I thought it was a brilliant idea, and so I mentioned it to the parents gathered at our annual street party. Because it was an English party, there was a tiny bit of food and an enormous amount of drink, and I waited until everyone was properly liquored up - that is, about 10 minutes after it kicked off.
My neighbours gathered in little groups talking about house prices and break-ins, as one does, and our children whizzed past us on all manner of wheeled transport - skateboards, bikes, scooters. They disappeared from our eyesight, screamed with delight, fought over water guns. Ollie smashed a bowl over another kid's head but otherwise peace reigned.
Our street is like a juvenile version of Night of the Living Dead - once a year, the children come out to play, glassy-eyed with freedom and staggering under the effects of sugar. The rest of the year, I barely see them. There are so many children, but you'd never know it because most of the time they're tucked away inside. It makes me nostalgic for my childhood, spent largely in a ravine in Toronto in the company of other filthy kids and the cigarettes we'd managed to steal from our parents. Thus my idea was born.
"What would you think," I asked a woman with a similar philosophical approach to parenting (that is to say, none), "if we made it a regular thing to just let the kids loose with each other?" I offered myself as a guardian. One evening a week during the summer, I would be willing to keep a surreptitious eye on my kids and theirs while they got on with the business of being kids - climbing trees, riding bikes to the park, fighting and making up. I pictured myself following a pack of them at a distance, like the world's lamest detective. Freedom, with a seat belt.
"Oh, I don't know," my neighbour said. "There are all those dogs in the park."
"Yeah, I'm not sure," said one of the dads. "Would you get insurance? What if something went wrong?" Many parents made sympathetic noises, but none of them was willing to let their children loose.
"Good luck with this lot," said another friend, who grew up in colonial splendour in Asia and is considered a rebel for the freedom she allows her son. "They all think London is going to eat their children."
Reader, I gave up. There was an unbridgeable chasm between the nostalgia we all felt for our helmet-free childhoods, with their parent-shaped holes and wonderful freedoms, and the chances we are willing to take with our own children. No one wanted to admit that childhood is safer now, by every empirical measure, than it was when we were young. Instead, they have the ubiquitous picture of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in 2007 from the hotel in Portugal where she was staying with her parents, stamped on their brains.
It seemed I was alone until I read about Lenore Skenazy, a mother of two boys from Queens, N.Y., who last week launched "Take Our Children to the Park ... and Leave Them There Day." The title says it all: She recommends taking your kids (from about aged 7 up) to a playground and leaving them for a bit to wallow in their freedom and make new friends. Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, thinks that only when children are let loose to play on their own do they learn invaluable skills of independence, problem solving and empathy. Not to mention having fun: Ask an eight-year-old if she'd rather spend Saturday afternoon being driven to kung fu and piano lessons by a harried parent, or building a fort in the park with her friends.
Skenazy got lambasted, with parents calling her crazy and irresponsible, and one New York newspaper labelling her a "moron." Many others joined in her experiment, though, braving disapproving stares to drop their kids off while they went for a coffee (or more likely, a good long chew of their fingernails). I'm with them. There are risks every time you leave the house, but "stranger danger'' is a vastly overrated concern, no matter what nonsense you hear from radio call-in shows. (Just looking at the U.K., a recent study from the University of Bournemouth showed that the child-murder rate has dropped by 40 per cent from the mid-1970s.)
"It was such a great day," says Skenazy when I call her. "It was so innocent and normal and unremarkable - except that it was remarkable. I mean, can you imagine a headline in the 1970s that said, 'Kids Play in Park, Experts Astounded.' "
Children learn bike safety at school, they have mobile phones in case things turn nasty, and yet we're terrified of taking them out of their egg cartons, which means they're in danger of forgetting how to play. Skenazy points out that some New York schools employ "recess coaches" to teach kids the rules of Mother May I and Hide and Seek.
Think of the flip side of allowing your children more freedom: You wouldn't have to spend so much time with them. They get the pleasure of hanging out with people whose company they actually enjoy - other children - and you no longer have to be the Eisenhower of play dates, arranging their social lives with the precision of the Normandy invasion. But it's only going to work if we all do it together, so open the door, take a deep breath and say it along with me: "Don't come home till the street lights go on."