The History of Let Grow

The History of Let Grow

The History of Let Grow

It started back in 2009

It started back in 2009

In 2009, Let Grow co-founder Lenore Skenazy published Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children Without Going Nuts with Worry. This grew out of her famous article in the New York Sun, “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone.”

A mom of two, Lenore herself was a worrier, but she knew that one of our jobs, as parents, is to swallow some fear and listen to our kids. When they’re ready for some independence, it’s up to us to prepare them, hug them, and let them spread their wings. The alternative is raising kids who don’t get to see how competent and capable they really are.

As Lenore likes to say: All the worry in the world doesn’t prevent death. It prevents life.

Let Grow Was Born

Let Grow Was Born

This message resonated with many parents sick of the culture of fear and skeptical of the push to helicopter parent. In 2017, three like-minded souls—Daniel Shuchman, a New York investor and Chairman of the Board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), NYU Business School Prof. Jonathan Haidt, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and Boston College Prof. Peter Gray, author of “Free to Learn“—proposed starting a nonprofit with Lenore to promote childhood independence and resilience. They wanted to make it easy, normal, and legal to give kids back some freedom. They wanted to make sure kids could think and do things for themselves, from kindergarten right on up through high school. And they wanted a name that summed up their mission to press the reset button a culture bent on overestimating danger and underestimating kids.

Thus was born Let Grow.