I appreciate that my mom was “overprotective” and didn’t let me go places alone til I was older, even though I always complained, “but Mom, other kids are doing it!” And guess what? Other kids were getting abducted too, including a very smart/observant/mature schoolmate of mine. Fortunately, she managed to get away. So being “intelligent” doesn’t make a kid safe from predators.

Let’s also keep in mind that predators come in many shapes and sizes, it’s not just the creepy guy who lives next door. They are men, women, young and old. In my town, there was a little old lady who killed over a dozen people and hid their bodies in her basement.

the same element who would gladly prey on her son were he to get into their car or van is riding the SUBWAY, ready to make a move on some vulnerable child. at the risk of being crude, she is offering her son up as boymeat to one of them…by their own admission, these people look for unattended kids.

i don’t like the subtext in this story…..

Millions of kids walk home from school everyday. No difference in taking a subway and is safer as a larger number of adults are around this kid.

“Fear Destroys” as Jon Anderson once so wisely penned.

With all of that , I want you all to know that I now have a 9 year old son. He, like myself, is small for his age BUT he is a very intelligent self aware young person (Lenore commented in her article that her son is 10 going on 40 and so is my son). If I still lived in NYC I would let him at least ride the buses by himself. And explore his neighborhood alone (but preferably with friends.. it’s much more fun that way). Thanks to the State of Connecticut, I am not allowed by law to leave him alone unattended until he is at least 12 years old. And by law, he is supposed to still be in a child safety seat in our car (because he is still not 80 pounds). I can understand that we all want our kids to be safe, but things are getting way out of control. What ever happened to just hanging out with your friends after school? We’re not letting our kids have the experiences they will need to become responsible adults. We now have college kids who email their school papers home to be checked over by their parents. I’ve also heard of many young adults who bring their PARENTS on jobs interviews! Enough is enough people. It’s time to let our kids grow up as we did. And if the start is to let our 9 or 10 year olds ride the subway for 5 stops or so, let it be. I only wish my son could have that opportunity too.

For they are far better informed about paedophiles and other crazies than we were as kids.

This also applies to the population in general, we are all far more savvy about kiddie fiddlers and far more likely to intervene in a situation that we feel is suspect or even just a little odd.

There will always be paedos, there’ll always be abductions,molestations and killings.

They will also always be incredibly rare.

So should we raise generations of kids to fear everything and everyone?

Riding the NYC subway in daytime is pretty much as safe as you can get, coz even the gang bangers and carreer criminals will look out for a little kid.

It’s little kids kicking the tar out of other little kids that is far more likely.

You have to learn how to survive on mass transit in
NYC. Them’s the rules and if you don’t, you’re at a
serious disadvantage later in life.

We know a lot about what’s going on out there, and it’s better to protect kids than not to.

(The story is hardly newsworthy, but it has stirred up a few comments)

I fully support Ms Skenazy’s decision, however were it my own child (I confess here that I have no children and am completely aware that if I did, I may assess the situation differently) I would probably have suggested my child took a friend (OKd by said friends parent, of course).

In the past (in my 70′s – 80′s childhood and adolescence for instance) this kind of independence was often possible and allowable, even with parents who might be deemed ‘overprotective’, because of the nature of kids to ‘gang’ together.

Admittedly getting away from the point a little, this ‘safety in numbers’ allowed me to explore the world and negotiate a microcosm of society with minimal risk. There was always someone else with you to give a different opinion on how best to respond to trouble, or to run for assistance if someone got hurt (no-one ever had their life ruined by a childhood broken arm – one of the most serious incidents I can remember).

My pal and I WERE confronted on a beach by an old paedo at the age of 11 at about 5pm. He offered us money to touch ‘it’ but shrank away into the encroaching dusk as we howled with laughter and shouted his suggestion into the twilight, drawing the attention of other adults in the area.

He was a silly old sausage, and we were confident, both that WE were smarter and HE was ridiculous. We were never frightened for a second, and I still believe, were never in danger.

Sorry for such a long post – but as well as wanting to moot my support for the active independance of children, I also wanted to suggest that parents who do want to encourage this, need to band together in their streets, apartment buildings and neighbourhoods and encourage their kids to know and explore with each other.

It’s an absolutely ridiculous argument to say that today, 9 year olds shouldn’t be allowed to do so. Are 9 year olds of lower intelligence today than they were in the past? Ludicrous.

I think the big difference is that folks are hyper aware of the potential dangers around, and tend to overreact a bit with kids these days.

But I think that by 11 or 12, most kids would be ready. My older son was barely 11 when he started taking the public bus on his own (we live in a small city). He was totally ready and we did talk about ‘what to do if’ kinds of things. But still, the other mothers here are shocked when I tell them he rides the bus on his own. Rampant irrational fear. It’s a shame, really.

Are you a fool?

In my grandmother’s farm neighborhood not one of the kids I played with is still alive. Army accident, hunting accidents, killed by father of girlfriend, drunk driving driver, drunk driving passenger, drunk driving pedestrian, fell off all terrain vehicle, cocaine overdose. Everyone of my generation on her “block” of farms was dead before 30. Every one.

I’m glad that all your friends lived, but to presume this is true of all kids everywhere is asinine in the extreme and insulting to the parents who grieve their lost children.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-al one

i’m sorry, not trying to be uncouth or insensitive or anything like that, but…..gay village?

we live in a society dominated by irrational fear. This fear all around us has been artificially created over a period of decades by the media in this country, that we too often blindly accept without

questioning. The media is all about selling newspapers and TV air time, and sadly, most of us aren’t interested in buying thoughtful analysis. That’s why the National Enquirer sells way more copies than

The Economist.

Proof of that is the many knee jerk responses to this article which are critical of Ms. Skenazy.

Most predatory attacks on kids – the VAST VAST majority – are made by people close to them in their lives. Adult relatives, neighbors, teachers, coaches, etc. That’s a well researched and documented

fact. On the other hand, it’s extremely rare for say a child molester to even initiate contact with a child in a public place like a subway system. I’m not saying it’s impossible, it is possible and it has

happened. Just extremely rare compared to all the other sources of child victimization. And when it does happen, the media blows it out of proportion, and we eat it up and think “this happens all the time to

kids whose irresponsible parents let them out by themselves in public”.

A nine year old who has been trained by his or her parents to take a subway trip across NYC is totally capable of pulling it off.

I applaud Lenore Skenazy for teaching her son to take intelligently calculated risks, preceded by careful training and conditioning. That’s what we all do in adult life, most of the time without even giving it a

thought. We do it every time we take our car onto the freeway with our kids in the passenger seats (again, a massively bigger risk of injury and death than sending a kid on a subway trip).

This is only one example of how fear has replaced thinking in this country and reduced the quality of our lives. I think it’s really sad. If you want to see what a society can be like without being dominated by

fear, visit Singapore or Denmark, where you’ll see kids on public transportation in inner cities all over the place.

Winston Churchill famously said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” I’ll take Winston over the National Enquirer any day of the week.

When I was a kid, I rode my bike wherever I wanted, the only rules were not to talk to strangers, and DON’T BE LATE FOR DINNER.

Times have changed. There are too many weirdos and perverts out there. Just bear in mind, that in order to save money, the politicians opened the mental wards in the early 1970′s, letting the mentally challenged out on the streets, uncared for. That accounts for the influx of ‘homeless people’, that we never had before.

Wake up, people. It is not safe out there. As an adult male, who knows how to take care of himself, I sometimes think twice about personal safety. I can only imagine what it must be like to be a kid.

Smothering your children only serves to create a generation of people who can’t do anything for themselves, and will rely on government to protect them at the cost of their freedom (just as you want to do to our children).

The likelihood of a child being taken off the street in a big city approaches zero, simply because there are so many people around, and most people are good. Your child is far more likely to be raped by a relative than by a stranger. Does that mean that you should never leave your kids with relatives?

this is one of my pet peeves. the helicopter parents. the bicycle helmets. the antibiotics. the allergy medications. the fenced-in yards.

jeez….let a kid be a kid. we all made it to adulthood and didn’t wear helmets and rode our bikes 5 miles away from home and played in the woods and all that.

these overprotective anal-retentive “parents” are just creating an environment for their children that will cause them to be immature, irresponsible adults that will probably end up running this country.

morons.

Yes they were, read the crime statistics for your state and county, duh. They may not have been safer in the Bronx is Burning era, but they were much safer down here prior to the crack war of 1987. They were measurably safer.

I was on the PATH subway coming into NYC in 1989 when I saw a 14 or 15 year old teenager push a much younger kid to the ground and try to steal something out of his backpack. The police intervened.

I think people who say that “nothing” will happen mean that the kid won’t get killed. I find that young teenagers walking through my neighborhood are approached by other teenagers, sometimes in a threatening bully-style way, every day. These pretend gangsters will challenge, “Where you from?” Which you have to answer with the name of my neighborhood, I presume.

This is definitely true of the Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and even Manhattan of 10 years ago and 30 years ago? Don’t kid yourself.

How in the hell does having one’s own sailboat Biff or Muffy, relate to a 15 yr old subway thief?

Lucky? The probability of anything happening is so low that it is ‘safe’ to let a kid do this. If you bring your kids up properly to be careful, observant, and know what they’re doing, etc. then you should have little to worry about.

It seems like oppression of your kids so they can’t think or act for themselves when most are quite capable by that age.

Kids are smarter than you think… give them some credit.