My priors weigh pretty heavily in favor of "if it makes the news it's probably rare enough that you don't have to worry about it", but as a counterpoint, we live in the same neighborhood as you and in the past ~1-2 years we've witnessed at least two instances of people calling the police on unattended children. Our neighbor's daughter (6-7) apparently went to the park without shoes on (she did not have to cross any streets to get there) and it seems that she crossed the street (the one the park is on) and someone called the police, who brought her home.
In another incident, our son (3 at the time) apparently escaped our notice and decided to go to the park (again, no street crossing), again without shoes. We looked for him on the bike path and sent our older son (6 or 7 but the size of a median 9-10 year old) to check the park. Our older son returned from the park with the younger one and an adult was following them and told us they were worried about our younger son being unaccompanied and without shoes and called the police. As far as we know the police never showed up, though.
Neither of these incidents resulted in any consequences for anyone involved and it doesn't worry me so much that I plan to let it stop me from free-range parenting, but it has made me think that "you let your kids play by themselves and then end up in a Kafka-esque CPS nightmare scenario" is more plausible than I had previously believed.
Can you further help by establishing a community feel or understanding that local residents shouldn't call the police? Like for example put public notices up somehow? On lampposts, public noticeboards making it seem like the default community spirit was to support such activities? Teaching kids your parents cell number is definitely a great idea, we taught kids that from 5. "If you get lost tell an adult your mum cell number"
This seems like a different worlds problem, probably related to social class.
Zvi cited examples from people personally known to him, not just "news stories," so the incidence is higher than the latter would suggest, in a way that you seem motivated to unsee. That motivation is probably related to why you're children are allowed to walk around in public on my own, while my toddler was not allowed to peacefully nap in his own stroller on our own front yard while I listened through the window so I could hear when he woke up.
I think the simplest explanation is that these things are behaviors one can get away with if they're sufficiently normalized in the local context, but not things one can functionally have the right to do, even if there's a law explicitly permitting it. Which is one of the reasons I wrote up Levels of Republicanism.
Zvi cited examples from people personally known to him, not just "news stories"
Reading through his post again I count one example personally known to him ("Update on that friend: They did indeed move out of New York for this reason, and then got into trouble for related issues when they were legally in the right") one friend-of-a-friend ("Scott Alexander: I live next to a rationalist group house with several kids. They tried letting their six-year old walk two blocks home from school in the afternoon. After a few weeks of this, a police officer picked up the kid, brought her home, and warned the parents not to do this.") and eleven people it doesn't sound like Zvi was connected to.
my toddler was not allowed to peacefully nap in his own stroller on our own front yard while I listened through the window so I could hear when he woke up. [link: "got the cops called on him for letting his baby sleep in their stroller in his yard by someone who actively impersonated a police officer and confessed to doing so. My friend got arrested, the confessed felon went on her way."]
I'd be curious to hear more details on how this played out, if you'd be up for sharing -- how did it start? What did the neighbor say? How did you respond? How did it escalate to arrest?
At that time often the easiest way for my toddler to take his daytime nap was to fall asleep on a stroller ride, and since we rent the second floor of a house, it was pretty difficult to transfer him from the stroller without ending the nap. So, sometimes we'd leave him in the stroller right at the front of the house, usually with one of us watching from the 2nd floor balcony, sometimes just leaving a window open to hear him when he woke up and called for us.
On this day I had the window open to listen, but instead of my child, I heard someone hollering "Hello?! Hello?!". (I later learned her car had broken down on our block, which is why she was there.)
I went outside (initially to our 2nd floor balcony) and somewhat grumpily (I think this was an important error that escalated the problem) complained that she was yelling right next to a sleeping baby, which seemed to enrage her, so I ran down to talk with her at less distance since I was a little worried at this point about what she might do.
She told me that this wasn't my child and demanded to see my "license," which confused me since Connecticut doesn't require a license to have a child, but eventually I figured out she meant my driver's license. She also claimed to be an "officer" and said she'd take away my child and arrest me, turned to her boyfriend, and said, "babe, get your handcuffs." I asked for her name and she refused to identify herself, then asked for a badge number and she said "152." (I have this bit on camera, which my lawyer thought was likely helpful in getting the charges dismissed. The police report documents that she also confessed to the police when they arrived that she'd falsely told me that she and her boyfriend were police officers.)
At this point I decided to take the stroller through our gate to the backyard, and since the woman claiming not very credibly to be a police officer didn't follow me, I called the non-emergency number of the New Haven Police Department on the assumption that, given a badge number and current location, they could likely tell me whether this was a real police officer or someone impersonating a police officer. (The police report I saw later described her explicitly as not an officer.) They told me they couldn't check anything without the officer's name since badge numbers are recycled.
At this point the police entered our backyard, asked me what happened (I stayed calm and told them what had happened instead of retreating into the house as soon as I saw them, which may have been my second major mistake) and then arrested me on the charge of child endangerment. I asked what the danger had been and they didn't have a consistent story - one said "he could choke on something", the other said he'd just come from a kidnapping call. (Since as I understood it stranger kidnappings of children are extremely rare in the US, I asked him afterwards when I saw him at the grocery store whether it had been a stranger kidnapping case, and he said no.)
That is really, really weird.
Now, ok, criminal do sometimes pretend to be police officers, e.g, as part of a scam.
I have once had to call the actual police when someine tried this on me — it really got th attention of the actual cops, shall we say.
The responding officer’s actions just don’t make sense here. (Whch suggests there might be something going on here we don’t know about)
The earlier Zvi post I linked to has other anecdotes, including mine, so the total count of those is higher. Since for obvious reasons anecdotes from people previously known to you are much stronger evidence than sensational anecdotes promoted by an advertising platform like most "news" publications, it makes more sense to mention the former and not the latter, than the other way around.
Incidentally while there's an obvious bad news bias that would promote overestimating the rate of such incidences, other factors suppress reporting. When this first happened to me, the sorts of responses I got when telling friends and family about it were mostly some combination of victim-blaming, and inventing a different, less politically inconvenient situation that they could take my side in (e.g. one friend decided that the real story was that the woman whose car had broken down wanted to kidnap my child). This made the whole thing demoralizing and stressful to talk about. In addition, getting arrested on the basis of an accusation from someone who was doing and admitting to an unambiguous felony while I was not, contributed to what I think is the rational impression that in some important respects I have more to lose socially from being seen as the sort of "loser" who gets arrested, than I have to gain from establishing that I have a legitimate grievance against the authorities.
Is there also a Europe/US difference here? Now, I’m British, and when I’m in the US I probably walk more places than the typical American would. (I have a reasonably good sense of when an area might be a bit dangerous).
So I wonder if in Europe we let kids walk more because adults also walk more.
There are some pretty good city walks you can do in the s. Like one time in San Francisco I walked through Golden Gate park, then the Presidio and over the Golden Gate Bridge into the Marin headlands. San Diego Mission Beach also pretty cool.
I think one of the main variables is the country where one is. You account for this more locally with "Be in a place where this sort of thing is reasonably common" but I don't think anyone in most (some? at least spain and germany) European countries worries about the police when deciding if letting kids do stuff alone or not.
Thank you for writing this. I think it's a bit humorous that the people complaining about too much fearmongering re. kids out on their own are themselves probably engaging in too much fearmongering about police/CPS.
When our kids were 7 and 5 they started walking home from school alone. We wrote explaining they were ready and giving permission, the school had a few reasonable questions, and that was it. Just kids walking home from the local public school like they have in this neighborhood for generations.
Online, however, it's common for people to write as if this sort of thing is long gone. Zvi captures a common view:
His post also references ~eight news stories where a family had trouble with authorities because they let their kid do things that should be ordinary, like walking to a store at age nine.
It's not just Zvi: parents who would like kids to have more freedom often focus on the risk, with the potential for police or Child Protective Services to get involved. While it's important to understand and mitigate the risks, amplifying the rare stories that go poorly magnifies their chilling effect and undermines the overall effort.
I showed the quote to our oldest, now 11 and comfortable on her own: "I sincerely doubt that a police officer would get mad at me for walking to school or to the corner store by myself."
She got to this level of comfort by spending a lot of time out in our walkable kid-friendly neighborhood. Sometimes with us, and increasingly on her own. For example it's raining today and she just came back to the house to tell me that she was grabbing rain gear and then she was going puddle jumping with two younger neighborhood kids. In a bit I'll stop writing and take her younger sister (age 3) out to join in.
Some other examples of being out alone:
Heading to a school concert the 8yo was running late and the 10yo was getting impatient. I asked her: "you know the way, do you want to go on ahead by yourself?" She walked the half mile without issue, with her watch as backup.
Both older kids will go to the corner store to spend their allowance (or busking money). They both started going alone around age 8.
At age 10 our oldest worked up to taking the bus to her grandfather's in the next town over.
Also at age 10 our oldest wanted some guacamole and we didn't have any avocados in the house. I suggested she could walk to the grocery store, about a mile away, which she did without issue.
Yesterday our youngest, nearly four, wanted to go on her own to the park. She's not ready to do this fully on her own, but I helped her through a version where from the perspective of most other parents at the park she probably looked like she was there alone.
There have been difficult times. For example, one got lost walking to swim lessons and called me, before being helped by a parent friend walking by who happened to be going to the same class. Or, one of the first times one went to the corner store alone a patron was acting kind of crazy. And at 5yo one decided to go around the block by herself without telling us. None of these have been cases where the police or CPS were involved, however, or where that even seems likely.
It's also not just our family:
I often see 8-10yo kids by themselves at the playground or along the community path. Our kids were out solo at slightly younger than is common in the neighborhood, but not by much.
Another parent told me about how their 7yo (2nd grade) was walking to school on their own but kept being late despite leaving with plenty of time. The parent decided to follow at a distance and discovered they'd been stopping to play at a swingset along their route. This was all recounted as a funny "kids being kids" story.
I asked one of my kids' friends, and they said in 4th grade (9yo) they started walking to and from school alone, about a mile.
A neighborhood parent who describes themself as "on the cautious end" has recently started letting their 8yo go to the park alone (which doesn't require crossing any streets) but are still building up to the corner store.
In other contexts people understand that it's important to be realistic about risks, and not give undue weight to sufficiently unlikely risks. For example, here's the same writer I quoted above on the risks of misjudging a romantic situation:
The chance of conflict with authorities varies based on who you are and where you live, but most of this risk-amplification is happening among demographics who are least likely to have their parenting decisions second-guessed. Still, it's worth thinking about how to reduce risk:
Talk with the kids about how they'd respond to an adult checking in: "my dad knows I'm here and is checking on me"; "I'm going to my grandfather's house"; "if I have a problem I'll use my walkie-talkie".
Similarly, discuss how they'd handle other scenarios. What if they get hurt? Lost? Hungry? Stuck in a tree? Feel like other kids are playing too dangerously? Invited to a friend's house? In general, a kid shouldn't be alone in a situation until they're prepared to handle the kinds of things that might go wrong there.
Make sure they know your phone number (I taught mine as a jingle) and/or have some other way to reach you. This reduces the risk that they need help and can't get it, and I suspect being able to talk with an adult who was checking in on them would offer a good opportunity to defuse the situation.
Talk with other parents. We spend a good amount of time at the local playground, and we know a lot of the other families there. In casual conversation I'll bring up attitudes towards kids being around solo, enough that if someone started asking around ("hey, is anyone watching that kid in the yellow shirt; I don't see a parent") there's a good chance someone would say something ("that's <kid>, she lives over there and her parents know she's here").
Be in a place where this sort of thing is reasonably common. In Somerville I see a lot of kids around by themselves; places where walking is a typical mode are probably good for this.
Think carefully about whether your specific kid is ready for the specific situation. Are they the kind of kid who can explain what's going on to an authority figure? If an adult asks if they're ok and they respond clearly the risk is much lower than if they won't engage.
These aren't just ways to avoid trouble with authorities, they're good proactive parenting. Work with your kid to understand what they're ready for, and help them take on challenges at the edge of their ability.
Overall, like most of parenting, it's a matter of finding a good balance. There are large benefits to kids of being able to spend time outside, visit their friends, choose how to spend their time, and generally become more independent, and while we shouldn't neglect unlikely-but-serious risks we also shouldn't fall into thinking these outcomes are common.
Comment via: substack