Rudi Gesch is a husband, a father of three, and has fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a children's author. No More Monkeys is the result of his son Arlo's incessant jumping off of any surface possible and of refining the classic children's rhyme over a period of multiple years. Rudi and his lovely wife Stephanie live in Sheboygan, Wisconsin USA with their three monkeys.

Joe

Hi, welcome to another episode of The Caring Instinct. This week's guest is Rudi Gesch. That rhymes. He is from Wisconsin in America and the author of the book no more Monkeys jumping on the bed and other things the doctor never said all about play and risky play in particular. What did you think, Olga?

Olga

I thought it was so lovely. At first we talked about the book and we talked about Peter Gray, who makes a cameo in the book. And then it just turned into this really warm, big hearted conversations that I hope you'll enjoy. And wherever you listen, please give us a follow and consider giving us a rating and a review as well that would really help us get more great guests for you. As usual, all the extra information, the links to Rudi's work, the transcript of the podcast will be on our website, www.thecaringinstinct.com.

Olga

And please consider signing up and joining us to find out who our next guest is going to be and have a chance to ask them a question too. Rudi, lovely to have you here on The Caring Instinct podcast. How are you?

Rudi

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Nice to meet you in person. Joe and Olga, good to meet you.

Joe

And you've got a book out. No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, which we found out just before Christmas. We bought it. We love it. Tell us a bit about it.

Rudi

So it was a bucket list item for me. I'm here in the States, in Wisconsin. Bucket list item for me was to become a children's author. It was actually my New Year's resolution. In 2023 to finally get that off the to do list.

Rudi

And so I spent the better part of a year taking this from a small idea to a fully published book and partnering with Dr. Peter Gray along the way. And pretty crazy journey. And hilarious to me that in 2024 I get to talk to people in the UK and people can buy my book around the world. It's quite the trip.

Olga

And it's a delight too. So is Peter Gray the "doctor who was world renowned"? Yes, the secret.

Rudi

So there's children pretending to be different animals throughout the book, jumping on and off of various furniture and other objects in the house, inspired by my four year old son Arlo, who, since he could walk, was jumping on and off of everything. I heard a podcast, actually, where Dr. Peter Gray was speaking and just really appreciated his message and what he had to say, and did a Google search like anything else and stumbled into various TED talks and I consumed anything that he could produce, did a little homework. I brought my copy with me, Free to Learn. Great plug for Dr.

Rudi

Peter Gray. So anyway, I read the book and as I was kind of synthesizing ideas for my children's book, a lot of the message is really inspired by Dr. Gray's message of letting children play and in particular letting them engage in risky play. Things like jumping off of couches and things along these lines. And so just in my own parenting journey, working through kind of the cringe moment of like, oh, I hope he doesn't get hurt because of course I love him.

Rudi

But also trying to always be a better dad and a better parent and trying to do what's best for him and his long term development and realizing, oh, there's all these great benefits to risky play and there's going to be bumps and bruises along the way, but it's better to let them play and let them figure it out and they learn all kinds of amazing and valuable lessons. So first and foremost, Dr. Gray's message has hopefully made me a little bit of a better parent. And then just as an author, I decided to do something crazy and just contact him. He works as a research professor at Boston College and I worked through their faculty directory and emailed him and said, hey, you've never heard of me and I've got this idea for a book and I'd really love a chance to talk to you.

Rudi

And much to my amazement, he actually took me up on it and did a FaceTime like this. And two or three conversations later he agreed to be featured, sort of the featured doctor in my book. So as the story goes along, there's children jumping on and off of various things and the parents really don't like that. They're sort of helicopter parents that want to keep their kids safe. And so the subtitle, Joe, of the book is "no more monkeys jumping on the bed and other things the doctor never said."

Rudi

And so my idea was, well, what happens if these parents would actually consult a real doctor instead of sort of blaming this fictitious doctor? And Dr. Gray agreed to be that expert, much to my delight.

Olga

Okay, wow, wonderful.

Joe

And tell us more, how would you describe risky play?

Rudi

Risky play is play that contains some risk. Dr. Gray talks about climbing to high heights and different heights might be different for different ages and obviously there's an inherent danger in that or it might be balancing on something, a wet log in the forest or jumping off of couches or running at great speeds. So it's all of the things that. If you let children be children and not just plop them down in front of screens.

Rudi

There are things that children naturally do, but in a very safety conscious culture of ours, that parents feel an increasing need to let their kids do less and less and less of this. But hopefully my story, in some small way, helps to champion the cause of risky play and to let children be children. Children are spending less time outside these days. They're spending more time in front of screens. And the sad irony is the parents think they're doing a good job by keeping their kids safe.

Rudi

Like, oh, the child is off on the screen. At least they can't hurt themselves. But ironically, any physical hurt, bumps, bruises, even broken bones, you don't want any of those things, certainly anything substantially dangerous. And there are appropriate guidelines.

Rudi

It's not willy nilly let them run in the street type of parenting, but just intentional direction into unstructured free play. Okay, go in the backyard and play and figure things out for yourself. And there's all kinds of developmental benefits that come from that risky play. And the irony is you feel that the child is being safer on the screen, but it's actually much, much worse for their development. And it's sort of pennywise and dollar dumb.

Rudi

You're doing something in the short term that's allowing maybe a little moment of calm and safety and sanity in your house, but it's doing long term harm to the child's development. So the way humanity has developed over time is that play is the number one teacher. And so some of the best things that parents can actually do is let their kids play and just get outside, especially outside. But if you can't get outside, then just unstructured free play where the child is in charge, and risky play, where the child is taking risks and figuring out how to navigate the world.

Olga

It's that gap, isn't it, between our, as grown ups, experiential understanding of physics and what's risky and our children's absolute lack of this experience. When they're very young, they do learn through those bumps and bruises. That's why it's so scary for us. We see the danger of it, and they, to an extent, don't. I've got a two year old who's been jumping off, similarly to what you described with your son, jumping off everything, bouncing on everything, climbing everything, doing really, really dangerous stuff.

Olga

And I spent the morning with him today, and for the first time, I heard him say twice in the playground when he tried to climb to a really big slide, like a slide meant for eight year olds. And he was like, "This is too big for Liam." And he wanted to climb back. And then again, he tried to jump from the couch to the armchair, and there's quite a gap. And again, he was like, "This is too big to jump for Liam," for the first time.

Olga

So it's coming. He's tried it. He's been working it out. He's worked out that some gaps are too big to jump.

Rudi

So what a great natural learning experience for him. That's something Dr. Gray frequently mentions, too, is that children know their own limitations. And even developmentally, there's this big fancy term called "the zone of proximal development."

Rudi

Are you guys familiar with this term?

Olga

Yes. Vygotsky.

Rudi

Okay, great. Yeah, exactly. We want to find what we're comfortable with and be slightly more challenging than that. And if it's too challenging, it's very frustrating and you give up. Or in risky play's case, a child says, I'm just not ready for that yet.

Rudi

It's too big for me. But if it's too easy, it gets very boring and you give up. So we want that. It's true in all forms of education and Olga, you mentioned as adults, we see the physical reality of the world. We have the benefit.

Rudi

And it's so inherent in us because this happened for us at a very young age. Frequently our generation was allowed to do more play than we allow for the next generation. And if you go back, I've read my book, actually to nursing homes, to retirement communities, gentlemen and women who are in their eighties, nineties, and in one case, actually over 100. It was so rewarding to hear them say, you're describing what I experienced as a child. My parents maybe were too loose with me, but it was just constant play for 8-9-10 hours a day outside, constantly learning.

Rudi

And it seems very sadly, and this is, again, something Dr. Gray has documented very well, is, unfortunately, the children's time for free play and unstructured playtime has just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk to the point to these days, it's under a half hour a day. But back to your point, Olga. The reason we understand these physical realities is we're older, we're the adults, and we have had that own development. The child, of course, is not yet a fully developed adult.

Rudi

So they're trying to navigate the world. And unfortunately, we know that, that navigation comes with the bumps and bruises, and those aren't fun. And we have these natural parenting urges to keep our child safe. And we, of course, love the child. So how do we do that?

Rudi

But I guess the hopeful theme of my book and certainly of a lot of Dr. Gray's messaging is that actually the best thing you can do for your child is to just delay that, maybe withdraw a little bit. He actually says in the epilogue of my story, like, if you can't take it, look, don't, don't tell them to stop. If you can't take it, just shield your eyes and look away while they're trying to navigate it. But it's so cool to hear things like Liam says, "Oh, that's too big for Liam," because that's exactly.

Rudi

He's bumping into the threshold of his own proximal development. He's saying, like, I'm not ready for that. That's what play does. He's explored the world enough to reach a limit, and that's a very valuable exercise for him.

Joe

Yeah, you talk about older generations as well. Their parents didn't have to safeguard that play. Like, we feels like the message now, we really need to safeguard risky play and give it our attention. And it's maybe even harder as parents. We have to give it attention, but we also have to give it space.

Joe

And we're taught, we want to jump in. But like you said, in the years gone by, it would have taken place out of the eyes of the parents or in a community with other, maybe older children.

Rudi

It's funny, this is a little bit of like Neo in the Matrix. It's like, oh, "I know kung fu" when he gets injected with it. Once you see risky play, you know. And it was very valuable for me to actually read the story to an older generation and just hear their input and their feedback. But anytime you look at sort of the great children's stories, the great narratives, one of the very first things they do just as almost a crutch to the story, but they try to explain away why the parents aren't involved in any way.

Rudi

So if there's any children's adventure, Peter Pan happens at night because the parents are asleep and the children are in their bedroom and they can escape to the window. So many of the classic Disney movies, the parents tragically have died. You look at Tangled, the child is actually abducted and raised in the forest. So it's a plot device of authors from time immemorial, to sort of get rid of the parents so that this adventure and narrative can take place. And sort of the deeper truth of that is that in some ways, we need to have the self control to remove ourselves from the situation, which is very hard in two ways today.

Rudi

Way one, we're all more aware of the dangers of the world, and so we carry a higher point in our heads than maybe is actually true. And then, number two, in the Internet age, we're all externally judged. There's cameras pointed on us. Parents of the 80 year olds weren't worried about how their parenting looked on Instagram. To someone around the world.

Rudi

They were worried about probably very important basic physical necessities of just providing and feeding and caring for their family. And they loved their kids and they let them play. And that's how we as an entire species have developed over the centuries. That's encoded within the child development process. And so the best thing to do, as the story says, let them outside, let them play, let them jump.

Olga

But it's also the disintegration of the community. I don't know if it's similar in the US, but here in the UK, basically, if the kids are at home, then at least one of the parents has to not work and be supervising them. The notion of quite young children just playing in someone's garden, in the street, I don't know, in the park, with sort of community supervision. Maybe the neighbors looking out of the windows. That's how it was when I was young.

Olga

Maybe one of the grandmas sitting there on the bench, knitting, telling the kids off every now and then until they're called for dinner. That's disappeared. If the kids are in any form of daycare, childminders, nursery, preschool, every bruise and bump has to be written up. That's the protocol in the UK. I don't know if it's the same in the US.

Olga

Rather than engage in the paperwork, of course you'll be watching them like a hawk.

Rudi

Yeah, that sense of community, for sure. And even knowing your neighbors, knowing your neighborhood, it's the double edged sword. So here's the amazing thing of technology, is I now have you two as friends in the UK. There's no way that would have happened without the technology. So there's online communities, which as adults, so important they can be both for good and for ill.

Rudi

But a lot of those communities have moved online, but unfortunately, a lot of that has been at the expense of the physical community. And of course, the two year old is not online, and so the two year old's physical reality needs that sense of community around them. And it's a really big piece. The smallest community that the child engages and that we as a society have, is the family. It starts in the home, but that's what a community is.

Rudi

It's a collection of homes in a neighborhood. And I'd be curious. My hunch is it's the same in the UK, but in the States, again, for me, growing up, we would ride. Our bikes around town, we would go to the park.

Rudi

We were completely unsupervised. I grew up in a rural community in Wisconsin where it's only a town of 2000 people. I think we had more cattle in the town than people. We had an ongoing game of tag that was literally through the entire town. We would be running through people's backyards. Sort of this idyllic childhood experience.

Rudi

And today, if you saw a group of children in the States running around together through a town, even. A small town, people are calling the authorities, like, where are the parents and all these things? And that's very unfortunate because there's legitimate dangers, of course, in society, and you want to protect children, but it's, I think, at the detriment of the children's development and leadership and initiative and a lot of the valuable skills that you learn having a childhood like that. And it seems, unfortunately, that, I'm not going to say it was all sunshine and rainbows when I was a child, but it was certainly a different era. And again, if you have a little bit of that generational wisdom and then you kind of project that out forward, we're saying, like, okay, already this generation of children are too...

Rudi

This is the COVID generation. Keep them inside, keep them protected from everything. And of course, legitimate dangers during a global pandemic and all that. But I feel that unfortunately, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and we've swung the pendulum too far, where we're now overprotecting to the detriment of the children.

Joe

How is it received generally, this kind of message?

Rudi

Yeah, it's been so cool to have parents come up to me and say things like, oh, this is exactly what my kids need. I had something in me that I knew something was wrong and I just didn't have the words for it. So that's been very rewarding. I've had a number of dads actually come up to me. I think this can be true of dads or moms, of course, but I think dads especially like to roughhouse with their children and wrestle and tickle and there's some risk.

Rudi

Many times when I'm wrestling with my four year old, it unfortunately ends in tears through some sort of, again, accidental bump or bruise or something along those lines. But it's one of my favorite bonding points with my son. We wrestle every night before bed. I get him all riled up before he goes down. But it's been really cool, especially for me as a father, to have other dads come up to me and say, "Yes,

Rudi

more of that!" We need more kids taking risks and going on adventures and wrestling and just having fun. So that's been cool. Someone asked for my autograph the other day, which was hilarious. I'm just a regular guy living in Wisconsin, so they were carrying the book.

Olga

Is that what you wrote as an autograph?

Joe

Yeah.

Rudi

I'm just a guy.

Olga

I'm just a regular guy.

Joe

Okay.

Rudi

Next time that happens, that's what I am going to write. I'm just a guy on the book. Anytime someone does ask me to sign. The book, the cover of the book, I have a copy right here. So the hidden message in it is "more jumping."

Rudi

So it's No More Monkeys Jumping on The Bed and Other Things the Doctor Never Said. But we've got in red "more jumping" as the hidden message. So we try to have fun with that.

Rudi

So anytime I've signed a book for someone, I always underline the more jumping. But, yeah, it's been cool to see a lot of parents of our generation remember or access something that they sort of know is wrong and kind of bring that out. And then again, for the older generations, it's been cool. So sort of, for our parents' generation, it's been cool to see them sort of co-sign and say, yes. More of this.

Olga

Yeah. And I love that the whole rough housing before bed as part of the bedtime routine. This is counterintuitive, actually, because a lot of the advice about bedtime is to slow down, dim the lights, twinkle, twinkle, little star. And I think, as you say, a lot of dads are really intuitive about this, and kids are very intuitive about this. What they actually need is jumping and play fighting.

Olga

This can be so regulating for children before they actually sleep.

Rudi

Think how comforting it is for them to know that the biggest person in their life loves them so much and is so strong compared to them. Yeah, what a resting, regulating thing to do. And of course, I let him win like I let him. You got to find that, right? Balance it.

Rudi

Where again, it's just hilarious, the look he gets on his face. And he knows that I'm letting him win, but he also knows that his dad loves him and that his dad is strong and is going to protect him. What a great way to end your day. Every day to just be like, okay, I'm safe, my parents love me. I'm in a good spot.

Rudi

It's okay to rest and to go to sleep. And he sleeps incredibly well. He's exhausted by the time he gets to bed every night. It's actually funny. He wouldn't have the way to say this, but he actually seeks it out.

Rudi

So he'll say, dad, let's wrestle. That's been something, too, that I've been trying to, as a parent, just be more keyed into. He's demonstrating a need of his, like, okay, let's drop what I'm doing. This is important. This kid needs this regulation.

Rudi

And so let's go.

Joe

Yeah.

Rudi

Okay, buddy, give me two minutes. I'll quickly put my stuff down, and let's go wrestle. And then it's just interesting to see his ask for that is really a form of self regulation.

Joe

Yeah, I think about it emotionally speaking as well. There's so much that can happen. There's so much defiance that can come out or resistance in any relationship, especially the closest relationships, like parents. There's so much frustration going both ways that can come out in really unsafe ways or wounding ways either way. But to be able to play fight just to allow that energy to move before you even got there.

Joe

The frustration doesn't need to move anymore. It's just done through play in a natural way. It makes such a huge difference to be able to have that space.

Rudi

Absolutely. My favorite play with him has been unique from my other two children, who we also did similar things with. But it's just cool to see how unique personalities bear out through the play. So the way the wrestling has sort of evolved over time with my son Arlo, is he wants to get a toy, but he wants me to prevent him from getting that toy. And then I will say, "You will never get the ball.

Rudi

There is no way, you will never get the ball." And I let him get very close, and then I'll pull him away. And then, of course, I eventually let him get the ball. And the look of euphoria and accomplishment when he gets it is so rewarding. And again, what are the things we're trying to develop in our children?

Rudi

It's like, oh, grit and perseverance and living out that drive and having a goal and not losing focus of a goal and really actively pursuing it, and in a very small way, acting it out through the narrative of play. That's what's happening. I, of course, am not thinking about those things when I'm saying "You'll never get the ball," but in reflecting on it after the fact, I like to discover these things through play. And then after the fact, I say, why was that so fun? What's the inherent thing in this?

Rudi

And I go, ah, he's developing perseverance and grit through this and it's very rewarding for me to see my son, who I love more than anything in the world, actively seek out a goal and actively accomplish that through obstacles, through different challenges, even if I'm the one that's laying out the pretend challenges for him.

Olga

Yes. And when we think about how regulating movement, risky play can be for children and how we can work with it rather than against it, that is a totally different perspective and can be so helpful for parents and teachers who are trying to calm the child down, get them to sit still, get them to pay attention when they actually move. They might be actually not able to pay attention when they have to sit still. All they're paying attention to is sitting still because it's so hard for them, because what they need to do is move. When they're allowed to move, you have a chance to get their attention.

Rudi

That's another one of those paradoxes of adulthood where you're wanting them to sit still and pay attention, but in order to access that level of regulation, you need them to move. And so unfortunately, this is the case in the States. I would imagine it's similar in the UK, is recess time, as standards of education have theoretically increased. Hey, we need to have more minutes per day in the classroom or x number of hours per year on reading, writing, arithmetic, all of that, which is good, or maybe good in concept, but the practical reality has been, as we've leaned more into that, outdoor and playtime has gone down. And then we wonder why there's all of these quote unquote "new behavior" problems amongst students and a huge percentage,

Rudi

I'm not suggesting that there's no such thing as ADD or ADHD or anything like that, but the massive prevalence of it certainly has a lot to do with the fact that we're sticking kids in seats and expecting them to sit still, which is not something that they are developmentally designed to do. One of the great things about the Dr. Gray book, Free to Learn, that we were talking about earlier is he's actually done all of the meta research of all of the anthropology of sort of the unreached peoples, unreached tribes anywhere around the planet. In other words, people who are doing things the way that they have been done for thousands of years, and sort of tribes in untapped areas of the Amazon, for instance, and the children in those tribes are interacting with their environment, literally from sunrise to sundown, constant movement. And that's in our genetic heritage for all of us. That is how humanity has developed over time.

Rudi

And so we quite literally are not designed, especially as children, to sit in a room and listen without movement. It almost has the potential to take on a prison-like existence. It just is the opposite of how children are naturally designed to be. That's my encouragement for parents and schools. And I'm in education in my day job.

Rudi

I'm not actually like a full time author or anything like that. Yeah, I work at a Christian school, actually, the school that I grew up in here in Wisconsin. I'm back to my alma mater, preschool through twelfth grade school system in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. There's a give and take, of course, like we have within that school and within education in general, we have high academic standards, and so we want to achieve those standards. But the great irony is, especially for early childhood, the more emphasis you put on academic achievement at the expense of the child's play, the worse the test results.

Rudi

And so within my own school and. Within the educational system at large, as much as possible as we can return to a sense of movement and play. And that's actually the norm for child development, not sitting in seats all day.

Olga

Oh, this is wonderful. This is such important work that you're doing. We've really put everything into boxes and we're trying to tackle each box separately. So there's your literacy, there's your mental health, there's your, I don't know, childhood obesity, sports, and we're trying to tackle each one separately when they could all be solved through a more holistic approach to how children are meant to grow and learn.

Rudi

Whole child! It's sort of the adultification of childhood where exactly like you're saying, like, oh, let's not go and play in the backyard and we'll play some soccer or football. Sorry, just as friends, but let's have it be monitored by adults with training sessions. I love sports and all these things, but even from an early age, we're just not letting kids be kids. Even in the play. We're sort of imposing our adult standards on things and rules and things along those lines.

Rudi

When, if you allow children to do the play themselves, think of what it takes for a group of children to have some agreed upon set of rules for whatever game they're going to play. Maybe it's an actual sport like football. Okay, so it's just kids playing a game of football, and then there's a handball. How are you going to navigate who's in charge? Who gets to call that out?

Rudi

Are we abiding by those rules? Or does one kid get to break the rules and everyone else doesn't have to live by that? It's a little society at play where leaders need to step up within that society to help impose their own version of sort of law and order. You're giving them the space, Joe, I appreciate what you said earlier,

Rudi

to breathe and the room to navigate that and figure that out. And as an educator, that's probably the hardest piece. And as a parent, too, is like when you know the right thing in the example, like, oh, that was a handball, they should stop and go the other way. It's very hard as an adult that knows the quote unquote "right way," to know it but not act on it, to take sort of a distance approach where you're still monitoring things, making sure we're not getting into fights or anything like this, but you're letting the children figure it out for themselves. And then the big reward is when a student or a child actually does step up and take a leadership role.

Rudi

And then you see the sort of first followers within that saying, yeah, that's right, they're learning how to regulate. And Olga, you mentioned this earlier as a community, and that's what that is. And if we compartmentalize, that's really what we're doing, is absolutely not thinking about training the whole child. And we are also robbing them of opportunities for leadership and initiative and responsibility. And these are all things that, of course, as they grow older, are some of the most important things into hopefully them taking their place as adults in society and hopefully making the world a better place someday.

Rudi

And that all starts with letting them play. I feel like for adults, it's almost like it seems too simple. And we all, of course, think we're way smarter and we're the generation that has it all figured out. But it really is like the way we've just developed as a human species is like children are meant to play. So wherever possible, just back off and let them do it.

Rudi

Set appropriate guidelines, and they know what they know. Liam says, "That slide's too big for me." He found his boundary and, okay, so then he backs off, and that's the end of that little vignette. And there's even tremendous strength in knowing your own limits. And how cool is that for a two year old to actually be able to not only know that, but then, in his case, articulate it?

Rudi

It's pretty impressive.

Joe

And another thing that where we go wrong as well, when we've, like you say, robbed them of that chance to develop those leadership skills  and courage through play, just through free play. And then when we see it's not there for our children, like in school or education, we kind of just try and tell them what to do, or this is how you be courageous, or teach them responsibility. And when it doesn't work, because it's not experiential, it's not something they found. When it doesn't work, we kind of get frustrated with them, and we just go down the wrong road with it. It just doesn't work.

Rudi

Children learn responsibility by being given responsibility, and they learn leadership by being put in leadership situations. Think of how everything is learned. They learn to walk, and how many times do they fall in the process of learning to walk? And that's a very physical process, but it's all integrated into how we learn everything. And so when you're robbing them of all of these sort of micro leadership moments or micro responsibility situations in play, that is their world.

Rudi

That is how they're learning to integrate these things into society at large. And when we're constantly, the adults say no to things, the irony is you're unintentionally interjecting yourself into the situation, and now you're demonstrating yourself as the authority figure. And so now it's constantly, oh, well, we have a little fight on the playground. Oh, well, "Teacher, he said this." When I'm on recess duty, I am the most laissez-faire recess responsibility person, where kids will come to me and complain, oh, Billy said this or did this, and I say, "Go play."

Rudi

And in some ways, it seems, again, this is the paradox. In some ways, like, you want to help the kids, but sort of the deeper truth that I found over time is you're really giving them the gift of the space to figure it out for themselves, and that's really the only way they're learning these things. Otherwise, we've inadvertently taught them that tattling and seeking out an adult is always the answer. And of course, there are situations where talking to an adult in real danger and things along these lines, of course there's real reasons to talk to an adult. I'm not saying otherwise, but it's just remarkable.

Rudi

If you allow children to constantly come to you for approval of things, you're inadvertently putting yourself as the ultimate arbiter of all of their decisions. And then we're surprised when we have teens and young adults that are depressed and have seemingly no drive or no initiative in their life. It's like, well, of course, because we've interjected ourselves as adults, as the regulating body between them and the world, you have to let them eventually take their place in the world and play is the way that children naturally do that.

Olga

I have so much compassion for us as parents. We've not got the community to fall back on. We've got to do it all ourselves. Of course we're overprotective. Of course we helicopter, we do literally everything.

Olga

And then we've got to know the right measure in which to do things, where to control and where to step back. This is a lot. I was just going to say this. This is a lot. And I think we've got to sort of appreciate the complexity of it.

Rudi

Yes. I think also, just for the record, I am not some completed work as a parent. Like, I have it all figured out or anything. And I'm writing this book very much to myself and it's inspirational as well as aspirational for me, where I hope that best version of myself, parents, like the parents eventually do in the book and not how the parents originally do in the book. But it is this interplay between the instincts you have to protect.

Rudi

It's sort of the spectrum of, on the one hand, safety and on the other hand, adventure and taking your place in the world. And Dr. Gray has a nice, again, so setting boundaries, letting kids play near a busy street and sort of just saying, like, okay, well, they're on their own adventure. There isn't a parent worth their salt that would ever do that because it's obviously so dangerous. And another thing he talks about is not forcing it either.

Rudi

So a child wanting to jump off of a high dive into a pool, if it's their idea, great. Liam climbing the slide made for eight year olds. If he wanted to do that and if he actually did it, great, it would be absolutely terrifying if he got halfway up that slide. Olga, and you said, nope, you started your way up that slide. You got to finish what you started.

Rudi

I'm an adult and I'm telling you how you have to do it would be terrifying because now you're taking part in pushing him beyond something that he's ready for. So on the one hand, don't want to. And I think, frankly, that end of the spectrum, there's almost no parents that are that laissez faire about things. But I think our society definitely tends towards rewarding the other side, which is protection. Exclusively safety.

Rudi

And exclusively protection is somehow considered the ideal or better parenting. And again, even in my own experience, I don't think I could have, well, I didn't write the book when I was a younger parent, and I don't think I could have.

Olga

Okay.

Rudi

So it's been very valuable. We actually have a big gap in our family, my wife and I. We have a 15 year old, a 13 year old, and a four year old. So there is a big gap there. I think just as a parent, it's been helpful for me to see that.

Rudi

Oh, look how our two great big kids are great. And just even being able to look back and say, boy, I wish I had let them do this more. And so I'm trying to be more intentional. I'm having that exact conversation, Olga, with myself and my wife, and I talk about this as well, of how can we be better parents for Arlo. That's a regular conversation we have.

Rudi

And I think having sympathy and empathy for parents in the situation we're in and trying to navigate the world that we're in and just always, every day, trying to be a little bit better, I think, is the real key.

Olga

That's lovely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Rudi. That was so much fun.

Joe

Yeah. Thank you.

Rudi

So it's really been, I feel like I know you guys from following you on Instagram and podcasts, and so my pleasure. And again, so cool to connect with friends around the world, around these really important topics, but I appreciate the opportunity.