Thank God CT passed Public Act 23-176 in 2023 explicitly defining that neglect must consist of "obvious danger" and that activities like walking to school or parks unsupervised are allowed. Here in Wallingford, especially during the summer, there's roving bands of children through teenagers on bikes and it's great.
Another possible culprit is the american car culture.
When everything is built for car drivers, kids -- who cannot independently drive -- suffer. They could ride a bike, but biking infrastructure is not great which makes it more dangerous (and thus, less parent-approved). They can't just walk to a friend's house or to hang out in the park, if they have to cross an intersection or a giant parking lot to get there, which the parents won't allow. Taking a bus to move around the suburbs can be hard/impossible. Their geographic range of classmates is constrained to anyone who could *drive* to school, rather than anyone who could *walk/bike* there, so it's much less likely that they befriend neighbor kids. All of this makes children end up stuck at home far more often than before. (and that's before video games and social distancing...)
> A few generations ago, in 1969, nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within *just one mile of school* walk or bike there.
Yes! I used to walk about a mile to elementary school (through this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rYVrgWrnBt2EQe67A ), and then back home again, along with my older brother and a friend from across the street, when I was in third grade and my brother was in fifth. It was fine! We often would cut through folks' back yards along the way too, along a stream that ran through the neighborhood, so we'd look at interesting plants and bugs, and generally see the seasons change. (And occasionally arrive at school with muddy shoes.) These days one might legitimately worry about some of the neighbors freaking out and pulling a gun on kids "trespassing" through their yards.
This stuff _does_ happen, and I think happens more than it used to because there are a lot of people who have pickled their brains in right-wing media who think anyone walking through their yard might be a super-predator coming to kill them, and they believe the "castle doctrine" gives them the right to shoot first and ask questions later, if they "feel threatened" (which they _always_ feel).
Here's just one recent random example I found on a quick google search of somebody massively over-reacting to unruly kids.
On the one hand, yes, it's not that big a risk on any given day. The probability of something bad happening is objectively low. But I can understand parents being freaked out by a risk where the potential consequences _really are_ deadly.
No, you're really, deeply confused, and to a rather confusing extent. If parents are not similarly freaked out every time they put their kids in a car, and I've never one time heard of a parent that actively avoids car trips when possible for safety reasons, then this reaction is indeed objectively wrong, by several orders of magnitude of risk.
I mean this is getting into a whole mess of issues around how people perceive risk, and how they tamp down perception of it when the risky activity is thought of as unavoidable. People risk their lives driving -- probably THE biggest risk-to-life they have on a daily basis -- because they "have to" drive (because we've spent hundreds of billions of public dollars building a car-dependent society)...
I'm not saying that people would be _mathematically correct_ to feel this way, I'm saying I can understand why they would. I think even though the risk is still low, the risk of this kind of shooting incident is significantly higher than it was forty years ago, it's highly publicized, and it's something parents feel like they can control. So they try to control it. Maybe you think "legitimate" is the wrong way to describe it, whatever. I find it understandable / relatable. It's not the choice I'd make, I still am for something closer to "free range kids". But I get it.
You could also look at the discourse about Black parents having a talk with their kids about risks from police. Objectively, police physically harm a fairly small percentage of Black kids, but it doesn't seem crazy for parents to teach their kids to err on the side of being extremely deferential in a police encounter, to try to control the risk.
100% correct. My school district in a relatively dense city expects middle and high schoolers to take the metro bus to school. (It's free). This forced my kids to get comfortable moving around the City on their own at 11, and as a result they have had freedom to meet friends at destinations they get themselves to for years. And I'm not worried about CPS being called, afterall using the metro bus is the school district's plan. We do know some families who still don't let their middle schoolers go to parks alone, but my kids were walking home from elementary solo (through a park) starting in 3rd grade and there was always a contingent of kids doing the same.
My sister's kids in an exurb do not have this freedom. They are entirely dependent on parents to drive them everywhere they go. My nephew would like to get a part time job, but my sister wonders how they would get him to & from it if he landed one. Car culture traps kids at home while ramping up the danger if they do venture out on their own, which reinforces the norm that it's dangerous for kids to go places solo.
You can make the opposite case though - that American car culture created the "safe suburb" that caused parents to let their kids go totally free range in the 70s-90s. I don't think people would've been so comfortable letting their kids do whatever they wanted in that time if they were living in Manhattan or downtown Chicago.
I'm a big fan of dense, walkable neighborhoods, but I don't think cars are the problem here.
As a mandated reporter and foster parent I find the black box of what cps does and doesn’t make a fuss about to be kind of insane.
I’ve heard and seen things that make most people squeamish described as no big deal. And yet they can come into my home and demand all kinds of meticulous changes that have little bearing on things. It’s a system that’s so arbitrary it’s kind of hard to believe anyone wants this.
Of course I think there should protections but a world where making a kid kneel on a cheese grater for a few minutes isn’t abuse but letting them play at the park across the street is is hard to understand.
Children in other wealthy peer countries have far more autonomy. Whatever has happened in the US isn't some inevitable consequence of children not dying young anymore. Part of the reason could indeed be cultural shenanigans, but there is a glaring environmental factor being overlooked here: cars. Motornormativity. Infrastructure centered around or designed only for cars is such the norm in the US people forget it didn't used to be this way and isn't elsewhere. Children, of course, can't drive. If there isn't a safe, pleasant, short distance walk to the grocery store, park, school, and their friends', you've taken away their independence.
The thing that boggles my mind on not letting kids play at the park, is that the response to "it isn't safe to let the kid play at the park" should be "how can we make it safe for the kid to play at the park?" If that is increased police rounds at the park, so be it. Would be good for the kids to be comfortable with authority being present, all told.
And if you think it isn't safe for police to be around kids, the response to that should be "how can we make it safe for kids to be around police?"
Like, I take some pride that my neighborhood is fine with kids being out and about. Curious how that is not the norm.
When our son started riding his bike alone to school at age 11, the practice made him a bit of a celebrity along his commute. The real lesson came when he had trouble yanking his bike from an icy street pole, called me for a consultation that left us each more annoyed with the other, and then spotted a neighbor who happened to be walking by. The neighbor gave the bike a bounce, the lock came loose, my son forgave my temper tantrum when I saw him that night, and I started thinking he was too young to have a phone in his pocket...
“But the same forces that worked to eliminate child labor and exploitation and gave parents more room and incentive to invest in their progeny have also worked to strip children of independence.”
Are they the same forces? Or are (at least) two different sets of forces at work?
I’m hungry for an opinionated year-by-year breakdown of what kids _can_ do, supported by developmental science. We have this in detail for the first two years of life but to my knowledge there’s not a text of Oster-level credibility and popularity that outlines this for later years.
Is it really a scientific question whether a ten-year-old can walk to the park alone? I’m somewhat sympathetic here but it also seems a bit like learned helplessness to ask for a study for that, even if, as I doubt, one could be done, when we have so much history to rely on.
Ok, sure, I can definitely agree that, bracketing whether “science” as opposed to “experience” is the main basis, a book like that seems very valuable. In principle you’d want to say parents always know what’s best for their kids, but as sparse as our social networks can be these days a little more legible support would help a lot.
I agree with this analysis but I'd just add that the most striking feature of teens today is the lack of interpersonal skills. Social media has meant that socialising has moved from being in person to online. Sometimes I'm hanging out with my friends and they are more preoccupied with messaging people who aren't there than engaging with those who are there. As AI leads to the loss of many entry level jobs, it's those very interpersonal skills which my generation lack which will become more crucial in the job market.
I was babysitting the neighbor's kids at 11 and a half. I was the favorite babysitter. I used the money to buy record albums, posters, and when I was 12, costume jewelry and makeup. I would have felt uncomfortable asking my parents to buy me these things.
As for CPS, the issue is that it's a bureaucracy. The workers are paid by how many reports they file, not how many children's lives they save. That's how you end up with a large percentage of people being investigated by CPS, yet CPS doing nothing except making the situation worse. As a therapist who worked with kids, I watched CPS not intervene when a child was being hit in the home, not intervene when a child was watching inappropriate material etc. I mean a 7 year old child. The problem is that the only focus is on the question of remove or not remove. We need mandated preventive services but this doesn't exist; it's always a yes or no question, because if the conclusion is yes there's abuse or neglect the child has to be removed. So a lot of cases are closed as "unfounded" when in reality there was abuse or neglect, but the only option is removal and there aren't enough foster homes.
Those survey results are indeed wild. I was allowed to be alone at home with my infant brother when I was 10, and I did a great job with him, if I do say so myself. And I think of my parents as helicopter parents if anything! (And for the record, I also had unrestricted internet access years before that, and a Facebook account in early high school, and those things all brought me many benefits and no harms too.)
The parents that don’t leave their kids alone had the same childhood as you but rationalize that today’s world is so much more dangerous when it is in fact much safer
It would be very interesting to study how many of this CPS-calling ~36% of the public would endorse anti-incarceration, abolish the police, or similar positions.
The law should treat spurious CPS calls like spurious 911 calls. Bringing law enforcement down on your neighbors for no good reason is not acceptable social behavior.
This might be about to get worse before it gets better. From a state policy perspective, legislation has been trending away from child autonomy for the last two years, and that trend is only expected to continue. The pendulum against culture war issues manifested in parents feeling children are being "led astray" by the internet, by their peers, by "woke" schools, and therefore need more parental control than ever. The other elephant in the room is gun-related injury, which is one of the leading causes of death for 13-19 year olds, and likely also contributed to a heightened sense of fear among American parents.
This piece hits on a term that has almost vanished from our lexicon: the "latchkey kid." Today, it sounds like a slur for neglect, but growing up, my mom wore it like a badge of normal childhood.
My mom grew up in Claver Road in Cleveland in the 1960s. She was a latchkey kid at eight years old, walking home for lunch, letting herself in, while both her parents were out working. But here is the crucial context: she wasn’t actually "alone." She was surrounded by a high-trust network of neighbors. The neighborhood created the systems the childcare.
The shift Kelsey describes isn’t just about individual parents becoming more paranoid; it’s about the unraveling of communal institutions which created an overall more secure environment for kids to be unsupervised.
I think that is the forgotten “X” factor in why so many families have such a short leash on their kids now. We don’t really know or trust our neighbors, so we don’t feel like if our kid is out and about and needs help, a neighbor will step up. “Back in the day” it seems that neighbors DID step up, even if it was just to let the kid sit on the front porch while they called the parents, or even just gave the kid a “hi” and a wave which meant “I see you and know if anything will happen.”
This must vary between urban/suburban too. At 9/10 local primary schools expect kids to arrive by themselves (in walkable London). Obviously not possible if you have to drive to school. I see packs of 9+ kids alone in parks/walking around all the time. At 11 kids in London get themselves to school and back alone. However, for my parents friends who have to drive, this independence is never forced in the same way.
Thank God CT passed Public Act 23-176 in 2023 explicitly defining that neglect must consist of "obvious danger" and that activities like walking to school or parks unsupervised are allowed. Here in Wallingford, especially during the summer, there's roving bands of children through teenagers on bikes and it's great.
Glad to hear that hasn't changed about my home town
Another possible culprit is the american car culture.
When everything is built for car drivers, kids -- who cannot independently drive -- suffer. They could ride a bike, but biking infrastructure is not great which makes it more dangerous (and thus, less parent-approved). They can't just walk to a friend's house or to hang out in the park, if they have to cross an intersection or a giant parking lot to get there, which the parents won't allow. Taking a bus to move around the suburbs can be hard/impossible. Their geographic range of classmates is constrained to anyone who could *drive* to school, rather than anyone who could *walk/bike* there, so it's much less likely that they befriend neighbor kids. All of this makes children end up stuck at home far more often than before. (and that's before video games and social distancing...)
I am genuinely shocked at how normal it's become to drive your kid to school every day. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/school-car-lines-buses-biking/675345/
> A few generations ago, in 1969, nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within *just one mile of school* walk or bike there.
Nice data point there!
As someone who has driven my kid to school since 3rd grade, there are few people who are worse drivers than parents dropping their kids off.
Yes! I used to walk about a mile to elementary school (through this neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rYVrgWrnBt2EQe67A ), and then back home again, along with my older brother and a friend from across the street, when I was in third grade and my brother was in fifth. It was fine! We often would cut through folks' back yards along the way too, along a stream that ran through the neighborhood, so we'd look at interesting plants and bugs, and generally see the seasons change. (And occasionally arrive at school with muddy shoes.) These days one might legitimately worry about some of the neighbors freaking out and pulling a gun on kids "trespassing" through their yards.
No, that would in fact be a profoundly illegitimate worry.
This stuff _does_ happen, and I think happens more than it used to because there are a lot of people who have pickled their brains in right-wing media who think anyone walking through their yard might be a super-predator coming to kill them, and they believe the "castle doctrine" gives them the right to shoot first and ask questions later, if they "feel threatened" (which they _always_ feel).
Here's just one recent random example I found on a quick google search of somebody massively over-reacting to unruly kids.
https://abc13.com/post/man-charged-murder-shooting-death-11-year-old-boy-playing-ding-dong-ditch-mimbrough-street-hpd-says/17720828/
On the one hand, yes, it's not that big a risk on any given day. The probability of something bad happening is objectively low. But I can understand parents being freaked out by a risk where the potential consequences _really are_ deadly.
No, you're really, deeply confused, and to a rather confusing extent. If parents are not similarly freaked out every time they put their kids in a car, and I've never one time heard of a parent that actively avoids car trips when possible for safety reasons, then this reaction is indeed objectively wrong, by several orders of magnitude of risk.
I mean this is getting into a whole mess of issues around how people perceive risk, and how they tamp down perception of it when the risky activity is thought of as unavoidable. People risk their lives driving -- probably THE biggest risk-to-life they have on a daily basis -- because they "have to" drive (because we've spent hundreds of billions of public dollars building a car-dependent society)...
I'm not saying that people would be _mathematically correct_ to feel this way, I'm saying I can understand why they would. I think even though the risk is still low, the risk of this kind of shooting incident is significantly higher than it was forty years ago, it's highly publicized, and it's something parents feel like they can control. So they try to control it. Maybe you think "legitimate" is the wrong way to describe it, whatever. I find it understandable / relatable. It's not the choice I'd make, I still am for something closer to "free range kids". But I get it.
You could also look at the discourse about Black parents having a talk with their kids about risks from police. Objectively, police physically harm a fairly small percentage of Black kids, but it doesn't seem crazy for parents to teach their kids to err on the side of being extremely deferential in a police encounter, to try to control the risk.
100% correct. My school district in a relatively dense city expects middle and high schoolers to take the metro bus to school. (It's free). This forced my kids to get comfortable moving around the City on their own at 11, and as a result they have had freedom to meet friends at destinations they get themselves to for years. And I'm not worried about CPS being called, afterall using the metro bus is the school district's plan. We do know some families who still don't let their middle schoolers go to parks alone, but my kids were walking home from elementary solo (through a park) starting in 3rd grade and there was always a contingent of kids doing the same.
My sister's kids in an exurb do not have this freedom. They are entirely dependent on parents to drive them everywhere they go. My nephew would like to get a part time job, but my sister wonders how they would get him to & from it if he landed one. Car culture traps kids at home while ramping up the danger if they do venture out on their own, which reinforces the norm that it's dangerous for kids to go places solo.
You can make the opposite case though - that American car culture created the "safe suburb" that caused parents to let their kids go totally free range in the 70s-90s. I don't think people would've been so comfortable letting their kids do whatever they wanted in that time if they were living in Manhattan or downtown Chicago.
I'm a big fan of dense, walkable neighborhoods, but I don't think cars are the problem here.
As a mandated reporter and foster parent I find the black box of what cps does and doesn’t make a fuss about to be kind of insane.
I’ve heard and seen things that make most people squeamish described as no big deal. And yet they can come into my home and demand all kinds of meticulous changes that have little bearing on things. It’s a system that’s so arbitrary it’s kind of hard to believe anyone wants this.
Of course I think there should protections but a world where making a kid kneel on a cheese grater for a few minutes isn’t abuse but letting them play at the park across the street is is hard to understand.
Children in other wealthy peer countries have far more autonomy. Whatever has happened in the US isn't some inevitable consequence of children not dying young anymore. Part of the reason could indeed be cultural shenanigans, but there is a glaring environmental factor being overlooked here: cars. Motornormativity. Infrastructure centered around or designed only for cars is such the norm in the US people forget it didn't used to be this way and isn't elsewhere. Children, of course, can't drive. If there isn't a safe, pleasant, short distance walk to the grocery store, park, school, and their friends', you've taken away their independence.
The thing that boggles my mind on not letting kids play at the park, is that the response to "it isn't safe to let the kid play at the park" should be "how can we make it safe for the kid to play at the park?" If that is increased police rounds at the park, so be it. Would be good for the kids to be comfortable with authority being present, all told.
And if you think it isn't safe for police to be around kids, the response to that should be "how can we make it safe for kids to be around police?"
Like, I take some pride that my neighborhood is fine with kids being out and about. Curious how that is not the norm.
When our son started riding his bike alone to school at age 11, the practice made him a bit of a celebrity along his commute. The real lesson came when he had trouble yanking his bike from an icy street pole, called me for a consultation that left us each more annoyed with the other, and then spotted a neighbor who happened to be walking by. The neighbor gave the bike a bounce, the lock came loose, my son forgave my temper tantrum when I saw him that night, and I started thinking he was too young to have a phone in his pocket...
Great article.
I’m not sure this is precise though:
“But the same forces that worked to eliminate child labor and exploitation and gave parents more room and incentive to invest in their progeny have also worked to strip children of independence.”
Are they the same forces? Or are (at least) two different sets of forces at work?
I’m hungry for an opinionated year-by-year breakdown of what kids _can_ do, supported by developmental science. We have this in detail for the first two years of life but to my knowledge there’s not a text of Oster-level credibility and popularity that outlines this for later years.
Each child is different so it would be worthless.
Is it really a scientific question whether a ten-year-old can walk to the park alone? I’m somewhat sympathetic here but it also seems a bit like learned helplessness to ask for a study for that, even if, as I doubt, one could be done, when we have so much history to rely on.
Maybe not scientific, true. But I think parents are looking for guidance. What’s the best way to give it to them?
Ok, sure, I can definitely agree that, bracketing whether “science” as opposed to “experience” is the main basis, a book like that seems very valuable. In principle you’d want to say parents always know what’s best for their kids, but as sparse as our social networks can be these days a little more legible support would help a lot.
I agree with this analysis but I'd just add that the most striking feature of teens today is the lack of interpersonal skills. Social media has meant that socialising has moved from being in person to online. Sometimes I'm hanging out with my friends and they are more preoccupied with messaging people who aren't there than engaging with those who are there. As AI leads to the loss of many entry level jobs, it's those very interpersonal skills which my generation lack which will become more crucial in the job market.
I was babysitting the neighbor's kids at 11 and a half. I was the favorite babysitter. I used the money to buy record albums, posters, and when I was 12, costume jewelry and makeup. I would have felt uncomfortable asking my parents to buy me these things.
As for CPS, the issue is that it's a bureaucracy. The workers are paid by how many reports they file, not how many children's lives they save. That's how you end up with a large percentage of people being investigated by CPS, yet CPS doing nothing except making the situation worse. As a therapist who worked with kids, I watched CPS not intervene when a child was being hit in the home, not intervene when a child was watching inappropriate material etc. I mean a 7 year old child. The problem is that the only focus is on the question of remove or not remove. We need mandated preventive services but this doesn't exist; it's always a yes or no question, because if the conclusion is yes there's abuse or neglect the child has to be removed. So a lot of cases are closed as "unfounded" when in reality there was abuse or neglect, but the only option is removal and there aren't enough foster homes.
Those survey results are indeed wild. I was allowed to be alone at home with my infant brother when I was 10, and I did a great job with him, if I do say so myself. And I think of my parents as helicopter parents if anything! (And for the record, I also had unrestricted internet access years before that, and a Facebook account in early high school, and those things all brought me many benefits and no harms too.)
The parents that don’t leave their kids alone had the same childhood as you but rationalize that today’s world is so much more dangerous when it is in fact much safer
It would be very interesting to study how many of this CPS-calling ~36% of the public would endorse anti-incarceration, abolish the police, or similar positions.
The law should treat spurious CPS calls like spurious 911 calls. Bringing law enforcement down on your neighbors for no good reason is not acceptable social behavior.
“Around 35% of American families have been investigated by CPS.”
Wait…what?!?!?
This might be about to get worse before it gets better. From a state policy perspective, legislation has been trending away from child autonomy for the last two years, and that trend is only expected to continue. The pendulum against culture war issues manifested in parents feeling children are being "led astray" by the internet, by their peers, by "woke" schools, and therefore need more parental control than ever. The other elephant in the room is gun-related injury, which is one of the leading causes of death for 13-19 year olds, and likely also contributed to a heightened sense of fear among American parents.
This piece hits on a term that has almost vanished from our lexicon: the "latchkey kid." Today, it sounds like a slur for neglect, but growing up, my mom wore it like a badge of normal childhood.
My mom grew up in Claver Road in Cleveland in the 1960s. She was a latchkey kid at eight years old, walking home for lunch, letting herself in, while both her parents were out working. But here is the crucial context: she wasn’t actually "alone." She was surrounded by a high-trust network of neighbors. The neighborhood created the systems the childcare.
The shift Kelsey describes isn’t just about individual parents becoming more paranoid; it’s about the unraveling of communal institutions which created an overall more secure environment for kids to be unsupervised.
I think that is the forgotten “X” factor in why so many families have such a short leash on their kids now. We don’t really know or trust our neighbors, so we don’t feel like if our kid is out and about and needs help, a neighbor will step up. “Back in the day” it seems that neighbors DID step up, even if it was just to let the kid sit on the front porch while they called the parents, or even just gave the kid a “hi” and a wave which meant “I see you and know if anything will happen.”
This must vary between urban/suburban too. At 9/10 local primary schools expect kids to arrive by themselves (in walkable London). Obviously not possible if you have to drive to school. I see packs of 9+ kids alone in parks/walking around all the time. At 11 kids in London get themselves to school and back alone. However, for my parents friends who have to drive, this independence is never forced in the same way.