Let Grow after school play clubs encourage children to make their own fun and games, to gain independence and learn social skills.
credit: Kevin Stinehart
Lenore Skenazy was once reviled as the worst mom in America for letting her 9-year-old son Izzy take the subway by himself. He got hassled so often that he began carrying a printout of the transit rules stating anybody over 8 could ride alone.
The newspaper columnist turned author has since become a champion of the “free-range kids” parenting style and helped spark a national movement, “Let Grow,” which encourages parents to gradually give their children the kind of small freedoms they were allowed as children, such as walking to school or to the park.
Skenazy recently took a few moments to chat about what she sees as the serious developmental impacts of curtailing the natural impulse for free play and how we went from a country where it was normal for children to ride the bus to a nation where parents try to manage their college kid’s schedule.
Amid the deepening youth mental health crisis, Skenazy suggests that free play is a serious matter for human development. She suggests that coddling our kids may limit their cognitive potential, holding them back from peak educational experiences, pointing to research showing a link between lower independence and higher anxiety. Independence, she says, is the key to developing happy, well-adjusted children.
Do you think that giving kids more independence can help fight anxiety?
Everybody’s worried about this and people are wondering, what should we do? And sometimes the answer is, let’s have a yoga room at school so they can center their feelings. Let’s do breathing exercises. And my answer is, if what has happened is we took out all their independence and all the time that they would just be playing with each other and laughing and figuring out what to do and changing the rules and arguing and compromising, OK, we’ll do it your way, but then next tomorrow we’ve got to play it my way. All that stuff. That is how children have grown up since the dawn of time, right? We’ve just taken these things out in the last few generations. You were allowed to play outside as kids, weren’t you? We were allowed to have free time after school. Our kids aren’t. You were allowed to be unsupervised sometimes, and our kids aren’t. If all that has resulted in a massive downturn in child mental health, how about we reverse engineer it? Wouldn’t that involve giving them back some independence and free play?
Tell me about the Let Grow play clubs after school.
What we’re trying to do is basically create a wildlife refuge, only for kids, a place where life goes on as if things haven’t all changed beyond the borders. There’s a bunch of kids together. There’s chalk, there’s balls, there’s cardboard boxes, and there’s an adult there. But they’re not organizing the games, they’re not solving the arguments. They’re just there like a lifeguard in case something goes really wrong. So the kids at first are awkward, like what are we supposed to do? And we say, what do you want us to do? It’s up to you. And remember, they are still human. And one of them says, well, let’s play football. And the other one says, I’m going to draw a tic-tac-toe. And then everybody starts playing. And then you hear the laughs and the smiles and the kids are interacting. So, by the time they have to go and ask the lady at McDonald’s for a spoon, it is not the end of the world.
Why do kids need time interacting with their peers face to face?
You want kids to be off their phones, learning how to interact, learning how to make things happen, learning how to deal with frustration because you can’t all be first. And also learning empathy, the older kids helping the younger kids and learning a little bit of maturity, because the little kids don’t want to look like babies. These cool older kids, you need to have them interacting like humans. Playing. That’s how they have always interacted and that’s how they make friends. We’re worried about loneliness. How do kids make friends? They make friends because they play with them. This is the way kids used to spend their entire childhoods.
How do you convince parents to let their children do the things they took for granted?
There’s something called the Let Grow Experience. And it’s just a homework assignment that teachers give their students, and it says, go home and do something new on your own without your parents. They could do anything from make pancakes to walk to school to walk the dog or use a sharp knife.
Does that help parents feel empowered as well as kids? Does it give all of us more agency?
The reason we love this project so much is that once your kid goes and does something on their own, parents are generally so excited and so thrilled that that rewires you. You are excited to send them out again. And then the kid gets rewired because, instead of my mom loves me, but she doesn’t think I can go to the store, she knows I’ll screw it up, or I’m too shy or whatever. Then the kid says, wait, no, my mom believes in me. I can do this. And knowing that somebody believes in you turns out to be the greatest gift to a kid’s psyche because, sometimes, somebody has to believe in you for you to believe in yourself.
How do you feel about the proliferation of ed-tech in the classroom? A lot of schools are deeply invested in ed-tech as a way to make kids smarter. This is the opposite of that. Is it hard to make an argument for the relationship between free play and intellectual development?
It’s really easy to make the argument. It doesn’t necessarily land, but the argument is this: The brain comes ready to be wired, right? How do you learn to deal with somebody who’s annoying? How do you learn to come up with an idea? How do you learn to innovate? How do you learn to solve a problem? You have to do all these things to learn how. They’re delightful to do. People love solving problems and love coming up with ideas and love playing. And Mother Nature put the play drive into kids so they would become the kind of geniuses who have gotten us to this point in human history. Ed-tech did not get us to this place in human history.
The rub is that taking the screens away is a really hard thing to do.
You can’t just take the screens away and leave them staring at blank walls. But if you have become the entertainment center, you’ve goofed. The world is actually more entertaining than the phones because you can smell it, taste it, feel it. So you just have to give them back the real world. Take away the phone and open the door.
