This is the reason interview with Nick Gillespie.

My guest today is Lenore Skanezi, a journalist and activist dubbed the world's worst mom for letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway alone back in 2008.

Since then, she's become the co-founder with psychologist Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt of Let Grow, a nonprofit that's changing laws and

school programs to restore independence to kids. She's also become a regular contributor to Reason

magazine. We discuss why children today are more anxious and less free than they used to be,

how fear and over parenting took over American childhood and why the free-range movement

for both kids and adults is finally on the rise.

Here is the Reason interview with Lenore Scanezzi.

Lenore Scenasey, the big mama Thornton of free-range parenting.

Thank you for talking to Risa. Thanks, Papa.

You have a TED Talk out. The event took place this spring, and you talked about the let-grow

movement or the let grow the foundation that you started, and we'll

talk about that in a little bit and more detail, and about free-range parenting. What's the key

message to your TED talk? It is that we should spend less time with our kids. Yeah. I think everyone

wins, right? Everyone does win, and everybody's been losing when the opposite became the sort of guiding ethos for parents' day.

I mean, the surgeon general did a, you know, a giant study, and it said kids are more depressed and anxious than ever.

And then two years later, he was moved to do another giant study, and it was that parents are more depressed and anxious than ever.

I'm like, that's not a coincidence. Right. So explain that because in the talk,

and there'll be links to it in the show notes, so if, you know, people can find it easily.

You talk about how it's, it's kind of over the past 20 or 30 years. It seems that this rise of

kind of panopticon childhood, where, you know, kids are

always in view of adults somewhere or being structured by adults.

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