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This installment is called After School Special.

As a dad, I'm often gifted, hand me down parenting books, most of which I seem to pick up when it's too late.

I mean, there's just no point in reading the book about baby mind power when the kid is no longer a baby.

So in the end, I gift a lot of parenting books to other parents in the neighborhood.

But a couple of years ago, my friend Trisha, who's not a parent, let me a book from her sociology collection.

Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenezy.

This one, I did read.

And Lenore's idea is about resisting cultural pressure and fighting for more freedom for children, totally resonated with me.

It's against a culture that has created all this worry in us that haunts us day and night and that sort of forces us whether we want to or not to worry and hover.

Because a good parent does that. If you're the parent who isn't at the bus stop, what's the matter with you?

If you're the parent who's not tracking your kids, won't you feel bad if slash when something terrible happens?

And so I'm mad at a culture that has made us so unable to enjoy being parents because we spend so much of our time worried.

Actually, I should back up. It took me a while to read Free Range Kids.

I started it in January 2020.

But then, well, I got distracted.

And then, well, I ended up living in France for 16 months.

But eventually, after the school year was over, my family and I returned home to New York and Lenore's book was sitting there.

And so I picked up where I'd left off.

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