A six-year-old rides his scooter to a playground a quarter mile from home. Two days later, Child Protective Services is at his family’s door. His case is one of several in a recent New York Times article asking whether letting children play outside alone has effectively become a crime. Chuck Marohn talks with Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement and president of Let Grow, and planner and pedestrian-safety advocate Angie Schmitt about “worst-first thinking,” neglect laws, and the decline of walking and biking to school. Parents are expected to raise capable, independent kids while also keeping them under constant watch, while the built environment often makes even short walks to school or the playground harder for children to navigate on their own.
A six-year-old rides his scooter to a playground about a quarter mile from his house. On the way home, an adult stops him, asks why he's alone, and apparently follows him back to his house. Two days later, Child Protective Services shows up at the family's door. That's one of the stories in a recent New York Times article by Ian Frisch titled "Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?
It looks at parents around the country who have been investigated and sometimes charged with crimes for letting their kids walk, bike, or play outside without an adult. Kids, which I think we should call future adults, become capable by taking small risks, making mistakes, and gradually figuring out how to navigate the world without someone standing over them. Yet we built both a culture and, in many places, a physical environment where doing that feels irresponsible or even dangerous. What does it say about our communities when a kid being outside alone looks like evidence that something has gone wrong?
Welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we take a story in the news and look beyond the headline at the systems, tradeoffs, and assumptions shaping our cities and towns. I'm Chuck Marohn. I'm really excited to be here with you today. Joining me, Angie Schmitt.
Angie's an author, urban planner, traffic safety advocate based in Cleveland, Ohio. Yay, go Cleveland! She spent more than a decade working on pedestrian safety. She's the author of Right of Way, a book about America's pedestrian safety crisis, and today she runs Three Mile Per Hour Planning and Consulting, working with advocacy organizations and public agencies on safer streets.
Angie, welcome to Upzoned.
Hi, thanks so much.
It's so great to have you here. Our other guest is Lenore Skenazy. She's the president of Let Grow and the founder of the Free Range Kids Movement. She became nationally known after writing about letting her nine-year-old ride the New York City subway alone, which I had forgotten about.
But as soon as I read that thing about you, yeah, I remember that. It earned her the title America's Worst Mom, which someone's got to have it. She's been pushing back on the culture of overprotection and making the case for childhood independence ever since, and she's actually featured in the article we're going to discuss today. Lenore, welcome to Upzoned.
It's so nice to have you here.
I am pumped.
Well, let's start with you, Lenore. You were interviewed for this. Obviously, you are a wonderful mom, but you wear the title America's Worst Mom as a way to have this conversation, What about this article really stood out the most to you?
The fact that it was on the front page of the New York Times, asking the very same question that I have been asking for almost 20 years now. The subway rider's 28 at this point, and that is, how come we even have to ask? Is it illegal? Is it a crime to let your kid play outside, walk to school, ride a bike?
That's insane! I've been working to make it seem very sane to let your kids outside. Let Grow was founded to make it easy, normal, and legal to give your kids some independence. When it finally gets on the front page of the Times, and then there's 2000 comments, and most of them say, "Yeah, how did we get to this point?
That's crazy. I remember walking to school. I want my kids to have some independence. Kids are on their phones.
Why don't we let them outside? It felt like a victory lap. It felt great.
Angie. I forgot to mention in your bio that you have a Substack and are very active there. I know you talk a lot about your kids and their experience. How did this article?
I'm looking for initial reactions. How did this article hit you, and what was your immediate thoughts on it?
Yeah, I don't know if you're aware, Chuck, but I'm actually working on a new book, and I just covered the first article. It's all about this, so it's going to talk about why kids are depressed and lonely. Jonathan Haidt has done all this great work about why kids are depressed and lonely, and I've seen some of that firsthand. I had kids that were at tender ages during the pandemic, which was very disruptive.
I'm thinking about this from an urban planning perspective: Why don't kids feel comfortable just leaving their house and playing in the street the way they used to, and as part of that, I informally interviewed a lot of old timers in Cleveland who grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and they all said they played outside all day, and I have a little bit of a memory of that myself because I grew up in the '90s and the '80s. I was born in 1982. I roll my eyes at this kind of thing now. I talk about this in the book.
It's its own genre of news articles. This comes up all the time, and people have the same reaction. I think they teed up the reaction they expected in the headline and everything. They know it's gonna get people talking and thinking, but it really is sad, and I think Lenore's work is really important because we do have these busybodies who feel they're deputized to judge mothers and interfere with normal activities.
That's happening a lot, and there really are some concerns for ordinary parents. I've been through nothing quite this dramatic, but I think almost all parents who are just in the normal process of raising their kids now do run into this pushback.
Tell a story. I want to hear a story.
Yeah, a couple times. One time, my son, who is very stubborn, was having a meltdown. One of the cases I write about in the book, drawing from your research, Lenore, is similar: a boy is in his mom's car, he's having a meltdown, he's not behaving, so his mom lets him out of the car and says, "Fine, you walk." Sometimes you don't know how to handle that as a parent. I said, "You sit there.
You sit at this trailhead. He didn't want to go on the trail. His sister and I walked a little ways down the trail and then walked back to check on him. It was in this fancy suburb, and someone had alerted a park ranger or police officer.
Oh, there's a boy here. He was five or six. He's unsupervised. He was a little bit outside of my vision for a couple of moments.
He wasn't in any harm, and they approached me and talked to me. Lenore and I talked about this. I have a lot of social capital. I'm not a poor person.
I'm not an immigrant, so I never really worried about being arrested or anything. But for someone else, that might be a real concern based on what they have going on in the background.
I have to say that's why Let Grow has worked to pass laws in 13 states. We call them reasonable childhood independence laws, and they make it clear that this is not neglect. The law takes these wide-open neglect laws in states where it just says parent must provide proper supervision. Somebody could say, oh, that was not proper supervision, but it narrows the definition of neglect to putting your child in obvious and serious danger, not just any time you take your eyes off them.
I have to say, in terms of front page stories, you're in Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday also had a front-page story. Should it be illegal to let your kid play outside? It was amazing.
I thought it was the same article as the New York Times article, but in fact, it was about a law, a reasonable childhood independence law that's been introduced in Ohio. It passed through the Senate and is sitting in the House, and hopefully, it will get voted on very soon, and then your state will become the 14th, where you can let your kids sit at the trailhead for five minutes while you're out of sight, and nobody decides that is a hanging offense.
I'm excited about that. My husband sent me the article.
Right.
One of the phrases in the New York Times article was this idea of worst-first thinking. I have two daughters. They're now both adults in college, so I'm not at the same phase that you are at, Angie. Although I am jealous often when you talk about your kids throwing a fit, having an experience, or biking.
I remember those days. They were so beautiful. I wish I could go back. I will confess that at times, and I wonder if we can give license to this because I feel like maybe as parents we all have a moment where we have worst-first thinking.
What is that, and how do we overcome it? Maybe, Lenore, if you want to take that one first. There's a human reaction at times.
To be concerned and worried, I think, is the human condition, and actually, I think one of the reasons that childhood has become so strange is because parents think that they can avoid worry and anxiety by simply being with their kids all the time, which is just not something that works for either generation, but worst-first thinking is actually a phrase I coined, and I'm so happy to hear somebody else use it. It has not become super popular yet, but I was trying to counter the idea of stranger danger, and stranger danger. It sounds so true in part because it rhymes.
So I came up with worst first, trying to counter it, and the whole idea behind it is coming up with not just worries, but the very worst-case scenario first, and then proceeding as if it's likely to happen. One of the reasons I tried to popularize it, and still I'm doing that, is because after I let my son ride the subway, and I was on a lot of talk shows, at some point, the conversation would shift from, "Did he have fun? Was it scary? Did you like it?
Where'd he go?" to, "But what if he hadn't come home?" Suddenly we were in this worst-first thinking again. My son was gone for an hour. He did something by himself. It was fine.
Now we're talking about what if he had been murdered and chopped to pieces and eaten by a rapist? That's the worst possible case scenario. I feel like our culture has taken the normal human wiring of worrying about your kid and told you not only is it normal to worry, it is normal to worry about the most terrifying case that you've ever heard in the history of watching the news, and think that it's going to happen to your kid. I was just talking to a mom yesterday.
Gosh, where was she? Bellevue, Washington. Some of the parents of her kid's friends won't let them do what she's letting her 12- or 13-year-old do, which is take a bus to the mall or whatever, because they're worried that they'll be kidnapped or they'll be sold into white slavery. There's sex trafficking, and you cannot go to that worst-case scenario.
It doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make you a more loving and good parent just because you're imagining your kids starring in a Liam Neeson movie. That's not good parenting. That is a crazy direction that our culture has pointed you towards. Once you recognize it, you can be a little skeptical.
But really, the only thing that will rewire you from what we at Let Grow call the fear loop. I could let her go to the mall, but what if something happens? What if a guy in a van says he's looking for his puppy? She gets in.
I never see her again. She's in the trunk. It's the funeral. Maybe they don't find the body.
How do you go from the fear loop to the trust loop? Which is, I'm sure she's going to be okay. Maybe she'll get lost. It'll be okay.
Maybe she'll be a little late. I'll deal with it. How do you go from the fear loop to the trust loop? The only path is action.
You literally have to let your kid go do that thing on their own - the bike ride, the walk, or whatever - before you start realizing, "Wow, it's so much easier than I thought, or, "Wow, I'm worried, but now I'm so proud that it's worth it." Action breaks the cycle.
Angie, I feel like I've watched you now for some time document just your kid biking to school, and I feel like you're maybe demonstrating how to overcome worst-first thinking. But you're a mom; you have to have fears. How do you work through this? How do you get beyond worst-first thinking?
Well, Lenore is such a legend. I just want to say, to coin a term like "free-range kids." I mean, I think this is an example of a public intellectual really breaking through the noise. So yes, and I write about that a lot in my book. Guess what percentage of kids bike to school in the U.S. now?
We've gotten down to 1%. It's really sad. There are about 10% that walk to school, but now the overwhelming way kids are delivered to school is being driven by their parents. Every school parking lot in the morning is totally crazy-making.
The whole time you're isolated from other people, you're scrolling on your phone. I just want to touch on a couple things Lenore said in that earlier exchange, which is I think there are people that have issues with anxiety, maybe anxiety disorders. I'm a little bit that way myself. I'm actually an anxious person, even though I'm pretty free-range philosophically.
So I think that everyone struggles with that and fears can get out of hand, but it's really affecting children a lot too. The number of children in my social sphere who are dealing with anxiety disorders that are actually pretty crippling for them is a real health and safety concern. I catch people in my family articulating that worst-first thinking. A kid wants to walk along a ledge.
Oh, you could fall and break your neck. Why would you articulate the exact worst thing that could happen in front of a child who might be a little bit anxious in the first place? Do not do that. I have to correct them.
There is this whole case right now with Lindsey Clancy, this woman who had this mental breakdown. I'm off on a tangent, but she was really troubled because she would go on these websites and hear, oh, your baby could die if they have a BPA bottle or something. There's little threats lurking behind every corner, and she had to be hospitalized and then descended into psychosis. Terrible case.
I think we need to be more careful about scaring people in our public messaging, across the board. Oftentimes, even with weather now, school ends up getting canceled, and then the kids are sitting around on screens all day, which is really a bigger threat to them than high winds. Getting back to your point about biking to school, sorry, big feelings about this. My sixth grader biked to school.
I was so proud today. He biked to school on his own, and he got up early. He set an alarm early, and two of his friends, who typically are driven to school, went with him. I insisted he do it the first couple of days because I don't want to deal with that drive.
His school is less than a mile away. I did the ride with him the first day. It was so pleasant and easy. It is absolutely crazy that every single person is not doing this.
It was just so easy, and there was this wonderful crossing guard there, and they've done some nice treatments at the crossing. So that was a big win. One thing I say in my book, where my perspective is a little different from Lenore's, is about traffic safety. I'm not particularly concerned about a kidnapping.
I think a lot of parents really have internalized that message. I think there has been some pushback. Lenore has reached some people. People understand it a little bit, but the traffic safety issue has not been resolved at all.
Our traffic safety outcomes have really eroded just compared to a decade ago. Now all these people are driving pickup trucks with 55-inch grilles that totally obscure a child at close range. Our built environment is a nightmare for kids. They're never even considered in our road designs, with the rare exception of areas near a school.
But even then, the safety treatments that should be automatic aren't, and parents have to do all this fighting behind the scenes. So that's a real problem too. I do want to defend parents a little bit. We are not doing a good job providing what they need to get their kids to school safely.
One of those things is we've dropped the ball on bus service. We've let our school bus service unravel. We have this austerity approach. We're not able to retain bus drivers anymore.
That's a big crisis. But also, our streets are a mess. We haven't made our streets safe. A lot of parents, when I talk to them about this, they say, "I would love to let my kid walk to school.
I would love to let my kid bike to school. But there's one intersection that is a problem, and I work in planning, and I'm a pest. That's my whole career is trying to make one intersection get fixed. But even with all my inside knowledge, and now I've lived in Cleveland so long, I have political connections.
I still can't get stuff fixed. I got hit by a car on a trail crossing in my community, and we just want one little fix in this place that I was hit, and I've tried all the right people. I can't get it fixed. So there's a lot within the way we handle our transportation system, overall that interferes with parents' best intentions and kids' independence.
I remember growing up. I was six or seven, and I lived on a farm. But the park where we had T-ball was a mile and a half from the house, and it was mostly farm roads. There was a little county road.
It wasn't very busy. Then you would get to the state highway, and it was just a two-lane highway at that point in a rural area. I remember my parents saying, "You have to look left, then right, then left again, and walk your bike across," and all this. I remember the first three or four times I did it, I was terrified.
I thought, "What if I do this wrong?" I'd walk my bike across, and then after a few times, I thought, "This is dumb. I can just look, judge, and bike across." You gain confidence as a person. Of course, my parents weren't mad that I biked across instead of walked it across, but they wanted me to be cautious. I think about that same intersection today.
It is five lanes now. It is concrete barriers to keep people from crossing the way that I would as a kid. To get to the park, you can't take the little shortcut that I took before, which was a little path through the schoolyard. The schoolyard now has to be bunkered in.
People can't get in, so you have to drive or bike another mile down a frontage road that's really busy. I do feel like there is something here that we have reacted to, and I wonder how the safetyism culture has inculcated the design profession in a way where we are reinforcing the notion that we should, in some ways, be pushing back against. Lenore, you're nodding. I've been nodding with everything you were saying.
I was nodding with everything both of you were saying. I don't even have a car, so I'm not a car-culture person. It is funny that the very measures that are being taken sometimes in the name of safety end up being the least safe ones around. Jonathan Haidt is one of my co-founders of Let Grow, and this is a roundabout way of getting to safetyism.
We did a study with the Harris Poll asking kids ages eight to 12 how they would most like to spend time with friends. Angie, how old is your son? Is he 12?
I have an 11-year-old and a nine-year-old.
Okay, so they're right in this cohort. We asked them, "How would you most like to spend time with friends?" We gave them three choices. One was old-1980s-style unstructured, unsupervised time just goofing off - just playing, I should say. Another was organized activities, which we know take up a lot of kids' lives today: soccer, ballet, tutoring, Kumon - nobody wants tutoring or Kumon, maybe chess - but an organized activity of their choosing.
The third was online. And this isn't being videotaped, so I won't show you. But the big winner was hanging out, old school 1980s just hanging out time. Second choice was organized activities.
I think because they're still in person. The dead last was online. But we all know that kids are spending a lot of time online, and I think it's because we've told them it is so dangerous to go outside. It's just impossible.
I don't want you doing anything out there. Part of the reason seems to be pretty rational. If it is hard to get to your friend's house without crossing a five-lane highway with no speed bumps and no crossing guard, that's understandable. Then part of it is this irrational fear that the sex traffickers are waiting at the end of the driveway, and so we've tried to make their lives so safe that they are inside all the time.
Peter Gray, one of my other Let Grow co-founders, has documented how over the decades, as we've let kids do less and less on their own, often in the name of safety, or else in the name of future safety, because we're cultivating you to get into a great college and get a great career, and so you can't have any freedom now. But safety has gone up, independence has gone down, free play has gone down, and depression has gone up. Depression and anxiety have gone up. Angie, when you're talking about the anxiety of the parent, leeching into the anxiety of the child.
I know we don't have a lot of time, but there's a new therapy that's out there called independence therapy, which is Camilo Ortiz. I think I introduced you guys. It says that it basically teaches parents about the importance of independence, and then the therapy is having them let their kids do more and more on their own, and it rewires the kids and the parents in this double helix. It seems to be very successful.
Yeah, I love that, and I'm trying really hard with my kids, and I'm fortunate. I talk about it a lot in the book I'm working on. I'm fortunate; my neighborhood is an old neighborhood, so the design from the days before cars made housing a little more social. I talk about the neighborhood.
One point I want to make is that I think that on one hand we're being really overzealous about some relatively minor risks, and then we're under-cautious about some major risks.
Let's put a kid in a child seat and drive them around all day. Yeah.
Right. Depending on the year, one of the number one ways kids are killed is in car crashes, as passengers.
Right.
Yeah. There are risks with walking and biking, of course, but kids are also killed as passengers. Another major one is drowning. But then we closed pools for five years in my city for COVID, and people didn't get the swim training they needed, or whatever.
There are a lot of examples like that. For teenagers, the things we should really be worried about include suicide and gun violence, and we're not doing a good job on any of that. These countries in Europe that have much more permissive attitudes towards children's mobility and independence, they have much lower child mortality rates. So we're not doing a good job at safety anyway, and we're screwing up our kids at the same time.
If it was really about making kids safer, we'd be making more serious efforts to make the walk to school safe instead of blaming parents whenever there's a freak accident, which is our impulse right now.
Angie, let me ask you a last question, and then Lenore, the same question. I feel like the article is describing a safety culture that we have today that has become normalized, but that feels at least to the three of us, and I think to many people probably listening, feels very abnormal. It feels anti-human. Describe, in the best way you can, what a healthy, normal culture or approach here would look like.
What should we be trying to get to?
It's hard because one thing I say is that the built environment is bad. I interviewed this woman who's a hero in the book. I think she's in Bristol in the UK, so by American standards, it's not Houston, Texas, but she still didn't feel comfortable letting her nine-year-old run around because of speeding. First of all, I think we should take dangerous driving more seriously.
Why do our roads have to be a free for all? Why are children staying in their houses all day instead of us imposing some reasonable restrictions on adult drivers? I think a lot of parents want that, but the engineering profession - and this is your bread and butter, Chuck - has not been very responsive to those concerns. They're not very responsive to public concerns, and so they've said, "Oh, that's some woman-y whining, and we're really here to serve the trucking industry or whatever.
Those concerns have gotten ignored, so there needs to be some reforms. I think one thing I'm excited about is this idea of children's rights, which is not something that's talked about very much in the United States, but almost every other country, I think every other country in the world has signed this UN declaration about child rights, and one of them is the right to play. So we should not be treating that as some special thing that can be hand waved away and taken away anytime it's convenient for adults. Children need that to develop in a healthy way, and so anytime there's an adult priority that interferes with that, that cannot supersede that.
So it's a real reframing, and I don't know if that was a very good explanation, but I think the United States should adopt that and start changing the way it thinks about this. You see it even in skateboarding bans. Teenage boys want to skateboard, and all these places ban it. Well, that's a healthy activity that's pretty inexpensive, and it gets them together and it gets them outside.
But at the end of the day, it's just been easy to marginalize teenage boys, even if they try to play basketball or ride bikes in the street in groups. They are sometimes subject to the same overzealous policing or prohibition. So we need to really examine that. In the UK and in some other countries, they've reformed some of their laws so that they have to, for example, they have to assess how much play space is available, per household or per number of children, and if there's an insufficiency, they have to explain how they're going to redress that.
We have so much work to do, I guess.
Lenore, what would normal look like to you in a healthy way?
Normal would be, first of all, teenage boys allowed to skateboard for sure, and kids allowed to walk around or bike around their neighborhoods. Obviously, safer streets are part of that. But one of the things that we suggest, and it's somewhere between just a wonderful idea and a stopgap, is that since it is sometimes literally dangerous for kids to be out and about, and sometimes it is simply perceived as dangerous, keep the schools open for mixed age, no phones, free play after school, and you have a place where there's already a ton of kids available. They don't have to go anywhere.
The parents trust it. There aren't cars. If there are cars, you put traffic cones on either end of the street, and you've created a play space in front of the school or in back of the school, and you've made the school this wonderful place where kids go. They know that they're going to have the best time of their lives.
It might not be during algebra, but certainly before and after school, if they just get to play with their friends, and the equipment can be so cheap. We're talking balls and chalk, cardboard boxes, and some junk from home - an old suitcase, an old fur coat, whatever you got. Kids will have the greatest time. They'll meet kids in other grades.
They'll expand their friendship circle, and to a certain extent, one of the things that we're worried about when we worry about kids' mental health is that they're not developing just the normal give and take. Even in this conversation, I'll wait for you to finish and then I'll say something, or I've got an idea, or let me add something, or here's why I don't agree and here's why I do. All that develops normally in play: "Throw the ball to me. No, wait, let's go this way." Everybody's going that way.
I'm going to go the other way and hide. All of the executive function and the socializing and the compromise and the creativity that normally happens in kids is being thwarted when everything is scripted by an adult, and then their social lives are scripted in the classroom where you're supposed to be learning empathy and kindness and friendship, because it's not happening on the playground. Make the school into a playground before and after school. We call it a Let Grow Play Club.
We have instructions, even though it's pretty obvious. There's an adult there, like a lifeguard, standing there just in case of an emergency. But otherwise, the kids are organizing their own games, solving their own spats and just having the childhood that maybe used to happen on the street or the cul-de-sac or at the park. If it's not happening, have it happen at a Let Grow Play Club.
Real quickly, one thing I found in my research is that used to be really common. Schools in Cleveland used to be open till 10 at night, and they just provided a place for kids to go in. Same in New York City. It also used to be common to have playground attendants.
Yeah, we call them partners in New York City.
Other countries still sometimes do that.
I do feel like normal to me - and I used the term "future adults" in the beginning - is giving kids room to experience these things. I'm watching two girls now that are young women that are in college and experiencing things, and obviously they are drawing at this point in their life on everything that's come before it. I mean, that's the only thing they have that informs them, and I do think part of Jonathan Haidt's research that has been most impactful for me is just this recognition that the way we learn to be healthy adults is to actually have healthy childhoods that allow us to, in a sense, cosplay what being an adult is.
I watched my young daughters play with dolls and play with whatever, but as they got older, they weren't just playing or mimicking. They were actually doing adult things, as you say, working out relationships. How do we talk to each other? How do we interact with each other?
What is it normal to feel when I feel slighted or upset about something, or I'm not the center of attention, or what have you? Those are all things you actually have to navigate to become an adult. I feel like normal is providing enough of our landscape, enough of our society that allows kids the room to do that, and you can't do that when mom and dad are standing there. You just can't.
Okay, this has been awesome. You two are amazing. Let's switch here at the end into the down zone, which is the point in the show where we ask our guests: Is there anything that you are reading, listening to, or watching that you think that our listeners might be interested in? I said I would start and go first.
I actually got a weird recommendation. I'm a nonfiction reader. I read a little bit of fiction at the end of the year as I'm winding down, but I don't read a lot of fiction otherwise. But I just finished writing a new book, and I needed a palate cleanser.
I had recommended to me World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, and it was recommended as the best book on geopolitics I'd ever read that was fiction. I thought, "What?" Lenore, You told me that it was written by Mel Brooks's son. It's written by Max Brooks. I didn't know there was a relationship there.
We better Google.
Yeah, it's a really good fiction book. I'm about a third of the way through, and I tend to read before I go to bed. Now I'm having dreams of a zombie apocalypse.
Bad book to read before you go to bed.
It's actually a really good book.
So is The Silence of the Lambs.
Yeah, Lenore, you have a down zone item.
Yeah, ironically, I normally read fiction. That's literally what I love. But I read this book by Maggie Jackson, and it was a couple years ago, but it just comes to mind now. It's called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder - or the Wonder and Wisdom - of Basically Not Knowing, and it's something that keeps coming up in my daily life.
The idea is that nowadays we know so much with such certainty. You can Google everything. There are also school portals that tell you the kids' grades automatically. Angie, you might have those at your kid's school.
Don't get me started. Yeah, there you go. There are tracking devices that tell us exactly where our kids are, and the gizmo watch allows you to actually listen in on your child if they don't pick up the phone, and you want to hear what they're doing. You can be the KGB in your child's childhood, and there's just a lot of information coming from preschools and camps, every place that kids used to be trusted with another adult, or even without an adult, is now something that we're privy to.
I feel like all of that information, all of that certainty about exactly what they're doing, saying, eating, reading, watching, is driving us insane. We weren't meant to have that much information. Kids weren't meant to have childhoods watched that closely. We don't know what to do with the information, and instead it just feeds a lot of worry.
So Uncertain is about the importance of not always immediately knowing everything.
One of the top nonfiction books of 2024. Amazing book. Yeah, Angie, anything for the down zone?
Well, it's not very on brand, but one thing I read recently that I liked is World War Z.
Z's not on brand.
Oh, I wasn't sure how intellectual that was. I was reading this book. It's nonfiction. It's called A Marriage at Sea, and it's about this couple.
They tried to sail around the world, and a whale smashes into their ship. It basically sinks, and they survive for about 180 days on this little life raft, pulling up turtles and killing them. It's a crazy survival story, but one thing that's cool about it is how touching and devoted they were as a married couple, and that they didn't kill each other on the raft is amazing. The woman, even though she's a traditional wife, is the one who always believes that they'll survive, and they do.
It's really cute and well written.
Wow!
I can imagine my wife and I. Whenever we have one of those difficult moments, I'll say, "I think we should do this," and she immediately says, "No, this." I can imagine us stuck on a raft that would not go well. So, yeah, the "I told you so."
I know it's wild. It's very good.
We've been married 31 years, and she is almost always the correct one. So I will just end with that, maybe. Thank you, both of you. That's it for Upzoned this week.
If you are listening and have a reaction to the conversation and want to take part in it yourself, you can go to the Strong Towns Commons at commons.strongtowns.org and participate. We shared the article there earlier this week. There's already an ongoing discussion, and we'd love to have your thoughts on it. As always, we'll be back next week with a new article and a new team to chat about it.
Thank you, Lenore. Thank you, Angie. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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