Kids forbidden to talk to strangers. Kids afraid to go inside a store on their own. Kids terrified of cooking an egg for fear of burning the house down. These are examples Lenore Skenazy, who pioneered the idea of “free-range” parenting, gives of how far gone we are as a society when it comes to rearing children.
After Skenazy published a 2008 column in The New York Sun about letting her son ride the New York City subway by himself at 9 years old, she was met with a widely publicized backlash that earned her the moniker “Worst Mom in America.” Skenazy wrote a book titled Free Range Kids in 2009, which outlined an approach to parenting that encourages independence and freedom as an antidote to the risk-averse, overprotective parenting that she saw around her.
Skenazy proposed a philosophy of parenting that fights, per her website, “the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”
