The Bottom-Up Revolution
When a nine-year-old rides the subway alone, is that neglect or normal childhood? Lenore Skenazy, a speaker, writer, and reality show host who was once dubbed "America's worst mom," makes the case for why kids need more independence and shares tactics for how parents can give it to them in the modern city or suburb.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany, and I am delighted to be bringing you another conversation today. On this show, I talk to lots of people who are working to change their towns, whether that's through infrastructure changes, policy changes, or design improvements. But sometimes we have to figure out how to make some aspect of our life more resilient, even if the policy, infrastructure, and design won't change anytime soon. Sometimes, a frustrating reality is that we might be working on the policy, we might be working on the design, we might be working on the infrastructure, but it still could take 20 to 30 years to really see the types of changes that we're looking for. So there's always this question, "How can we as individuals, and as a community at large, move towards a stronger, more resilient version of ourselves, of our lives, of ourselves as a community, despite things being broken, unsustainable, and unsafe? How can we keep becoming more resilient in the meantime?" Today, we're going to be talking about that from an interesting angle, from the angle of raising children in cities not designed for them. This is something I've been thinking about a lot since becoming a mom. Historically, children were more free to play in the streets, roam their neighborhood, and explore their towns than they are today, and that's affecting their development. It's affecting how they grow up into adulthood.
Today's guest is going to be sharing why it's important for children to have more independence, and some creative ways that we can be giving them that independence despite the reality that most of us live in car-oriented cities that aren't really safe for them. Despite those limitations, what can we do about that? And how can we help? How can we help children cultivate healthy independence, find ways to interact with each other outside the constant supervision of adults, and just do all the things that children need to do to really transition into adulthood? Well, Lenore Skenazy is an American speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist, author, and reality show host known for her activism in favor of free-range parenting. In 2008, she went viral for an article titled, "Why I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone," and was subsequently dubbed America's worst mom. In 2018, she founded Let Grow with Daniel Schuman, Peter Gray, and Jonathan Hite. The organization's mission is to make it easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy adults. Lenore, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution Podcast. I'm so excited to talk with you.
Thank you, Tiffany. I hope it's fun. I sort of expect it to be.
So we get to bond over the fact that you live in New York City, and I have lived in New York City, but you get to have the extra adventure of having raised kids in New York City. This whole show is going to be talking about children in the city, safety, and the relationship between how we think about our cities and what is possible for our children. First, I'd love just to hear a little bit of your story. You raised your two sons in New York City. Can you just share with us what that was like? What did you love about it? What were some challenges? Maybe if you have a favorite memory or something that you feel summarizes the joy of being a mom in such an interesting and big city.
I guess the memory that's easiest to summon is my origin story, which is of letting my nine-year-old ride the subway alone. Do you know this whole story?
Yeah, I think you've mentioned it to me before, but please share it for our audience.
Okay, so my kids are old now. They're in their late 20s, but when our younger son was nine, he was asking me and my husband if we would take him someplace he'd never been before in New York City and let him find his way home by subway. If you live in New York, some of us have subway kids—kids who just love public transit and are really interested in it. We knew the bus driver's names, et cetera. So long story short, I took him to a fancy department store, Bloomingdale's, and I let him find his own way home from there on the subway, which is right underneath Bloomingdale's. Then I wrote a column, "Why I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone." Two days later, I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR defending myself and defending this decision to let him do something in the real world without me, and even without a phone, if you can imagine that. That's why I started the Free Range Kids blog and then the Free Range Kids movement, saying that it's actually good to give kids some independence, especially when they think they're ready for it and you think about it and decide, yeah, they are.
Then about 10 years into that, I started the nonprofit Let Grow, which is what I have now. It's a nonprofit devoted to the same ideas as Free Range Kids. Our kids are safer, stronger, smarter than our culture gives them credit for, so there's no reason not to give them more independence than our culture has started giving them today. The fun of raising kids in the city is that you don't have to drive them everywhere. I'm not a great driver and I'm a timid driver, so the fact that there are buses and trains everywhere, and so much is within walking distance makes it a strange place compared to most of America, but I'd say an easier place for parents, because they're not stuck behind the wheel for 16 years.
So for people who may not have spent time in New York City or who are familiar with it, what kind of subway ride are we talking about here that you let your son do?
Well, subterranean, as the "sub" would suggest, but it was not a long ride. It was probably a 15-minute ride, if that. You have to go into the subway, you have to use your little ticket to get on, and then you get out at the right stop, which he was nine years old—we'd been getting on and off that subway for nine years of his life. Then he had to take a bus across town, which was actually voted many times the slowest bus in New York City. Just horrible. But that's the only one that went to where we lived. Then you come upstairs from where the bus drops you off. So that probably took about an hour from start to finish, or maybe more, because that bus is so pokey.
So why did he ask to do this? I'm just curious. Was this something he had been begging for for a while?
Yeah. Also, you have kids—they beg you to do things, right? I do it, I brush teeth, I feel full. Well, then they just start putting the verb in. They get a little older—I want to take a ride on the subway. I think if we were growing up on the savannahs of Africa, he would have wanted to go on a hunt with the menfolk with a spear. At some point, young men do join groups like that. Young people want to be part of the world. In the part of the world that I'm in, New York City, the way you get around is by public transit. So he wanted to do that. My older son wanted to make macaroni and cheese. It's a less exciting column.
I let my nine-year-old cook mac and cheese. You never know where that could take you.
That's right. Maybe I'll try it. Now he's 29, so that one might be more interesting—teaching me how to make quiche. It always seems like it's gonna take no time, and it takes forever to make quiche.
It does. Yeah, I have a two-year-old, and his independent streak is coming out. He starts to go into rooms by himself and tells me not to come in, which we're working on healthy independence and all that. But I've noticed too, when we go outside the front yard, I've had to start negotiating with him on how far he can go on his bike by himself.
He's two, and he's on a bike. What kind of bike?
Little balance bike. So I let him go from our front—I'm standing on the stairs, and he can go down to the neighbor's house. There's a tree, turn around, and then you can come back to mom, and you can keep going the other way, and there's another tree, and you can turn around and come back. So we just do that back and forth. I couldn't tell you how much of a distance it is, but it's barely nothing.
Fantastic.
Yeah. So just observing—wow, he's only two, and he's already ready to start figuring out the outside world a little bit independently. He doesn't want me to go in the house and close the door, and I would never do that, but I can start to see this independence come out. Or when we go to the playground, I try to take this policy of in sight, but not on your back. I see some parents following their child to every piece of the playground right behind them. I'm like, I will keep you in sight, but it makes me so happy to see him run off and enjoy a little bit of independence and figure things out. Then he'll look for me, and we'll see each other, and then he'll just keep going.
But I was such surprised—I didn't expect to see such a strong interest in independence so early, and independence in the outside world, not just independence at home.
I love it. I mean, he's a human being. He's eager to spread his wings and see what's out there. I worry that a lot of times that incredible drive—the drive that will make them curious and intrepid and brave and start to know what their limits are and what their limits aren't—I worry that that gets squashed by a culture that doesn't let kids do anything on their own.
In terms of having a very young kid like that, the best book I would recommend is Hunt, Gather, Parent, which you may have heard of, by Michaeleen Doucleff. She was moved by her daughter, who was slapping her and impossible at age three and four, to go and live in indigenous communities somewhere in South America, Alaska, I think, and somewhere in Africa. I wish I could tell you what countries and I can't remember, but the point is that what she saw in these groups was kids who seemed more fulfilled and eager to help and part of the community than she was seeing with her own kid. What she realized is that this desire to be a person, to explore and to help out is happening at age two, three, four, five, especially the desire to help you. If you never let a kid do that, it starts to extinguish. I don't mean it's extinguished forever, and they'll never go off and live on their own or whatever. But if you want to raise a kid who feels like they're part of something, including part of your family, and not just a taker but a giver—even though it takes forever—you do let them pour their cereal into their bowl or help you sweep or put the...
Oh, yeah. We had a bucket of soap and water and bubbles this morning, and we were both cleaning the floor. Thomas's highlight of the day.
Yeah, because there's purpose, right? There's meaning, there's purpose, there's this sense of pride. I mean, did you see a sense of pride in him?
Yeah, well, I have a four-month-old, so I dashed off to take care of the baby, but it was very quiet, and I came back and the whole floor was covered in water.
Perfect. Isn't that neat? I mean, quiet because there's something meaningful and interesting and grown-up to do. So when you ask why did the nine-year-old want to ride the subway, it's because that's how we get around. If he could master that, then he was master of his fate, right? I mean, he had a grown-up skill and a new blade in his switchblade—not a real switchblade, although a switchblade for a nine-year-old seems perfectly normal too. But anyways, he was just becoming competent. There is a desire in, I'd say all animals, to become competent in what they need to do. Why do we stop them from that? Why do we say, "No, honey, I'll do that for you"? It makes it boring and hard for us. It blows my mind.
Then, when you really think about car-oriented cities, where you've basically told these individuals who possibly—for that—have to restrain their desire to participate, their desire for autonomy, their desire for mastery, for 14 years, until they're allowed to have a driver's license.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, pause. 14 years? Because in New York, I think it's 17.
I'm saying, let's say it starts around two. Okay, let's say the awareness kicks in around Levi's age, around two-ish. So it's like, well, too bad. I mean, obviously there's a spectrum here. I'm not saying they should be able to be fully independent roaming around the city at two years old, but the world is not designed for that. Our cities, our communities, our neighborhoods are not designed with an awareness of what children need and how that's growing over time, right? So it's sort of like, well, you're going to just have to wait a decade and a half before you can figure out how to move around the world independently. And also, by the way, you could die at any point when you finally do get to do it.
Well, you could die at any point doing anything, but the point, I think that you're...
The only option being this hyper-dangerous one, right? It's like...
But we're skipping over some other ways of getting around, which are walking and bikes.
Yeah, but most places aren't designed for those. So I think that's what I'm saying. It's this huge jump from nothing to the most dangerous option, rather than it being a gradient, rather than having lots of options, and it's sort of a spectrum, right? It's like, well, yeah, by nine, you can walk yourself lots of places. By 14, you're able to ride an e-bike around town. So instead of it being nothing—you're just chaperoned everywhere because you can't walk and you can't bike—and then boom, 16, driver's license.
I mean, our whole culture seems like that. It's like, I'm going to do everything with you and for you, and then at 18, you're either going off to work or college or the army, and it's like, I hope you're fine, because at 17, we didn't even let you buy a beer. I mean, maybe 17 for beer is a bad idea. But the point is that we are with our kids so much for the entire time that they're growing up. Why do we expect them to immediately thrive as independent young adults when we've given them—most of them don't have jobs anymore, most of them do not walk to school, even at age 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Most of them are in organized activities, which means that an adult is running them, or they're online. So how do we expect them to be part of the real world and making their way when we've given them so few opportunities to do that, not just the transit, but making the meals for the family or having a part-time job?
So let's go back to this article and the response. Can you just give me the summary of what was the response, what was the pushback, and what were you saying in return? What was your pitch, so to speak?
All right, so the response was immediate and huge, as evidenced by all the television talk shows. It became a cultural touchstone for a while. Would you let your nine-year-old ride the subway? Is she crazy? Should she have her kids taken away? Or is this what kids need?
Most people, at that point—most adults—could still remember a much more free-range childhood of their own. I mean, a lot of people, whether in the cities or the suburbs or even the countryside, do remember more time on their own, whether it was riding their bikes to the store or playing in the woods or just walking to friends' homes. There was both more freedom and also more free time. So kids had to fill it.
I mean, what's happened over the last generation or two is that we really have decided that kids, when they're on their own, are not doing anything important. I actually think they're doing a lot that's important when they're playing on their own, when they're figuring things out. But the culture—we have smaller families, we have more money per kid, and into that petri dish came a lot of options for what our kids could be doing after school. So across the demographic spectrum, and I'm talking economic spectrum, race, neighborhood, you name it, kids are doing far more after-school activities than they did before. Some of those are great, and there's nothing wrong with learning ballet or soccer, but what they've been missing out on—and my pitch is this—what they've been missing out on is figuring out something to do on their own, figuring out what to play with friends, figuring out how to make something happen, how to build something, how to organize a game, how to decide if the ball was in or out.
These are all things that kids do when there isn't an adult doing that for them. Without those opportunities to make their way and take minor risks and get buy-in and explore, we've really—just as we worry about the two-year-old never being able to help with washing the floor or doing the laundry, helping out with little things—when you're 8, 9, 10, 14, and you're not playing and organizing stuff on your own, you're not learning the basic social-emotional skills that we recognize are missing. I mean, most schools now teach social-emotional skills, but they teach them in the classroom with a teacher leading it, with exercises and workbooks and worksheets. I think that if we stepped back, we'd realize that some of those skills are missing or slowed down because the kids aren't getting them from just being on their own and saying, "That's not fair. It was my turn." Or, "Let's make teams. Those teams aren't fair." Or, "Hey, let's explore the woods or this subdivision that's going up."
All the stuff that kids used to do to develop their bravery and their curiosity and their competence—let's build a treehouse. Without any of these things that are spontaneous and challenging, that the kids challenge themselves with—I'm going to climb this tree, oh, that was scary, oh, that was exhilarating, oh, I'm never going to do that again. No, next time I'm going to go a little higher—they're just not—they're missing this building up what's called an internal locus of control. There's an external locus of control—somebody else is controlling what you do and how you spend your time—or an internal locus of control: I'm going to try that. Oh, that was hard. I'm not going to do that again. Or I'm going to try harder. All the stuff that has to do with motivation. So what we're seeing is a lack thereof, and it's not as fun, or I would say, even as nutritious a childhood.
Yeah, that's so rich what you just shared. As you were speaking, I had so many little flashbacks to my childhood. I actually grew up homeschooled with three other siblings. It was normal to just be kicked out the house for hours and just—I mean, we invented all kinds of stuff, all kinds of ridiculous games, all kinds of costumes.
Costumes? Wait, tell me.
My brothers are really into Greek and Roman soldier stuff, so they were always making new toga wear. This is a shield. Yeah, exactly. But I'm trying to remember if there were other kids we played with, though, because it was—you have a quadrant. That's a pretty solid quadrant within your house. But I'm trying to remember to what degree we were able to integrate with other children in the neighborhood. I do remember having some encounters with other children there. We also moved a lot, so it wasn't like we were in one place for a really long time.
I think this might be one of the struggles that parents think of right now. As they're listening to you speak, they're like, even if I'm all for this, we can't find other kids to play with. This is where I want to bridge the gap between ideas of what a childhood should be and the reality of what life is like outside the front door when you factor in things like car culture, especially, or places that aren't walkable, or places where people are so hyper-private that they don't send their kids out unless it's to a pre-planned extracurricular activity, right? The idea of just sticking kids out to find the other kids in the neighborhood and play—I almost feel like it's dead and gone. I don't really know.
So I'd just be curious—how do you make sense of what has happened with neighborhood culture, with children? Children used to own the street. It used to be for the kids and ball games and basketball, roller-blading, riding bikes, playing tag. That used to be what the neighborhood streets are for. Now I feel like I don't really see that anymore. There's a variety of reasons for that, but can you just speak to that? Because I know it's a lot of what our audience is going to be thinking about.
Yeah, no, I live in reality. I recognize a lot of the problems that you just mentioned, a lot of the barriers to play. So Let Grow, when we co-founded—it was co-founded by me and Peter Gray, who wrote the book Free to Learn. He's just wonderful. He spent his life studying—he's a professor at Boston College—studying the importance of free play. Daniel Shuchman, who used to be for 10 years the chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech on campus. Then Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind and now The Anxious Generation.
The four of us recognized that thought leadership just leads thoughts. It doesn't change things. We have to look for action. John Haidt always says that a collective problem, which is what you've just described—nobody's sending their kids outside to play, they don't own the streets anymore—needs a collective solution. How do you get kids back to playing? If that has disappeared, and maybe you want to send your kid out to play but there's no one else to play with, or you send your kid out to ride their bike and there's nobody—who else is sending their kids out to ride their bikes?
So we've come up with what we consider two really simple, free solutions that work in any neighborhood. The first, and the one that speaks to the free play idea, is to keep the schools open for what we call a Let Grow Play Club. The school stays open for all the age kids together, just like with you and your siblings. It doesn't have to be just the seven-year-olds with the seven-year-olds. You put some junk out there. Kids can bring stuff from home. They can bring an old typewriter, a suitcase, fabric, rope, an old tire. Then there's stuff that's classic, like balls and hula hoops and chalk. There's an adult out there, but they're a lifeguard. They are not organizing the games, they are not solving the arguments.
So what you have is a place that is completely safe to get to, because the kids are already there, right? However they get to and from the school, that's what they'll do, just a little later. It's safe because there's an adult there, but it is still free-form. It is just amazing to watch the kids, because you think that they have to go to their soccer club to learn soccer, and then you go to a play club and, golly, the kids can organize their own soccer game and decide if the ball was actually a goal or no, it didn't make it. I have no idea if that makes even sense with soccer, but with baseball or whatever else. Then the kids make up games.
My favorite game that a kid made up once was the kids were off in a part of the playground where there were wooden slats, and there was grass growing up through the slats, and the kids were bending down and licking the grass. The teacher finally asked, "What are you doing?" And they said, "We're playing lice."
Oh my gosh.
Yeah. I love that, and I love it so much because if the teachers had said, "Today, kids, we're going to play a game," no one would say lice. We're going to play lice, right? It's just a kid thing. So you have all the joy of kids figuring out what they want to do, being creative. There's junk to play with. There's old cardboard boxes. Obviously, those are the greatest. They're solving their own arguments. While it's not—if it's just a plain old playground, you're not in the woods—you are having, I would say, 85% of what you and your brothers had, which is coming up with something to do, getting buy-in. This is boring. Let's change the rules.
All the social-emotional skills we were talking about earlier still have to be developed if you want to have fun with friends. "Can I play?" "Yeah, but you have to be the goalie." "I don't want to be the goalie." "Well, if you want to play..." "Okay." Just all the compromising and the communication. Supposedly, kids' vocabulary is higher in play, even though you think play, it's not the classroom. They could just say, "Throw it to me," but they're so incentivized: "No, we have to start simultaneously, because then blah, blah, blah." So all the richness of free play is happening there.
What are parents the most afraid of? They're afraid of kidnappers, and they're afraid of phones. They're afraid of their kids being online all afternoon. So you finally provided them with this third place that everyone is looking for that's not school and it's not home. It's the playground. It's a place where they can hang out together. If you don't feel like playing soccer—I would never play soccer—you talk with your friends, or you draw with chalk, or you make up a game, or you hide in a cardboard box and pretend it's your castle or your cave. So that's a very simple...
When all else fails, there's lice.
Anyway, so obviously—and then the kids learn, get to meet each other from different grades, because most of school is so segregated. You could be a third grader. We've talked to a third grader who had very few friends. He said no friends. But in Play Club, he met kids in other grades, and there's a couple who are perfect for him.
Yeah, that's such a great idea. It's inspiring to me. There's actually a playground really close to us, connected to a school, that has "No Trespassing" signs. I told you about this on our intro chat. No one is allowed to use the playground, except for the kids in the school. Then it'll be perfectly empty outside for five hours after school. No one's allowed to use it.
So this is inspiring. What I'm hearing you say is really insightful for various reasons. Having—negotiating with an adult is very different from negotiating with a child. So Levi negotiates with me all day long, right? He's learning some good skills. That's very different from when he'll need to start to negotiate with his friends, right? So I think what you're talking about here is creating an opportunity for them to learn to negotiate with each other—child-to-child negotiation.
But the other thing I've started to notice when I take him to playgrounds is children—they don't know what to do with a child that's not in their group. So it's like if they came with a group, or if they came with their parents, they almost don't know how to cross the line from "this is a child that I may not know, but I can still play with them." They have a really hard time bridging that gap. So I think what you're explaining here could be really powerful in helping children see, here are some skills for interacting with the child you may not know. You don't have to run away in terror or stare at them in horror. You can pass them a ball. You can say, "Hi, my name is..." You can—if a little child is trying to initiate tag, here's how to play tag, right?
That's just something I've noticed where it's very shocking. Levi will initiate games. He'll try to initiate games with kids older than him. Sometimes the look on their faces—it's like they've seen a ghost. They don't know. They can't categorize this. What is this? Am I talking? Or what am I supposed to do with you? You're not from my group. You're not from my friends. This is not an activity where I'm supposed—this is not soccer club, like you're saying, where I'm supposed to interact with you. You're just a random kid that came up to me, and I don't know what. So I don't know. I just feel like there's something to what you're saying of let all the grades and groups be together, and don't let an adult orchestrate it and let them learn how to interact with all the other kids, how to negotiate, how to move in and out of groups, right?
Exactly. What's wild about our culture today is that that is unusual, because I think for all of humanity until two seconds ago, evolutionarily speaking, it was always that. It was always a group of kids, and then the younger kids would turn three or four and start running after the older kids. I hate to bring up studies, because it seems so stupid to quote studies when it's something so obvious, which is that play is important for kids. But studies show that when there's at least a three-year gap between some of the kids, the older kids are actually really nicer to the younger kids, because this thing kicks in, which is a little bit of paternalism, leadership, compassion. The little kids, of course, want to be like the big kids.
So Peter Gray, who I mentioned before, always says that if there's seven-year-olds trying to play a game of cards, it is a disaster. It just doesn't work. But if you have seven-year-olds playing cards with nine-year-olds, the nine-year-olds are like, "Hold up your cards. We can see your hand. Don't throw out your queen. I'm putting it back in your hand. You got to save that to the end." So it doesn't sound polite like "today we're going to learn how to play Gin Rummy," but it is how kids learn. The little kids are learning, and they're trying to—they want to be like the nine-year-old, so they're holding themselves together, and they're trying to hold up their cards, and they're trying to remember the rules.
Then the nine-year-olds—once again, we were talking about vocabulary being higher in play. It's like they have to explain: "You're trying to get a run. What's a run? A run is when three cards are in a row, but they have to be the same..." Whatever it's called. They have to be aces, or they have to be spades or clubs or whatever. What is that word?
I don't know. Cards always throw me off. I always want to play them, and I always want to be really good at playing them. It's like my brain just shuts down when people start explaining all the terms and rules.
It's suit. Okay, so you're halfway there. After this, you're gonna go play Go Fish with your two-year-old, who probably could. That will be your entry point. The point is that it's just a very normal thing for kids to do and to learn from that we have taken out of their lives and replaced with rigid, rule-bound skill lessons—how to kick a ball or how to hit a ball—but you're not learning how to do that negotiation that you talked about, and the compromise and the leadership that are required just for making something happen.
The other thing I wanted to recommend for the real world—how do you make sure that my ideas are not just theoretical about independence and free play? The independence comes through what we call the Let Grow Experience. If you're a homeschooler, you can do it through a homeschool association or just at your house. But if you're in a regular school, a teacher or a counselor or the principal or the superintendent says the Let Grow Experience is going to be part of your schooling for the year, and that is once a month, the kids get a homework assignment that simply says, "Go home and do something new on your own or with a friend, but without your parents, with your parents' permission, but without them."
There's a whole list of things that we offer as ideas, but it's just one one-millionth of what kids can do. We say you can—depending on where you live—you can ride your bike to a friend, you can climb a tree, you can go to the store, you can make pancakes, you can babysit, you can help Grandma make cookies. You can do anything. If you're in a very remote neighborhood, you do something at home. If you're in a very dangerous neighborhood, you can do something at home or go down the hall to someone else's apartment. But there's always something a kid can do, just like you were talking about today with your son helping with washing the floor. There's always something new and a slight step up, or a giant leap up—even better—that you haven't done yet. Maybe you've never packed your lunch, so you pack your lunch. Maybe you packed your lunch every day, but you've never made a whole dinner, including the soup and the entree and a dessert. So there's always something that can show you, the kid, and you, the parent, just how much that kid is ready to do.
There's this fantastic feeling. My whole TED Talk, which people should listen to, is about that feeling of "I did it myself."
Oh yeah, it's huge. I mean, Levi—it makes his whole day. Today he built a tower and was ripping through the house shrieking with delight that he built the tower, right? I wanted to ask you—I think the conversation about danger in the city with children being out—I saw that video that you all put up on your website about the child who walked to Chick-fil-A, and it was this whole ordeal with the Chick-fil-A operator and the policeman totally coddling him, shuttling him back home, and talking.
Saying, "Oh, my God, it's amazing that he wasn't kidnapped."
Yeah, I have so many thoughts on this, but I feel like part of it is this assumption that all strangers are dangerous, instead of seeing most strangers as helpers. Why have we almost shirked the responsibility to be the good stranger? It's like, well, if a child is out walking around—I'm not saying this should be the norm, or we're just kicking our kids out the house and being like, "Go for a walk, whatever." That should happen at the right age. But I'm saying it's just interesting how the possibility of one stranger being dangerous means that we should eliminate the possibility that there could be other strangers that are helpful.
Shouldn't we be thinking about this more like, if we see a child out in public, it's our duty to help take care of them, look out for them, make sure that they're safe, intervene if they need it, rather than seeing ourselves as—is this making sense? It's almost like there's no longer an assumption that we're all—like Jane Jacobs used to say, "eyes on the street." We're all eyes on the street, and we all have a duty to each other. Instead of saying, "Where are those kids' parents," we should be saying, "Where are we right now? Can't we all just be an extension of the parental duty in a way, instead of it being like, 'Oh, well, only those two human beings...'" I know this sounds very risky, but...
No, no, it's not very risky.
I've had to recruit other women at airports to help me travel with my children. I literally just turn to them and I'm like, "Can you watch him for one second?"
Literally, I've had people hold my baby, which might get me canceled these days, but they immediately step in. In an instant, you're recruiting your village. You can recruit a village in most places—Aldi, the airport. But this idea that everyone is dangerous rather than everyone is a potential helper, and the way we see ourselves when we relate to children—of course, if it's a two-year-old that got out of their house, that's a different response. But if it's a five-year-old walking, I don't know—I just think it's interesting. We have immediately assumed that our job is to hurry up and schlep them back to their house, instead of seeing our job as an extension of almost parental care—adult concern and safety, make sure that they're safe on their adventure. Is that possible? Can we talk about that in a way where it's like, instead of—maybe the policeman just keep an eye on him as he walks home, but let him finish his adventure.
No, I love it all. So I have so many thoughts. Let's start out with, are strangers dangerous? Yeah, a few, as you mentioned. The vast majority of people are decent. Are parents and relatives and friends of the family dangerous? A few. In terms of if you want to keep your kids safe, there's certainly—you have to teach them the three R's. That is a recognition that pointing towards strangers as the big danger is looking in the wrong direction. I'm going to go from the depressing stuff to the happy stuff.
So the depressing stuff is that most kids, if they are hurt or molested or anything, it's not by a stranger. It's by somebody they know, often a family member or close family friend. So saying "don't talk to strangers" is—that's not where the danger lurks. The best thing to do, rather than saying "don't talk to strangers," because kids never even know who is a stranger—you talk to the lady as you got your change at the grocery, so is she a stranger or not? You don't know. So teach them the three R's. That is to recognize—no one can touch where their bathing suit covers. Reject—if anybody does, you run, kick, scream, right? Reject any of these advances. Don't feel you have to be polite. And report if somebody is bothering you or even says you have to keep this secret, or "I'm going to tell on you," or something bad will happen. Report it. Just tell me, and I won't be mad at you, right? You'll be safe and nothing bad will happen.
So that takes away the secrecy that is any bad person's greatest asset—trying to keep the kid quiet. So first of all, rather than stranger danger, teach your kids the three R's. That will keep them a lot safer.
Can I throw in another R, though? Recruit. Recruit other adults. Recruit others. Literally, recruit strangers. If there's a situation where you're in trouble, go recruit another adult. It's very, very likely that the other adult you recruit is not going to be...
Right. It's not going to turn out to be in cahoots with the person. Yeah, actually, that's something I said in my Free Range Kids book. It's like, you want to teach kids that they can talk to anybody. So you can talk to anybody. You cannot go off with anybody. That just makes it a lot easier for kids to understand. You can talk to people, and especially if somebody is bothering you—there's a van following you, you run across the street, and you stand next to the man raking the leaves, and you wait till the van passes and you're safe. You've trusted a stranger, and you used your own spidey sense to keep yourself safe. So the idea of not talking to the man raking the leaves because he's a stranger is silly. You're right. Recruit people if you feel like you need them. I think that's very wise. Okay, I'll start adding it. Recognize, resist, report, and recruit. So that's cool.
Okay, so that's the stranger thing. The other question is, if there's a kid outside and you see them and their parent isn't around, rather than saying, "Where is your mother? I'm going to call the police. I'm going to drag you home," I think you're right. Consider yourself part of the world of this kid. You want the best for the kid. That's why you're thinking, "Are they okay?" So watch over them.
I even say that if you see a kid in a car—if you see a kid in a car and it's in front of the dry cleaner and you see somebody in there picking up some clothing, you don't call 911 to say there's a child in a car, "I'm so worried for them." You wait a few minutes to see if the person comes out. If you see a kid in a car and they're in the IBM parking lot and it's noon, open the doors. Call 911. There's somebody who forgot their kid. But letting your kid wait in the car for a few minutes is okay. It's not a dangerous thing. If you're just running an errand, you're not going to suddenly decide to learn dry cleaning and spend the rest of the day there, right? "Oh, this is a wonderful time. I've always wondered how to get out an ink spot." No.
So be a decent person, right? You don't have to involve the law. You don't have to shame a parent. You can be part of the world of this kid. When the mom comes out, say, "Oh, I thought that was you in there," or "I assume that you were at the pharmacy. Glad to see you. Hope you're feeling better soon." Or, "Boy, I love that wedding dress," whatever it is. So make yourself part of the community. I mean, if you really do care about that kid, calling the police is the worst thing you could do, because having the family then get involved with Child Protective Services or law enforcement simply because they let their kid walk to the park, or their kid got out one morning and walked to Chick-fil-A, as in this story that you're referencing—that's not bad parenting. That's normal life.
Sometimes kids surprise you and do things that you didn't expect, and sometimes you know your child better and your neighborhood better than an onlooker. I have a story that I was just getting ready for the blog about a mom who has three kids. They were on some little trail in some little nature center wherever she lived—I can't even remember, Buffalo, New York—and the six-year-old, who was the youngest of the three kids, forgot her water bottle. The mom said, "You guys, wait here. I'll go back and get it." She comes back literally five minutes and 20 seconds later, and a man is like, "Lady, you abandoned your kids. You're just lucky they didn't drown."
"Drown in what? The mud?"
"Well, they could—anything terrible could have happened. How dare you do this?"
He starts taking pictures like he's gonna send incriminating pictures to the police of this horrible mom. It's like, if you really did care about those kids, and not about shaming and feeling powerful and just God's gift to children, you would watch them, right? Yeah, right. That's what you were doing.
That happened to me not too long ago. I went into a coffee shop and I told the oldest—I told Levi, he's two—to go sit, pick a table and sit down. I left the stroller with him, with my three-month-old in it, while I walked probably a grand total of 15 steps to the counter to order something for him. Literally, five people right there. We're not talking about a food court, anything like that. They're literally right there. But I walked up to the counter to start ordering, and my baby must have started crying, and a college student just jumped up and ran over and started pushing the stroller for him. She just immediately stepped in, just like, "Okay." She just stepped in and started rocking, talking to him, and just pushing the stroller. I just couldn't believe it. I was just like, the relief. I don't think people realize the blessing you can be to parents when you just see yourself as part—stepping in for a minute to relieve the burden and say, "Hey, glad you..."
I think part of it is reading the context. Are these kids crying? Do they look disheveled? Let's read the whole situation here. Then when the responsible adult comes back and you're like, "Okay, this all looks like it's all right. This was just a mom who ran to get a water bottle. This is great. Great. Have a great day, enjoy your hike," right? So I just think it's immature, and it's really—this immediate assumption that all danger needs to be escalated to the law, but that instead of...
Saying that it was danger. That kids weren't in danger. I really like...
This idea of, how about we just all see ourselves as part—we might not know these people, but we can step in as part of their world, like you're saying, instead of seeing ourselves as the judge of their parenting, right? You probably have a better shot at reading a bad situation if you start with helpfulness than if you just assume that everything has gone wrong.
But I wanted to jump in for one second when you're talking about somebody saying, "How come I have to watch your kids?" or "How dare you abandon them?" The assumption on their part is not only that the mom or that the children were in danger because there was no adult right there, and that that means that the adult was extremely irresponsible, which allows you to scream at them. There's all that. Then there's this weird feeling of unpaid labor—"How come I'm stuck babysitting your kids, lady?"
It's like, you're not babysitting them. You're in the world. They're in the world. You see them. They see you. That's not babysitting. So it's this weird idea that the children only belong to their parents, so anything that you're doing that helps them is unpaid labor for the parents, as opposed to being part of a community where the children are part of a community, you're part of a community, the parents are part of the community, too. Of course, you see each other and you help each other, or you smile.
I love the idea that you're talking about, which is start out with the assumption that I can help and that the kids are good and the parents are good, as opposed to giving everybody what I call "worst first" thinking—thinking up the worst-case scenario first, coming up with the worst-case parents, and proceeding as if that's reality, because it's not.
I think part of what you're getting at with everything you're talking about is really pointing to just the complete and total fraying of social capital and community ties, right? Which I think you can go from there to the design decisions we've been making about our cities. So I think what you're getting at with this "worst first" thinking is really, to me, it feels like a reflection of just fracture everywhere.
Because I feel like if people were in environments where the sense of connectedness was embodied in the way we built the place, this wouldn't be rocket science. If you're living in a walkable environment, I think the chances of people assuming that all children are two steps away from being kidnapped would be—I don't know. I think it'd be an interesting study. What's the perception of danger relative to the actual built environment?
That is a good question, because part of it is—I mean, I live in New York City. Obviously it's very walkable, but it's also so urban that we don't know most of our neighbors. So I don't know if, once again, the assumption is, anytime a child is a few steps ahead, that they are safe because it's a walkable place. Maybe they're safe from being run over, because the infrastructure is for walking. But I don't know that there's the trust.
I think the trust that you're talking about, that we both would love to see, comes from a couple of things. One of them, a big one, is just that you are part of a group of people who you know. If you're in a small town, you know each other, right? If you're on a block where everybody knows each other, that's a different feeling from just being on an anonymous street somewhere in a suburban city. Part of it is to know your neighbors, I guess, or to at least feel like you're part of a neighborhood.
That's the challenge, right? I know that design can't solve all of that in a place that's so dense and crowded. New York City is a whole other category to me, so I'm probably not thinking of that as my case study.
No, I'm thinking of Winesburg, Ohio, or something.
Something where it's like, well, if we—I just think it's worth thinking about how our sense of duty to each other is connected to the sense of—what's the relationship between the car culture and the single-family home and the—there's no porch culture anymore, and the internet culture and the delivery culture. I think all of that is just increasing our sense of fracture from each other. The only way to—I think a part of what's getting eroded is that—I think our sense of danger is getting heightened, right, because we're not interacting with each other. But I think our sense of duty is also getting diminished, right?
Also, if you were just in a neighborhood and you knew a lot of your neighbors, and they knew you, everybody's walking to school—it's not even a sense of duty. It's just a sense of normalcy, right? I mean, that thing that the jerk was getting high on saying, "You abandoned your kids"—like, "My duty is to save your children." Whereas in a neighborhood, it's like, "My duty is..." It's not a duty. It's like, "I see you. Oh, look, there go the kids." Or "I wonder where their mom is. There she is." As opposed to—it's not something onerous.
So I have a weird situation that I want to talk to you about, because there's cars involved, and yet it feels safe. You're talking to somebody who barely drives. We don't own a car, so I'm not big on car culture, but one place where I've seen that almost consistently has a really free-range, Let Grow ethos with kids outside—different ages playing—is camping, campgrounds or RV parks. What's interesting is that obviously in RV parks, there's big RVs around, and the people don't know each other. The adults don't know each other. The kids don't know each other. So how come they're always playing?
The reason is that that's a culture that has decided that is just—that's what part of the culture is. Kids are going to be outside. There's going to be a playground, and they're going to play. So there's no judgment on, "Hey lady, your kids at the park, and you're not there." I think along with the built environment that you're concerned about, understandably, there's also the no-free-time environment that also keeps people from getting to know each other, certainly from neighborhood kids getting to know each other, because I'm at ballet and your kid's at soccer, and then there's Sunday school, and then there's Kumon, and then you drive into the garage and then you deposit the kids inside. So there's something about free time that is also eroded, and with it went a lot of this culture that just develops because I've got free time, you've got free time. Let's go to the park. Let's kick a ball. Let's draw.
Oh, I completely agree. I think going back to what you said at the beginning, that collective—what does a collective solution look like? I've talked to some parents who are more concerned about the effects of smartphones and the internet. Their whole thing is, "We really want to be a low-screen to no-screen household, but it's really hard to do that if we don't have other friends buying in, because the kids have to have other kids whose parents are going to enforce the same rules."
I think there's got to be something similar here, especially for those in our audience who are listening and want to create this type of free-range culture, but they're going to need other families who are committed and saying, "Hey, we're committed to preserving and protecting free time. We're committed to allowing them to explore. We're committed to seeing ourselves as part of their world, instead of..." What we've been talking about.
Really good. I do work with John Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation, and he has the four new norms. Three of them are about phones: no smartphones till 14, no phones in the school, no social media till 16. His fourth norm is more independence, responsibility, and free play in the real world, which is Let Grow, right?
So the two things that we talked about—keeping the school open for free play, for a Let Grow Play Club, and then sending kids home to go into the world—unless they're in a really dangerous neighborhood, but to go out into the world and do something, even if it's walking two houses down to knock on a friend's door or to borrow a cup of sugar. Just re-normalizing the idea of kids out and about is one of the things that will go a long way to changing the culture in almost any neighborhood.
We've seen this. We've seen this in neighborhoods where one kid goes to the store and everybody's wondering, "Where's that kid's mom?" He explained to the manager, "I'm doing my Let Grow Experience." "What's that?" "I have to do something on my own." "Oh, okay." Then other kids start going there, and it is normal again. We've heard of trick-or-treating where the parents, rather than going in a clump, said, "Let's Let Grow." Or the kids said, "Let Grow." Somebody says, "Let Grow." Then the kids went off and they trick-or-treated while the parents hung out together. So, I mean...
Go talk to the police department ahead of time. We have pictures of my children.
Right. At letgrow.org, we even have a community toolkit, and one of them is how to talk to the local police, how to talk to your school, and how to talk to your neighbors and all of that.
But another easy idea and sort of way of easing into more free play, more localized fun is to get some friends together who have kids of different ages and make a Free Play Friday where you or somebody else will watch all the kids who feel like going to the park—just drop them off on a Friday afternoon. So there's an adult there, you or somebody else, for emergencies, again, like a lifeguard. But then the kids just run around. The parents have a little bit of free time, and they get used to the kids being together without one-on-one security guards for each child. Then the kids want to do that again. Then they start knocking on doors.
We heard of this one lady who was very scared in the suburbs of New York, who was so scared—whenever the doorbell rang, she would literally have the kids lie down on the ground. Her two sons, lie down on the ground for fear of who was at the door. So this was a woman off-the-charts afraid, but gets the Let Grow Experience. "What do we have to do?" "Okay, Mom, can I ride my bike?" "Okay, but just back and forth in front of the house to the end of the block and back and forth." He's 10.
Finally said, "Mom, this is so boring. Can't I please go around the corner and get my friend at least and bike with him?" "Okay," because she's gotten used to the back and forth. So he gets the friend, and then they get other friends. Then she sent me a picture. There's 10 kids in what they call the biker gang now, and they ride all over. Her son, who has ADHD, is somehow planning things like, "Okay, I'll go to your house, we'll get the bat, you go to your house, get the ball, and then we'll play the game."
She sent me a picture about a month ago when it was freezing outside. This is just in Connecticut. It's winter. It's cold here. There were six kids on their bikes in the biker gang, because this has become their life now. She said he comes home, he throws down his backpack, and he goes outside on his bike with his friends. It's just a question of re-normalizing the idea of kids out and about again. You have to take the first step. The Let Grow Experience, by saying you have to do something new on your own—parents, you have to let them—is what breaks the ice.
Yeah, talk about what you're doing on the legal side, because I know that might be another fear. Just to sort of contextualize all this conversation, sometimes I have people on the show who are actively doing things to change the built environment to align more with what we think is a normal human habitat. Then there are people who are like, "Okay, maybe we can't fix all of that, but we can create little counter-cultures within this broken environment and broken ecosystem."
I think what you're talking about is, here are little ways we can create little counter-cultures, little pocket counter-cultures. If it's working with the school to open the playground, if it's showing your—helping your kids start a biker gang, if that's what it is. Some people are doing the bike bus, right? So they might not be able to get all the streets put on a diet and redesign and eliminate cars and create this idyllic child-safe village that we all long for. But I think there are a lot of ways we can start creating little pockets of this, right? Hopefully we are working on those more systemic changes. I think that's just a really helpful way of thinking, because I think sometimes our audience gets stuck into "we have to just fix it all and make it great," and I think we should keep doing that. But I also think there's another side where it's like, let's assume that this is going to be the status quo for the next 20 years. Because even if you got started fixing every stroad, every city, every bike lane in your town, it's still probably going to take 20 years, right? What are we going to do in the meantime?
I think getting out there and meeting the business owners and meeting the neighbors and finding the other kids and finding creative ideas to—let's start pushing back on this now, and hopefully the infrastructure changes will be there to meet us.
I'm with you. I would love to see all these changes—I'd like calmer streets, bike lanes. I like—as we said, I don't like cars. So anything that makes a neighborhood safer is great. But in the meantime, you're right. There are other changes to make, and one of the things that Let Grow has been working on is what we call narrowing the neglect laws.
Let me explain. Most states have neglect laws that say something like, "Parents must provide proper supervision." That's pretty open-ended, right? Because what I think of as proper supervision—letting my nine-year-old ride the subway—is not what somebody else might think is proper supervision, who won't let their kid even ride their bike in a suburb until they're 15 or whatever. So what you want to do is make sure that parents can make the decision that they think makes sense for their kid, their neighborhood, the age of the child, and what they need, because sometimes parents don't have a lot of resources. Instead of being able to pick the kid up from the bus stop every day and walk them home, mom is working a second shift at McDonald's and needs to allow the child to walk home by herself and get in with a latchkey. Is that neglect?
We say that poverty is not neglect and free-ranging your kid is not neglect. Neglect is only when you put your kid in obvious, serious danger. That way, even if I make a decision that's different from yours, if I'm not doing something that's really dangerous—a three-year-old on the edge of the highway at midnight, something that we all know is a bad idea—then we leave it up to the parent, unless it's serious, obvious danger.
So we call this the Reasonable Childhood Independence Law, and it has been passed now in 11 states, including Texas—you'll be happy to know. We're working in about seven states this year. We'll probably get it passed in maybe two or three states. But it just helps everybody. It helps that mom in poverty. It helps you thinking that your two-year-old can go up and down the block without this being a crime. It also helps Child Protective Services, which doesn't want to waste its time on somebody who lets their kid walk to the store. They should be investigating the cases where kids really are neglected in the serious sense of not being given the means to survive or being put in truly dangerous situations.
Most Child Protective Services workers are stretched thin. Let's let them pick up the phone and hear, "Oh, you're calling because you saw a child with her brother at the playground, and they looked young. Thank you very much. Were they being chased by somebody? Were they in pain? No, everything was fine. Thanks." And then they don't have to follow up with an investigation.
So that's something that if anybody—if your listeners are interested—if you go to letgrow.org and you click on state laws, you can get involved. You can find out if we're working in your state. You can find out what your state's law is. We have a map. If you're in a state that hasn't passed this law yet, you can help us.
Well, I think that, combined with the other resources that you've mentioned, really create a full picture of participating in a culture change, right? I think that's really at the heart of all this. There's so many components. I think the first step really is get to know your neighbor so that if they see your kid out, you know—tell them, "It's not, 'Oh, hurry up and shuttle them home.'" You know who they are. The world expands for that child. Their safety net expands with every person they know, right? Think of it that way. Yeah, there are a few houses you want them to skip. That's fine. But instead of seeing the neighborhood as a place of danger, it's like, well, what can we do to make the neighborhood just an extension of their world? So they can go to Miss Ellen's house or Mr. Jackson's house. Instead of those being dangerous places, you've alchemized them into extensions of their world.
Which they actually are, not even alchemy. It's what a neighborhood is. The idea of a neighborhood is that...
You've integrated them into the world instead of the binary of only...
Only, yeah.
Exactly. Home or bad. I mean, I think that's part of it. I think we were talking about—we had neighbors walk over and pick up Levi. They had their own little informal biker gang ride to the school where the parking lot was empty because it was a holiday. So three parents shuttled like six children—some of them were pretty little—guided them over there so they could all just ride their bikes together, and then came home. The courage, though—this is a neighborhood with loose dogs, with broken sidewalks, with dangerous drivers, right? But I think banding together and creating those pockets create those opportunities for the kids.
I think part of this is really—and I think there is something to say for, man, how much of this conversation do we have to have because our places are designed without children in mind? I think that is a big part of it, right? There is still something to think about with the hostility of the way—who's excluded by designing places primarily for cars than for people, right? I understand hyper-dense crowded places like New York City might be getting the walkability right, but the number of strangers there still makes it a little bit tricky. But I just think there's still so much to wrestle with—even just subdivisions. How are we defining a good neighborhood? Is a good neighborhood just housing? Well, think about that from the perspective of a child. There's nowhere for them to go—a child who can be entrusted with a reasonable level of independence. Where is there for them to go? Literally nowhere, right? Because we haven't put shops, we haven't put a pizza parlor, ice cream shop, nothing. There's nothing.
So I think this is a really great invitation to start thinking about, what have we assumed about what it means to be a human being? What have we assumed about what it means to be a human being who can't drive? What does it mean about being a child?
A human being who can't drive is a great way to put kids. But I had one other suggestion that somebody had made at our site that I thought was great, which is that even if you're in one of these subdivisions and there's nothing for miles and miles, there's other kids. So one mom started calling something a Friendship Club. What she meant by that is she and a couple of other parents of kids in the neighborhood who her kid knew formed a Friendship Club. By that, they meant that my kid can knock on your door, and your kids can knock on our door, and we're not going to consider it a horrible imposition that they've come and said, "Can Levi come out and play?" because this is our Friendship Club. Even though it was just in her case—I think it was four or five families—it gave Levi, or whatever her kid's name was, these four houses to knock on the doors of. So there was a place for him to go. It's not a commercial place. It's not a place he can get a popsicle, but it was a place where you could find—if somebody's home, do you want to come out and play? Do you want to bounce a ball? Do you want to go to the playground with me?
It's just—I mean, I had that when I was a kid. We didn't call it a Friendship Club. We just said, "I'm going to go see who's home." But it gives you that back, and it makes even a boring suburb into a place where there's fun behind doors and you can find it.
Yeah, and that's what I think is really standing out to me from speaking with you, Lenore, is just how—it's almost making me think, policy change is great, infrastructure change is awesome, but there is a case to be made for part of this is us just taking responsibility for it. Meeting the people in our neighborhood, looking for the children and creating opportunities for them, even if the infrastructure is lacking and the policy is absent, right? It's like, well, there are still human beings here. So what can we do just as human beings, despite the limitations of our neighborhood? That's really encouraging. That's a really encouraging perspective. Well, let's wrap it there.
I was thinking, that's so perfect. I totally love what you said. The other thing is to make your home a destination for other kids. Yeah, absolutely. Look in the driveway. They can come and play. They're welcome here.
Well, I love to ask this of all my guests—tell us a little bit about your neighborhood. Do you have a couple favorite places you like to recommend people check out if they come through for a visit?
I so love my neighborhood. Everybody who comes to New York City should come to Jackson Heights, Queens.
It's great. It's so fun. It's so vivid. Yeah, dynamic, so much energy, and just...
That's right, yeah. Listen to her. She's right. It's just got a lot of street food. There's 167 languages. Supposedly, there's bakeries and fruit stands. If you like ethnic groceries, which I do, oh, my God, this is the land of the enchanted ethnic grocery of almost every ethnicity. It's not expensive. I mean, sometimes you can get a thing of strawberries for $1. So people should come visit me.
Do you have a favorite coffee shop or favorite...
Yes, Letty's Bakery, L-E-T-T-Y-S, on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights. It's delicious. I'm going there in two mornings to have coffee with my friend. If you come to town, find me online. I'm easy to find. I'm Lenore at Let Grow, and we'll have coffee.
Wonderful, Lenore. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing your insights and experience and great advice to the show. I really appreciate it. To our audience, thank you so much for listening. I hope your new year is off to a good start. I'll be back soon with another conversation. Don't forget to nominate someone who you think we should bring on the show, and in the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This afternoon's episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.