Would you let your kids do this?

Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone FreeRangeKids
I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun!

And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself .

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, ‘Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.’

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating ‘ for us and for them.

Wow, this blog entry certainly generated a lot of heated discussions if you read through the comments. It’s pretty interesting… has crime decreased because we simply do less? Or have we simply done less despite the decrease in crime?

It’s also interesting how much attention this has generated, in part because a lot of NYC kids commute by themselves to school via subway everyday.

For some reason, this brings to my mind a piece I read in 2005 noting how the majority letters to the editor to defending the practice of police randomly searching bags in the NY subway were written by people who did not live in NY.

Does living in “safe” areas make the world less safe?

Lots of interesting questions here.