The War on Free-Range Kids Makes The New York Times

Thursday’s edition of The New York Times asked a question I’ve been asking here for over a decade: “Is Letting Children Out Alone A Rite of Passage or a Crime?”

Reason readers know it can, in some sense, be both: a rite of passage too often treated as a crime. One of the primary missions of Let Grow, the nonprofit I cofounded, is to make sure the parents who trust their kids with some reasonable independence are not investigated for neglect.

But they are. The Times piece opens with the story of Mallerie Shirley—a story first reported in Reason. Shirley is an Atlanta mom who let her 6-year-old ride his scooter to the local park. Someone who saw the tyke called the authorities. Two days later a caseworker appeared at the home of Shirley and her husband, Christopher Pleasants.

Shirley wasn’t home, but the caseworker (recorded on the family’s Ring camera) told Pleasants that a child would have to be 13 before he could ride his bike unsupervised.

Pleasants asked if that was actually the law.

The caseworker replied that child protective services would certainly consider six too young, “because anything could happen, right?”

For too long, that unanswerable question has given the government free rein 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 feel the same way about children being driven in cars, though “anything could happen” then, too. Kids are killed in car accidents every day. Nor do authorities consider 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 mentions 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 mentions my brush with viral controversy when I wrote about letting my 9-year-old riding the subway alone in 2008.) Some, meanwhile, stayed small. But the steady drip of crazy arrests and investigations has had its effect. It has moved the needle. “Eventually, state laws about child neglect began to change,” Frisch writes.

It has taken a lot of effort to pass those “reasonable childhood independence” laws, which specify that “neglect” is when you put your child in obvious, serious danger—not just any time you take your eyes off them. Such laws have passed in 13 states. Three more (in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania) are currently pending, as is a bipartisan law at the federal level.

The Times spotlights some dissenting voices. One is the same colorful psychologist featured years ago on The Daily Show who attempted to counter claims that independence is healthy. 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?”

It’s the wrong question. Being investigated by the agency with the power to take away your kids is not a small bother. The real question is: Should the state have the ability to turn paranoid parenting into the law of the land?