Interview with “America’s Worst Mom”

Ginny: Welcome to the One Thousand Hours Outside podcast. I am so excited about today's episode. It was like almost the middle of the night and I immediately sent you a message because I just started your book. I've got Lenore Skenazy on today. And she just wrote this phenomenal book. Phenomenal. Free Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow. This is actually the second edition, and I just enjoyed it so much. I've been so excited to have this time to talk with you. I was going to read your bio real quick so people can know about you. Lenore is the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, founder of the Free Range Kids Movement. She is also a speaker, a blogger, a syndicated columnist and author and a reality show host. That's so cool.

A mother who lives in Queens, her controversial decision to let her then nine year old son take the New York City subway home alone became a national story and promoted massive media attention. She was dubbed “America's Worst Mom.” In response, Skenazy founded the book and blog Free-Range Kids with the aim of fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnaping, germs, grades, flashers, frustrations, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of the nonorganic grape. Let Grow continues the quest to make it easy, normal and legal to give kids back some old fashioned independence of thought and deed. What a bio!

So Lenore, I've been sharing this quote of yours for a very long time and I had not read your book yet. 

“We want our child, our children to have a childhood that's magical and enriched. But I'll bet your best childhood memories involve something you were thrilled to do by yourself. Childhood magic words. I did it myself.” 

Lenore: My kids say that to me all the time when I'm overbearing. I did it myself, Mom. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I have to take my own advice.

Ginny: Yes, yeah. I love that one. And I've been sharing it for a long time. And then I picked your book up and it is so entertaining. I picked up your book and I read it at night a lot of times. And we've got a little one that still comes in the bed. And, you know, she's not forming her independence quite yet. So but I was having to stifle my laughs and I'm like snorting. It's all funny. Like this line that says “Childhood has changed in less time than it takes to, say, Red Rover, Red Rover... Let's go inside and play Call of Duty.” You are just so funny. 

And even the chapter titles: We All Scream for Iscreens. all scream for ice creams, it's just been a phenomenal book.

Lenore: It's so great and I don't need therapy anymore. I'm just going to listen to the beginning of this podcast. 

Ginny: You know, Lenore, it was such a breath of fresh air to read your book. I've read a lot of books about parenting and play, and they're inspiring and they're encouraging. But yours is also entertaining. And that's what you need, you know. 

Lenore: Thank you. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea, really, all I like to do is laugh and make jokes and mutter under my breath and so I do it in book form and you're the beneficiary. I'm glad you get this. And really I was just talking to this guy today who's trying to bring more play to Italy. He's like, what recommendations do you have? I mean, it's not hard if you put up a couple of jump ropes and old suitcases, you don’t have to do anything. It's always my goal. We've lost our minds. We think that everything requires ten years of study and a lot of footnotes and a lot of training and maybe it doesn't.

Ginny: Right. Yeah, it's so refreshing. And I just so thoroughly enjoyed it. Like I said, I think I got through maybe three or four pages and I was like, I have to talk to this author. 

I wrote out a couple different themes I found throughout the book. So I thought maybe we could talk about a couple of those.

The first one really is just fear. And one of the quotes you have in the book is that “All the fear in the world doesn't prevent death, it prevents life.” And I thought that was really an impactful thought. A couple of different fears come up throughout the book. Obviously, one is the fear of abduction. I’lln leave that one to the end because you talk a lot about that in your book. But there's also this fear that leads to over scheduling and filling in all the time and space. Have you found this is a sort of a newer fear that's kind of come in over the past several decades?

Lenore: For sure I have and I'll just throw this back at you, Were you scheduled your entire afternoon and weekends?

Ginny: No, no, not at all. And you know, but what I'm finding, kids are scheduled from 7:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night. And I liked what you said in your book, that “mediocrity is nipping at our children's heels. And if they ever trip or fall, our current culture delights in warning us their future is grim indeed.” And you had another one. “Woe to the child who develops a good parental grip at age seven instead of four.” So do you think that over scheduling at its root sort of stems from fear? 

Lenore: Yeah, I'm glad you figured that out, because it took me a long time to realize that. So one of the things I write sometimes is that there's two fears stocking American parents. One is that their kids will be kidnaped, raped and eaten and the others that they won't get into Harvard. And either way, they require constant supervision.

You don't want your kid to be hurt and you don't want your kid to once again fall behind and leave any of that potential on the table that could have gotten them to a better school, a better job, a better life.

What's depressing is this idea that kids are learning when we're teaching them something and otherwise there is nothing going on. We seem to think that the default mode of kids is blank, a blank stare, no curiosity, no function, no real playfulness at all. And so we better be there because otherwise that time will be wasted.

And so I have a new chapter in this edition of the book, “Wasting Time is Not a Waste of Time.” I had so much fun researching that one because my thesis was there. My hypothesis was about what you do in your free time, just because it's fun, not because it's for a goal or a teacher or a grade or a trophy or a scholarship... just because it's fun, something that interests you. Can I tell you how many coasters I made out of glue? I would take tissue paper and squeeze the color out of it as if the color only existed in tissue paper. It was so pointless. And I cannot tell you that’s what made me the stunning success I am today. But I can tell you it didn't prevent anything. And it gave me a chance to just pursue something for fun and that did lead me to who I am today.

Kids have a lot of innate drive and I think they need somebody to give them paper, maybe even tissue paper, and somebody has to provide the glue. But the idea that all that time was wasted and I should have been spending it in French horn lessons or even getting some tutoring so my grades would have been higher, that stems from the fear that if I was just wasting my time or you were just wasting your time, for instance, playing outside when you could have been doing something that is literally academic or something that you can get a scholarship in, is the only way to make a kid smart and successful. That's wrong.

Kids have never had constant adult tutelage the way we think they need now. And it's wrong to think that they don't get anything out of goofing around or having fun with friends or being curious. They get so much of their brain wired as opposed to being passive, which is what they often are when somebody is teaching them something that they want them to do .

Ginny: I wanted to be the controlling mom. That was sort of my plan, to direct. We’re a homeschooling family and my plan was to direct the learning and to check off all the little content standards. And then due to our situation (four kids four and under when kindergarten came around) I couldn't do that. And so I had to let go and had to sort of pull back and say, we're going to wait. We're going to wait to do academics until age seven and I found certain philosophies back that up.

And because I had to walk through that fear then I learned these kids are doing great. They're thriving and they're growing. And the growth isn't linear. It's not necessarily the check the box growth, but it's beautiful growth. It's their own growth. And when they play all of the facets of their development are enhanced. Like you said, it's wrong to think we have to fill every single moment with these resume builders. That's coming from fear and possibly just misinformation, I think. 

Lenore: Oh, I'm sure it's a lot of misinformation because there are so many books telling you what to do. I always read Parents magazine just to get annoyed enough to write. And one of the Parents magazine articles was about how to raise a music lover. And it's like, OK, what do I have to do? You introduce them early and show them the notes on the page and take them to this and that. And it's like, don't you think most kids love music but don't most people love music? And in general, isn't it sort of hardwired into humanity? And the idea was that you had to do certain things by certain ages.

And I remember thinking I was raising music haters by taking them to “Music and Mommy and Me.” And it was like, now we all have to sing this song. And the parents were out of their minds with boredom and the children were looking around and waiting for the snack. And there's this idea that the misinformation often comes from people who have something to sell. And I don't blame music teachers for wanting to teach music and camp counselors for wanting to run camps. But there’s this idea that without them, nothing would turn on where it would be inferior to the expert-lead education.

There's a class that models to teach babies how to start paying attention to their surroundings and developing language skills. And it helps them crawl. And I you know, I look at our culture and I go, really? There is a crawling and looking around class? And if you're asking about misinformation, that's misinformation. 

Every human being in the history of humanity who was neurotypical learned how to crawl and look around and pay attention and even speak the language, even a confusing language like Chinese just by being curious and absorbing. And they did not need an expert to say, “Now we're going to start talking.” You don't have to do that. Kid, they're gonna talk. They're gonna walk. They're going to look around. They're going to understand cause and effect. Pretty soon a kid learns that gravity is working. They learn these things because they're curious. They're wired to be that way. That is our superpower as humans.

Baby gazelles come out and they can already walk. They can eat, they can run. They are set for life when they're born. And the only thing that we have when we're born because we're completely incompetent for several years, possibly decades, some would say - but what we have is curiosity. And the experts that are telling you you better start teaching them X or Y because otherwise they'll never learn it are saying that there is no curiosity and the kids won't pursue anything on their own that could ever get them ahead. And so you better be there with an expert and a worksheet. 

Ginny: Right. What's so interesting about that is it's so counterintuitive to what we see those first three years. What I see is that kids learn for mastery without any program of study, without even knowing what day of the week it is. You know, they learn and they master it and then they know what to move on to next. And we see that all the way through early childhood. And then all of a sudden, it seems like we swoop in and take over. Like you're saying, this trend is moving back further and further to four month olds where we swoop in and take over and forget that they are going to pursue things on their own and grow on their own without someone telling them what to do all the time.

Lenore: Yeah, and what we're talking about is some free time. I mean, I'm not saying that there can be no instruction, that there's nothing beneficial about having adults around, having kids of other ages around, literally teaching them and sometimes just teaching by example. But you need some breathing time and you need to trust that we couldn't have gotten this far in human history. Einstein, what did Einstein do in his free time? He built card houses.

Ginny: Oh, that's in the book, I remember that from the book.

Lenore: I think that's one of the most amazing things. What did you do that made your brain so smart? Were you in physics lesson? Did you go to the university at age seven? Like, I was building these card houses. And you think, well, I guess that was downtime that gave him time to rev up. And it's like, I'm not sure what downtime is. A lot of concentration. There's a lot of frustration in the house of cards. They're falling and then you're trying it again and maybe there's some physics involved. Oh, this works better if there's a surface tension or whatever it is. I don't know what actually goes into building a house.

Ginny: So maybe we should be doing that.

Lenore: I feel like I can say it and people are running out to get cards and then they're getting the wrong cards because they think it's flash cards like no, no, no - regular cards. 

I just got a letter before I was talking to you from a lady who's been teaching in dental school for 20 years in England. And she said over those years, the kids have become so much more afraid of doing something wrong, to the point where they're not willing to do even what they have to do. Because what if I get it wrong and they're so fragile. They're good students. They do well on tests. This is a prestigious job. But there's no real internal interest. And so you want kids to develop some kind of sense of who they are, what they like doing, and the chapter in the book about a waste of time is not waste time is about all of this. There are interesting stories about people who are very happy and with what they're doing as grown ups you can sometimes see a straight line back to what they did just for fun as kids. So I'll ask you, what are you going to do just for fun?

Ginny: I play the piano and I loved it. I didn't play because I had to. And so that's a big part of my adult life. I also have always really loved kids. I started working with young kids in church and at a pretty young age. And so I think that that has circled back for me where, you know, I have this interest in children and how they learn and how they thrive. And so I'm kind of on that same path like you talk about this in your book. I really liked it.

There was something in the book that I actually have not heard people talk about. You hear people talk about falling forward or failing forward. You talked about failing and turning. Sometimes we should change direction. And I like that because I don't think that we talk about that very much. We say push, push, push. Keep going, keep going. Try, try again.

Ginny: And I thought, well that was a really freeing thing. What if that's not for the kid? And I think it goes along with what you're saying, that sometimes things show up very early for children, what they're drawn to. And so sometimes we should recognize that, as parents and as teachers. 

Lenore: Sometimes things show up really early and sometimes things that we think that they're going to like or that they do like they don't like forever. In the book I talk about one kid taking guitar and one of my sons taking piano and both of them bailing on it. And it's going OK. And I needed help with that because I thought, oh, what about quitters never win. And, you have to work hard at something before you do enjoy it. This is the front loading part and then they'll get the enjoyment later on.

But I did talk to a psychiatrist. And why do we all have to talk to experts? But I did. And I was writing books and he said, why do we think that you have to do something even if you hate it? Because it will be great later on? He said, we don't make people like “I know you hate him, but marry him anyway. And 17 years later, you'll be grateful or you can divorce.” Then it's like, you know, the kids, were not interested in the music. And I was not interested in listening to them play their music. Why aren't you practicing? Why aren't you practicing? That was a terrible dynamic. And so I have to say they're not musical in terms of creating music. They're musical in that they like it and they listen to music like most of us. But they didn't have to scale forward and keep working on it. They could just let it slide.

Ginny: Right. I liked what you said in the book. You said failed, floundered and reborn. You said, “failing allows for a chance to try again, but it also allows for something else just as valuable, the chance for a child or adult to call it quits and go in an entirely new direction.” So I have written down because I have not heard many people talk about that at all, this permission to shift. And I thought that was really beautiful, a really good reminder for parents.

Lenore: You have my permission to shift.

Ginny: Yeah, it's really good. You got to you got a whole lot in this book about play being essential to childhood like “love, sunshine and broccoli.”

Sunshine, broccoli and love all go together. You talk about how kids are learning so much through play. You give an example about throwing a ball and they're learning force. And then if they break the window, they're learning different physical properties. And then you say an economics lessons, right? Play has disappeared from the landscape of childhood for the most part. And do you sort of see it starting to come back? Do you see that parents are coming around and kind of getting it? 

Lenore: I sure see a lot of people writing about it from where I am because people are always sending me studies and articles about it. It's very hard. A big part of the book is that I don't blame parents for anything that they're doing, including me. My kids would wake up on Saturday mornings and say, “What are we doing, mom?” Shouldn't they just be running around and having fun on their own?

It’s very hard to fight a culture that has come up with activities, well, there's soccer in the morning and then there's a birthday party. And then don't forget, in the afternoon we're going to do a little tutoring. This is the way childhood has been organized. And if you're the only one who wants the kids to go out and play, you can't even do it. 

Peter Gray, who's my guru in all these things, he wrote “Free to Learn”, talked about how kids are not necessarily lured outside by the outdoors. They're lured by other kids outdoors and the fun of getting with them and playing tag and climbing trees and making forest and a lemonade stand. So the interest in play is there. But the ability to make it happen is less. So because every kid is either busy or indoors on electronics because the parents are worried that if they go outside, they'll be hurt or if they go outside, there's nobody fun to play with. And so they're indoors again. 

Let Grow, is the nonprofit that grew out of the free range kids movement. And again, it wasn't me. It was Peter Gray with a good idea for an easy way to get free play back into kid’s lives. I was just talking to the guy in Italy who's doing it there now with some schools. It is called “Play Club.” I don't care if you call it that but it sort of helps me with donors. But it doesn't really matter. 

The idea is for schools to stay open before or after school for mixed aged play. No devices, a lot of junk out there. Freeplay. And what I mean by that is that the kids come early and then there's an hour after school, there's an hour or two or three when they just get to do what they feel like. Some kids will end up playing a football game and some kids will end up building something and some kids will just walk in a corner. But what they have is a place that parents trust is safe enough because they were going to be at school today anyhow.

So before and after school you have enough kids. There are kids to play with. There are mixed ages. Generally if you're in an organized activity that is any kind of physical activity, it's striated by age. The nine year olds are playing in the nine year old league and the 12 year olds are playing in the 12 year old league. But when a 12 year old plays with a nine year old, that's a different thing. Especially when the 12 year old is playing with a very young kid, like a six year old, the 12 year old isn’t going to throw their fastball at the six year old. And so generally, they play nicely. They sort of help a little kid. And that's the budding of empathy. And the little kid, who would normally be so mad at his friend and stomp off or go to his mom, wants to look cool to the twelve year old since he's twelve. And so instead of crying, they pull themselves together when they lose and they go to the back of the line. And that's the beginning of self-control or executive function.

So if you have a place for free play and you organized it so that the teachers or whoever is observing it knows that their job is not to organize the games, it's not to solve the arguments. It's just to be there in case the bone is sticking through the skin, then you have a pretty close approximation. You don't have the exploration and oftentimes you don't have the nature. But you do have the essential ingredient, which is kids of a lot of different ages and probably some junk out there, suitcases, balls, jump ropes. 

Ginny: They call that loose parts, right? Things that you can kind of manipulate, kind of like how nature is. You can manipulate and use elements in different creative ways. 

I love the part. When you're talking about the Play Club. In the book you talked about, for example, (and I don't know if this is a real story or just sort of something that could happen), but a kid that feels really out of place. You know, a nine year old, let's say, feels out of place, having a hard time making friends within his grade. And one of the things in the book you talk about is how kids at the same age are competitive. But when we have this striation of ages then there's a six year old that really is into the nine year old and then the nine year old feels better, and the self esteem is lifted. Maybe they connect on this different level. For my own children, I have a nine year old and her very best friend of all the people she's ever met is seven. There's something about their connection. And so it's really precious to watch that and to see that they're allowed to play together.

What you say about Play Club is that it's free except for maybe the staffin. It doesn't take any preparation, really. It's just about letting the kids go. It's a brilliant idea for schools to help with all sorts of things.

Lenore: Yeah, we've heard that it helps with discipline problems.

Marveling at stuff like the nine year old playing with the seven year old would be strange in another generation. Like sisters are often best friends. It could be several years between them. And sometimes you're in the neighborhood and you're the only fifth grader on the block and everybody else is a little younger or older and you end up being friends with them. It's weird to think that it’s only normal to be friends with somebody exactly your age. Obviously they're both getting something really great from that friendship. In high school, I would say my best friend was my neighbor who had dropped out of college and moved back home. And we spent the weekends together. And she's still a very dear friend a zillion years later. And I'm so glad she didn't think, wow, it's embarrassing for me to be with a high school student now that I'm twenty one and that our parents didn't say, no, you can't be friends. That's strange, you know, she's too old for you.

I think friendship is who you connect with, not the age. 

Ginny: Yeah, I agree. And I think by allowing these freeplay experiences, that becomes a part of who kids are.

Our movement is about basically giving parents the permission to play. My kids don't ever want to go outside unless there's friends coming. But if there are friends coming, then they're absolutely fine. Even though I have five children, they play with each other better when there's other kids involved.

And so I think there is this piece where the parents have to be so much more involved now because you have to set it all up. You have to meet at the park because it's just not happening in the neighborhoods. And so it takes more effort. But we have found that the effort is really worth it, because once you get there, then the kids are having a blast and they're growing. And then I'm forming relationships, too, with these other families. So it's different from how it used to be, but also still kind of neat and very fulfilling. Peter Gray says in his book that kids would rather play with friends and be on screens, which is surprising. And it’s true. I've seen it with my own children. If there are going to be friends three, they want to go.

Lenore:  Yeah, I see that. I see that here in the summer community, it's very old fashioned. It's been around for one hundred years. And our neighbor, who's six this summer, has become very good friends with the four year old, another boy. And you just see them running around and then you see some older kids and everybody was like, aren't the older kids going to bully the younger kids? I saw an older kid, probably about ten, leading younger kids. “OK, everybody has to pick apples. These crabapples fell on the ground and now we're going to put him in a box.” And then they were all going around yelling, “Marshall, Marshall.” So Marshall was clearly the ringleader. Everybody was so excited. They started a company. And so the different ages can be a great thing. And Marshall is learning how to be a leader and these other kids are learning how to be part of a team and make something happen that they might not have thought of because they're five and six years old. But with a ten year old meeting them now, they've got something new and they're playing vocabulary, which is a horrible phrase, but something new that they know how to do and create. There is so much to be said for getting kids together without a big agenda of what they have to do. I was just reading that Illinois just passed a law that said that schools must provide at least half an hour of playtime per day and the chunks cannot be smaller than 15 minutes. And I'm thinking my kids have that, “half hour of recess”, of which five minutes is spent lining up before you could go outside and another five minutes was spent lining up to get back inside. And there was no running around. It's like half an hour is not what you spent in your childhood playing with your friends.

Ginny: I remember that recess was an hour and we had several of them and we would get lost in our play. I have a specific  memory of being on the playground and we had those big tire tubes tube. They were stacked and you could go crawl inside of them. And I remember being in there with a girlfriend of mine in elementary school and we were just pretending and we lost track of time and when we poked our heads out, no one was on the playground. Everyone was gone. We missed the bell. 

Angela Hanscom, in her book called Balanced And Barefoot, talks about how it can take up to forty five minutes for kids to develop what they're going to play. You talk about it in your book, too. Sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and just kind of wait for them to get through that time of figuring out what they're going to do. And then they kind of dive into that creative world. But with recess being so short, there's not enough time for them to get to do that.

Lenore: Parents and adults who look at kids think they're not playing. They're wasting their time when they should be playing. But it's right back to that wasted time thing, what looks like wasted time and the arguing. And then that's not fair. And we'll try it this way. All the negotiating and compromising the frustration, the team building, that is why play this?

 I mean, the theory is that animals, especially mammals and especially humans, are driven to play because that's how they're going to practice all the skills that they're going to need to get along in life. Actually, I don't think I put this in the book, but one of the coolest things that some play expert said to me once was about some of the games that we play that are universal. There's tag, right? Sometimes there's hide and go seek. And there's build a fort. I mean, did you build forts or camps? 

Ginny: Absolutely. 

Lenore: OK, OK. So let's think back to when we were primates, before we evolved Homo sapiens. What do we need to do? We need to catch our food. Right. We need to hide so that we don't become the food for another animal or hominid and then we need shelter. And so these drives are as old as humanity and possibly older because they're all the things that we need to do to survive. And in between all that, is all the negotiating with each other and the compromise and the friendship that it creates when you're playing. So to deny kids that because they should be spending more time on their worksheet, it's pretty silly, right?

Ginny: Yeah. One of the last things that you talked about in your nook that I never read about was about how boredom is more painful than actual pain. There was a whole study about boredom and people are choosing physical pain over boredom. I never read about that before. That means that boredom is a motivator to get out of that state of boredom and to find something creative to do and to fill that time with whatever the child finds worthy. So I really, really liked that part of the book.

Lenore: Yeah, that was a cool study where people were shown a machine that gives you a little slightly painful shock. And then the professor, the researcher, leaves the room and says, well, I'll be back in half an hour and there's nothing in the room except the machine that gives you a slightly painful shock. And after a while, they were like, oh, let me try that again, that kind of thing. Oh, yeah, it hurts. They kept doing that because otherwise I'm bored.

And so that's why in Play Club, the rule is that you don't have your devices. I'm not anti tech, but I know that I fill up my time by constantly scrolling through Twitter when I don't have anything else to do or to fill in that interstitial time. I do want to give kids some time where they can't find something immediately to do. 

Ginny: Right, because then they'll they'll be intrinsically motivated to figure it out.

Lenore, I just cannot say enough about how much I enjoyed your book. 

Lenore: Really. You can't you can't stand up and say [00:38:08][2.5]

Ginny: This is the second edition that came out. I’m imploring families that this is a great read. For people who are wanting to find more about Lets Grow, about Play Club, about Free Range Kids, what's the best way to find you?

Lenore: I say the best way is to go to www.letgrow.org. People always get it wrong. They think it's “Let's Go” or “Let’s Grow.” 

And the reason I'm suggesting there is because obviously we have a blog like every place else, but we also have all the school materials and the explanation for teachers and parents and how to run a Play Club and also to do the Let Grow project, which is our other school initiative, which is extremely simple.

The kids get a homework assignment to go home and do something new on their own without their parents. They can ride their bikes, run errands, make muffins, babysit. Just something new that gets parents used to a little time away from their kids and kids used to seeing how it feels to actually do something without somebody observing you, helping you with you all the time and adults. So all that stuff is free. If you're a teacher or a school administrator or a school counselor, I really recommend going and looking at our school programs, because there you can just download our information. And then if you have a story to tell me, because I'm always looking for great stories of kids doing something independently, changing because they have found a new interest or competence or confidence that you didn't see in them when you were helping them and they sort of got it on their own. Please write to me. I'm lenore@letgrow.org 

Ginny: That's easy.

Lenore: Yeah, it's easy to forget. But remember if you look up “America's Worst Mom”, you’ll find me there.

Ginny: I liked in the book when you talked about all the Let Grow things that the kids did that helped them gain independence and then that confidence they gained showed up in other areas as well. I thought that was really neat. And you talked about how it helps with anxiety. And so I think those Let Grow experiences can be done, obviously in the classroom that can be done at home. Parents can do those or help facilitate them with their kids. So it's great. www.letgrow.org 

Let's end with this. What's a favorite outdoor childhood memory of yours? 

Lenore: I like free things and I really like flea markets, etc. But when I was a kid at ten, we ended up moving someplace where there was a lot of land and I would wander around and find all the free fruit. It had been an overrun orchard, so there were apples and they were free. I guess you'd call them “wild” as opposed to free grapes. And I took them home and I made them into jelly. And it was amazing to me that you could find something and sort of survive on it. So that's a favorite memory. And that one actually didn't have other kids. That was just me wandering around by myself with all the free food that happens to grow.

Ginny: Well, Lenore, thank you for your time. Thank you for your movement. And thank you for writing the most entertaining parenting book I have ever read.