How This Sparked A MASSIVE Parenting Debate Online | Episode 20

So, this might be crazy to think about in 2025, considering everything that we have heard about New York City and the subway system.

But when I was a kid and I was in New York visiting my family who has lived there for 30 years, when I was auditioning, doing acting classes and dance classes, I would very frequently ride the subway alone.

And this is not the only thing that I did independently as a kid.

My mom was 100% committed to raising independent, resilient kids, and that started with doing things alone confidently.

But apparently, that is very controversial.

So, a recent story about a father being arrested for leaving his three children at a local McDonald's has blown the entire helicopter parenting debate into the limelight in a major way on social media, which also perfectly coincides with a movement that author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been pushing in a debate that my friend Alex Clark has literally been having on her own social media this week.

And so, the questions that we need to dive into today are: how much freedom do young children actually need?

How much is too dangerous?

And why are modern parents so damn damn afraid of childhood independence?

But before we dive into that story, make sure that you are following our podcast page and please rate the show if you are enjoying it.

And if you want to come join me on tour this spring, we will link all of the stops and the links to buy tickets in the description below.

I hope that I get to see all of your beautiful faces in person and meet a bunch of you.

All right, so you guys might have seen this story already because it went mega viral last week on X, but basically this huge story broke on X last week after a father in Augusta, Georgia was arrested for allegedly leaving his three children alone at at a McDonald's while he attended a job interview nearby.

One headline from Everything Georgia reads, a 24-year-old Augusta man was arrested for leaving his children, ages one, six, and 10, alone at a McDonald's while he attended a nearby job interview.

And this story alone broke open a whole debate about childhood independence and autonomy and the changing trends between generations, because for a lot of people, they saw this as completely normal and permissible.

based on their own childhoods.

For example, my friend Hannah Cox, who was actually my boss when I was writing at the Foundation for Economic Education, she tweeted and said, helicopter parenting culture has to end.

This is insane.

A 10-year-old looking after their siblings in a safe space for a short period of time while their parent does something next door was normal like 30 years ago.

Another person said, a 10-year-old is absolutely capable of watching their six and one-year-old siblings for an hour in a safe public space.

This man did nothing wrong.

Safetyism is destroying society.

And guys, based on this, I completely agree.

Like I think back to my childhood, which really wasn't that long ago.

And at 10 years old, I had just gotten my Red Cross babysitter certification.

I knew CPR.

I was actively working as a babysitter and a mother's helper.

I was doing pet sitting.

I was doing little like gardening tasks for people.

I was working as an actor.

Like I was very independent already at 10 years old.

It was totally normal for me to go over to somebody's house and take care of their two, three, four, five-year-old kids.

I would go into stores alone.

I would shop alone.

By age 10 or 11, I probably had already flown as an unaccompanied minor on an airplane by that age.

But apparently, a lot of people online had had very similar experiences.

So again, this became a broader conversation about not just parenting, but also how our society and how law enforcement encourages and supports or does not support that kind of independence.

And so people immediately rallied behind this father saying this is completely out of line.

This is ridiculous.

Antonio Brown, the former NFL player, he even created a huge GoFundMe for him, which is now amassed over $70,000.

It had been donated.

You can see it here.

$76,000 as of this morning.

And to me, looking at all of this, this seemed like, it was just amazing.

Like this seemed like a rousing, unifying cry across our society.

Like people, regardless of their political affiliation and their background or their age, they were standing up for this man.

And more importantly, were standing up against a culture of safetyism.

And I still think the root of this story is.

However, there has been a major plot twist.

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But back to this very Shakespearean twist, Clay Travis and his group over at Outkick, they were able to actually talk to the Augusta police and they acquired the police report from this arrest.

And now it seems like the story isn't exactly what we were presented with.

So Outkick reported in their article, according to the report from Lewis C.

Blanchard of the Sheriff's Department, Chris Lewis, who's the father, quote, was not engaged in a job interview or application process during the time that the children were left unattended.

Furthermore, by his own admission, he was walking between McDonald's and the Hendricks apartments on foot during that period.

The distance between these two locations is approximately 0.4 miles.

And so now, based on all of these new facts and what is being presented to us in this police report, a lot of people are suspicious that, you know, no, this was not some kind of, you know, job application, going in interview, trying to make a better life for your kids, but that actually, it might have been some kind of drug deal because the kids themselves told the cops that their dad had to go deliver a backpack.

to somebody.

They don't know what was in the backpack, but he was in pursuit of delivering this random bag.

But more importantly than even that and what the dad was doing, according to the children, they were often left alone.

This was a very frequent thing.

This was not a one-time thing.

This is something that happened normally in their family.

Now, all of this information is actively coming out.

I am filming this episode on a Thursday.

It's going to be edited.

We're going to be releasing it on a Monday.

I am sure that we will have updates even then.

Maybe I'll even do one of my selfie updates if there's something crazy that comes out.

But again, the facts are still rolling out.

And so Antonio Brown has decided that he is going to keep the GoFundMe up until all of these facts come out.

He has also said that he has spoken with the family and the mother of these children.

They have apparently been homeless.

since last year.

He's working through what is true, what is not, if he still wants to give the money to the family because obviously people are wanting to support them, which I completely respect.

I think that that is the right thing to do.

Now back to the main point here, because this episode really isn't about this father specifically.

Even though this story isn't exactly what many people believed it to be, the conversation that arose from it is still vitally important, in my opinion.

And as I said earlier, it lined up with a broader discourse that was already happening online.

And the reason why all of that was happening this week is because last week was the one year anniversary of Jonathan Heidz's incredibly important book, Anxious Generation, which actually I have on the shelf.

Where is it?

Oh, right there, it's under my hat.

Basically, this book dissects all the reasons why the younger generations are so stunted, which, shock of the century, is partially due to this helicopter parenting and the lack of independence that we are talking about today.

The fact that these children were so sheltered and that independence and autonomy was never fostered in the home.

And because he has been celebrating the anniversary of the release and trying to bring this conversation back into the limelight, he actually posted about that point just a couple of days ago.

Take a listen.

What we did in America was: so, you know, you and I grew up during a crime wave.

There was a big crime wave in the 70s and 80s, and it started in the 60s.

And so there was actually danger of crime, but we still played outside.

Kids went outside, second, third grade, you're out with your friends, hiking around your town.

You can buy candy, whatever.

You're out on your own.

You learn to function.

You learn autonomy.

You learn to be a person.

And in the 90s, the crime wave ends, but yet we freak out about child abduction.

And we say, oh, you can't go outside anymore because you'll be abducted.

Jonathan Haidt is making an incredibly important point here.

And he actually directs people to chapters two and three of his book, which completely focus on this, focus on childhood independence and the importance of risky play, as he calls it.

Now, even though he has been promoting the book on his own social media and talking about this over the last couple of weeks, what has really taken off online is something that his organization called Let Grow created.

And that would be the Independence Challenge, where basically he encourages parents to put their kids in situations where they have to do something alone.

And he has been sharing all the parents who are doing this on his social media and they have been going incredibly viral.

Here's an example: Um, I'm giving donuts by myself in at six.

Okay, so here's the card.

So you, how many donuts?

Six.

And you're going to tell them which ones you want.

Okay, and if you have a question, if you get confused, just say, oh, can you help me?

You asked you asked the person to help you.

But I think you'll be fine.

See, you got it?

Yeah.

All right.

Here she goes.

We just sent Abby into the donut shop.

She just turned seven.

Yeah.

We're doing the

Jonathan Height independent challenges.

We do those.

Who is Jonathan Heights?

We do those sometimes.

We were inspired by the Chick-fil-A video the other day, and so we're doing it.

Here she comes.

You did it!

I mostly got round donuts, but one is for Jacob.

And my favorite part of this entire video is the mother's confidence.

Like she has become so accustomed to doing this with her son.

Her daughter is completely comfortable because the mom's saying, you've got this.

You have all the tools you need.

You're going to be great.

Go on.

And the girl just marches right in there.

That is incredible.

And you think about the types of kids that are in schools these days.

You, you know, you watch the videos of teachers who are saying, oh my God, Jen Alpha is just so awful.

They can't communicate.

They can't express their emotions.

They can't do anything independently.

Like, please, parents, help us.

This is one of the things that you need to do.

You need to make them feel comfortable being away from you, being adept.

It's so, so incredible.

Now, in this video, they also referenced a Chick-fil-A video.

that was the first one that really went viral last week so let's watch that one as well

he's so little

you just read anxious generation

and at the end they have this challenge where they're like we challenge you to like let your kid do something that without a parent the worst part is i can't watch

Because I can see like if he was gonna go do something confidently I was in there

I could see him ordering or even even if the blinds weren't shut, and I could just peek in and see him, like, okay, he's next in line.

He's got this.

No.

Oh, my gosh, he did it.

He's so little.

Hey!

I didn't have to ask the manager what I needed.

Really?

He just gave it to me, yeah.

They just served you?

Yep.

And then, yeah.

I got your hunting out.

It's so awesome.

He gave me some money.

And you can literally see the kids when they come back.

They're so excited.

Like, this hasn't been a terrifying experience.

They feel confident.

They feel secure.

They're so proud to come back and show their parents what they were able to accomplish.

That's something that parents should be striving for.

That's an incredible gift to give your children.

I mean, this is like the exact type of thing that my mom would do with me.

I distinctively remember because I was so shy, as I've talked about before, I would literally like hide in the cupboard.

If you guys watched my Sean Ryan interview, I would literally hide in cupboards, close the door.

I was so, so quiet.

I didn't want to speak to anybody.

Like, if I was with my family, that would be a totally different thing.

But I was very, very reserved when I was like five or six years old.

And my mom was like, this is a problem.

This is not going to work out in adulthood.

So she would, you know, take me to 7-Eleven, to Goodwill, wherever we were.

And she would give me like five to $10 and say, okay, I want you to go in there.

And you're going to get my Diet Coke.

She loved Diet Coke and you can get a snack for yourself.

But you need to find the item that you want.

You need to go and check out.

You need to bring back.

And I remember like sobbing at the idea idea of doing that.

And then, you know, the challenges, we didn't really call them challenges.

It was just things that she did, like they progressed.

Like I, you know, then started an acting career.

And I remember there was one time where I was in an acting class and it really didn't fit.

Like I was having a really hard time.

I wasn't really responding to the people.

I had had some kind of conflict with the teacher where I was made to feel uncomfortable.

And I basically came home and I was like, I don't want to go again.

I don't want to go again.

And my mom was like, okay, well, then you need to tell her.

You need to express yourself and, you know, go without me because you are, you know, a young adult, you're a tweet.

You You need to go tell her.

And I literally, I sat in the car, sobbed, don't make me do it.

Don't make me do it.

I was a very dramatic child is how I ended up being an actor, but like literally full on tantrum with the idea of having to go in and do something by myself, confront somebody, stand up for myself.

And my mom was like, sorry.

You got to be independent.

You got to learn how to deal with these things yourself.

This is a very safe environment.

This is somebody who cares about you.

They're not going to hurt you, but you do have to go do this by yourself.

That was an incredible gift that my mom gave me throughout my childhood.

And I would not be the same person had she not taken those steps, steps, had she not felt uncomfortable as a mother, I'm sure, watching her child cry and be so scared, but she stuck with it and I am better for it.

And I guarantee that all of these children whose parents are doing the independent challenge will be better for it.

And this whole idea, really, it goes back so much further than just Jonathan Haidt.

I mean, of course, my mom was doing this 10 years ago.

Other parents were doing this, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

It was very normal, but he has such a prolific voice right now.

So I think a lot of people look to him.

But we also need to talk about his co-founder of his organization, Let Grove.

Her name is Lenore Skinazzi, and she is the founder of the Free Range Kids Movement, which works very closely with Jonathan Haidt and his work.

And you might remember her, if you were paying attention to the news at this time, as the mom who came to fame 15 years ago for letting her nine-year-old child ride the subway by himself.

This is a headline from a 2015 op-ed that she wrote about it.

And she said, I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone and I was labeled as America's worst mom.

We are having a hysterical moment in our society, she writes.

We believe that children are in danger.

every single second that they are unsupervised.

And I just want you to listen to this first line.

Two Maryland parents stand accused of doing the unthinkable.

They trusted their kids, 10 and 6, to walk home from the park.

The children got about halfway there when somebody saw them and called the cops.

For this, the parents, Danielle and Alexander, have been visited by the police and child protective services.

Their kids were interviewed at school without their consent, and CPS even threatened to take their children away because they walked home from the park unsupervised.

That is their crime.

I mean, that is an insane and major overcorrection that we are seeing in our society.

And this is a story that Lauren knows well.

She then goes into her own story saying, this is all because we are having this hysterical moment in our society.

We believe that children are in danger every single second that they are unsupervised.

I learned this firsthand six years ago when I let my nine-year-old ride the subway alone.

We live in New York and I wrote a column about it.

Two days later I found myself decreed as quote America's worst mom on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR.

That might be the one time that MSNBC and Fox News agreed on something and that was 15 years ago.

That weekend I started my free range kids blog to explain my philosophy.

Obviously, I love safety.

My kid wears a helmet, got strapped into car seats, always wears wears his seatbelt, but I don't believe that kids need a security detail every time they leave the house.

When society thinks they do and turns that fear into law, loving, rational parents get arrested.

And that is not hyperbolic, that is reality.

And the stories that she has shared over the years on her blog are like genuinely nothing short of shocking and eye-opening like these.

She wrote, over the summer, a South Carolina mom who sent her nine-year-old to play in a popular park was arrested for not supervising her child.

She was held overnight in jail, the mother was, and her daughter spent 17 days as a ward of the state.

Another example she cited was that in the fall, an Austin, Texas, mom, who let her six-year-old play outside within view of the house, was also visited by the cops and then child protective services.

CPS interviewed the kids individually and even asked her eight-year-old daughter if she had ever seen movies with people's private parts, the mom told me.

So my daughter, who didn't know things like that existed, does now.

Thank you, CPS.

I mean, again, an insane over-correction.

This mom could watch, she was watching her children play.

She was within eyesight, and that still happened.

And this was 10 years ago, ago and we are still hearing stories like this.

I mean, Lauren and all of these parents were up against the exact same paranoia that good parents are facing today.

And I'm clarifying good because allegedly leaving your three kids at a McDonald's to go do a drug deal is different than, you know, intentionally encouraging parent-assisted confidence and independence.

I think we all can acknowledge that nuance there.

Now, another thing that has stood out to me as I've been watching all of this unfold is that it is not just all parents up against law enforcement and the government, it's parents up against parents.

Now I mentioned this in the introduction, but my good friend Alex Clark, who hosts the Culture Apothecary podcast, she has been talking about this issue all week on her social media, and she has gotten reamed online by parents in her own community who listen to her podcast, who follow her on social media for pushing this idea that they believe is so dangerous and unsafe and out of touch.

But she has held strong all week long.

I mean, it's probably 10 days at this point, because she knows that this is a root cause of so many of the issues that our society and our children are facing today.

And I commend her for sticking through that because, I mean, the comments that she's been getting have been insane.

And so now, over a week later, after some of these parents have taken the time to go, you know, kind of reflect, do some of the research, watch the videos that Alex has been posting on her social media, they've actually come around.

And now they're daming her and commenting and saying, really sorry for my emotional reaction.

You're actually right.

I should, you know, try doing this for my kids.

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Now, speaking of researching and finding better options for your families, as I was researching all of this, I started to think about other cultures because obviously, you know, I'm in America, I think through an American lens, but I wanted to think outside of that box and I was really interested.

Like, are people as terrified as Americans are?

Are they so concerned with basically keeping their children in bubble wrap for 18 years straight?

And I learned that no, no, that is not the case.

This is not how things work in a majority of the world.

Like take Japan, for instance.

This was the most interesting thing I learned.

This culture values independence from a young, young age.

It is a core tenet of their entire society.

And my favorite thing that I stumbled upon that I just cannot wait for you guys to go and watch is the fact that all of this is highlighted in a long-running, I mean like 25-year-long reality show called Old Enough.

And it is based in Japan.

It's a Japanese show, but you can watch it on Netflix now.

And it depicts young Japanese children running errands for the first time.

And it is so adorable.

It is hilarious.

Please watch this clip.

It's humor.

It's funny.

It's entertainment.

But again, this speaks to a much deeper issue of what is actually going on in Japan's culture and what they value.

Take a watch.

I mean, it's just that.

Every single episode.

It's tiny little humans and they're being secretly recorded by these camera crews as they go back and forth to the store.

Oh no, I forgot the curry.

I need to order this pho.

Oh my god, I forgot the cabbage.

And they just go back and forth.

You see them crossing the street.

I mean, it is just pure comedy, but it is also such a far cry from what we're seeing in the US where parents are literally getting arrested for their kids being out of their sight for an hour.

And yes, because I had this question, I'm sure that you guys will too.

This is not just fodder for a reality show.

According to Japanese people on Reddit, this actually happens.

This is what they said as they were discussing the show.

One person said, we sent each of our kids on their first errand a month or so.

before elementary school started.

It was part of getting them used to their neighborhood and surroundings and so on.

Another person said, it's definitely not unusual to see scores of elementary school-age kids going to and from school, as well as just running around the neighborhood being kids.

Another person said, I remember my mom sent me to buy bread and the guy asked me salt or sugar bread.

I started crying and went back home running.

This show is awesome, by the way.

Now, all of that being said, even though I'm incredibly happy that this actually does happen, it's important to note that in Japan, it's not just about being without your parents and walking to school alone and running errands alone, but this independence and this responsibility is fostered on every single level, not just in the home, not just with these errands, but also in school and in extracurriculars.

One Bloomberg article was writing about this and they said, this assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties.

This quote distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance.

Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have a pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess since they will have to clean it up themselves.

This ethic extends to the public space more broadly, one of the reasons why Japanese streets are generally so clean.

A child out in public knows that he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.

So they foster from a young age this responsibility, not just for themselves and their own person, but for the world around them, for the people around them, for the things that they do in life that they will then have to face the consequences for, even if it is as small as spilling a drink that you then have to clean up yourself because the staff member isn't going to come and do it for you.

And so knowing that and actually seeing it in action where it works means that this conversation is so much bigger than just having your kids doing things alone in public or doing dangerous things safely, as Jordan Peterson often says.

It is about instilling responsibility at every level and encouraging maturity, even at a young age.

Maturity is often looked at as such a bad thing in our culture.

Like, oh, you had to grow up so quickly.

You're so mature.

I think that that is a good thing for young people.

Obviously, it needs to be age-appropriate, but we should be encouraging that.

I mean, whether that is helping around the house or at school, caring for your younger siblings when your parents are busy, or even getting a job as a teenager, which is so crazy that that feels controversial or revolutionary, but it has become that.

American teens working just like normal jobs, after school, part-time jobs, that was on a decline for decades.

It is only in the last couple of years, I think, due to economic insecurity that that has changed.

And just think about that.

An entire generation was pumped into the workforce after college with no legitimate work experience, not having to show up somewhere or punch a clock or be responsible for their work or respond to an authority that was not their parent or their teacher.

And while I think that a lot of parents thought that they were doing the right thing and that this was a gift they were giving their kids, that it was a privilege that they didn't have to work, that they were, you know, protecting them, allowing them to be kids, that only hurt their kids and it hurt society as a whole.

I mean, this had a detrimental effect on our culture and it has now driven even more protective parenting styles and a massive over-correction and outrage anytime these people see a young person working or doing something independently.

Like there are so many stories of young teens who have been blasted on social media for working part-time jobs.

Like people go into Burger Kings or Dairy Queens or McDonald's and they take pictures of kids working or they find parents posting about kids working on social media and they basically go, oh my god, this is a travesty.

This is so appalling.

How could Donald Trump have done this if the economy is so bad that now the children have to work?

This is so abusive.

This is so awful.

And it's a 14 year old working the cash register at McDonald's and they literally think that this is some kind of child labor controversy when 20 years ago, this was completely normal.

And so I think the major takeaway here in looking at how our society responds and supports and how that differs from other cultures like Japan is that these cultural norms, they help parents shape their children's independence and it is far from being supported here in the US.

And the reason for that, the reason that is almost always cited is crime.

People always point back to crime, like Jonathan Haidt said in that clip that we watched at the beginning of this episode.

They say the world is different than we were kids.

It's far more dangerous.

Kids can't play outside because of everything that we've seen on social media and in the news.

It's so dangerous.

We just can't do it.

But we have to ask, is this really as big of an issue as we have been told or as we have just been conditioned to think?

Because violent crime against children has actually been on a decline since the 90s.

And yes, there was a crime surge in the 70s that made everybody feel paranoid, but in the 90s, it dropped.

And it has been on a steady decline since then.

In fact, between 1993 and 2019, violent crime against children decreased by 67%.

But even since then, the numbers have continued to decrease.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics wrote the rate of non-fatal violent victimization of persons ages 12 to 17 declined 85% in the 30 years from 1993 to 2022 based on the BJS's National Crime Victimization Survey.

Now, we do want to acknowledge that there was a slight increase amidst the crime surge of COVID in 2020, but the broader trend over the last 30 years does show a significant decline.

But of course, we also have to ask, if we're being honest about this, we're having integrity in trying to examine this, you know, is that because our society is getting better?

Is that because crime has actually decreased?

Or is it because parents aren't letting their kids outside?

So they're not putting them in harm's way to begin with.

Now, we don't have a firm answer there.

I don't know know if that can even be studied, but what we do know, just on a whole, is that reducing independence out of fear is not a net positive.

And there is a way to keep your children safe and out of harm's way while still encouraging their autonomy.

Because what we're doing now, this is only hurting younger generations.

It is setting them up for decades of failure and anxieties in adulthood, which is what Jonathan Haidt wrote about in his entire book.

And of course, the alternatives to all of this are no better.

The alternatives are that parents just drop their kids in front of screens 24-7.

And that is not any less dangerous, in my opinion, because instead of playing outside or walking to the park or doing whatever kids have normally done in history, they are handed iPhones and iPads and laptops and video games, and they are encouraged to stay sheltered.

They are encouraged to stay inside in this little digital bubble.

And not a single study that has ever been done on this subject points to children having heavily online and digital lives helping their development in any way.

It doesn't even stay...

stagnant.

It always harms.

It impacts language skills.

It impacts interpersonal relationship skills and focus focus and confidence and mental health.

And that alone is before you even start exploring the risks of cyberbullying and exposure to pornography at a young age, which is a huge issue on Instagram and of course, online trafficking.

That is the biggest risk for children in 2025.

I mean, in 2018, it was found that 90% of trafficking victims met their abusers online.

That is the direct pipeline.

And I'm not trying to scare everybody and say, oh my God, it's dangerous outside.

It's dangerous inside.

But you do have to acknowledge the reality of the world that we live in and that this is where the majority of crime against children is happening.

And yet, parents are thinking that this is the safer alternative, but we don't really know if it is.

And so, if you are intentionally keeping your children in bubble wrap, as I like to say, or hindering their independence out of fear, out of risks, the monitoring that you should also be doing, or maybe focusing even more on in 2025, should start with your child's online life, not following them around the playground out of fear.

And so, the lesson that I hope to leave you all with is that pushing yourself and your kids, that is a good thing.

And of course, you have to do those risky things safely, as Jordan says, but humans need responsibility we need autonomy we need to learn all of those things in order to flourish we need to be independent and resilient and that starts in childhood it is nearly impossible.

It's not easy to learn that as an adult.

You have to start that at a very young age.

And so everyone, I encourage you to go pick up Jonathan Heights book because it is just incredible.

I think it speaks to so many of the issues that are going on in our world right now.

Read the Free Range Kids blog.

Take part in the Independent Challenge if you have young kids and find ways in your day-to-day lives to assist your kids in developing this confidence and this competency that is just so vital.

I also don't want this episode just to be for parents.

I'm not even a parent, so maybe I shouldn't even be speaking to you about this, but I also think this is something that I need to hear sometimes, that young adults need to hear.

Like what can I, Brett, at 23 years old, be doing to encourage buoyancy in my life?

How can I continue to develop that resilience in my day-to-day life?

Like this is the way that we all learn to weather life storms.

This is how we become flexible and grounded.

And again, that doesn't come easily.

You learn all of this through very calculated, intentional, and safe growth and discomfort.

Discomfort is just part of life.

It is a necessary part of childhood.

And with the story that we saw unfold on X last week, even though the facts are a bit murky and maybe not that great, but the fact that people responded with a huge outrage about safetyism and wanting children to have more autonomy, that gives me so much hope that our society is finally waking up to this once again.

And I promise you, we will all be better for it.