This is an iHeart Podcast.
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I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi Bowen, hi Matt.
Hey Elmo.
Hey Matt, hey Bowen.
Hi Cookie.
Hi.
Hi.
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Menelik Lumumba.
Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years?
Didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by Black people?
Because of what happened in Alabama.
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with racism.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey guys, Josh here, and for this week's Select, I chose our April 2019 episode on free-range parenting.
This was an episode that I initially approached with some preconceptions, and they turned out to be quite wrong.
I was raised with quite a bit of freedom and I assume that parents still kind of raise their kids in that manner.
But it turns out that they don't and, even more to the point, that's basically illegal these days.
Fortunately, there's a movement pushing back against that, and I'm all for it.
See what you decide in this great episode of Stuff You Should Know.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know About Kids.
Can I COA right off the bat here?
I presumed you would.
All right, there's a couple of COAs I want to issue.
One, we are not telling anyone how to parent their children.
Indeed.
Indeed.
And two, we realize that the whole concept of free-range parenting that will follow comes from a place of extreme privilege.
Yes.
To be able to entertain the idea of free-range parenting comes from a place of extreme privilege.
Okay.
Can I amend that or should I wait until we talk about that part to kind of amend it?
No, you can amend it.
So to me, free-range parenting, having the freedom to free-range parent.
What I saw.
It ties in with parenting.
That's already being done by people who might not have a choice.
Are you saying that the ability to choose whether you want to free-range parent or not is privileged?
Yes.
Okay, yes, agreed.
I got you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, again, we'll get into that, but—
We'll get into that at the end, but I just want to just go ahead and lead that off, because it's a lot of privilege involved with being able to say you know that you want a free-range parent.
Are you going to land one way or another on it?
On whether or not I support free-range parenting?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, Emily and I don't title it or say, hey, I think we should do this as a style.
But we, as it turns out, are sort of dabbling in free-range parenting a bit as much as you can for a three-and-a-half-year-old.
So you're listening to your instincts?
Yeah.
I've never read a parenting book.
I'm not knocking them, but I've never read one.
We parent by instinct.
And our daughter has always had a lot of room to free play and explore and figure stuff out on her own and fall down and get back up and all that stuff.
Okay.
I'm reading between the lines.
You guys haven't decided yet.
All right, so ready?
Free range parenting, go.
Okay, so do you remember when we were kids, Chuck?
Yeah.
Back when we used to hang out when we were kids?
Mm-hmm.
And we would go ride bikes together at, like, sunrise.
We had no idea where we were going to go, but it might involve a swamp, could involve a glacier.
There may have been like rail riding hobos that we shared lunch with.
Who knows what the day was going to bring, but we were up for all that and may or may not have engaged in any of that during that day.
And then at the end of the day, around sunset, maybe a little later, depending on whether it was summer or not We'd ride our bikes back home, say see you tomorrow, go to our respective houses and then talk the night away on our soup cans that were connected by a rope.
And that was our childhood, right?
We turned out okay.
Sure.
I have talked about my childhood, some growing up, but you know I grew up in the woods, basically on like— a couple of acres of land with a creek and forest, not in a subdivision but on a street with like seven houses in the woods.
Right.
And my mother had a – we had this giant iron bell, probably about 18 inches across, mounted on a big like telephone pole.
Yeah.
Kind of right beside our driveway.
And she would at the – you know, when it was dinnertime in the evening –
She would go pull that bell, and you could hear it from like a mile away, the bell tolling.
And that's when Scott and I were like, all right, it's time to go eat.
After having been out all day long with zero supervision –
And I had a great mom.
Like, she wasn't neglectful.
This is just how it was done.
Yeah.
Were you a latchkey kid?
I know your mom was a teacher, but did she stay at home with you?
She didn't go back to teaching.
She quit teaching to raise kids and then started up again when I was like I feel like eighth or ninth grade or something like that.
Okay.
Yeah.
My mom took off until I was –
I don't know, like six, seven, I guess like kindergarten.
No, maybe she's still around in kindergarten.
I guess about first grade when I started school and she's like, okay, I'm going back to nursing.
And then after that point, I was the last key kid for like the rest of my life.
But I had like older sisters who would be home around the time I would.
But I had like my own key to my house that was just a couple blocks away from my school.
And I would walk myself or ride my bike myself.
And then I would be home by myself if my sister was doing something else for a couple hours, until either my mom or my dad showed up.
And I think I turned out pretty well too.
I don't know that I even had a house key ever.
Well, you guys probably didn't lock your doors if your mom rang a bell on the telephone pole to call you in for dinner.
I don't think we locked our door.
Okay.
But you were – you had free range literally of your house, your yard, the woods around you.
But here's a really big caveat from what I've seen.
I think a lot of people who are like – who aren't familiar necessarily with free-range parenting assume that we could have done anything we wanted and gotten away with it because we had overly permissive parents.
That's not the case for me, and I would dare say that wasn't the case for you as well that we actually had plenty of rules and structure.
We were just also given a lot of freedom to do things within that rules and structure, including geographic freedom right.
Yeah.
For sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that is what I thought all kids had up to this time.
And I knew that there was like such things as piano and Mandarin lessons or Mandarin classes, that kind of stuff.
Like things that kids were taking more and more and they were really busy and stressed out and they had like iPhones at age seven, that kind of thing.
But I still thought that this happened.
And I was really shocked about as shocked as I've ever been in researching an episode of Stuff You Should Know to find that that is not the case.
That not only has this been kind of squeezed out by other activities, it's actually become criminalized behavior by society at large, among the parents who are raising children today.
I was blown away to find this out.
I really legitimately didn't know.
Yeah, I mean, and getting back to the activities, you know I played some soccer in high school and then I did like church sports, which there's not a lot of – I mean, I think we did like maybe one basketball practice a week.
So it wasn't like everyday practice and stuff like that.
I never took lessons of any kind.
Like I taught myself guitar and all that stuff.
So like I don't think I literally ever had a structured – post-school activity in my life.
Yeah, did you say church sports?
Yeah, i played church softball and basketball.
Did like everybody win every game?
No, it was actually fiercely competitive.
Oh okay, i'm just kidding.
No no, it was.
It was.
It was legit.
Like we had a pretty good basketball team and the league was pretty impressive too.
Yeah, but um Yeah, I never signed – I never had a single class.
Like the idea of my mom having been like all right, I'm going to take you to your violin lesson, and then on the weekends we have gymnastics and – whatever else people are doing these days was just – we didn't do that.
She was just like, go play.
Right.
So there has been – and we'll talk about all the reasons why, but there has been a movement away from the kind of childhood we had, a very pronounced one.
If you look at culture as a pendulum swinging one way or another, it has swung very far the opposite way to where kids' lives are structured – down to the minute where they have actual calendars and schedules that they have to keep up with because they have so many things going on.
And there has come about in reaction to that an antithesis, basically.
And it is nothing more than letting kids – grow up the way that you and I did.
And it has become so novel in the face of the world and the culture that we have in raising kids in the United States now that it has its own name.
It's a movement.
They have to go to court to defend themselves.
It's so weird.
But really, if you strip it down and look at it, all they're doing is raising their kids the way you and I and Jerry I'm sure was raised.
Well, yeah, I mean to a certain degree.
But the whole idea – and it's not just like I want you to grow up the way I did.
What it really is is an argument that says, you know what?
Kids will grow up healthier and happier if they have freedom to play and they have freedom to fail and freedom to – get in a playground scrap and to work it out with another kid on their own and figure things out for themselves.
They will end up better people because of this.
It's not, oh, I'm lazy or I have nostalgia for my childhood.
It's – and there's a lot of research into this now, or some research that says no, what we're doing is trying to make better future adults by not hovering over my child, scheduling them to death and –.
You know, every time they fall, run over, pick themselves up and like, and you know, rock them to sleep.
You know if they get a boo-boo.
Right.
I sound so judgy.
I don't mean that.
Well, let's just take a second.
Let's take a break real quick and, like, collect ourselves.
And then we'll come back and we'll really get into what free-range parenting is.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Elmo.
Hey, Matt.
Hey, Bowen.
Hi, Cookie.
Hi.
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
It's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all?
NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Menelik Lumumba.
Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay Chuck, so I think you demonstrated something that has made free-range parenting very unpalatable to a lot of parents who don't raise their kids that way.
And that it seems to be a reaction, almost an in-your-face-to-some-people reaction or judgment, of that helicopter-style parenting where you're always kind of around your kid.
Their entire life is very structured and supervised, including playtime.
And that free-range parenting is meant to be a reaction to that.
And in some ways, it is a reaction to that, but it also stands on its own.
And if you step back and look at it and look at free-range parenting specifically, not as a reaction to helicopter parenting, but as its own thing, its own philosophy for how to raise a kid?
And you strip away the judginess and all that stuff.
It holds up to me.
And like you said, there's been a lot more study recently.
But the whole thing really started back in 2008. by a journalist.
It wasn't a child psychologist.
It wasn't a child development psychologist.
It wasn't a child development, child analyst psychologist.
None of those things.
I made that last one up, by the way.
It was a journalist named Lenore Skenazy.
Yeah, so she is a New York mom, and in 2008 she wrote a column for the New York Sun called Why I Let My Nine-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.
She was in a store one day in Manhattan and her son had been badgering her to be able to ride the subway and bus back home by himself.
And finally, one day, she said—
All right, great.
Let's do this.
Here's a subway map.
Here's a subway card.
Here's 20 bucks.
Here's some change for a payphone.
Have at it.
The kid made it home, and she said he was, quote, ecstatic with independence.
What a great quote.
Yeah, and, like, she got a lot of blowback from this.
Like, the judgment goes both ways.
I mean, there were people that said it was neglect and abuse for her to do this and let her kid ride the subway alone.
Oh, yes, yeah.
If you had to divide the two sides up and start weighing which one was a little judgier, you would definitely your hand would be much lower holding the helicopter parent side, for sure.
Yeah, if you're a free-range kid proponent or you raise your kids, following that there's a whole burden, a whole social burden that you have in addition to the burden of raising your kids, that you have to put up with, for sure.
Yeah, and I should point out too real quick that it all depends upon your kid too.
I don't think there are any sweeping generalizations.
Sure.
My daughter has always been very just instinctively kind of safe and smart about stuff.
Yeah.
Other kids in her class are just – like little wild banshees.
And I would probably be a lot more worried if she was the kind of kid who has an instinct to like jump out of a tree instead of like back down very slowly out of a tree.
So it's all different depending on your kid, you know?
Or a kid who like, can't seem to shake being totally fascinated with matches or knives or something like that.
Yeah, I think that was a really good point.
Like you shouldn't sweep or generalize.
But I think that's an even larger point too.
People should be left to raise their children how they see fit, rather given a certain amount of trust invested in the parents that the parent isn't going to harm the kid or let harm come to the kid because it's their parent right.
Right.
Okay.
So this whole thing started with Lenore Skenazy and, like you said, she got a lot of blowback, but she also got a really positive response too and actually parlayed the whole thing from that New York Sun article into a blog that that she called free-range kids.
So from what I understand, she coined the term free-range kids and started writing about this stuff.
And at first, a lot of it was just like, it's good.
It's on its face.
It's obvious that this is how you should raise a kid.
Kids need play.
They need to learn how to pick themselves back up. when they fall down.
And not only that, you're doing a disservice to your kid when you pick them up after they fall down, because they're not learning how to get back up themselves.
And over time it kind of went as people became more and more enamored with her philosophy or this whole free-range kids idea.
More child psychologists started weighing in and the whole movement kind of took the shape.
And they figured out that for a parent to kind of see the light as far as they were concerned, they had to first change the mindset about what kind of world they were raising a kid in.
Because if you're a free-range kid parent, you probably don't feel as threatened by the world in general as say, a helicopter parent would ounce for ounce.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
I mean when parents have experimented with this.
The changes that they've seen in their kids have been pretty striking, if anecdotal.
There's this one woman, Dana Bloomberg.
She's a school counselor in suburban Chicago.
And we should also point out, it depends on where you live as well.
If you live in a very safe suburb or way out in the country, it's a little different than a kid like in the middle of the city or something like that.
Yeah.
But she gave her kid a lot of free range starting in the second grade and got some neighborhood parents involved in letting their kids do it.
And they said, before you know it, they had this little, you know little gang of kids kind of touring around the neighborhood on their own.
And she's getting all these texts from these different parents saying like what a big change has happened.
Mm-hmm.
In their own kid.
One parent even said it was life-changing for her daughter, gave her a new sense of confidence.
And that's sort of what the free-range thing can look like.
But, like you were saying, it all comes down to assuaging a parent's fear, the biggest fear, which is my child will get abducted or my child will get –.
There will be a sexual predator to target my child or, heaven forbid, my child will get kidnapped and murdered.
Right, because you can understand and it's really tough to fault somebody who doesn't want their kid wandering around by themselves because they're afraid that something really bad is going to happen to their kid.
So kind of the first step to adopting like a free-range kid attitude is to adjusting how you see the world.
And they think that with...
There are several things.
It's really fascinating to me.
I love cultural changes, especially when we can point to different things, seemingly unrelated things, that all kind of converge and has changed the world in ways you never think of.
That seems to have happened to produce today's helicopter parents or at least to produce – the level of of fear, the climate of fear that the world is an inherently dangerous brutal, um sadistic place that has that, where children have no call to be wandering around themselves.
Um, that that is actually.
You can trace that back to a convergence of things that have happened starting in like the late seventies and early eighties.
Um, and in particular there was some high profile uh, child murder cases, basically that all kind of took place between 1979 and 1981.
And those really changed a lot of parents' minds about things.
Yeah.
In New York, the very sad story of a six-year-old eaten pets disappeared and was later found out to have been murdered.
John Walsh, very famously, his son Adam.
He's the one that does all the TV shows now.
I think he's on The Hunt on CNN now and really made this his life's work.
But his son Adam disappeared and died in 1981.
Obviously, the Atlanta child murders from 79 to 81.
And this all converged around the same time, like you were talking about these strange things aligning.
Cable news coming out.
CNN was launched in 1980.
So all of a sudden you have parents that are getting this kind of constant flow of fear from the news about their children.
Right.
Because so if, if a prior to cable news, 24 hour news, if something happened to a kid somewhere in some state, maybe if it were just particularly egregious or outrageous or everything was kind of set up in just the right way, it would capture the attention of the national media and you'd hear about it around the country.
But that was really, really rare.
And then, second to that, the other place that you would hear about child abductions, child murders, horrific accidents that befell a child, would be locally right.
Like on your local news, that maybe expanded to a region, maybe the state, but it was pretty localized.
And so if statistically something like that happened fairly rarely, you weren't going to hear about it very often.
And so in your mind, it was a pretty rare thing and you weren't afraid of the world in general.
But what a lot of commentators and a lot of well, some of the people I ran across in research said is that with cable news, that potential pool of horrible things that befell kids to talk about expanded to the entire nation, not just local, not just regional or even state, but the whole nation.
So now all the bad things happening to all the kids around the nation was potential news fodder.
And so when you were watching CNN, it seemed like every other story was about a kid who had been abducted and killed or sexually assaulted or raped Any number of horrible things.
And there's really no way to put it other than that that kind of stuff keeps people glued to their televisions.
And so it's really in the best interest of television news networks like CNN to feed people that, because while you're glued to your television, you're also glued to the ads that they show too.
And so from this model came a climate of fear that a lot of people point to is like.
This is the source.
And it's not just CNN.
CNN gets pointed to because it was the one that started it all.
That was Ted Turner who came up with this and started the first 24-hour cable news network.
But all cable news is guilty of this and became guilty of it pretty quickly, because that's the model of cable news.
And because cable news laid that foundation and showed like oh, you got that kind of –, you can really make some revenue.
Nightly News tried its best to resist that kind of thing, but it kind of had to follow suit a little bit too.
So it would become more sensational from the 80s onward as well.
Not nearly anything like cable news, but compared to how it had been before, it was much more sensationalized because it was following that cable news model.
All that put together created the foundation of why people are just scared to death about the world, because we think that it's way more dangerous than it actually is, because the statistics are inflated by hearing about this stuff all the time.
Yeah, and there's another couple of things that contributed that Skanezi has pointed out.
One, we live in what she dubs an expert society.
So again on cable news or on social media, like everywhere you turn, there's another expert coming out with a new book they're trying to sell, basically telling you how you're doing it wrong as a parent, how you should do it.
And then the whole fact that we live in a very litigious society now.
So what if I want to free range parent my kid and they go down and get their friend out of the house and they're riding bikes and one of them gets hurt.
Like, are their parents going to sue me? because my kid went and lured them into the mean streets.
Right.
Well, yeah, that was another thing that happened, Chuck, in the 70s.
The idea of negligence became really big and there was what's called like a tort revolution to where you went from.
Well, you know, your kid didn't know the other kid's arm was going to get broken, so you can't get sued for that to no, that was negligent and we're going to allow that.
And more and more case law expanded to, to make people think like lawyers because of it, too.
Dave, when you were a kid, I mean that must have been a thing, because did you ever have the lawsuit threat from another child?
Yeah.
That was such a thing.
Like, yeah, I'm going to kick your butt or whatever.
Like, oh, yeah, well, my dad's going to sue you for all the money you got.
That's right.
He's a dentist.
It's so funny, man, to think back in the 70s, these children threatening lawsuits on one another.
Yeah.
I'd forgotten about that.
For like ripping their shirt or something.
Oh, yeah.
Any number of things could generate a lawsuit.
Could sue you.
Yeah.
But in the end, Skenazy says, and this is, I think, a pretty relevant quote.
She said, all of this stuff combined has convinced parents that they have to be both omniscient and omnipotent because of fear, and monitor every single move that your kid makes.
So let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the facts, about whether or not your kids are really in danger out on the streets right after this.
Well now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck?
It's stuff you should know.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi Bowen, hi Matt.
Hey Elmo.
Hey Matt, hey Bowen.
Hi Cookie.
Hi.
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of nlp it's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all nlp, might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969 Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles.
I'm Menelik Lumumba.
Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, Chuck.
So, like we were saying, to not be just scared to death because you're letting your kid say, walk home from the park or something like that unsupervised, you have to go through a change in mindset.
Like you have to stop seeing the world as a very, very scary place.
And sometimes statistics can be actually kind of comforting.
So the free-range kids movement has really – you know, made one of its foundational support poles.
And you'd think I would actually be getting better at this all this time, but no.
I love it sometimes to watch you stumble through something like that.
Anyway, they talk a lot about statistics and crime statistics related to kids in particular.
And when you look at them in the cold, hard light of the day, it doesn't seem like it's a very dangerous world after all.
Right.
If you look at the numbers, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that just 1 of the 27000 missing children cases are non-family abductions.
And that also includes like friends and acquaintances.
So if you're talking about literally a stranger targeting your child and plucking them off a playground, it is exceedingly rare that that happens.
Yeah.
And so 1% is non-family, right?
Right.
Right, but that also doesn't even break down like if it's a friend or an acquaintance of the family or something like that.
So little strangers snatching your kid rarely, rarely, rarely happens.
Yeah.
So even that, even including, like friends of the family, somebody who's not a direct family member but known to the kid, a non-stranger, that's 270 kids that that happened to in 2017, out of 27000, I think.
Which is, that's awful for those kids that they were kidnapped, right?
That's.
Another thing, too is when you throw out statistics like this, it's really easy to be like see, that was it.
But you don't want to do that because Because to those 270 families, that's all that matters.
And that's really important to remember as well when we're kind of tossing out these statistics too.
Yeah, and not to make light of family abductions, which is, you know, 91% of abductions.
Those are horrific and traumatic as well.
We're just talking about the bare bones of like the fear that if I let my kid go to a park, a stranger is going to pluck them.
Right, right.
So even that, even if you look at it, it's 27,000.
Out of all the kids in the United States in 2017, 27000 of them went missing in 2017 and the vast majority of them ran away.
So if you're worried that your kid is going to get plucked by a stranger, specifically out of a park somewhere—.
Because you let them go to the park.
What the free-range parenting people are saying.
If you look at the statistics, the chances of that are so small that it's actually not worth limiting your kids' freedom of movement because of that outlier possibility.
It's just a disproportionate response to that risk is what they're saying.
Right.
If you want to talk about the worst thing that you can imagine, which is a child murder.
From 1980 to 2008, statistics about murders of children under five years old 63 percent of the time the parents are the ones who did it, followed by 23, so that's 86 total.
23% are male acquaintances, so like, you know, mom's boyfriend or something like that.
7% are other relatives, so only 3% of all murders of young children are strangers.
Right.
So again... And again, dress... Jinxed.
We're addressing the fear of strangers doing something to your child, not making light of these other statistics.
And there are parents out there who are like, good, that's enough.
The fact that it happens to one kid makes me want to protect my child and make sure that they don't do that.
Okay, you're the parent.
You're raising your kid in that way.
I understand.
But, again, what the free-range kids people are saying is, like, is it really worth that?
Like, what about –
That is is I mean, is it really worth that kind of a response?
And we'll get to.
We'll get to that because you could say like if there were no negative aspects of of completely ensconcing your kid in protection, then the free range kids advocates wouldn't have anything.
They could be like, okay, well, whatever.
That's what you're doing with your kid.
But there's suspicions that actually is detrimental to the development of a kid.
Protecting them from everything at all costs.
And I think that's one of the big other foundational platform post-tenants of the free-range kids thing.
Yeah.
That one was for showing off.
All right.
So building on that, like you were saying, like there –
There has to be – like in order to get a parent on board with a free-range parenting lifestyle.
It's not just I want to be lazy or I want to go back to my childhood.
It's a parent who thinks there are actual benefits to doing so.
Right, right.
And that that outweighs the risk, like you were saying, of the 3 percent chance or the 1 percent or the 05 percent chance that something is going to happen to my kid if they're on their own.
Right.
There is evidence, and it's growing and growing evidence, that all these efforts to schedule all these activities for your kid are overlooking one big, fundamental issue, element of raising a healthy, well-adjusted child that seems to be getting lost more and more, which is something called free play.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has a report out that said that free play promotes social I'm sorry, social.
I like it.
It's the new way of saying it.
Social, emotional, cognitive language, and self-regulation skills that build executive function and a pro-social brain.
And play is fundamentally important for learning 21st century skills like problem solving, collaboration and creativity, and executive functioning skills that are critical for adult success.
Right, and they threw that last one in to be like well okay, maybe play's good, but it's not going to help them in life.
And they're saying yes, it will actually help them in life and that by keeping them from playing, you're basically creating a little adult from the nursery right.
Which is interesting to me Chuck, because prior to the 19th century, when you were a kid, starting around age five or something, you had a job.
If it wasn't around like your family's farm, maybe you were helping out with the wash that your mom took in.
Who knows?
But then there was no such thing as childhood, really.
And then we moved away from that and we developed childhood.
And now it seems like we're moving away from childhood now.
We're taking kids and They're not working on the farm.
We're making them little CEOs and marketing directors and brand managers and stuff like that.
But they're losing their childhood in that bargain, is I think what they're saying.
And from play specifically.
Play helps, but it helps also like just in and of itself for its own sake, but it also helps eventually down the road.
It's an investment that will pay off, I think, in terms that helicopter parents can understand.
Yeah, there's another guy named Peter Gray.
He's a developmental psychologist.
He has a book called Free to Learn and founded a nonprofit, I believe, with yeah Skanezi called Let Grow.
A little play on words there.
Yes.
And he basically says that you know, if you look back through human evolution children – their education was through play with their peers.
And if you look at societies and cultures in the world today, that I mean, how would you classify these cultures?
Traditional societies?
I'm not sure.
Maybe, but they say that children of these cultures that still play and explore freely, if they're left to do that, they will do so into their teen years.
Like that is their natural instinct is to be among their peers, free playing.
Right.
And so, like I think one of the problems that helicopter parents have with the idea of play is that like it's a waste of time.
The kid could be learning like cello or, you know, doing math flashcards or like creating a better foundation for a better future for themselves.
And that if they're not doing that, they're falling behind.
And so what Peter Gray and some of his ilk are saying is like, no, no, no.
Play helps kids develop a child in ways that no other thing you could possibly come up with or supervise or get them to do can, because this is what we've done all this time and this is how we've built society is letting little kids play and figure things out on their own.
And he says that if there's a parent around, if it's supervised, if there's a parent even within like eyesight or earshot, or you know there's a parent watching, it's going to be different.
It has to be unsupervised, unstructured play so that the kids can be left to make up their own rules, can be taught by the group that you know actually.
No, that's not really fair or it's not really cool to take the ball and go home because you aren't winning.
That's how you learn that stuff.
And those are good things to learn.
That makes you a more socially well-adjusted kid than probably learning cello is going to.
Well yeah, I mean you can try and teach your kid by showing and by telling as much as you can as a parent, and that is all valuable.
But nothing will teach a lesson to a kid like learning it through experience with their peers.
Right.
And I remember myself.
You know when I was a kid like the biggest lessons I learned were lessons that I learned among my peer group.
You know, like tough, hard lessons that a lot of parents, I think, try and even shield their kid from, because it's tough stuff sometimes.
But and, you know, you don't want your kid to suffer traumas and things like that.
But and not to sound like a parent from the 1950s but that stuff does help build your child's character.
And I mean, I guess that sounds sort of old school.
What it does is it helps them learn how to regulate their emotions and how to fit in with their peer group, which is, in turn, going to be eventually, just society at large.
Right.
It's funny you say that that sounds kind of 50s, because this whole idea of like free range kids is kind of based on that philosophy of Dr Spock, who was like one of the first experts, one of the first child experts that America ever really paid attention to.
And he wrote a book in 1946 called The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child.
And he basically is saying all the stuff that free range kids parents say is like, let your kid play, let your kid like learn through their own um, their own way of like exploring the world, like let them take risks um, let them be themselves, trust your instincts as a parent.
And so that's what free-range parents seem to be kind of getting back to.
Is like the dr spock um school of thought, benjamin spock not um the other spock not.
Live long and prosper spock.
Did he have a first name?
Oh, I don't know, man.
I didn't watch Star Trek.
I didn't either.
Just lay it on us, million people who are going to send the email.
We're waiting.
There's something called the Internal External Locus of Control Scale.
It's an odd name, but this has been around since the 1960s.
It's a psychological indicator scale.
And these days, since the 1960s, there's been a big shift in and the scale and how teens report themselves and their internal control.
And today, teens report very little internal control over their own lives.
And Gray believes and I think he's really on to something here that These high levels of anxiety and depression among kids these days has a lot to do with that, and he thinks it's directly related to the decline in free play over the last 40 or 50 years.
Right, which I want to say, like, this is like one psychologist's opinion.
It makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm sure it does to a lot of people.
But there's, you know, this is not necessarily like gospel truth or set in stone.
The jury is still kind of out.
But there is a lot of evidence out there that does seem like overprotecting your kid can stunt them emotionally or developmentally.
And then letting them go be themselves and learn things on their own and learn that they can pick themselves back up and still survive and failure is not the worst thing in the world can actually help them develop.
Um, This is it's just like we routinely shoot holes in social psychology stuff all the time and we do it gleefully.
So I don't want to like go the opposite way and just be like, but this one's right because we agree with.
Yeah, that's not necessarily the case.
And I'm sure a lot of people disagree with it.
But I tend to kind of favor that mentality, probably because that's how I was raised.
Yeah and, like I said, it does sound like I'm from the 1950s to say that failure breeds character, but it really does.
It's sort of a simplistic way to say it, but when you fail, you hopefully learn something and build on that, and that does build character.
Right.
Quite literally.
One of the things they call that is the dignity of risk, where you are showing your kid.
I'm letting you go figure this out on your own.
And another big misunderstanding with free-range parents is that you just go from like zero to walking.
You know taking the subway in New York at the flip of a switch.
That's not how it works.
You slowly build your kid up for this.
You know the big thing that you write an article about, but there's, you know, dozens or scores or possibly hundreds of little interactions that you're having to kind of make sure that your kid is up for this, when they're finally, when you decide they're finally ready to.
And it's not just like flipping a switch.
It's very kind of thoughtful and protracted and planned, but not necessarily shared with the kid that it's planned, paying out of trust so that the kid can show you yeah, I'm ready for this.
I know what to do.
I'm not just going to like ball up on the ground in the subway and start crying until someone calls 911 and the cops come get me.
Well yeah, and I'm sure when she sent her kid on the subway home that very first time, it wasn't just like all right, here's the stuff.
See you later.
I'm sure there was a very serious talk like, all right, dude, I trust you.
I'm letting you do this.
I know you know the way.
We're going to give this a shot.
If I see you on the news in the middle of Times Square, like, you're going to be in big trouble.
Right.
I'm sure there was a lot of thought and talk that went into that.
And you know what I'm saying?
Yes, totally.
And kids get that stuff, you know?
Yep, for sure.
Kids are smarter than people give them credit for a lot of times, I think.
It's interesting when it comes to the law because it's such a new thing.
In Utah last year, in 2018—
It became the first state to pass what was called a free-range parenting law, where it basically was just sort of redefining what child neglect was.
And in Utah – I thought it was going to go the other way when I was reading this.
But it actually went the way of sort of encouraging or being behind free-range parenting.
The new definition.
A parent cannot be accused of neglect just because their kid is – going to a store by themself, that's down the street, or playing outside alone, or biking to school on their own or at home without a parent there, if they're a minor, which is pretty interesting.
Yeah, I thought so, too.
But most free range parents are like, oh, we don't want to live in Utah.
So hopefully our states will all come up with similar laws that decriminalize free range parenting.
Because in a lot of states, things like latchkey kids are illegal.
Like you can have your kid taken from you if they are a latchkey kid under a certain age.
I think in Washington, you have to be 14 to be left at home alone.
Right.
Like you could lose your kid.
And so there's a real problem with trying free-range parenting, because part of this helicopter parenting society is also helicopter villaging.
But rather than picking up the phone and calling the parents whose kids you see wandering alone down the street – like you used to would have done, now people just pick up the phone and call the cops.
And then the cops respond and they take the kid to Child Protective Services and the parent has to go down and explain that they will never do this again and they're very, very sorry, or else Child Protective Services will take their kid from them.
Because most states rule on what's called the best interests of the child, which is totally subjective.
It's completely not based in any actual case law necessarily.
It's just.
Does the child protective services person think that the kid is smart enough to walk from the playground to the house?
No?
Okay, well, we're taking your kid, maybe permanently.
And so it's really risky to raise your kid this way, because people will call the cops if they see your kid walking down the street.
And basically, real trouble.
Your, your parentship of your kid is in jeopardy at that moment, which has got to be one of the worst things that could possibly happen to a parent.
Yeah, and this is where kind of we get back to the place of like, this is a um privilege has a lot to do with this because, when it comes to the law and children and child protective services, you are way more likely um to get a visit um from Child Protective Services if you are poor or if you are a person of color or minority.
Like they may write an article about you in the local magazine, praising you If you're like a white suburban parent of middle or upper middle class for letting your kid free range around.
But in the case of, like Deborah Harrell in 2014 in South Carolina, she wasn't like oh, I want to be a free range parent.
She's like, I am a working mom and I work at McDonald's.
And I'm finishing a shift and my nine-year-old daughter is playing at a park nearby until I'm done.
And they sent her to jail for a night and took her daughter for two weeks away from her.
Yeah, 17 days.
Yeah, so it is very much a case of privilege to even be allowed to do this without getting a visit from Child Protective Services.
Right.
So Skenazy and some of the other free range parents say right, this is why we need laws that are much more common sense and decriminalize this kind of behavior and put the trust back in parents to know that their kids are smart enough.
Or if they think their kids aren't smart enough to be trusted with that kind of stuff.
They wouldn't let them do that.
They argue that this would benefit everybody whether, no matter you know, whether you're a minority or whatever socioeconomic status you have, which is true.
That's a pretty sensible statement. it's sensible.
But I think that that kind of underscores a larger problem, which is, you know, like some people don't have the choice to get childcare if the school suddenly cancels class.
Like you just can't afford it.
What are you going to do?
And then your work says, well, you can't bring them here.
This is work, you know?
What can you do?
Hopefully you've raised your kid to a point where you can trust them to go play you know next door at the playground or something like that.
But that doesn't mean that you're not going to end up in trouble with the authorities.
So it's a sticky, sticky situation that we're in too.
It is.
And, you know, again, it depends on your kid.
It depends on where you live.
Like in my brother's neighborhood.
If I live there, I would let my kid go out and do what she wanted when she was like seven.
Yeah.
It's just so safe.
Right.
And kids are everywhere on their own doing stuff very much like it was when we were kids.
At my house, I live next to a super scary, busy street.
Like, I would never let her out of the front of my house.
But even at three and a half, we let her go in the backyard by herself and do stuff all the time.
Right.
I mean, just this past weekend, I...
She was out in the backyard with the dogs, and I went out about a half an hour later.
She was walking through the garden with a watering can singing We Will Rock You.
And I was like, all right, everything's fine.
But again, she's in my enclosed backyard.
I wasn't sweating it.
I would never just open the front door and be like, go have fun.
Memorial Drive's right there.
Cars are going 60 miles an hour.
But that's the point.
It's all context, you know?
Like, you would have had to have worked up to that point.
She would have had to have shown you that she was able to be trusted with that busy street, and maybe she'd be 16 before you would.
But that's the point.
It's all context, you know?
Yeah, you know, again, just do the best you can.
It's hard.
There are a thousand ways to do it, and everybody thinks their way is the right way.
That's right.
Yeah.
Also, just before we sign off, I want to say I didn't mean to pick on kids who take cello lessons.
Cello is, by the way, my favorite stringed instrument, which means it was the one that was easiest called the mind.
That's why I kept bringing up the cello.
So all of you out there learning cello, hats off to you because that's my fave string instrument.
Yeah, what if Yo-Yo Ma had just been free playing?
But I'll bet Yo-Yo Ma did free play.
I'll bet he did both.
And if he didn't, I'll bet he regrets it.
If you want to know more about free-range kids well, just go on the Internet and start reading, because there's a lot about it.
And since I said that, oh, also, there's a pretty good article on how stuff works you can read, too.
Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.
All right.
I'm going to call this Desert Flooding.
Hey guys, listen to the podcast this morning on desert survival.
I live here in Phoenix, Arizona and have for 19 years.
And the flash flood issue is real, even in Metro Phoenix.
They have a stupid motorist law here.
And that's capitalized and in quotes.
She said after and during heavy rains, a lot of washes fill with running water.
A lot of the washes have been paved.
Barriers will be put up when they flood, even if the water is only a few inches deep.
But there is always someone who decides that their SUV or truck is hefty enough to get through, and their rescue is always on the nightly news because they have to pay for it.
They actually have to pay for the cost of their rescue.
Huh.
Sometimes these daredevils don't fare too well.
Actually, lives have been lost in less than a foot of moving water in a watch.
Yeah, I believe that.
I've heard six inches.
Yeah.
And Teresa Hinberry closes by saying this.
I do so enjoy your podcast.
Nice.
Thank you, Teresa.
We do so enjoy your emails, too.
Yes.
I like the way she put that.
Yeah.
If you want to be like Teresa and impress us with your verbal or written dexterity, we'd love that kind of stuff.
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I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
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Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles.
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Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years?
Didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people?
Because of what happened in Alabama.
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
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