On a recent Saturday afternoon, a 10-year-old Maryland boy named Rafi and his six-year-old sister, Dvora, walked home by themselves from a playground about a mile from their suburban house. Their parents were fine with that: they’re part of the “free-range kids” movement, a national campaign to give children more independence so they can learn self-reliance. But the police didn’t think it was fine: they stopped the children and drove them home. The family is now under investigation by the Child Protection Services. (Someone told me the parents work for the International Monetary Fund. Ed.)
This sort of thing used to be the norm. One of the milestones for first-graders listed in a popular child-rearing manual of 1979 – Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant – was this: “Can he travel alone in the neighbour-hood to a store, school, playground, or to a friend’s house?” That was just 40 years ago. Is the world so much more dangerous today? No: research suggests it has actually become safer. So why this paranoia about leaving children unattended? The goal of parenting is “to raise kids who won’t always be kids”, but they can’t acquire self-reliance overnight. “It takes time, and practice, and trust – trust in our children, and trust in parents’ judgement about those children.” (K.J. Dell’Antonia, NYTimes.com)
When I was six and my sister was four-and-a-half we went to a kindergarten, which was opposite a school with much older children. We had to walk home after school (no more than three hundred yards) every day. Often a gang of bullies from the school gathered opposite and threw stones at us, sporadically chased away by passing adults. This was regarded as part of growing up. We never complained to mother. She trusted us, and we trusted her judgement. It was a given that children should learn independence and work out for themselves how to deal with unpleasantness. I personally learned to stay well clear of loud-mouths, bullies and disagreeable people, and still do, as Epicurus advocated. Why is there so little common sense? Where is an intelligent Governor of Maryland when we need her?
This is all the fault of a sleazy media. It is even worse in the UK, where the Murdoch press has made huge sums of money by frightening the public with stories about child abuse. Unfortunately, some of it has been true (where was The Sun etc when the TV “personalities” were abusing kids in the 60s and 70s?). But now it has gone too far, and we are producing a generation of children who cannot trust their elders, are allowed no freedom, and are not allowed to use their commonsense or initiative.
What a way to sell newspapers! You would think the “reporters” would be ashamed.
Considering that crime in the both the US and the UK has dropped significantly in recent years, there is no reason not to allow your children to walk home alone. It teaches them independence and self-reliance, and it gives them a invaluable degree of freedom- all good values. But across the political spectrum, this faces opposition: from nanny-statist busy-body lefties to freedom-constraining paranoid ‘conservatives.’
There’s another possibility on which we might agree: let your young children walk alone in safe neighborhoods but not in more dodgy areas of the city. This would mean admitting that there is a distinction between relatively safe streets and unsafe areas. .