Kids forbidden to talk to strangers. Kids afraid to go inside a store on their own. Kids terrified of cooking an egg for fear of burning the house down. These are examples Lenore Skenazy, who pioneered the idea of “free-range” parenting, gives of how far gone we are as a society when it comes to rearing children.
After Skenazy published a 2008 column in The New York Sun about letting her son ride the New York City subway by himself at 9 years old, she was met with a widely publicized backlash that earned her the moniker “Worst Mom in America.” Skenazy wrote a book titled Free Range Kids in 2009, which outlined an approach to parenting that encourages independence and freedom as an antidote to the risk-averse, overprotective parenting that she saw around her.
Skenazy proposed a philosophy of parenting that fights, per her website, “the belief that our ...
