If you want to be out-of-your-mind inspired, check out this huge Time Magazine profile of The Balance Project – “a parent-run nonprofit working to rebuild communities to encourage childhood independence and get kids off screens,” as Time puts it. Already, 60 other Balance Projects have sprung up across America.

The movement is the brainchild of our Let Grow partner, the indefatigable Holly Moscatiello of Little Silver, NJ, whose goal is “to make it just as easy to experience life in our community as it is to go on your phone.”

The article details how Holly is renormalizing the idea of kids out and about – including her own 7-year-old who rides her bike to school and has gotten a half dozen kids to join her.

Charlotte Alter, the Time writer whose beat is kids and tech, interviewed another mom in Little Silver who is about to let her 8-year- old start running errands at the store. That mom, Tori Finnegan, said that before the Balance Project, “I never made the connection that independence leads to resilience and confidence.”

A ha!

Having adventures, getting around, helping out – those are keys to a healthy, happy, confident childhood. But making sure kids have those opportunities takes “changing their community’s culture around childhood independence,” writes Alter. “Moscatiello and her friends’ goal is to make Little Silver so fun and accessible that kids don’t even want to be on their devices.”

The article then describes Let Grow’s work and philosophy so adeptly, we couldn’t help but reprint it here. For more of Alter’s work on kids and tech – what’s new, what’s working, what’s worrisome and what’s not, please visit her Substack, Humanism.

Here’s her take on Let Grow:

The Balance Project also draws heavily on the philosophy of Let Grow, a national non-profit promoting childhood independence.

When she first pioneered the idea of “free range” parenting in 2009, Let Grow President Lenore Skenazy got fearful feedback from other parents. What if kids are abducted when they’re walking alone around the neighborhood? But in recent years, Skenazy says, something has changed. “It’s not that that fear has abated, it’s that other fears have superseded it,” she says. “And one of those is our children’s mental health.”

Kids desperately want to be able to explore and play without adults micromanaging them, Skenazy says. They gravitate towards devices, she argues, because they’re not allowed to roam freely in real life. “The only place where they have freedom to meet, to play, to joke around without adults watching every move and intervening and suggesting and helping,” Skenazy says, “is online.”

In a March Harris survey of more than 500 children aged 8 to 12, most of the respondents said they used smartphones, and about half of the 10- to 12-year-olds said most or all of their friends were on social media. But fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds said they’d been down a grocery-store aisle on their own. More than a quarter said they aren’t allowed to play by themselves in their own yard.

And even if they’re spending much of their time online, kids don’t necessarily want it that way. Most prefer to play outside with their friends. Nearly half the children told researchers that unstructured play with their friends was their favorite way to spend their time, while 30% said they preferred an organized activity, like soccer practice. Only 25% said they wanted to be online. Three-quarters of kids surveyed said they would spend less time online if there were more kids to play with in their neighborhood. “If you don’t want your kids going online,” says Skenazy, “they have to go back to going outside.”

Let Grow promotes several different ways to build kids’ independence, usually through schools. The Let Grow Experience is a homework assignment requiring kids to go home and do something new on their own, with their parents’ permission but without their parents. The Let Grow Play Club is an after-school program in which schools stay open for kids of all ages, offering free play without devices. There’s an adult present, but they’re like a lifeguard; they can help if there’s a serious emergency, but they’re not there to organize games or resolve spats. Across the country, Skenazy says, roughly 1,260 schools have implemented at least one of these programs.

Let Grow also provides recommendations for ways parents and communities can increase childhood independence: the first thing parents can do, Skenazy says, is simply “open the door.” (Let Grow also offers what it calls a Four Weeks to a Let Grow Kid, a guide to increasing kids’ self-reliance.) Communities, she says, can make crosswalks safer, encourage shopkeepers to allow kids to be alone in their stores, and create “free play Fridays” at local playgrounds. 

The Balance Project, says Skenazy, is taking those recommendations and putting them into action on a local level. “This is a way of knitting together neighborhoods again,” she says. “It just has to be done more consciously now.”

All very true! And all very well explained!

To get your town on board with The Balance Project, click here. To get Let Grow’s Community Toolkit (free!), click here. We recommend doing both!