Category: reason

The astonishing $6 trillion budget proposed by President Joe Biden includes a 20 percent increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While that $201 million sounds like real money, it’s admittedly a pretty small slice, just 0.003 percent of the whole. And it is surely one of the most innocent of federal expenditures: supporting mega-museums and community orchestras is about the least dangerous piece of government spending I can think of. (It beats a new weapons system or internment facility.) 

Proponents of more funding for the arts often point out that many “developed” countries, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, spend much more government money supporting the arts than the U.S. does. But leaving aside the question of whether the U.S. should emulate Germany’s history of state support for the arts, one might worry that arts expenditures do not seem practically to do much in the way of securing the common defense or ensuring the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. There’s no sign that the founders of the Republic regarded support of the arts as the business of the federal government whatsoever.

And yet, it is often said, the arts are central to any culture, to the unity and character of any people. The NEA is constantly hinting with an anodyne wave that it is telling the story of who we are as Americans: “The arts are a powerful and important part of what unites us as Americans. The arts celebrate our differences while connecting us through a communal experience….[NEA grants seek to] enrich our humanity by broadening our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a society.” Well, it’s hard to argue with that, I suppose, and who would endorse disenriching humanity? Giving some federal support, I have heard it said, expresses that we, as Americans, are concerned not just with guns and butter but with meaning.

But if arts funding is to show “who we are as Americans,” or to narrate our alleged communal experience, it is going to have to respond to the tastes of the American people, which at the moment run to autotuned hip hop and bro country. Perhaps the tastes of we, the American people, should be somewhat reshaped through arts education, or through the intervention of the New York Philharmonic. But you may, after a bit of reflection, agree with me that the government is an implausible agent of our refinement, maybe not who we ought to appoint as our critic-in-chief. The bureaucracy as tastemaker: Well, it just does not appear plausible, and it has an unwholesome history.

In 1989, Sen. Jesse Helms (R–N.C.) and others of what was then known as “the moral majority” held up NEA funding over a series of grants to avant-garde artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley. They were offended by the sexual or supposedly blasphemous content of works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artists’ urine.

The whole controversy almost ended the NEA, and emblematized the culture wars of that moment, pitting southern evangelical Christians against New York curators. Ever since, the NEA’s grantmaking has been much safer; it’s basically turned from funding individual artists to funding community arts organizations. It has largely avoided controversy over the last 20 years.

But if the arts are part of the federal budget, they are subject in a democracy to political processes, and ought to be. And as federal spending increases (and increases), keep in mind that it is liable to be supervised, after the next election or the one after that, by people whose tastes you deplore. Less than two years ago, the Trump administration promulgated the executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Architecture,” condemning modernism and instructing that all new federal buildings be designed in a classical style. A later administration might drive a revival of brutalism.

Government-funded art, that is, descends into propaganda almost no matter what its content: It expresses all sorts of things about what the ruling party wants you to be and what it wants you to see. It expresses, at best, an elaborate set of political negotiations about what sorts of creative expression are appropriate. That is very unlikely to contribute to the intensity or sincerity, the diversity and the funk, that we should associate with creativity.

Every form of arts funding (foundation grants, private sales, crowdsourcing) brings with it certain pressures and distortions, and I know artists and organizations who have done good work with NEA grants. But government funding, in which state coercive power (taxation, to begin with) underlies the grant-making, makes for art that directly serves political power and raises particularly excruciating problems with regard to the possibilities of creative expression, seen in authoritarian regimes but also in democracies. The will of the voters is only a marginally more reliable aesthetic guide than the will of the ruler, but the will of the voters should guide federal expenditures.

Almost any other way of funding the arts is preferable.

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Censor

Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond probably didn’t have a lot of money to make her first feature, but that could have worked in her favor. Censor tells a story set in the trash-horror film world of the 1980s—in Britain, the era of gut-ripping “video nasty”: pictures like Cannibal Holocaust, The Driller Killer, and Gestapo’s Last Orgy. As everyone in this post-psychotronic age knows by now, these films were distinguished by their extreme violence and low production values—bleak sets, awkward camerawork, assertively lurid lighting. Bailey-Bond, a fan of the form with no access to major financing, has replicated those deficiencies with an easy precision.

The advent of home video in the 1970s enabled the release of such films directly to consumers, prompting much media-fueled handwringing about their possible effect on children. Naturally, the government got involved. In the ’80s, video classifications were devised, with some films ruled to be appropriate only for moviegoers either 15 and over or 18 and over. People with vague credentials were hired to be censors—to gather up all the most violent and otherwise disgusting video movies on the market, and to spend their days in government offices watching and rating them, demanding cuts wherever they felt necessary. (Unsurprisingly, collateral damage was not uncommon—among the movies initially rounded up for censure was the 1982 Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.)

Censor focuses on one such warrior in the battle for video decency, Enid Baines (Irish actress Niamh Algar in a tightly controlled performance). Enid isn’t a prig—she understands that pop depravity requires some degree of leeway. “I’ve kept in most of the screwdriver stuff,” she reports of one nasty piece of work, “and I’ve only trimmed the tiniest bit of the end of the genitals.”

Enid is sincere in her desire to protect society from these movies, but she also has a personal agenda. Years ago, her little sister Nina disappeared on a walk in the woods and has never been found. Enid believes she is still alive and is now convinced that she is one of the actors in a bloody horror film called Don’t Go in the Church, the latest release from a reclusive cult sleaze director named Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). Enid seeks out North’s oily producer (Michael Smiley), who offers her a part in one of his pictures. (“I’m not sure how much I like the idea of being raped and cut into pieces on camera,” she says. “I’m sure the public would love it,” he ickily responds.) Enid’s encounter with this creep goes badly, and she moves on to track down the mysterious Frederick North in the forest where he’s shooting his new film. “People think I create the horror, but I don’t,” he tells Enid. “The horror is already out there. In all of us. It’s in you.”

The movie morphs adroitly into a full-on giallo that would be familiar to past horror masters like Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci. Bailey-Bond has a distinctive sensibility of her own, though, and with the eerie and unexpected ending of this picture, she stakes a claim for a second feature, and maybe a bigger budget.

Flashback

Dylan O’Brien and Maika Monroe are both solid in Flashback—especially considering that they were surely held against their will during the making of this preposterous motion picture. The title is misleading: It should be Flashbacks, since the story (or whatever you want to call it—it’s the work of director Christopher MacBride) is told entirely in time jumps. It begins with O’Brien’s character, Fred Fitzell, in a hospital with his dying mom (Liisa Repo-Martell) and his attentive wife Karen (Hannah Gross). Then, over and over again, we find him back in high school, crushing on Cindy Williams (Monroe), a droll boho girl who likes to hang with the bad boys. Cindy doesn’t have a lot to say, but she says it quite a bit:

“Don’t let anyone influence you. Make your choice yourself.”

“We have to remember the power we have – the power of choice.”

“This is only one set of choices, and I exist in all of them simultaneously.”

When Cindy’s not nattering away in that manner, we get to hang with Fred and his old high school buddies Sebastian (Emory Cohen) and Andre (Keir Gilchrist) as they reminisce about the long-ago days when they used to party down with a drug called Mercury. (Why they would’ve wanted to do that is unclear, since the drug’s effects on people we see taking it—crying, slobbering, rolling on the floor in terror—are not at all intriguing.)       

There’s also a group of odd-looking people who drift across the screen muttering words like “Numbers.” “Language.” “Color.” “Shape.” After a bit you begin to suspect that these words are part of a disjointed sentence; that if you add them up you’ll get…well, who knows. There’s also an unexplained character with nubbins of horns pushing up out of his forehead, as if he’d just escaped from a Hellboy roadshow. No explanation what his deal is.

Meanwhile, back in the real world (or whatever), Fred has a top job as a “data analyst” at some company in some city, and he has a swell home, and he’s married to Karen—but he’s still obsessing about Cindy. There’s also a fabulous beach house overlooking the sea where Fred has become a painter, while Cindy reclines on the patio sipping chilled white wine. At one point, we check back in with Fred and discover that he’s become a baby, just embarking on a long life of choices.

There is an elemental idea buried here, and it might have been made into an interesting movie. This is it: Every choice we make in life leads us inexorably to the place where we wind up at the end. There. Note that it didn’t take 97 minutes to relay that information.  

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The rule of law can be serviceably defined as restricting the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. Unfortunately, politicians have learned how to subvert the rule of law by laundering their decisions through supine federal bureaucracies that interpret badly-defined laws and regulations to suit the desires of the president and his minions.

The decade-long saga of the Keystone XL oil pipeline is a near-perfect example of how this works. (Don’t get me started on arbitrary presidential power to impose tariffs and exercise secret emergency powers.)

Earlier this week, bowing to President Biden’s January declaration that its pipeline was not in the U.S.’s national interest, the builder of the pipeline, TC Energy, announced that it was permanently canceling construction of its Keystone pipeline. That project would have transported more than 800,000 barrels of Canadian oil daily to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Let’s jump into the federal policy WABAC Machine to see how this capricious melodrama unfolded. Back in September 2008, TransCanada Keystone Pipeline (TC Energy now) filed an application for a Presidential Permit with the Department of State to build and operate the Keystone XL Project. That began a three-year-long process in which the Department of State oversaw the compilation and issuance of a Final Environmental Impact Statement in 2011 that concluded that the Keystone XL would have “no significant impact” on land and water resources along its route and a negligible effect on man-made climate change.

All that these sorts of assessments are supposed to do is supply the information to federal agency appointees who then make national interest determinations. Reasonable people would agree that a finding of “no significant impact” would suggest that the project is in the national interest and should be approved, right? Wrong.

The findings were evidently not the right answers for then-Secretary of State John Kerry, so he sent the report back for further deliberation. The requirement for further deliberation meant that certain deadlines were missed and the company was obliged to reapply for a presidential permit in 2012. Because President Obama did not want to alienate either the blue-collar unionists who favored the pipeline or the environmental activists who were protesting frequently in front of the White House, he strategically dithered for years.

In 2013, a Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement again concluded, “Approval or denial of the proposed project is unlikely to have a substantial impact on the rate of development in the oil sands, or on the amount of heavy crude oil refined in the Gulf Coast area” and would be unlikely to alter the future trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions. Again, the wrong findings. So the bureaucrats were sent back to their desks again for further consideration.

The result was a January 2014 Final Environmental Impact Statement that more comprehensively analyzed the project’s greenhouse gas emissions and their likely impact on global climate. Among other things, the new report outlined a scenario in which blocking the pipeline would shift Canadian crude oil transport to railways. That switch would actually increase greenhouse gas emissions by 27 percent over those emitted by the proposed pipeline.

Despite yet another finding that building the pipeline would have only minor impacts on land, water, and climate, on November 6, 2015, Secretary Kerry issued a determination that “the proposed project would not serve the national interest.” Kerry stated, “The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combatting climate change.”

Then came the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to allow the Keystone pipeline to be built in return for “a big piece of the profits” for the American people. Four days after he took office, Trump issued the Presidential Memorandum Regarding Construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, in which he basically ordered the same bureaucracies to redo the Final Environmental Impact Statement on the pipeline. When various court fights delayed that process, President Trump acted unilaterally and simply issued a Presidential Permit on March 29, 2019, authorizing construction, connection, maintenance, and operation of the project at the U.S.-Canada border.

Still, the wheels of bureaucracy ground on. In December 2019, the Trump administration’s Department of State issued an updated Final Environmental Impact Assessment that concluded that the effects on land use, water, biological and cultural resources, and climate change of the building and maintaining the pipeline would range all the way from negligible to minor.

During the 2020 campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised to reverse the decision allowing the construction of the pipeline. Biden didn’t even bother with ordering another Environmental Impact Statement. Citing Kerry’s 2015 determination, Biden on his first day in office revoked the permit, declaring that “approving the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the U.S. national interest.” Why not? Because “the Keystone XL pipeline disserves the U.S. national interest” due to the cumulating effects of man-made climate change.

Thirteen years after the pipeline was first proposed, the $8 billion project is kaput.

During his tenure, Trump arbitrarily reversed Obama administration decisions, including those on vehicle fuel economy standards, methane emissions, appliance energy efficiency standards, the establishment of national monuments, oil drilling in Alaska and offshore, calculating the social cost of carbon emissions, and clean water regulations. Now Biden’s first executive order has arbitrarily reversed Trump’s reversals.

This is not to say that either Trump or Biden is right or wrong with respect to the policies they seek to impose on the rest of us. The machinations around the Keystone Pipeline project highlight how modern American politicians have become adept at bending ostensibly fair and transparent bureaucratic procedures to justify decisions that they have already made. The result is that citizens and companies increasingly cannot count on the stability and certainty of the law when making decisions about their lives and businesses. Ever-expanding administrative autocracy is the opposite of the rule of law.

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As much as half of money doled out through pandemic unemployment benefit programs may have gone to scammers, says Axios. “Unemployment fraud during the pandemic could easily reach $400 billion,” it adds, “and the bulk of the money likely ended in the hands of foreign crime syndicates.”

That’s an insanely high—and disturbing—estimate, as well as one that seems to vindicate the worst fears about fraud in U.S. unemployment insurance programs.

It’s also pretty thinly sourced, coming from one dude—ID.me CEO Blake Hall—with a vested interest in fearmongering around identity theft. His company is in the business of online identity verification. (“I asked ID.me for more specific information and they sent me an argument in favor of their product—which helps verify claims,” notes CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf.) In addition, one other source—Haywood Talcove, also from a fraud prevention company (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)—told Axios that much of the stolen money ended up in the hands of crime syndicates in China, Russia, Nigeria, and other foreign countries. It’s unclear how either source arrived at these estimates.

But that’s not to say some serious fraud hasn’t taken place. A significant amount of anecdotal evidence does lend credence to their claims. Just last month, “a Nigerian man suspected in Washington state’s $650 million unemployment fraud was arrested” trying to flee the country, Seattle Times reports:

Abidemi Rufai, of Lekki, Nigeria, appeared in federal court Saturday on charges that he used the identities of more than 100 Washington residents to steal more than $350,000 in unemployment benefits from the Washington state Employment Security Department during the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

Earlier this week, “the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced 64-year-old Delma Ruth High pleaded guilty” to unemployment fraud, WDAM.com reports. “According to prosecutors, a local bank alerted the U.S. Secret Service’s Jackson office in May 2020 that unemployment insurance benefits from the state of Washington and Arizona had been deposited into High’s account under other people’s names.”

Also this week, “a 28-year-old man suspected of committing identity theft to fraudulently collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in unemployment benefits” was jailed, says NBC Palm Springs. “It’s believed the suspect stole as much as $316,500 in unemployment benefits from the California Employment Development Department.”

Between January and May 2021, the Texas Department of Transportation “received 529 fraudulent unemployment claims filed using stolen identities of employed TxDOT workers,” according to KXAN.

And these aren’t the only recent examples of such fraud. While the precise extent of unemployment benefit theft may be hard to pin down, there’s clearly a significant amount of it happening.

White House economist Gene Sperling blamed lack of oversight by the Trump administration for the fraud. He told Axios that concerns about it were “why we passed $2 billion for [unemployment insurance] modernizations in the American Rescue Plan, instituted a Department of Justice Anti-Fraud Task Force and an all-of-government Identity Theft and Public Benefits Initiative.”

FREE MINDS

Cause-based abortion bans keep coming and courts keep striking them down. North Carolina is banning abortion based on race, sex, or Down syndrome diagnosis. Similar bills have been signed into law—and declared unconstitutional—in a number of other states. A federal appeals court ruled just this week that a similar ban in Missouri was unconstitutional. However, an appeals court in April upheld a similar ban in Ohio.

FREE MARKETS

Republicans want to declare tech companies common carriers, but they would hate the results. “More and more conservatives critique social media by arguing that websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are effectively the modern public square that shouldn’t have moderation practices built to balance online safety and free speech,” writes Kir Nuthi at Techdirt:

So it’s only natural that a proposal like common carriage gained traction in the Trump presidency and has not lost momentum since. Just look at Sen. Hagerty’s 21st Century FREE Speech Act.

Some conservative critics think treating these sites as common carriers ticks many of their boxes—less content moderation, less alleged anti-conservative bias, and more regulation of America’s tech companies. But they’re wrong. Not only is it an unconstitutional solution, its design to work around First Amendment jurisprudence will almost certainly make the internet worse, not better, for conservatives.

[…] Nondiscrimination is a central feature of traditional common carriers, but it is not a feature of social media. Unlike the railroads and communications companies of the Gilded Age, social media relies on the ability to contextualize and discriminate between different content to provide useful information to users. Content moderation is at the center of that, providing websites the ability to balance free expression and online safety to maximize both and make the internet somewhere we want to spend time. Concerned parents shouldn’t have to wade through expletives, references to violence, and sexual content just to connect with their friends and family as well as protect their kids online.

The ability to moderate is a feature, not a bug, of social media.

QUICK HITS

• More people worldwide have died from COVID-19 so far in 2021 than died from the disease in all of 2020.

• Two people on the first U.S. cruise ship voyage in more than a year have tested positive for COVID-19.

• Paul Krugman’s 10-year history of being wrong about Bitcoin.

• California will appeal a federal court ruling striking down its ban on “assault weapons.”

• A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union brands Pennsylvania’s General Assembly a “bipartisan criminal offense factory.” In 2019-2020, the state legislature “introduced 280 new bills […] resulting in 15 new offenses and suboffenses, passed with bipartisan support that imposed 26 new penalties,” notes the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

• “Authoritarianism without borders”:

We are in a new era of threats to freedom of expression on campus. It is time our universities start acting like it. https://t.co/diUUJqPfG4

— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) June 10, 2021

• Are Republican governments turning against needle exchanges?

• “The Labor Department says consumer prices rose 5 percent for the 12-month period ending in May,” notes NPR. “That’s the sharpest increase since August 2008, topping the 4.2 percent rise seen in April.”

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The second edition of Free-Range Kids comes out on June 16. I wrote the first edition 12 years ago, after my column about letting my nine-year-old ride the subway alone became national news and I got dubbed “America’s Worst Mom.” Since then, I’ve been fighting for childhood independence alongside some fierce allies, including Reason.

What has changed in the past dozen years, for better or for worse, when it comes to childhood freedom?

What’s Getting Worse

Kids are being treated like babies for even longer stretches. When Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, gives lectures, he often asks audience members born before 1982 to shout out what age they were first allowed to leave the house on their own. Many in the crowd answer eight, seven, or even six. (Personally, I shout “Five!”)

Then, skipping the mishmash of Generation X, he asks everyone born after 1995 to answer the same question, and most of the millennials respond in the 10-13 age range. “The effect is always huge,” says Haidt, a co-founder with me of Let Grow, the nonprofit dedicated to making childhood independence easy, normal, and legal.

This drop-off in autonomy can be traced to several factors.

Crime: Even though crime began to plummet in the mid 1990s, Americans just can’t believe it. “In 20 of 24 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60 percent of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before,” according to Pew Research, despite a general downward trend. (Note: 2020 was a unique year, and crime did increase.)

How big a “downward trend”? Violent crime is about half of what it was in 1991. Yes, pandemic times have pushed crime numbers up, but this misperception of mayhem has been going on for decades and it is just hard to fight fear with reality. If you really believe the world is one big, white van driven by a clown with an Uzi, you don’t let your kids play outside.

Smartphones: These technological tethers are particularly insidious. A Wall Street Journal article titled, literally, “Raising a Free-Range Child in 2020,” suggests equipping the kids with smartwatches that allow parents to track the kids. In fact, one of the pre-installed buttons sends the text: “When are you picking me up?”

A mom interviewed in the Journal piece waxed nostalgic about her childhood down by the creek. Spending time there, “was not just lovely but really important in creating independence and developing confidence,” she said, adding, “I wanted to find a way to recreate that for my daughter.”

So she gave her daughter a high-tech watch. And when the girl’s chain fell off her bike, the girl alerted her dad who immediately came and fixed it.

Presented as a win for autonomy, this is, in fact, the opposite—and the opposite of that mom’s independence-building creek-time. The girl didn’t figure out how to fix her bike, or how to get home without it working. She called childhood’s Triple A: the Always Available Adult.

Constant adult oversight is a stealth reason kids have less autonomy. Parents think they’re giving their kids freedom, but it’s actually a blanket of surveillance and assistance. The kids know they are never truly on their own, and from what I’ve seen, they often become accustomed to it. Being on your own starts to seem scary when it is never the norm.

A 7th grade teacher in the suburbs told me that this spring her students were imagining what it would be like to walk to their quaint downtown shopping area, when one student asked, “What happens if I’m walking or riding my bike and I get stuck on the train tracks?”

This child was 12 or 13.

You almost can’t blame them. (Almost.) Many kids have been picked up and delivered to school and sundry activities all their lives, like UPS packages. Packages can’t get off the train tracks by themselves either.

And of course, the flip side of the tech revolution is another reason kids get so much less freedom. Not only are they obsessively tracked by parents who can check their grades, texts, location, browsing history, school behavior and even body temperature from afar, they also have enough fun tech to keep them inside without going crazy.

Back in the hoary past, if your home was hot, crowded, loud, or boring, your only alternative was to go outside and find someone or something to play with. Now that staying inside is fascinating (hey, it’s a beautiful day and I’m at my computer, too), kids aren’t champing at the bit. When the couch beckons, parents don’t have to worry about their kids flying the coop.

Homework: A 2004 University of Michigan study found kids are spending an extra 7.5 hours a week on schoolwork than they were 20 years earlier. A more recent study found that younger students were getting three times more homework than was recommended by education experts. You can’t ride your bike to the 7-Eleven if you’ve got a math test coming up, science project due, and reading log to fill in. (And, remember, no more hiding your F’s in your pajama drawer, as an unnamed relative of mine did: Your parents can see every grade on every quiz.)

Extracurriculars: Children who might once have had some time to, say, play by the creek, are often now in organized activities. The children’s sports industrial complex has become a $15 billion dollar business (though, once again, COVID-19 has mixed that up some).

The more that kids are in adult-run activities, the more it feels to parents and kids as if it is only natural to always have someone, preferably a specialist, teaching a child something. Free time starts to look like time that could be better spent getting a leg up. Who’s going to get that scholarship: The kid pointlessly climbing a tree or the kid in travel hockey?

911 calls: Many parents worry, quite reasonably, that some busybody could call 911 to report an unattended kid. Next think you know, child services are knocking at the door.

As parents started contacting me to say they had been investigated for letting their kids play at the park, or walk home from the playground, or even shoot hoops in their own backyard, I wrote about their stories. In fact, Reason is the first place the public heard about the Meitivs of Maryland, the Debra Harrell story, and the dad given hard labor for making his son walk home from the grocery store at dusk.

These stories got huge play, which is good—no parent should be second-guessed for making everyday decisions that do not put their kids in serious and likely danger. On the other hand, I never meant to make parents even more worried about their reasonable parenting decisions coming under formal scrutiny. But that does bring me, at last, to the good news about childhood independence.

What’s Getting Better

New laws: Just last month, Oklahoma and Texas, passed so-called Reasonable Childhood Independence bills. These say that kids have the right to some unsupervised time, and parents have the right to give it to them—by choice or by necessity. For instance, if I want my son to feel confident and competent because I let him “free-range,” that’s fine. But a stretched-thin single mom who works two shifts and can’t be home with her seven-year-old for an hour or two after school? She’s covered by the new laws, too. Giving your kid some unsupervised time can no longer be considered neglect when it is simply poverty.

Texas and Oklahoma joined Utah, which had passed the first free-range parenting law in 2018. Let Grow has another five or six states on our radar for next year, and in some of them—Colorado, South Carolina, and Idaho—the bills have already been drafted. Click here if you’d like to see the laws in your state, and here if you’d like to help us get some good ones passed. (And here if you would like to donate to the cause).

New research: The rise in childhood anxiety is so scary and sad that some psychologists and educators are beginning to research novel ways to fight it. Long Island University Psychology Professor Camilo Ortiz is undertaking a study this fall that will treat children diagnosed with anxiety disorder with a dose of independence. He will give these kids the Let Grow Project: The assignment to go home and do something new, on their own, without their parents. If, as I’ve seen happen, the kids grow bolder the more they do some things on their own—run an errand, ride their bike, walk to school—well, then we’ve got a simple, new, free way to help a whole lot of anxious kids and their parents. After all, parents change as much as the kids do, once they see their hothouse flowers blossoming with pride and confidence. A pilot project in the Boston Public Schools this summer will also be measuring The Let Grow Project’s impact on students’ social-emotional growth.

New partners: In 2017, Haidt, Free to Learn author Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman, former chairman of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and I co-founded Let Grow. All of us were worried that overprotection was undermining kids. Gray and Shuchman were particularly concerned that groups promoting civil discourse and open-mindedness at the university level represented late-stage interventions. So our nonprofit is focused on developing resilience much earlier in childhood, as a vaccine against fragility. Our school programs, thought leadership, advocacy, and outreach are all dedicated to making it easy, normal and legal to give kids back some fortifying independence.

New Word: The phrase Free-Range Kids has made its way into the dictionary. It gives people a name for “a style of child rearing in which parents allow their children to move about without constant adult supervision, aimed at instilling independence and self-reliance,” as Dictionary.com says. Giving kids some freedom to explore, play, and even screw up a bit isn’t slacker parenting or neglect. It’s “Free-Range.”

That sounds like bragging, so I’ll leave it there. The fact is, there are plenty of forces keeping kids inside, supervised, scared, distrusted, and in a way, disabled. (“How will I get off the tracks?”) But there are so many people concerned about stunting a generation’s growth that we are now a force to be reckoned with, too.

And since our way gives kids and parents more freedom, more trust, more power and more hope, we are going to win.

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