Why I Let My Kid Roam Free Outside

When I heard the news that a Georgia mom was arrested for reckless conduct after someone spotted her ten-year-old son walking alone less than a mile from home, the first thing I did was open Google Maps. I looked up the distance between my house and a nearby middle school that my six-year-old daughter sometimes walks to with a friend her age. They get a thrill from playing at its playground without a grown-up around, and I relish the freedom of getting the house to myself for half an hour.

Still, I’m relieved every time I hear my daughter’s voice approaching our driveway after one of her mini-adventures—which, according to my Google Maps search, spans less than half a mile round trip. My relief stems less from my concern that something might actually happen to her, and more from the possibility that a neighbor or passerby might judge me to be negligent for letting her walk to a playground on her own.

Even before the story about the Georgia mom blew up the internet, I’d heard similar reports: the Texas mom handcuffed and jailed overnight for making her eight-year-old walk a half-mile home; the Maryland siblings detained for nearly six hours by police for playing alone at a playground.

Each time one of these stories makes headlines, the American public loses its collective shit. People from all sides of the political spectrum are equally outraged, agreeing (for once) that helicopter-parenting culture has gone too far. The same comments echo across the internet: When I was a kid, my parents didn’t care where we were, as long as we were home when the streetlights came on! Or: When I was that age, I walked home from school and babysat my younger siblings! 

The parents I know in real life are similarly supportive of giving our children freedom to roam, and horrified that we might get in trouble for it. One friend has printed out and laminated a “License to Roam” card for her eight-year-old to carry. If a concerned citizen tries to intervene, the child can present the card, which includes her parents’ phone number and states that she is not lost or neglected.

My sister-in-law, meanwhile, told me that two of her kids, ages 15 and 8, were recently walking home from the library when a nice older woman pulled her car alongside them, begging them to get in so she could give them a ride home. The woman was so distraught over what she perceived as the kids’ risky behavior that she thought asking them to get in a car with a stranger was better than letting them walk unsupervised down a familiar suburban street in broad daylight.

Though such lapses of judgement are well-intentioned, the chances of a child being either kidnapped or hit by a car are extremely low in the United States, and certainly lower than they were in the eighties and nineties when I was a kid. Yet in part because media reports tend to amplify violence and tragedy, such incidents can seem more common than they actually are, prompting some people to misjudge the risk of children acting independently.

Anecdotally, many of the people concerned by modern kids walking or playing alone seem to be folks from generations older than my own, who themselves had ample freedom growing up but may have watched too much CSI since then. My own peers—elder Millennials, mostly—have absorbed plenty of articles extolling the developmental benefits of letting our kids manage risks and build independence, and many of us try to encourage such behaviors.

A 2023 Pew study sort of backs this up, finding that only 28 percent of Millennial parents are “very concerned” about their child getting kidnapped. The same study found that Black and Hispanic parents are far more concerned than white or Asian parents about their kids getting shot, which aligns with demographic trends of gun violence and underscores the fact that free-range parenting is a privilege of living somewhere relatively safe.

Personally, I worry more about the societal or legal repercussions of letting my kid roam the neighborhood unsupervised than I do about some stranger snatching her up. But what if my concerns are just as overblown as those of the lady in the car who tried to stop my niece and nephew from walking home? Lenore Skenazy, who coined the term “free-range parenting” and co-founded the childhood independence nonprofit Let Grow, emphasizes that it’s extremely uncommon for parents to face legal action for letting their kids play outside or walk home alone—so uncommon, in fact, that when it does happen, it becomes national news.

In other words, just as the risk of a child getting abducted is minuscule, so is the chance that someone will call the police if I let my six-year-old explore outside with a friend—especially now that more states are passing free-range parenting laws.

Parenting is inherently risky. The world is not and never will be fully safe. But instead of being influenced by stories of what could go wrong, maybe the best thing we can do for our kids and ourselves is to focus instead on all the things that are still OK—like my daughter, skipping up the driveway with her best friend, her cheeks flushed from cold and excitement, coming home just as the streetlights are turning on and I’m pulling a hot dinner from the oven.