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If you try to prevent every possible danger in your child’s everyday life, they will never get a chance to grow up.
Lenore Skenazy let her son ride the metro by himself at the age of nine after studying the map with him in order to prepare. Unbeknownst to her, this caused great unrest and scrutiny from a variety of parenting groups, so much so that she decided to write a book and start a project on letting your kid grow to be self-reliant.
Should children ride the NYC subway by themselves? When did children stop having unsupervised and unstructured time? What did ‘strange danger’ do to change the way we parent? What are the consequences of over-parenting?
Let Grow Website, founded by Jonathan Haidt, Peter Gray, Lenore Skenazy, and Daniel Schuchman
The Fragile Generation, written by Lenore Skenazy and Jonathan Haidt
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry), written by Lenore Skenazy
Jonathan Haidt Lets His 9-Year-Old Daughter Walk to School Alone for the First Time
Let Grow project
The Coddling of the American Mind, Free Thoughts Podcast
Conformist Students Fear Disagreement, written by Natalie Dowzicky
Trevor Burrus was a research fellow in the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, legal history, and the interface between science and public policy.
He is the editor of A Conspiracy against Obamacare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Deep Commitments: The Past, Present, and Future of Religious Liberty (Cato, 2017). Burrus holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. He also contributed a chapter to Libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty.
Aaron Powell founded Libertarianism.org. He is now the host of (Re)Imagining Liberty, a podcast about the case for radical freedom.