Free Range Kids

I encourage you to pay a visit to Free Range Kids; a blog by Lenore Skenazy op-ed columnist at The New York Sun:

Do you ever let your kid ride a bike to the library? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If so, you are raising a Free Range Kid! At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less.

Skenazy rocketed to fame (or infamy) recently when she wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son take the New York City Subway on his own.

There is a propensity to exaggerate the danger of giving children some measure of independence. High profile yet statistically extremely rare abductions of children have made most parents jittery about letting children out of their sight.

At ten or eleven years old I was allowed to hop on the bus and travel from our suburban Virginia home to downtown Washington D.C. - a voyage I made many times without incident. We rode our bikes all over kingdom come and hitch-hiked quite a bit too.

No I'm not suggesting that children should hitch-hike. It is probably a good idea to give them some more autonomy and reexamine the often irrational fears that cause us to restrict it.