I’m thrilled to have cowritten this piece with Esther Wojcicki, author of “How to Raise Successful People.” We think that some of the most thankful people in America this year might be the moms you see on Instagram who let their tots do something new on their own — and that their children are super thankful too.

This independence-sharing moment started in the spring when Utah mom Stephanie Read’s video of letting her 7-year-old son go into Chick-Fil-A by himself garnered 1.3 million views. She recorded while she waited in the car for him, growing teary.

A few minutes later when he came bounding out with their dinner, she and her son were both so thrilled they couldn’t wait to do it again.

Then came other moms doing the same sort of thing, including one who sent her son with Down syndrome into a 7-Eleven to order a Slurpee by himself. “He walked out like he had just conquered the world,” his mom wrote on Instagram.

As two moms who have done some similar things, we are grateful to see other trusting parents starting to let go.

One of us — Esther — did this all the time when her three girls were growing up. She let them walk to school starting in kindergarten. Soon they were making dinner once a week. 

And then those girls went on to change the world: Susan (a former CEO of YouTube who unfortunately passed away in 2024), Janet (a Fulbright-winning anthropologist and distinguished professor of pediatrics and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School), and Anne (founder of 23andMe).

They were growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, though, when things were different, right? Fast-forward a generation. One Saturday, Esther had three grandchildren to look after: two girls who needed school supplies, and one boy who needed a haircut. So Esther dropped the girls, both 9, off at Target, and the boy, 8, off at the barber.

When her daughter called to ask how the tots were, there was an explosion.

“WHAT??? They’re WHERE? ALONE?”

Susan could not believe her mom had taken her eyes off the children, much less left them at Target by themselves.

Yet Esther reminded Susan of her  philosophy — tots need trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness (yes, that’s “TRICK”). After all, that’s how she’d raised her own brood. That is explained in her book and her app.

Calm was eventually restored. Yet when word got out about the excellent adventure the older grandchildren had, all the others wanted to do the same thing. The unaccompanied Target run became a family rite of passage.

Lenore’s story is similar: She let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone and wrote a column about it. The ensuing press firestorm inspired  her to write the book “Free-Range Kids,” and now she helms Let Grow, the nonprofit promoting childhood independence.

Both of us believe that when parents get a chance to see how much their tots can do, it breaks the cycle of anxiety in both generations. After all, that’s what exposure therapy is: fearing something but approaching it anyway, only to realize it’s not so bad.

Trusting our tots to do things we find mildly scary when they’re young allows us to keep doing that as they reach adolescence and beyond. The opposite — letting children do almost nothing on their own — ingrains the impulse to keep hovering. 

We’ve heard of parents who track their tots’ whereabouts in college and call them to make sure they wake up in time for class.

On the other hand, parents’ hearts fill to the brim when they see their children start doing something new on their own, from crawling to toddling to heading off into the world.

At last, some parents have started reclaiming the right to trust their tots and let go. The two of us are thankful for them.

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