A Winnipeg community hopes to roll the clock back a generation or two, when the sound of kids playing outside was prevalent and they did things without being tethered to adults or smartphones, with more freedom to explore and take risks.
“I think there’s been a loss of independence, of freedom, of outdoor playtime for children over the past few decades. It’s sad. It’s a loss to not hear those sounds … and having some opportunity to develop competence and skills,” said Kaleigh Quinn, who sits on the parent advisory council at Laura Secord School in Winnipeg’s Wolseley neighbourhood.
“We’ve lost some really essential element in our childhoods, and we have more phone-full childhoods and less playful childhoods,” she told CBC Manitoba Information Radio host Marcy Markusa.
Next week, the Laura Secord staff will begin discussions on implementing the Let Grow Experience, a program that aims “to get our kids back to having some adventures, solving some problems, and blossoming,” and thereby building confidence, resilience and self-reliance.
“We want to create independence in students. That’s just a life skill that they’re going to need throughout,” said principal Wade Gregg.
Let Grow was co-founded in 2018 by four people, one them Lenore Skenazy, who ignited controversy with an April 2008 newspaper article in The New York Sun, titled “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride The Subway.”
Skenazy was dubbed America’s worst mom by those who called her irresponsible. But she also garnered a lot of support and some of those people — Daniel Shuchman, Peter Gray and Jonathan Haidt — became her Let Grow co-founders in 2018.
Skenazy’s 2021 book, Free-Range Kids, and Haidt’s 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, have become the unofficial bibles of Let Grow.
The latter says parents started reducing children’s access to unsupervised outdoor free play in the 1980s out of media-fuelled safety fears, and the decline accelerated in the ’90s.
Haidt’s rules to resurrect that type of childhood includes no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools and far more unsupervised play.
Let Grow, a non-profit organization, offers free curriculum, with activities and suggestions for real-world tasks like taking a dog for a walk, running errands and making meals.
On its website, it rejects the idea kids are “in constant physical, emotional or psychological danger.”
“Somehow our culture has become obsessed with kids’ fragility and lost sight of their innate resilience. Treating kids as fragile is making them so,” the website says.
The curriculum is aimed at students and parents because they both need to be on board, Quinn said.
“The idea is they confer with their parents and they decide with their parents, but they do it without their parents.”
Melanie Soderstrom, head of the University of Manitoba’s department of psychology, calls the program’s approach “a great idea.”
“I think it’s long overdue. One of the things about the development of maturity and independence is that it has to be learned through experience. If we don’t give children the opportunity to grow and make mistakes occasionally then they don’t learn to develop the skills to manage those mistakes,” she said.
“Obviously we’re not encouraging unsafe behaviour, so it is a balance.”
For instance, kids should still wear a helmet when biking but be able to go on their own to a friend’s place.
She also blames some of the fears parents have on media coverage.
“When we hear news stories, we sort of get an outsized idea of how common things like stranger kidnappings are, for example. So we place too much emphasis in our sort of risk management,” she said.
“And we don’t properly think through what are the smaller but everyday [consequences] of reducing the independence that we give our kids.”
The idea for Laura Secord to adopt Let Grow stemmed from happenstance.
Quinn and other parents from the school were reading Haidt’s book as part of a book club over the summer. Coincidentally, Winnipeg School Division head Matt Henderson had also made it required summer reading for principals.
When the first parent council meeting of the year came up, Henderson was in attendance and discussion veered into the book. A community meeting to talk about adopting the program was then held Jan. 22, drawing about 100 parents, school trustees, staff and administrators.
“We had an opportunity to discuss our priorities for what we want to see changing in our school and in our community,” Quinn said.
Henderson, in an email to CBC News, said he is fully on board.
“More and more educators and families are really thinking hard about shifting away from screens to face-to-face experiences in community. WSD is excited to support this thinking and design,” he said.
One of the fears raised by parents at the Jan. 22 meeting was that Child and Family Services would come knocking if someone saw a child walking alone and called authorities.
That’s why it’s important to make it a community initiative, so many people are aware, Quinn said.
“That can start shifting our community to supporting each other and looking out for each other instead of surveilling and policing one another,” she said.
That’s a first-hand experience for Soderstrom. Her child tried walking to school alone in Grade 1. The school was nearby and the streets that had to be crossed were not busy, she said.
“They were constantly being bombarded by people, well-meaning people in the neighborhood, coming and asking them if they’re OK and where their parents are and people trying to walk them home,” she said.
“It comes from a good place but it basically torpedoed the whole endeavour. It just didn’t work in our neighborhood.”
While she supports a return to the lost childhood experiences, Soderstrom, who is also co-editor of the Journal of Child Language, cautions against rolling the clock back too far.
“There are some really positive changes that we’ve made in our cultural understanding of caregiving and parenting and schooling over the last few decades. For example, we are a lot more focused on the development of emotional regulation and managing neurodivergence,” she said.
“But certainly in terms of what children are ready to take on in terms of independence, we can sort of rethink some of the directions that we’ve gone, for sure.”