Speaker 1: 0:12

here we are, another episode of shifted podcast. Uh, coming to you from cold, frigid quebec, um, and we're reaching down to cold, frigidid New York Nothing on us today.

Speaker 2: 0:25

Oh my God, it's so cold.

Speaker 1: 0:27

I have to wear this long turtleneck. Lenore Skenazy is coming in. Writer, blogger, advocate for children free play and co-founder of Let Grow, an organization that came out in 2018. Let Grow, an organization that came out in 2018, helping us realize we got to let these kids play and be free, and we're really going to focus on that today in our cast and Lenore. Thanks again so much for hopping on here and joining for a chat.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Well, thank you, Chris. Thank you for not making me come up there.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Yes, yes, we'll just hibernate for a while. I don't mind. I guess I want to start, lenore, like I'd like to ask people that are that are advocates for free play and young children having experiences. What were your earliest recollections of play when you were growing up?

Speaker 2: 1:25

Oh my God, they were so boring that your audience is going to leave you. I played outside, I looked for four-leaf clovers, I played Barbie. Sometimes I, you know, went walking, sometimes in the woods, but a lot of times just to school. And then a lot of my free time was just in my room drawing and writing and reading. So blah, just plain old childhood by a kind of dull kid.

Speaker 1: 1:49

Right Now in some of the stuff that I was reading, those times seem to be, you know, vestiges of a past almost where that it's decreased a lot.

Speaker 1: 2:01

I I wrote the number down but it's like five to eight times like lower now of kids going out and enjoying the outdoors, and we think of outdoors as that kind of free play where it's unstructured and kids kind of figure out what they want to do in the games they play, in the negotiation, all those wonderful skills they develop. What is your biggest impression of? What has decreased this joy of just going outside and just letting kids be and develop the way that they're supposed to?

Speaker 2: 2:35

Well, I did write a whole book on this, but I would say that the big drivers are first of all, I think there was a major shift in the 80s, which was long after I was a kid. The 80s saw the growth of cable television, 24-hour news cycle. What are you going to fill it with? You look around for more disasters and just keep hammering them home. I don't know if they did this in Canada, but in America in the 80s we also got these kids' pictures on the milk cartons. Did you have this? It was missing kids' pictures and there was never an asterisk explaining.

Speaker 2: 3:09

I was taken in a custodial dispute between my divorced parents, which is generally the case, or I ran away from home. My mom remarried a stepdad. I hated him, whatever. It was so rarely actual, stranger danger. And yet that's when that phrase became popular. And there was a mini series about one kid who was abducted and it broke all ratings records. And so the TV executives said get me more of these. And I don't think the executives actually went out and kidnapped kids, but they did get more of these specials. And the television news changed to action news or eyewitness news, which is all about just sending a reporter out with a microphone to where there's some blood on the ground, and so it just felt like we were living in to use a phrase that's popular today carnage, and so it felt very scary.

Speaker 2: 4:04

Have a. You know we have smaller families and I don't think smaller families mean you love your children more because there's only two of them instead of dividing your life, you know your love between six or eight or 10 of them. But it does mean that you have more time per kid and more money per kid and as the marketplace adjusts to that fact income quote unquote must-haves that nobody must have. There were products like baby knee pads and there's baby helmets to wear when your kid is toddling, and there's all sorts of classes, and the most egregious is, of course, in New Jersey. We make fun of New Jersey. You must make fun of I don't know Newfoundland or something, but we make fun of New Jersey all the time and there are classes there on, like how you know, for four month olds, you know how to get them to pay attention to sounds and smells and movement, and it's like how about you leave them on the planet Earth and see what happens?

Speaker 1: 4:53

That generally is going to unfold.

Speaker 2: 4:55

You know crawling and how to get your kids engaged. And listening to music. It's like if music is playing, I don't care if you like it or hate it, you're listening to it. So it was just. It's this strange sort of eviscerating of the idea that anything would happen automatically and for the best and a replacement with the idea that nothing happens unless you are making it happen. And if you leave the kids alone they will fester in stupidity and danger. So you better hop in right now and do something, buy something, enroll in something, make something, read something, blah, blah, blah. So I think all those things together.

Speaker 2: 5:31

And then, obviously, recently, there's technology, but I feel like enough of the world is worrying about the impact of kids being on social media. I kind of concern myself with the impact of kids, knowing that they are growing up, tracked in every way and you know you can't just wander around the woods. Oh, why is she at the pond? Is she drowning? I better find out. Let me just text her. I'm sure this won't change the experience at all. Are you OK or are you drowning, drowning, ha ha? No, really, mom, I'm OK.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Really, yes, really. Okay, don't forget to smell the flowers, mom. I'm smelling the flowers. Oh, how do they smell? Did you know flower begins with f? Let's come home and we'll look up flowers. So it's that, right, yeah, yeah. And where are these misconceptions? Like were they? I mean, it seems like the evidence doesn't point to all of this. Right like abductions, like, like you mentioned, is typically people they might have, might know, or within the it's not like stranger danger.

Speaker 2: 6:26

A lot, exactly like the stats don't put up the evidence and your stats are. Don't even measure like you're in canada. Like you know, our our best days are your worst days, so there's just like there's no reason to be afraid of the least likely thing happening. Otherwise you would have to wear I I don't know a helmet every day, in case a meteor fell on you, you know, or bring a raft with you in case there's a flood.

Speaker 2: 6:51

I mean, you can't always think that way and yet, when it comes to abduction, we've been encouraged to always imagine the worst. And the weird thing about imagination is, first of all, I don't have one. There's people who can't see things in their mind. I think that's why I'm so much more rational. But the other thing about imagination is if you can picture something and you see it in your mind's eye, it's as if it happened. I mean, your mind files that away under drowning or abduction, even if you watched it on a Law and Order episode, but certainly even if you just imagined how sad you'd feel if your kid was taken from their front lawn. And then it's it's in the pile of.

Speaker 1: 7:34

these are terrible things that happened, or almost happened or could happen and it's all the same pile. Well, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite, uh, it's quite shocking because in the end, like I've done a lot of research and work with preschool teachers and a lot of the research says you have to give them free play. They have to have time to grow and explore themselves and problem solve together, like these skills that are going to be super important. Yet we focus on the content of you know the cognitive all the time, know the cognitive all the time and I kind of wanted to ask you a little bit about those, that division between the life skills that we need to give them versus this idea that they all have to go to higher ed.

Speaker 2: 8:13

You know, you know I was yeah, so I was just having this kind of conversation with um a group of teachers, like by online up in massachusetts, I guess down for you in Massachusetts and an AP history teacher, you know, raised his hand oh, perfect.

Speaker 2: 8:30

And said well, you know, you say that there's these life skills that are important, but schools judge you on. You know how many APs you pass and your grade point average. And then I told the story and I'm going to tell it again because I think it got me someplace. I don't usually chew on and it's nice to have something new to chew on, which is that I interview for Yale. Yale has a million alumni.

Speaker 2: 8:53

We interview kids because so many kids apply, and on Sunday I interviewed a girl who started out by telling me that she can't stand her math class and she's not doing too well in chemistry Okay, but then she tells me that she can't stand her math class and she's not doing too well in chemistry okay, but then she tells me that she loves thrifting. So do I actually wearing thrift? You can't tell, because, um, not visual, but I'm wearing a lot of thrift and she loves it so much that she started a thrift shop at her high school and at first it was impossible to get kids to bring stuff in, but then, excuse me, the teacher started doing it and the kids did it, and then they sold it and they raised $500. And she decided to give that money to a nonprofit that recycles the sort of samples that designers here in New York make. And then she made a little documentary about that because she loved it so much. And then in the meantime she wanted to read more. So she started a reading club and because she's at sort of a mediocre high school, she'd never been exposed to even Nabokov or Lolita. So they're reading Lolita. And she said that's such a weird book but it's so interesting, and so, and then she was doing one other thing on her, when she was running the yearbook. And then she likes rocks, and I always liked rocks as a kid.

Speaker 2: 10:01

Anyways, and running the yearbook she started to realize that it's hard to get people to do things on deadline. So she's, she's making things into smaller chunks so that they meet these little milestones along the way. And I thought this is a genius. Okay, she's doing bad in math, doing bad in science, but she has figured out, she's iterating. Okay, I can't just tell people this is due on January 15, and expect it to be done. So I will make it smaller chunks and I will press pause to make sure that we're all caught up, and I will find people to read books with me, and we'll try to find books that people say are important, and then we'll read them and we'll talk about them, even without a teacher. And I love thrift. What else can I do with thrift? Let me actually start a thrift shop. Who starts a thrift shop?

Speaker 2: 10:40

So to me that was super intelligence. I mean intelligence in other cultures that aren't as college obsessed as we are. Consider, the mark of an intelligent person is coming into a situation, looking around, seeing what has to be done and then figuring out how to do it and then doing it. And so I said like, look, I, you know, I don't know if Yale's going to take her, but I gave her, you know, you know, two thumbs up and this girl would be fantastic.

Speaker 2: 11:03

And then the sort of peeved AP history teacher said, excuse me, one second, mm-hmm, god knows what's going on here.

Speaker 2: 11:17

So the peeved AP history teacher said, well, that's all fine for Yale, they can pick and choose who they want, and but what about everybody else? And basically what he was saying is like what about the unintelligent kids who only have AP classes to their credit? And so he was sort of tacitly admitting that this was a super intelligent kid. So he was sort of tacitly admitting that this was a super intelligent kid and Yale gets to take the most intelligent kids and not rely on these sort of markers that only tell parents and schools and guidance counselors that a kid has memorized a lot of AP history. We are recognizing that intelligence is something that is only tiny, partially measured by grades and test scores, and in reality is measured by what you do in the world, what you make happen and what you figure out from that and how curious you are and how you follow up on your curiosity.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Well, isn't that kind of damning of the school system and the college admissions process? And the answer is yes, but you still want your kid to get into college. So give them a lot of free time when they're younger and then maybe just crack the whip when they're in high school.

Speaker 1: 12:28

Yeah, yeah. Well, we're even seeing that. Earlier, like I was talking to some pre-service teachers and the pressure they feel of grade one, of getting the kids ready, you know in quotes, for you know, and even kids like. Talking to kids in grade one and two, I'm like so do you guys play at all in class?

Speaker 2: 12:47

And they're like no, there's extra time, or you know, play a class, but do they play outside of class?

Speaker 1: 12:54

Well, they have, they have you. You know recess and lunchtime and stuff, but the idea that in preschool we it's, it's play-based, right, like they should be playing lots and lots and that's how they develop and learn and they're saying even up until great, till eight years old. That should be. Your main focus is play, play. And yet we have this like totally shut off the valve of play once they get in, to start preparing them for this.

Speaker 1: 13:22

They get into the sausage machine and it's just like it doesn't stop. So kind of thinking of that. With that in mind. What's the crux behind? Let Grow Like what? Where did that idea start to develop? And you have such wonderful partners that have? All come together right to advocate for this. So can you explain a little bit about Let Grow?

Speaker 2: 13:49

Yeah, I will. And then we'll get back to like what happens when kids need more play than they're getting. So a million years ago, when my younger son was nine, he'd wanted me and my husband to take him someplace he'd never been before and let him find his own way home by the subway. I did that. I wrote a column a newspaper column about it, and two days later I was on every possible television show I don't know if you know them so I won't mention them, but like all the big morning shows and news shows defending myself. And so the weekend after all this broke, I started a blog and I called it Free Range Kids, and my whole premise is that our kids are smarter and safer than our culture gives them credit for. And so that was all I did. I wrote the book Free Range Kids, I ran the blog Free Range Kids. I went around the country I've actually been in every province in Canada giving talks on how did we get so afraid for our kids?

Speaker 2: 14:38

And there's a lot of reasons, but the Let Grow happened because in 2018, daniel Shuckman, who was the chairman of FIRE, which fights for free speech on campus, was talking to Jonathan Haidt, famous most recently for the book the Anxious Generation, but he hadn't written it then and the two of them were talking about what they were seeing on campus, because John is a professor and what they were seeing is kids who seemed more fragile than earlier generations, more seeking an adult's help when something minor happened, like an argument with a roommate or a mouse in the dorm, and also mistaking, feeling like when they felt uncomfortable, they thought they were unsafe, which is why we started seeing the rise of safe rooms, safe spaces, and trigger warnings when you know when there was a book they disagreed with or a speaker they found controversial, instead of just going in and listening politely and then raising your hand and giving your considered objections and engaging with an idea that you either weren't familiar with or didn't agree with. And the two of them realized that trying to make kids more open-minded and robust and resilient at age 18, 19, 20 is a late stage intervention, right? Why don't we start by raising kids who are more open, curious and resourceful, I guess, is what you'd say. So John had read Free Range Kids and had met me and was raising his kids free range, and he said well, let's talk to Lenore, let's start a nonprofit with her. And when they came to me I said two things. One is let's bring in Peter Gray as well, because Peter Gray, you and your listeners probably know, is a professor of psychology at Boston College who has spent his life studying the importance of all ages together, mixed aged kids, just playing without anybody organizing them.

Speaker 2: 16:34

So we brought in Peter Gray and I said then the other caveat is that I've been a thought leader now for like a dozen years and I can tell you where thoughts go. They go back to the worst case scenario. So being a thought leader isn't getting me anywhere. You know, people listen, they nod, they agree. Oh, yes, I love my childhood. Oh, I learned so much from free play. I climbed a tree once. I didn't know how to get down. We stayed out till the streetlights came on. My dad had a bell blah, blah, blah. Okay, great, but then they would go home and they couldn't change because there was no push and nobody else was doing it.

Speaker 2: 17:05

And so I said we have to come up with a way to change people's actions, particularly parents, because the only thing that I've seen that changes anything when it comes to a parent is their kid. If they are pushed to let go of their kid and their kid goes to the store or makes the snowman or, you know, organizes a game of hockey on their own, and then they come in and they're you know, they're rosy-cheeked and they're excited, or they got lost or they fell, but it's still not the end of the world. All that rewires the parent, not me saying your kid needs independence, not me saying the end of the world. All that rewires the parent, not me saying your kid needs independence, not me saying the chances of a kid being kidnapped are like one in a zillion, doesn't matter, but seeing your own kid do something on their own is the greatest pleasure any parent ever has, and I can say that because when my kids are in their 20s, when they, you know, get a job, it's a thrill. When they voluntarily take out the garbage, which they didn't do for their first 25 years, that's a thrill, right. So really, the reward of parenting is not telling your kid please do that, and they do that. It's them doing something on their own, and one of the reasons that parents are being driven so crazy these days is it's we're with them all the time, so we're always telling them what to do, so we never get the joy of seeing them do anything on their own, and we get the misery of seeing them do something badly or be mean or take a mini risk or do something, waste their time, and so the more closely we are bound to our kids, where we see all the faults and we don't get the rewards, so Let Grow's main.

Speaker 2: 18:35

We have two programs that we recommend for schools, and all our materials are free, and one of them is called the Let Grow Experience, and this is, you know, sort of inspired by. John Haidt always says that a collective problem needs a collective solution. I'm afraid to send my kid to the store. You're afraid to send your kid to the store, I don't want my kid on the street, there's nobody else there. But if we're all doing it at the same time, then it's collective action and it breaks through.

Speaker 2: 19:02

So the thing the electoral experience is simply a homework assignment that teachers give the students, and it's one page and it says in more than one sentence, but it basically says go home and do something new on your own, with your parents' permission, but without your parents. And then we have a list of things they can climb a tree, they can, you know, make pancakes, they can visit grandma, whatever it is, and obviously it all depends on your neighborhood and the age of the kid and their interests, because it should be something that actually interests them, that they feel like doing that for one reason or another they haven't done yet. And so once that happens, and again the parent sees the kid come home, you know, with the milk from the store, that changes the parent. But the reason the LECRO experience is so important is because it puts the cart before the horse. We're making you let go before you're ready to let go, because once you let go you'll be ready the next time and the next time and the next one, because it keeps getting easier. And then it becomes normal and you're not the only person doing it. So there's not the guilt and there's not the fear, and it's recommended by the school, so maybe there's something good about it.

Speaker 2: 20:07

And then the kid writes a little reflection. Like you know, I went to the store. How was it? It was hard but fun. And then what are you going to do next time? Next time I want to go get my own haircut or whatever, but I really feel like we haven't figured this out yet, but we should have. We should have these little reflections for the parent, because the parent has to realize how far they've come from. No, they couldn't possibly do it. There's a big street. There's a scary dog. Oh, she's only seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. She's only 14 years old. And then afterwards people are like, well, that was easy. Or why was I so scared? Or look at my kid. But it's never. Oh, I'm never doing that again. It's never that.

Speaker 1: 20:44

Right, right. That's so cool and like what was the crux behind when you had your, your son and you.

Speaker 2: 20:51

You know that that first that kind of sparked everything like he had asked.

Speaker 1: 20:55

I want to go and and like how did you let go, how did you overcome I don't know fear or like like what's gonna happen or like what, what was your process that you had to go through to kind of let that happen?

Speaker 2: 21:36

no-transcript. He needed to take a cab instead. And back then the nine year old is 26. So back then there were telephones on poles, strangely enough, and so I gave him some quarters if he had to call us. And I think I look back, I've been a newspaper columnist for so long I could find old columns of mine saying my kids are four and six years old.

Speaker 2: 22:01

They're boys, you know, when we go to the theater I let them go into the men's room without me because I think they're going to be okay. And my kids are now seven and nine and I let them go downstairs to the courtyard. There's no cars. We lived in like a fortress, you know. Is that crazy to let them take the elevator by themselves? And so I think, I think it was just something that I believe in.

Speaker 2: 22:24

Also, I'm a reporter, so all I do or did was like wander around the city, and sometimes I would just take the subway, get off, and I wouldn't let myself get back on until I'd found a story. And so that just meant I was talking to strangers all the time in neighborhoods of different ethnicities, and it was, you know, sometimes hard to find a story, but it was always interesting because it just had an excuse to talk to everybody. And when you realize like that most people are either nice or boring, you know, but not evil, you get a. I'd say I sort of had a very correctly calibrated sense of reality and also I never watched the TV news.

Speaker 1: 23:03

Right.

Speaker 2: 23:04

That helps me.

Speaker 1: 23:06

Yes, yes, because it's just full of anxiety ridden news anyway, right, it's just they, you know they.

Speaker 2: 23:12

If it bleeds, it leads. But like when I, after I let my son ride the subway and I was on all these TV shows, there was a question that a lot of the interviewers would ask. It's like, okay, it's great he came home, he was happy, good for you. But what if he didn't come home? And I'm like, why are we talking about that? I don't say you drove to the grocery today, but what if you were hit by a drunk driver? I mean, but there was something about this compulsion of the media and I say now the culture at large of thinking that the normal and safe is the exception and the disaster is the rule. And so let's talk about the disaster. And why are we talking about kidnapping, which is so rare, when all I was talking about was a subway ride on a Sunday in a neighborhood that I chose?

Speaker 1: 23:59

Right, right, right. It's amazing the visceral reaction people had to this.

Speaker 2: 24:05

I read some of the feedback and the comments the first comment on my blog from 2009 or 2010 was you're an asshole. It's like this is kind of great. This will forever be there.

Speaker 1: 24:23

People respond to that kind of you know it's like children, oh my God, we must protect them. And it's like this overbearingness almost, because it's the opposite of how kids have grown up since the dawn of time, really right, Like it's only recently.

Speaker 2: 24:40

Parents have always wanted to protect their kids, but one of the ways you protect them is by allowing them to develop some skills and some street smarts and some relationship abilities so that they'll be okay. And when you take all those away and all you give them is the backseat of the car and a five-point harness until they go off to college, you've protected them from something that they were protected from anyhow, which was being kidnapped, because whether they were in the car or not in the car, they weren't going to be kidnapped. But in the meantime, you have not protected them from the big things. Actually, the new big fears of parents' day is that their child will be anxious and depressed, and Peter Gray, who I work with, did a big study that was published in the Journal of Pediatrics that found that over the decades, as children's independence and free play have gone down not just since COVID, not just since the iPhone, decades of this going down and being replaced by supervised, structured activities their anxiety and depression have been going up. And I always want them to measure something else, which is passivity, because when I've been at school I can't remember was I this dulled out at school? Maybe I was. I mean, maybe it's been so long I don't remember, but I see these kids and it's like kids, you know.

Speaker 2: 25:53

Today we have a visitor, okay, okay, and let's talk about what you've been doing. What have you been doing? I picked up my pencil. What my pencil? You picked up your pencil. Wow, class. Did you hear that? He picked up his pencil? Let's give him a high five. It's. There's something very um unreal about the this, the whole kabuki of some of the schools that I've been in, and I've been in some schools which is the opposite, where kids are excited and can't wait to tell you things and are engaged, whether it's in class or at recess. But I've been in enough that the kids seem almost like their body is there, but they're having an out of body experience and their other body is at home taking a nap. So I see that I see that.

Speaker 2: 26:49

You do see that. How young do you see it?

Speaker 1: 26:52

I see it like, I can see it in grade one, I see it in grade two, three, I mean, as you get into high school, you see at least half have checked out. You know, or just like I don't do math, or you know, they just are fearful of wrong answers.

Speaker 2: 27:10

They're really afraid they're people talking. I mean I would be in class I say, like what? I'd just be this obnoxious, like what lady? And it's like I decided I would go to a room. You can't, you can't mutter. They've been through the process where the teacher talks and you listen.

Speaker 1: 27:38

Right and that dynamic must shift dramatically. But all things in education take time. It's not a very proactive community at times, because they do have these structures, they must follow.

Speaker 2: 27:54

Yeah, well, sometimes it's just the you know the requirements of the district. It's like you must spend this much time in seats and you must have, you know, have proficiency on X or Y. But I think I think one of the things too is that the less we see kids doing on their own, the less we believe they can do. And I'm sure that's true in schools too. If the kids never speak up, maybe just give up on having them speak. And it's hard, I think, for a teacher or a parent or almost any adult to recognize how much kids learn when we're not teaching them. And really I don't have it.

Speaker 1: 28:32

I think that would be a scary realization for teachers to realize that my effectiveness of like transmission of stuff really doesn't help much. You know, the soft skills, the personal development, the, the things that are going to be super important in their lives, that they need, um, you know, I mean content comes and goes and I can find it if I need to, and we put so much onus on that rather than this developing these future generations that are going to be, you know, in our positions down the road, and so it's. It does have this kind of um, generational effect to it as well. Um, and and you so right, I mean, it wasn't COVID where this started happening. This happened way before all this stuff. I love that point that you made that we think, you know, sometimes might have this misconception that, oh, it's just recently, but no, it's not recently.

Speaker 2: 29:27

Although COVID did a huge number it sure, did it sure did On kids and parents and school, it really amplified it all. Yeah, it was like yeah, so interesting.

Speaker 1: 29:36

Well, I just want to thank you for taking some time. I really appreciate your insights.

Speaker 2: 29:42

You're welcome, but I have to make one other plug.

Speaker 2: 29:44

So, let grow, does two things in schools or recommends two things from schools, and the other is that the schools stay open for mixed age. No phone replay before or after school, so that you know if kids go home they're going to go onto their screens or they're going to go into some adult-organized activity, which is fine, but it doesn't teach all those skills we've been talking about, the negotiation and compromise and creativity. So there's sort of no place in kids' lives where they're with other kids of different ages and not on a device. You know where there's time and space and other kids and it's a device-free area. So I think of it as a wildlife sanctuary. So if you can keep your school open for that and you have an adult who's there but they're just like a you know a lifeguard, they're not intervening, they're not organizing the games Then you've provided them with this very enriched environment which happens to be time, space, other kids combined, without phones. So consider doing that and we've seen amazing results. We had a teacher who started one and took, went and got all the metrics from how many principal's office visits happened before the first year of play club, second year, third year. He's been in five years of play club now and they've gone down over the years as they've matriculated more kids into playing and playing became a bigger thing and now they're open every day before school for free play.

Speaker 2: 31:15

Kids love coming to school even more. They're not late, there's less school refusal and the discipline problems. They're not completely gone, but they've come there. They've plunged since giving kids back and I always think of it as like it's like if you took all the whole wheat out of bread and then you were feeding kids this nice white, fluffy loaf which is, you know, sort of the adult organized world, but then you put the whole wheat back and then they stop drooping because they're getting the nutrients that come from organizing your own game.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Finding a new friend, meeting a kid in a different grade, trying something new, or just knowing you're going to see your friends and have time together that isn't at a desk is really great. So the Let Grow Play Club and the Let Grow Experience are both at letgroworg, both free, easy. It's so easy it's kind of embarrassing that we've turned them into you know, quote unquote curricula, because I just explained them to you in two seconds. But there they are and there's letters to send home to the parents and there's, you know, for further reading, but really it boils down to more free play and independence Perfect.

Speaker 1: 32:22

Well, I'll definitely share those links in the in the bio and um on the blog posts that I'll put up. Um, just so insightful, um. Thank you so much again.

Speaker 2: 32:31

You'd hope I'd have some insights, talking about the same thing for 16 years.

Speaker 1: 32:43

Like we said, nothing goes quickly in education, um, but I think, like your resources are definitely something that people should have in their hands and have an awareness of, so I will make that happen, uh, here in our province. Um, I appreciate your time and I hope that we, uh we touch base again. Uh, lenore, this has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed talking with you.

Speaker 2: 32:57

Ditto. Your listeners can send me stories. I live through stories of something that a kid did or a parent realized or a teacher saw. So it's just Lenore L-E-N-O-R-E at letgroworg.

Speaker 1: 33:10

And she's amazing at responding to emails Sometimes, except when I lose them, all right.

Speaker 2: 33:19

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 33:19

Chris Pleasure.