacrosse or school about chess.
And so the antidote is more independence. And there are two things I’d like to say about that.
One is that Let Grow has a free program for schools that’s really easy. It takes like 15 minutes twice a month, and it’s called the Let Grow Experience. If you go to letgrow.org, you click on it, there it is. And what it is, is it’s a homework assignment that teachers give their kids—or that a counselor can give the kids, whoever it is at the school—once a month that says, go home and do something new on your own with your parents’ permission, but without your parents.
And each month there’s a slightly different tinge to it, like do something with a friend, or do something for your family, or do something out in the community. But the whole idea is for the kid to see that the world is their oyster. I can go to the store. I can bake the cake. I can climb the tree. And it’s for the parents to sit there shaking the whole time, yet their kid is getting the milk or whatever.
And then have this burst of joy when their kid comes through the door. They brought the milk. Oh, and look, they also brought cookies. I didn’t say to get cookies. Okay, they brought cookies. And recognizing that their kid is growing up and competent and isn’t a baby anymore, is capable of being a real person.
And that’s the joy that we keep taking out of parents’ lives by saying, you have to be with them every single second. Imagine if they came through the door: oh my God, you missed the home run. They get to tell you, it was a home run. You should have seen it. Everybody was cheering, and I thought I wasn’t gonna make it, and I did.
You know, you don’t have to be there for every triumph of your kid’s life. They can tell you about it too. And you just feel this joy of recognizing there’s a person separate from you who’s going forth in the world and making it happen.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: So we really recommend the Let Grow Experience.
And the other thing that I wanted to say originally about the importance of independence and being able to go around your neighborhood and be part of it is that we are all concerned about phones. And so over the summer, when we did that study about parents who think that their kids are going to be kidnapped, we also had the Harris Poll do a study of kids age eight to 12. And one of the questions they asked was: if you could play with your friends in any way, or you could hang out with your friends in any way, which way would you prefer? Either just free play, hanging out in the neighborhood, no adults, whatever, or in an organized activity—it could be knitting or hockey or chess—or online. And that could be playing video games or Snapchatting or just texting each other, whatever. Which would you prefer?
And I realize that this is audio, so I’m going to show you a graph, but I will also explain it. There’s a giant part of the graph that’s what kids most prefer, and that is just hanging out, free play.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Second choice is organized activity, and trailing far behind is phones, screen time, phones.
And so we keep thinking that kids are addicted to their phones. But kids are addicted to each other, and when we don’t let them meet up one way or another in real life, they will go where they can. Okay, everybody’s at soccer or everybody’s online, but that’s not by choice.
We keep thinking that kids are online by desire, but it’s by default. And default is ours. Sorry, that’s the first time I tried out that pun.
Sarah: I like it.
Lenore: But I would say that the fault is ours—and not individually. Culturally, we’ve just decided that kids can’t be roaming around the neighborhood and can’t be trusted with some free time. We think that they’re gonna fall behind or they’re gonna be—and that’s why we began this discussion with, well, if you want your kids to be outside, what can you do? You gather together with other friends and you make a pact. You send them to the park. Or you ask your school to keep the school open for the Let Grow Play Club. And then there they are.
It’s just so fun to watch. You watch them and you just can’t believe how funny and creative and sometimes bored and sometimes mad, and then problem-solving, they are. Because the desire is to play, and they make it happen by hook or by crook.
Sarah: I have another idea for you that is—
Lenore: Oh, great. Let me hear.
Sarah: Bring back the teenage babysitter.
Lenore: Yes.
Sarah: When I was growing up, everyone—myself and all my friends and my sister—we all had summer babysitting jobs. Because I think part of the reason why parents overschedule their kids and they’re in camp all summer in these activities is because they need childcare. Right, right. And even—I didn’t need childcare in the summers when my kids were little because I was a stay-at-home mom, but there were no other kids for them to play with. So I would actually tell other parents, hey, don’t put your kid in camp this week, and I’ll take care of them.
But when I was a kid, the 14-, 15-, 16-year-olds would have their summer charges. And this could work for after school as well. And then we would get together with our friends at a park or the neighborhood pool or whatever who had the kids that they were babysitting for. And they would all play together.
And even if you don’t have your teenage babysitter get together with other kids that are being babysat, they still have—they can still play instead of being in the organized activities. And honestly, I work with enough parents who have teenagers who—the teenagers say there aren’t any jobs. There’s no way for me to make money. And they don’t have anything to do either.
And lots of teenagers love kids. My kids all loved babysitting. And that’s another thing too, though, is that a lot of parents are afraid to let their kids be babysat by teenagers because they think they’re not responsible, which is totally not true in most cases. So maybe in Let Grow you could talk about bringing back the teenage babysitters.
Lenore: First of all, I think you should write a blog post for us about that, but you should probably just get it in the Globe and Mail. I mean, that’s just a great idea because it gives teens a job.
And then I thought what you were gonna say is bring back the teen babysitter because unlike a professional nanny or a coach, who’s paid to really be assiduously watching every single second of them or teaching them a skill, a teen babysitter might be sitting on the couch eating Cheetos, which means that the kids do have to entertain themselves more.
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: Or a teenage babysitter might say, let’s go outside and we’ll play a game together, because they’re still of game-playing age, young enough they—
Sarah: Wanna play. Yeah.
Lenore: Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s really great.
And one of the things Peter says about a Let Grow Play Club is that you don’t have to have a professional teacher at however many dollars an hour running that. You can hire a teen or a couple of teens from the local high school.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And then, like you said, they’ve got a job, and then the kids have somebody who’s supervising them who’s not inclined to micromanage—
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: Or teach.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: So that’s a great idea.
You know, I’ve spoken to parents who were teenage babysitters and would not hire a teenage babysitter now, and also wouldn’t even let their teen be a babysitter because of this wholesale undermining of our trust in what our kids are capable of.
And when you say like, they’re not responsible enough—well, of course, if they have no responsibility, how can they even prove that they’re responsible? Which is sort of why I’m worried about phones and tracking. It’s like, how do you prove that you’re responsible when somebody can always check to see? I mean—
Sarah: Yeah.
Lenore: That’s—how do you prove I didn’t go to the party? I said I wasn’t gonna go to the party. I wouldn’t go to the party. Maybe you didn’t go to the party because you knew I could track you. It’s like, well, how do I ever prove to you how capable I am and how mature and responsible I—it’s hard.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. This is such a great conversation. I love the work that you’re doing and that Let Grow is doing. And I love the title—in my mind I had a “let it” in there, and then today I was like, oh, it’s Let Grow, like let go.
Lenore: That’s exactly—that was our original name, was Let Go and Let Grow. And then our executive director’s husband said, why don’t you just shorten it? And so we did. And it’s a terrible name in some ways—people think it is “let it go” or “let it grow” or “let’s go,” and “let grow” is a weird phrase. But that is the whole point.
Sarah: I love it. I think it’s great, and I love the work that you’re doing. And I wish that—I hope this catches on.
It’s interesting. I got interviewed for a radio piece the other day, and there was an article, and the article was about trending searches. And whoever wrote it seemed to think that the trend and the trending searches were about parents looking for ways to get their kids off screens, of course. But all the trending searches were adult-organized activities.
Lenore: Yes.
Sarah: You know what I mean? And so I said to the radio person, I was like, you know, these are all great, and maybe these are a really wonderful bridge from screens to being outside or doing creative play or whatever. But really, adults just need to get out of kids’ way. And that’s the key here, is that we need to get out of kids’ way and just let them do what they’re naturally predisposed to do.
Lenore: And also it gives us back our lives.
I mean, speaking of trends, the birthrate is plummeting and parents are stressed and some giant percent say they’re just barely getting through every day. And of course that’s the case.
I was just—there was somebody on, I don’t know, Twitter or Instagram today saying, like, I can’t believe it. My kids are saying, “Where’s my Lego?” and “What can I eat?” and “What can I do?” And I’m like, those are all questions that could be answered by a kid and not by you.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Lenore: And then that would get them more engaged in life, and that would give you time to read a book or run away from home, which sounds like it’d be great for everyone.
The whole point of my TED Talk was “I did it myself” is so important for kids, and it gives parents back their world too. Not everything has to be you watching them do something that you can see.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s really the answer to making intensive parenting less intensive.
And honestly, for me, a lot of the reason why my kids had so much of this unsupervised time was because I’m a bit lazy. Like, I remember this one time—I was thinking about this in terms of, like, the kids sometimes they’ll make mistakes and they won’t get it exactly right. I was bringing my daughter and her friend somewhere—they were probably eight—after dance class, I think I’d picked them up, and they were hungry, so I said, let’s get you each a piece of pizza.
But living in a city, it’s hard to find a place to park to go into the pizza place. So I said, I’ll give you some money. I’m going to pull over here in the no-parking area, and you two go in and get yourself some pizza. And I’m sitting out there like, this is taking an awfully long time.
And they came back with a medium pizza, like a whole pizza.
Lenore: Oh, that’s so funny. Wow.
Sarah: And they had somehow, instead of ordering two slices, somehow they had ordered a whole pizza. And they were a little surprised too. But I just laughed and I thought, how cool that they were doing this thing themselves and it didn’t go quite right, but also it was an experience, and they learned from it.
Lenore: And a memory. A memory. What if instead you’d parked and run in and brought them two slices of pizza and they ate them in the back of the car while you drove home? That would be a day that you would never remember for the rest of your life. And instead, it’s the day that everybody came home with this giant pizza.
Sarah: It was really funny. But that was purely because I was trying to cut some corners myself. I wasn’t thinking, gee, let’s let them experience going into a store on their own.
Lenore: Right, right, right. I mean, that’s the beauty of being a human. Not every—you know, you’re not a servant. And everybody’s better off if—
My friend once explained this to me, and then, of course, I’ve taken it as my own mantra as if I came up with it, but Chris Byrne told me that in the olden days there were three worlds, right? There’s the kid world, which is the riding their bikes and eating candy and chasing squirrels, whatever. And then there’s the adult world, which is boring. I remembered from when my parents were at the table, it’s like they’re discussing politics, they’re discussing who’s having an operation. It felt like you get to 50 and all it is is operations and politics. And then there’s family world when you are together, you know, at family dinner or on a vacation or church or synagogue or whatever.
But now we mash them all together. And really, everybody likes it more when the kids—it’s like the kid table is more fun than the kids being at the adult table at Thanksgiving, right? So you separate them. It’s not that they’re never gonna spend time with grandma, it’s that they’re joking and becoming dearly close with their cousins, and you’re finding out who’s having an operation. So everybody wins.
Sarah: That’s right. That’s right.
Where’s—the two more quick questions before I let you go. Where’s the best place for folks to go and find out more about what you do? And we’ll put any links you mentioned in the show notes.
Lenore: Great. So go to letgrow.org. And if you’re a school or at a school, there’s a section for schools, and you can get our free programs there. If you’re a parent, we have the same programs just for home use, and those are all free. Everything’s free. So you could click on the parent thing if you want to change the law where you live so that you’re—you know what, don’t even go into the law. So just press schools or parents. And then we’re all over all the different social media.
Sarah: Wonderful. Okay. The last question is the question I ask all my guests, which is: if you could go back in time with a time machine, what advice would you give your younger parent self?
Lenore: Oh, my younger parent self. I think I gave myself the advice, which was let your son ride the subway alone, because that was the inciting incident that started Free-Range Kids, is that I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone, and I wrote a newspaper column about it.
What I didn’t know then is that it would end up being a movement and my life’s work. But I would say, do it that weekend, because like a week later he was 10 and nobody would care. So hurry up. That’s great. You got five days left, Lenore. Get him on the subway.
Sarah: Thank you for doing that, because it’s been—it’s really an important countercultural voice that you have and that your organization has.
Lenore: Well, thank you, and thanks for having me. And I love the rat story, and I’m taking it as my own.
Sarah: Oh, good. Please do.
Lenore: Thanks!


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