Do you want to judge my parenting? Then let me tell you: The police brought my 7-year-old son home last week because he was walking alone to my mom’s house.
Does it help if I tell you he turns 8 in a few days?
What if I tell you that we live in a nice neighborhood in downtown Colorado Springs where everyone knows one another?
I’m not fond of most parenting trends, but I do like free-range parenting; it makes intuitive sense to me that we are raising kids for adulthood, not childhood, and so we need to let them do things on their own. A 2023 nationally representative survey found that three in four parents of a child 5 to 8 years old say they make it a point to have their child do things themselves. Worry about the child’s safety, the same survey found, is the number one reason kids don’t do things independently.
