The nervous nellies strike again. This time a 10-year-old boy was riding on the Long Island Railroad to see his friend last Friday. His friend's family was going to pick him up at the station. He'd done the ride dozens of times before. LIRR has no policy about what age is too young to ride alone, but his mom had talked to them before his first ride, and they said 10 sounded fine.
But not to one hovering conductor, who not only called the police, but wouldn't talk to the boy's mother when he called her after being harassed. Mr. conductor then held up the train at the station the boy was traveling to and wouldn't let him leave with his friends' parents until the police came and basically told the guy he was overreacting and should chill.
The scary thing is, these days, one could just as easily believe the police taking the conductor's side and charging the parents with negligence or some such nonsense. I've heard of some very scary official reactions to children who were well-trained in safety precautions doing exactly what they were supposed to do with the full knowledge, but not immediate presence, of their parents.
This particular story was posted over at Free Range Kids, a site devoted to reclaiming kids' rights to move about freely in the world. Lenore Skenazy, the columnist who founded it, writes that at the same time as she was being depicted as a devil in the media for writing about the freedom she gave her son, individuals kept coming up to her and recounting what they'd been able to do as a kid and how much they'd valued it.
It's true for me: I walked alone to the bus stop starting at 6 or 7, school itself at 9, and wandered my block and then my neighborhood freely from around then too. And the world actually hasn't gotten anymore dangerous since then, at least not in any of the ways people cite when they say this is a bad idea. (Of course even when I was a teenager and my mother told me to take a bus to the mall, the people around her reacted as if she'd asked me to go panhandle outside a strip club. But sadly, that was probably at least as much to do with the class difference of who takes short-distance buses vs trains in NJ as with stranger paranoia.)
What about you? Are you more worried about what might happen to your kids (or you) if they are given their freedom, or if they aren't?
Photo by Spring Dew.
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