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When Lenore Skenazy speaks, parents listen.
It all started back in 2008, when Skenazy wrote an audacious newspaper opinion piece about how she allowed her 9-year-old son to ride the New York subway alone. From then on, she was immediately dubbed "America's worst mom." And that label spurred the leader within her to start the Free-Range Kids movement.
It's not that Skenazy eschews safety. It's quite the opposite. She just believes, like many, that children have the right to some safe, unsupervised time. And parents have a right to give them that—without getting arrested. When she wrote about the experience on her blog, titled Free-Range Kids, Skenazy created a platform to share her mission: to help parents parent better. According to Skenazy, granting age-appropriate freedoms to children helps them become more self-reliant and confident, like riding a bike to the park, or walking home from school, or riding a subway—alone or with friends. Today, her nonprofit has partnered with some 3,000 schools to provide independence-minded activities for students....