Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we are together with Lenore Skenesi, and she is from Let Grow and I would love to hear more about that. But first of all, welcome. It's good to be together with you today.

Lenore Skenazy: 0:21

Thanks, same, happy to meet you both.

Jesper Conrad: 0:25

We have had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Gray a couple of times and now we are together with you and you are involved in a project he's also involved in. If we could start with that, if you can tell about the project for people who don't know about it?

Lenore Skenazy: 0:41

Sure, I wrote the book Free Range Kids about how kids, I think, need more independence and free play and free time and trust. And because of the book, peter Gray wanted to meet me and we met many years ago and then about eight years ago he and I and Jonathan Haidt and Daniel Schuchman two other big thought leaders here in America started a nonprofit called Let Grow to make it easy, normal and legal for parents to give their kids back some independence and free play and responsibility, and really everything that Peter said in his book Free to Learn and everything that I've heard him say whenever I hear him give a talk, I find myself I just have to write down everything again, because I find him brilliant and insightful and those have been the watchwords for us at Let Grow when it comes to what kids really need. Because I was just talking to a woman who works at a private school here in New York and she gave the high school students they could do anything they wanted for their one week of sort of spring break within the school and there were field trips and there were special classes, interesting people, but she got the group of kids who wanted to play and she said it was the greatest week ever. And what she was surprised by is that when they were playing these are 15 and 16 year olds who haven't had a lot of free play for a long time. They've been very scheduled, they've been structured. There's a lot of academic pressure on them.

Lenore Skenazy: 2:09

Nonetheless, given a week to just play, she was shocked by how good they were at organizing games. And then they decided no, that's not fun, let's change the rules this way. And they made the teams. And then originally they were going to say each time one person gets sort of thrown off the island, and then they decided no, we don't want anyone thrown off the island. So they changed the rules again and I said it just sounded like what you did was you released them from the bondage that is the rest of the year and there was still this spark of life in them that could make things happen and have fun and compromise and be creative. And she showed me these graphs of.

Lenore Skenazy: 2:47

She had interviewed the kids. She'd given the kids the week before that, the week of play, a little survey how stressed are you, how lonely are you? And it was off the charts. And then during that week, oh my God, the joy just went up and it's like everything is pinging at nine and 10 on her chart. That had been practically non-existent the week before. And it's what are we doing? I realized that not everything is about joy.

Lenore Skenazy: 3:13

But if you have kids and they're spending most of their time feeling stressed, lonely, anxious, sad and worried, and then you give them back some self-direction in the form of a week without classes and a week when they have to fill their time, nonetheless, they have to do something. They're not just all lying on mats taking naps all day. Suddenly they came back to life and you think don't you want kids with that spark in them? Don't you want kids who come up with things to do and make friends? Another question was did you make any new friends?

Lenore Skenazy: 3:43

And these are kids who have been at the school forever and they still made new friends, because it's so easy to make friends when you're playing, and some of the days they'd start off playing sort of separately and then gradually, you'd just watch them like magnet filings, come together and have more fun together. And isn't that the skill they're going to need when they're adults getting buy-in and working together and compromising and making something happen. And yet that the other 51 weeks of the year are not dedicated to that at all, in fact, sort of the opposite. So I learned to see all that from Peter, who just talks about. When kids are self-directed, when they're doing something for its own sake, because it's so interesting to them, they focus, they learn to tolerate frustration and they make things happen because it's this intrinsic motivation. We've pretty much leeched intrinsic motivation out of most kids' lives and it's amazing that it just doesn't die out. It's in there.

Jesper Conrad: 4:44

Lenore, I am curious about why you think this has happened. What is it in society that have made us confine the lives in a way where one week of free play a year sounds like amazing? What if?

Lenore Skenazy: 5:02

we only fed our kids one week a year. Look how much more excited they are. They seem to be standing up straighter. I think it's from good intentions that just got sort of derailed. The model of school that we have I know everybody talks about it comes from the 1800s and it had to do with preparing people for factories. But most of, I'd say, the biggest misperception that regular schooling gave all of us is that if five hours a day are good, six hours a day is better and seven is great, and 10 is ideal and 12,. Imagine how intelligent they'd get if only we gave them more schooling.

Lenore Skenazy: 5:41

And the anthropologist David Lancey, who's somebody else you either might want to talk to or have spoken to he works with Peter as well. He just pointed out something once that blew my mind, which is that ever since we started having formal schooling sort of popularized throughout the Western world and then the rest of the world, it changed our perception of how kids learn, because we knew that schools were places of learning. We started thinking that places outside of school were places where kids weren't learning unless there was something that looked a lot like school going on. There was a class, there was a coach teaching kids and it even it seeped into family life. And then it was aided and abetted by all these parenting books that say don't waste any of your child's potential. When you're sitting there at the dinner table, count the number of tines on the fork, or point out that bread starts with B and remember as you're slicing. It mentioned that slicing requires physics and sharpness or whatever. It's just. Parents were told that their job is to be a teacher, and without them recognizing that we're always teaching and we're always learning. And so then they became sort of didactic, like a teacher, turning everything into something that looked like a lesson, as opposed to the way kids have learned throughout all of human history, which is just copying, listening, exploring, trying.

Lenore Skenazy: 7:02

And my main nemesis in the world today is Parents Magazine. I get their Parents Magazine just the most popular parenting magazine anywhere ever and they send out sort of daily bulletins. I don't have any of them printed out right now, but they will tell you things like how to have a wonderful and enriched reading session with your child. And it says, when you sit down with your child might just want to look at the pictures. Yeah, maybe that's why they're called picture books, but that would be leaving potential on the table. And so remember to point out that this is the title of the book. Count the number of words in the title Pat the Bunny, that's three words.

Lenore Skenazy: 7:41

And so that's not how anyone gets any enjoyment out of life. It's not only, it's the opposite of, it's the opposite of learning, it's the opposite of fun. And, frankly, learning and fun are usually together, because you want to learn something, because it is fun or you're interested. That's why people talk about going down the rabbit hole, which I'm always down on my computer, but that's because I'm like oh, that looks like an interesting article, oh, that referred to this study, and pretty soon I'm down there. Is that a stupid waste of time or is that curiosity? And maybe it's both, but we sort of seem to think that anything that isn't directly related to something that you're supposed to be learning is this waste of time. And it's like that's how we learn is by being curious and wasting our time learning more. So it's just, how did we get to this point? We believed that more is better, we believe that boring is serious, and we believed that teaching is dull. I'd say I'd boil it down that way.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:18

I'm just wondering, you are preaching for the choir here, yeah. I'll say there's just no reason for me to say I agree with everything. But I'm thinking about how. I'm thinking about two things. So one is cultural difference, as we are Scandinavian and it looks different where we come from. You're Scandinavian, where are you guys from? We are from Denmark, oh, lucky, yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:43

and childhood looks different in Denmark than it does in the US so it's going in the wrong direction, but it's still very good compared to other places. Yeah, but that's one thing and I think we could maybe dive into that and maybe it is actually part of my other question, which is just how did we get to here? When did the fear take over? Do you think there's an element not just of the school growing and the school lacking a word sort?

Cecilie Conrad: 10:15

of the model or the yeah, the model but also the way we think and the way we speak about childhood becomes this very focused on results and methods and all these things. But also I think there's an element of fearfulness, and maybe the fearfulness combined with parental responsibility that we think we're bad parents.

Lenore Skenazy: 10:35

The focus on results is interesting because you can focus on results once there's a way to measure results, and I think that the measurement might have come first. I don't know, I don't know enough about this history, but the fact that we can measure and compare means that then you start sort, measure, self-direction. You can't measure joy of getting up in the morning, so you can measure how many spelling words they know or what their math tests are. So I think measurement itself sort of contorts what we think of as important. They say there's a phrase that's really clever, that I can't remember, but basically when what you can, whatever you can measure, becomes important, and you can't measure a soul, but you can measure the geographic knowledge or whatever, and then the fearfulness comes from so many places. Just even as I glance at my desk, I see the word amygdala.

Lenore Skenazy: 11:35

I'm always thinking about fear, because there's a bunch of fears going on. One is the fear that our children will fall behind, and if your child falls behind, that they will have a rotten life. And I can understand that fear, I'm not immune to it. And so if you think that the only way to keep your child on the straight and narrow, so that they'll be able to lead a healthy, happy life in the great beyond, which is the great beyond college. Then a lot of your focus becomes getting them into college. In America we have just a vast array of colleges and some are considered tippy top and guarantors of joy and success and the others aren't, and so people just set their North star there. I actually understand it so well in some of the Asian countries where either you get into the college and the university and you go on and you're able to get a decent job, or not.

Lenore Skenazy: 12:24

It is pretty stark here. We feel like that, but it's not the same truth. So part of the fear is economic. Part of the fear is that you're in an arms race. When I was growing up, there's a test that you have to take to get into college called the SATs here in America and we went and took the SATs some weekend day in our senior year of high school. But now everybody gets preparation. They take a I don't know five or a 10 week class to prepare you for the SATs and you do endless drilling and frankly, I sent my kids to that because now everyone's sending it. So it's a little bit of an arms race If you walked in like I did, with no preparation. You would be behind all these kids who get like a 200 point boost from going to this frankly expensive class.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:11

So it looks like, yeah, I want to ask a question, because this is like the other end of childhood are you talking about't know, I'm talking about the whole thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 13:21

I'm just curious. I'm cute, I want to be curious with you. I'm not, and I have right now. Half of my kids are exactly there, so we need to see how do we get them into this university in our end. And they've never been to school. So I and I understand the pain point, because it's a thing, but I think it's very different from keeping track of what an eight year old is spending his or her time doing. Oh yeah, and I'm just wondering did it just spiral down from the university idea or is it coming from something else? No, it's not just the university idea.

Lenore Skenazy: 14:00

No, it's not just the university idea. The idea of success, building on success, is certainly there, with perhaps the university as a specific goal or just thinking. I don't want my eight-year-old to be a bad student. But when you're talking about fear, it's not just fear that your child won't succeed. I mean, we're stewed in fear, at least here in the United States. Fear that if your kid is walking to the bus stop they will be kidnapped. Your fear that if your kid is playing a game with a friend without you there, he might be upset or bullied or get into an argument and that he won't be able to handle it.

Lenore Skenazy: 14:34

And that it is our job as parents to be watching almost everything that our kids do to make sure they won't be hurt and won't fall behind. And I think that starts very young. It starts young with they won't fall behind. You get them these educational toys Tomorrow. I'm going to I don't know some kind of convention and there's going to be a person there who's CEO of this company that sends parents the developmentally appropriate toys every month or every two months, so that your kid doesn't waste their time spent with last month's toys when they're ready for this month's toys we're talking about eight months old, solid business plan.

Lenore Skenazy: 15:09

It's so solid. I, if I weren't me, I'd say like, why didn't I do that?

Cecilie Conrad: 15:12

well, I'm in on it man yeah, yeah and they don't say.

Lenore Skenazy: 15:16

My family member gets them and they're beautiful, they're expensive, they're nice, there's nothing wrong with the toys. Gets them, and they're beautiful, they're expensive, they're nice, there's nothing wrong with the toys. And in a way, parenting is so boring now because we think we have to spend every single second with our child either making sure no potential is left on the table or making sure they're safe, and so having a new toy is almost like good for me, like I'm not so bored because oh, there's this new toy and when I see her playing with that I realize that she's understanding spatial relationships or that he's starting to learn cause and effect or eye movements. Maybe it's more interesting for the parent because, like a scientist or an anthropologist, they're watching their kid and maybe that's fine.

Lenore Skenazy: 15:56

I personally worry that kids are just kids and treating them like these big projects that could get derailed or that can be slightly pumped up seems to be a lot of pressure on the parents. But I wanted to go back to more of the fear, so that's back to the fear of them falling behind. But we really have this extremely inflated fear that if we're not watching them they will be hurt and that means that, like schools here in America not all of them, but many of them won't let the kid get off the school bus in the afternoon and walk home from the school bus stop two blocks, two houses. They make an adult wait there for the child to escort them home. And I'm sure the school is afraid that something bad quote, unquote bad will happen and that they'll be sued. And isn't that still their liability if they let the kid off the bus?

Lenore Skenazy: 16:42

And so everybody starts sort of defensive parenting where sometimes you're required to watch them and sometimes it just becomes the social norm that of course everybody waits at the bus stop in the morning with the kids to put them on the bus. And suddenly it becomes not suddenly gradually, it becomes weird to think that they could stand at the bus stop and not be lonely and not need a snack and not need to ask you a question and not feel abandoned and not be in danger if you're not there. So the social norm changes to the point of why aren't you staying to watch the soccer practice? Everybody else is how come you're not at the bus stop? Everybody else is how come you're letting them walk to the park? You could drive them and all of this stuff has to sort of be reverse engineered, which is what Let Grow is trying to do, to make it normal modern society where we live in these small family units, alone in our parenting and alone with our children.

Jesper Conrad: 17:36

Yes, and I understand it can be boring if you're only together with your parents because children love other children. If you have a big group of kids it might be a different thing in your household. So part of me is thinking if the move into society, towards smaller family units that are living more enclosed, is part of creating a society where we are not there.

Lenore Skenazy: 18:25

Yeah. So first of all, I think you're right and I think it does get. It gets a little hothouse in the house because it's just you and your kids all the time. But when we talk about what's another factor that's making kids a little, I don't know. Let's just go back to your word self-directed Part of it is it's the smaller families and it's more money. We have often two working parents and often a smaller family, and that means there's more time and money at least more money to be spent on each kid.

Lenore Skenazy: 18:56

People always say, oh, when people had 10 kids it didn't matter if a couple of them died. But now they're really worried. I'm like I don't think it's. They didn't matter if a couple of kids died. But when you had 10 kids, first of all nobody expected you to wait at 10 different bus stops. You couldn't and you couldn't sit there reading to each kid and counting the number of words in the title if you had 10 kids. And then also your money was spread out and so you couldn't buy them a special new, developmentally enriching toy box every month, because that was just impossible. So I think there's the connection between the smaller families is not just that it's boring and that we're more atomized but that we live in a clever entrepreneurial world. And somebody saw that if you only have one kid and you have two parents were earning a living. Why not fill up that house with these toys every month? And they came up with a subscription service.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:52

I'm just really wondering how we can reverse it, because I think the whole thing is on a very deep level of not trusting life as a process and thinking that this unknown that the future will always be can be controlled by setting up some systems just yeah sure it's that and the other and I really. For me it's a long time ago, but it really was an epiphany when I realized all the hours that I'm trying to control. I will never know what would happen if I let them do whatever they want.

Lenore Skenazy: 20:28

I might you know, you would never let them know what would happen. You'll never know.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:31

If I control say I control 10, 12 hours of my children's day by having my agenda, If you play with this and you learn that and you eat this and you go there and you go to school and take a shower and every morning at this time and I just control all the hours I am.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:47

I know what they're doing and I know why they're doing it. I have a goal with it. Maybe I'm super efficient and they spend speak 10 languages before they are 12. But I will never know what would have happened if I had set them free. Yeah, maybe they would play eight musical instruments, maybe they would invent something epic, maybe they would be happy. How do I know? And I think this venturing into the unknown, letting go of this control response that fear always will spark, it's a mental exercise we really have to get parents on board with.

Lenore Skenazy: 21:26

Right. First of all, I think you're completely right when you talk about that. At base, the issue is you can call it control or you can call it trust. It's sort of the same thing and one of the things, as we got smaller families and more wealthy, forget about families, forget about our issue for a minute. People are doing better, they think it's all because of them, that they made them succeed, and when people are doing worse, it's like fate. And in general, people are wealthier now and so it feels, oh, we can control for everything. And that's a big lie and it also drives you crazy.

Lenore Skenazy: 22:02

But most of the products and services sold to kids, sold to parents or things that parents are encouraged to do, imply that you can control everything. If you have those 12 hours, first of all you sit down to your perfect meal and it was made organically and it was presented attractively and it was discussed endlessly. And then comes the reading out loud with the counting of the numbers and the pointing out of interesting things and all the teachable moments, and then you enrolled them in ballet and Mandarin. And you're right that. The assumption is that if I am very deliberate on everything that I'm presenting to them and having them do, I will get the outcome that I want and when there's any interstitial time I will be watching from afar. I will be tracking them and then the schools comply. The schools send home if you're in a traditional school notices generally about what grade your kid just got on a test or even a quiz, or sometimes it's their behavior that day, and usually I can find it, but not that fast. A friend told me her kid's preschool sends a daily report of 1027 am, 1102 am, 153 pm. It's all the times that the kid went to the bathroom and was it just pee or pee and poop, and then how many orange segments they ate at lunch.

Lenore Skenazy: 23:23

And we're going back to this idea that if you can quantify something, it's considered better, but it is all under the umbrella of control. Somehow, if you have all this data, all this knowledge and all this supervision and kids have no free time to do anything that's unscheduled or spontaneous or wasting time, then you could create this perfect kid. So how do you reverse that? I think the way you reverse that is by, like what I just said, this one lady who did this week of free play at the school. The parents have to see that this was not a dumb week. Their kids are happy and healthy again. Their kids are smiling again. Their kids made friends.

Lenore Skenazy: 24:06

I know that as worried as we are to make sure that our kids succeed and don't waste their time, we're also very hardwired for wanting our kids to be like emotionally okay and also the joy of seeing when they do something on their own.

Lenore Skenazy: 24:23

They're picking up the instrument, not because you're saying you must learn violin if you want to go to Harvard, but because they heard another kid playing it and they want to try it and so Let Grow. The nonprofit that grew out of free range kids has two programs, both free, and I realize it's probably speaking to the wrong group here, because we try to get schools to do these two things and you guys aren't schools, but here goes anyway. One is you can do this at home without a school. A homework assignment that all the kids get K through 12, that says go home and do something new on your own, with your parents' permission, but without your parents, something that you feel like you're ready to do or you want to do, but for one reason or another you just haven't done it yet. And we give a giant list of ideas, but it's basically run an errand, ride your bike, walk the dog, go to the pet store, whatever it is.

Lenore Skenazy: 25:12

And then the reason we suggest this is because when a parent sees their kid leave, oh, there goes my kid, is everything going to be okay. And then the kid comes home and they had a great time. Or they fell off their bike and they limped home, but they did it themselves, doesn't matter. Just seeing your kid do something without you is what rewires you. It makes you realize control is not the absolute end, all and be all. The real end, all and be all is raising a kid who can do something on their own. And you just saw it. In fact you allowed it to happen and by rewiring your brain that one time look what my kid did. Or my kid screwed up, but it's still okay. It allows you to let them go again and again. That's what that show World's Worst Mom that I did that nobody watched. That's what it was about.

Lenore Skenazy: 26:04

I would sit with very nervous parents and send the kids out to go and get bread or go to your friend's house or go roller skating and by the end of four days with these parents which meant four different things, you know go on an overnight, go walk to school, take a bus. The parents were unrecognizable. Like they wrote to me months later and said you won't believe it. Now my kid's going to camp. Now we stopped at this. My kid went to the bathroom by herself at the rest stop and she's only six. It was just. They were so freed and it was so easy. And it was not fake, because here they are writing to me months later after the cameras have gone Right. That it gives me hope. If we could get everybody to try letting go a couple of times, I think we would see a much less anxious world and much happier kids and much prouder parents, and so the fact that it works for both generations gives me hope. So that's one thing that we want.

Lenore Skenazy: 26:54

Let Grow what schools to do or individuals and the other thing is you keep the schools open for mixed age no phones, free play and you've created a wildlife sanctuary for childhood, because you got balls and chalk and some cardboard boxes and an old suitcase and kids will have fun.

Lenore Skenazy: 27:12

Just like this lady said, these are the most scheduled 15 year olds in America are the kids that she just gave a week of free play to, and when they got to a place where there was bricks and old pipes and pieces of fabric, they intuitively still it had not been snuffed out. They knew how to play, and so kids are on their phones all the time or they're in organized activities all the time, but if you create a place where they have other kids and time and a place to play, they know what to do and they are healthier for it. So Let Grow's two ideas are both extraordinarily straightforward, simple. All our materials are free, and that's why I do this, that's why I talk to podcasts, that's why I write every day, because it's not that hard to change things if we did those two things. So those are my two big, stupid, simple recommendations.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:12

Go do something on your own Play.

Jesper Conrad: 28:15

And the go. Do something for your own is, for the sake of the parents, to release and let their kids go and grow. Lenora, how has this work affected yourself? Have you started to play more? Have you let yourself grow?

Lenore Skenazy: 28:32

I don't actually think so. I think I'm pretty cramped, I'm always talking about the same thing, but I like it. I wake up every day. People write to me with interesting questions and I respond and I do my research and I'm always angry, but that's a driving force in my life. It's like I can't believe this ad shows a kid being kidnapped. That's not fair. And then I feel I must write. It's propulsive for me. But am I playing? My playing is going to dinners with people, and that's what I'm doing after this.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:02

We just discussed it today whether we could start playing more, more. I think having this conversation with you today, in this specific context where we are right now at the huge event with a lot of traveling families, well it's so interesting how I see how different America really is. Yeah, tell me, I thought a few years ago I thought it was sort of same culture as over here in Europe, but really it isn't, because these things I think we have the same problems on a meta level and on the mindset level. I think we have the same problems of control, of fear, of being focused on results, all these things.

Lenore Skenazy: 29:49

But what's the difference?

Cecilie Conrad: 29:50

they walk home from school alone. They do that still, and teenagers are out in the nights in the cities and it's just different. They do. They track obviously in our the social circles. We move in as unschoolers, so it's very different.

Lenore Skenazy: 30:08

Are the kids tracked by their parents?

Cecilie Conrad: 30:20

No, most of them have some sort of tracking on their phones, but it's basically more as long as that tracking gives me more freedom than it takes away. It's a safety thing. The parents would not look at it all the time. They would trust the kids to be all right, but in case they're not, they can find them.

Jesper Conrad: 30:32

yeah for us. We have it because we are a full-time traveling family and we are in a new city, we don't know. So if they go to a museum and we go somewhere else, it's like, how should we meet? Can you see a location? And then we find each other. So it is less about control and more would be like hey, can you find us?

Cecilie Conrad: 30:51

I will say when the teenagers are out at night and they don't have curfew and there's no rule really.

Jesper Conrad: 30:57

I relax more as a parent.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:02

But they relax as well because they know they don't have panicked parents at home. They know that if they for some reason sleep over at someone's place, they't need to have to. They don't have to ping the address, they can just say I'm sleeping at I don't know charlie's house and I can see on the map where that is, in case I need to pick them up. So yeah, what they say is as long as it gives more freedom than it takes away, it's all right. And the day my kids say I don't want to, I don't want you to track me, I'll turn it off, because that's cool. Yeah, so it so. It's just really, really different. And what was I saying with that?

Lenore Skenazy: 31:34

America is not America. Yeah, that's what I'm. That's what I'm.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:38

I don't know, maybe come learn something over here, yeah.

Lenore Skenazy: 31:43

America doesn't pay attention to anyone. I don't know, but in theory yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 31:48

At the same time, you have some of the biggest fingers that a lot of us have been inspired by in the homeschooling, unschooling, being free to play world that we have. So there's like a fun diversion between a lot of fear and a lot of freedom.

Lenore Skenazy: 32:04

A lot of fear and a lot of people and a couple of people saying wait.

Jesper Conrad: 32:08

Yeah, hey, wait, let's talk about it. So one of the plays I would like to round up about is why is play so important? Because even for unschooled, homeschooled families, who are our listeners, are mostly in the self-directed realm. Sometimes we maybe have difficulties to understand what play is for our kids, because it can be on screens, it can be on computers, etc. So why is play so important? You must have used a lot of time thinking about this.

Lenore Skenazy: 32:40

I use a lot of time quoting Peter Gray. Here's what I do.

Lenore Skenazy: 32:44

So, I'll just talk about him. What Peter made me see is that play is self-motivated, right If it's not a team that you're supposed to join because your parents want you in soccer or something like that. So you have to figure out what to do with your friends and you have to make it happen. There will be arguments along the way, there will be confusion, and so that means that you are doing, you're coming up with an idea. That's you could call that being alive, you could call that entrepreneurship. You're getting buy-in. That's a social skill. You're compromising. You're going to have to do that for the rest of your life. You're changing the rules. That's called creativity, that's called pivoting, that's called evolving and then all the other skills that you learn from there.

Lenore Skenazy: 33:28

When you're really interested in something, you deal with the fact that you just struck out right. You deal with the fact that it's boring. You're in the outfield, but pretty soon it'll be your turn again. You focus because you really want to capture that ant or whatever it is that you're saying ant, because I want to capture the ants right in my kitchen right now. I want to kill them all. They just have invaded. I don't know what went on. So when you're playing.

Lenore Skenazy: 33:52

The fun is what Penny Wilson, who's the play worker in England, always says is that Mother Nature put this play drive into kids so that they will learn all the skills they need to do to have to be a functioning human being. And the fun part? Fun is the orgasm of play. It's what you get to, but it's all the stuff on the way there. You are so motivated to get to the fun that you do control yourself, that you do agree to try again or take your turns.

Lenore Skenazy: 34:20

Or if you're the dog and you really want to be the mom, you know that for the next 10 minutes you have to go ruff ruff, ruff, ruff, because dogs don't talk. And so you're learning how to control yourself, you're learning executive function, you're learning all the things that I hate having to talk about, because basically, that play is fun. And there's something puritanical about my country, my crazy country, that says fun. That must be bad, that must be a waste of time. But you're not. You don't come from Puritan stock, do I? But I'm in this country and so there should be no prejudice against play where you're from, because it's us that hate it well, I wouldn't say everyone's perfect over here, that would be stretching it very far I feel like we're playing.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:02

Aren't we playing right?

Lenore Skenazy: 35:03

now? Well, that's what I say like I don't, you'll never see me kicking a ball.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:07

I hate kicking the ball but it is play in a way to produce a podcast and have a conversation with someone yeah, yeah and to joke around.

Lenore Skenazy: 35:15

Joking around is, I guess, the most fun that I have and eating dinner with people. Eventually you evolve to sit down and just eat and that's really fun. And talking to people, that's the rest of my day Perfect.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:26

We'll leave you to it, then I think.

Jesper Conrad: 35:28

Yes, but before we leave you to it, please mention where people can find out more about the wonderful nonprofit, so they know where to go.

Lenore Skenazy: 35:36

Okay, great, remember, everything is free, so it's Let Grow, like you see down there. L-e-t new word grow but it's all smooshed together when you do letgroworg, o-r-g, and then, if you're parents, you click on parents and if org. And then, if you're parents, you click on parents, and if you're a school, you click on school. In america, we have some crazy laws that seem to imply that if you're not watching your kid every single second, that's bad, and so we've changed the laws in eight of our 50 states so far. If, if there's laws in wherever you live, that that strike you as too, too easy to criminalize parents who trust their kids, take a look at the laws page. There's a donation page, for obvious reasons, and that's it. Let grow.

Jesper Conrad: 36:18

Fantastic. We will put all the links in and ask people to go support the wonderful course you are having. Thanks a lot for your time. It was a pleasure.

Lenore Skenazy: 36:27

Same Okay, go have fun yeah.