A few weeks ago, my nine-year-old came home from school and wanted to buy Beyblades, a spinning top toy that is the current craze in his classroom. After raiding his piggy bank, he begged me to go to Walmart. I couldn’t. I had 45 minutes to start dinner before taking all the kids to the dentist.
He said, “I can go on my own. I’ll ride my bike!”
I said no. The store was more than two kilometres away. He’d have to cross four lanes of traffic and navigate a huge, busy parking lot.
He protested. “I can do it. I want to. Please!”
Then I thought, why not? He believed he was capable. I knew he was, too; it just felt inconvenient to relinquish control. I changed my mind. We discussed the safest route, he buckled on his helmet, and off he went.
I tried not to worry while he was gone. Even though he’s my third kid and has spent years tagging along with older siblings, it never feels easy or comfortable to send a child out on their own. But it is our duty, as parents, to let kids go, especially if they are competent. They need a chance to prove themselves, and I wouldn’t want to stunt an opportunity for growth by making an irrational, fear-based decision. Worse yet, I do not want him to start doubting his own ability.
Meanwhile, that same week, another mother was arrested because her 10-year-old son walked one mile to the dollar store alone. Brittany Patterson, a mom of four from a tiny town in northern Georgia (pop. 370, no stoplights), left her son with his grandfather while taking another child to the doctor. Without telling anyone, the son headed downtown on his own. It was early afternoon.
A woman saw him and called police. An officer took him home, then came back a few hours later to handcuff his mother and take her to jail. Patterson was charged with reckless conduct. For charges to be dropped, she must sign a safety plan that includes designating a “safety person” who would always know her son’s whereabouts, as well as download a tracking app so she can monitor his location, too. She has bravely refused and, if tried, risks a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
As I watched the bodycam footage of Patterson’s arrest, I felt a surge of relief and rage – relief because I’ve never been arrested for letting my own kids exercise reasonable independence, and rage because we live in a world where parents are censured for letting kids do what they’ve done for all of human history, up until very recently, which is go out and explore the world. It is shocking, too, to think that arresting a mother is seen as “protecting” her child.
In an interview with the media website, The Free Press, Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and founder of Let Grow, a non-profit group working to give kids independence and free play, said that we now live in a society that fantasizes about worst-case scenarios. This shift is driven by two factors. One is the idea that any child alone must be in danger, and that any parent who leaves their child alone is terrible. Another is cell phones, which make it alarmingly easy for paranoid bystanders to call authorities as soon as they see a lone child, as incongruous a sight, as Skenazy put it, as “an escaped lemur from the zoo.”
Parents should be outraged by Patterson’s arrest. It should be up to them, not the state, to decide when to give children some independence. Of course, the state should intervene when a child is in grave danger, but that is not most of the time. The world is safer than it’s ever been. According to Statistics Canada, violent crime peaked in this country in 1992. In the U.S., it was 1993, and it has been dropping steadily in both countries ever since.
We need to normalize the sight of kids moving independently through the world. The more kids that are out and about, the less shocking it will seem. Kids need it, too. A 2023 article in the Journal of Pediatrics linked kids’ depression and anxiety to a decline in independence and free play, citing causation, not correlation.
As for my own son, he returned home with a huge grin. He forgot to lock his bike and had trouble finding the toys, but he figured it out – and even had enough money to buy two Beyblades. He said, “I want to do it again!” Maybe it’s my imagination, but he already seems a bit older.
Katherine Johnson Martinko is a Canadian writer and the author of the 2023 book Childhood Unplugged: Practical Advice to Get Kids Off Screens and Find Balance. She writes about digital minimalism, parenting and technology in her e-mail newsletter, The Analog Family.