Too often, officials treat any child who ventures out on their own as being in danger—and assume the parents are negligent.
In Thursday’s issue of The New York Times, a question I’ve explored here for more than a decade was posed: “Is Letting Children Out Alone A Rite of Passage or a Crime?”
Reason readers recognize that, in some sense, it can be both: a coming‑of‑age milestone too often treated as neglect. A central aim of Let Grow, the nonprofit I cofounded, is to ensure the parents who grant their kids a reasonable degree of independence aren’t subjected to neglect investigations.
Yet the concern persists. The Times piece opens with the story of Mallerie Shirley—a tale first reported in Reason. Shirley, an Atlanta mom, allowed her 6‑year‑old to ride a scooter to the local park. A bystander who witnessed the child called the authorities. Two days later a caseworker appeared at Shirley and her husband, Christopher Pleasants’s, home.
Shirley wasn’t home, but the caseworker (recorded on the family’s Ring camera) informed Pleasants that a child would have to be 13 before he could ride his bike unsupervised.
Pleasants asked whether that was actually the law.
The caseworker replied that child protective services would certainly consider six too young, “because anything could happen, right?”
For far too long, that unresolved question has given the government broad license to act as if any child venturing out unsupervised (or staying home alone) is automatically in egregious danger thanks to negligent parents.
The government doesn’t share that sentiment about children being driven in cars, though “anything could happen” then, too. Kids are killed in car accidents every day. Nor do authorities deem parents negligent when they allow a child to eat solid food—what about choking?—or walk down stairs they could trip on. Allowing kids some unsupervised time is the net that keeps ensnaring decent parents.
The article cites several cases of parents arrested or investigated simply for giving their kids some time outside on their own: moms in Kansas, and Georgia, and Maryland. After those stories were first reported in Reason, some went on to become national news stories. (The Times writer, Ian Frisch, also notes my brush with viral controversy when I wrote about letting my 9‑year‑old ride the subway alone in 2008.) Some, meanwhile, stayed small. But the steady drip of such arrests and investigations has had an impact. It has moved the needle. “Eventually, state laws about child neglect began to change,” Frisch writes.
It has taken substantial effort to pass those “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which define neglect as placing a child in obvious, serious danger—not simply any time you lose sight of them. Thirteen states have enacted such laws. Three more (in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania) are currently considering them, and there is a bipartisan federal bill in the works.
The Times spotlights a few dissenting voices. One is the same vivid psychologist who, years ago on The Daily Show, challenged the notion that independence is beneficial. Another is a Duke professor who asks, “Do we want to err on the side of caution or do we want to err on the side of not bothering parents?”
That framing is the wrong question. Being investigated by the agency with the power to remove your children is not a minor inconvenience. The real question is: Should the state have the authority to turn paranoid parenting into the law of the land?
