give your nine-year-old kid a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20, some quarters for a phone call, drop him off at Bloomingdales and see if he makes it home.

For a really fun time, eschew the $20, MetroCard and the quarters for a phone call. Yee Haw!

This brings up all sorts of early childhood issues for me. The time my mom forgot me in the grocery store. The time I had to walk home from school all by myself in a new city. The time … oh dear God, where’s that therapist’s phone number!?!

Aggggh!

This is the best idea I’ve heard concerning child rearing in ages. Kids are WAY too coddled these days. Some of my best childhood memories are from travelling on the T in Boston when I was a kid. Skipping school for opening day at Fenway for the Red Sox is probably at or near the top of that list. The neat part was getting our absentee notice excused the next day if we had a ticket stub from the game.

I can still tell you the exact route from Belmont-
12 stops on the bus to harvard square, take the red line to Park Street Station, connect to the green line for seven stops until you reached Kenmore Square. My mom always taught me to give up my seat to any elderlys, and to call the cops if I got in trouble or lost.

I did this when I was seven. Nowadays this is like sacreligious or something.

Weak.

From the linked post:

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it.

Scared to lose a cell phone but not to lose your child?

Something is SERIOUSLY wrong (not to mention inconsistent) with that picture.

According to the original story, the kid lives on or very near West 34th. I’d say that any parent who didn’t let their kids get back there on their own from Bloomie’s was guilty of child abuse. For those who don’t know NYC, that put you on the Lexington Avenue line, the richest subway line in the city, so to speak, on the upper and middle East Side, the richest part of the city. And taking the cross-town bus from there? Well, I suppose that at rush hour there’s a danger of getting stepped on. But, otherwise, that’s remarkably safe. I think I’d go for something quite intermediate before making Queens the next adventure — the lower East Side, maybe? Chelsea?

Back in the day (about 1975) during the epic 3-week snow, the bus ran down Estes, my mom put my brothers, 13 and 9, on the bus, gave them $5 and told them to ride all day. I can’t imagine doing that now. My neighbors even drive their kids the block-and-a-half to school. In fairness, there’s a busy street crossing involved, but honestly, I confess that I’m part of the generation that overcoddles our kids.

I think I’d go for something quite intermediate before making Queens the next adventure — the lower East Side, maybe? Chelsea?

Hell, I won’t go to Alphabet City.

But some of the best clubs are there! Well, I guess they would ID a 9 year old, so there would be no point.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. First of all, I have to consider the location. NYC is pedestrian, Nashville is not. Kids do need to know how to get around NYC if that is where they live. But 9 years old seems too young to me. Elementary age children don’t have the cognitive skills yet to make proper decisions. If it were me, I’d wait a few more years before training my child in that matter. And I don’t think I’d let them go solo the first few times out. That’s something they would need to work up to.

Knowing how to use public transportation is a good life skill in general, so I think when the time comes, I’d start with riding a Metro bus with my kid(s) or taking a family ride on the Nashville Star. Just like with the NYC scenario, they wouldn’t go solo until they had some training and had shown they could handle it.

The thing is, she doesn’t think her child is mature enough to hang on to a cell phone for the time it takes him to get from where she dumped him, back to the house. YET, she thinks he’s mature enough to wonder around the big apple by himself.

There’s a major disconnect there if you ask me.

On snow days my parents would take me to the UT campus (where they worked) and let me loose - when I was about that age.

I didn’t even have a few quarters.

I would hope that this proposed adventure is the final exam that followed some serious mentoring, smaller experimentation, and sound counsel….rather than the first time a 9 year-old is pushed from a moving car at the mall entrance (figuratively speaking, of course).

Weighing fears for the security of our children and the need to make them more independent is not a comfortable decision for parents…and there is no one-size-fits-all rule for when/how/how much reduction in apron string tethering should occur. But ignoring the fact that independence is coming ranks pretty high on the poor parenting scale.

Just a tiny reality check here. Whether or not it was proper for the mother to let her child get home alone, remember that (unless his family is very unusual) he has been riding subways and buses his whole life. With parents or other older people, it seems, but that’s how New Yorkers get around. That would be how he and his mother got to Bloomingdale’s in the first place, that’s probably how he gets to school and home again, that’s how they go wherever they’re going. He’s not being confronted with a novel situation except in being on his own. Relatively few Manhattanites own cars.

When my mom was nine years old she got her picture in the paper for being the youngest child to ever fly in an airplane by herself (i.e., she was traveling by herself). I think it was United Airlines, if such a thing existed back then. Of course, air travel wasn’t as common back then as it is now.

Still, tossing your kids to the fates seems to be a time-honored tradition in some places.

I think it depends on the child. Some can handle adversity and fear of the unknown at age 9, some not until their twenties. Some, never.

I would have given the kid a cell phone. Dolphin is right about that being unnecessary and a little stupid.

When my kids were younger, I took them out into the woods, gave them a compass, and told them to meet me at a pre-arranged spot. They did well. There was never any danger, because the entire perimeter was fenced, and no strangers involved.

I struggle with how much to teach them, and when, but yes, over-coddling is a HUGE problem with our young people.

i think that most of today’s adversity is not really but imagined. we hear of one kid having something bad happen to them, then we begin thinking the same thing will soon be happening to every kid every day. you may think about the one bad guy looking at your kid with evil intent, but there are hundreds of other people who would be willing to help your kid, if he was truly in need.

For anyone interested in “liberal parenting tips” an acquaintance of mine has started this blog. She hasn’t weighed in on this issue there just yet, however.

[…] *Hat-tip: MusicCityBloggers […]

My father swears to the accuracy of this story, which is one of his favorites and which I’ve told before at my blog. Dad grew up in an apartment building, long since demolished, overlooking Centennial Park. When he was (supposedly) five years old, which would have been in the early 1940s, he asked his mother for a nickel so he could see “the ball game.” She assumed that he was talking about going across the street to the ball field at the park, and that the nickel was for a Coke or some such. (Nowadays, of course, you’d never let a five-year-old wander across the street unattended.)

But my five-year-old father meant something completely different. He took his nickel, used it to board a bus, got a transfer to another bus, and arrived at Sulphur Dell stadium, home of the minor-league Nashville Vols. My grandfather worked at the Post Office, and he and numerous of his co-workers had after-hours jobs working the Sulphur Dell box office. They all knew my father and let him into the stadium on sight, without a ticket. He stopped by to see my grandfather, who called home and asked my grandmother where “Jackie” was.

“He’s across the street, watching a ball game,” replied my grandmother.

When she was informed that this was not, in fact, the case, her immediate reaction was “…. but he’s filthy!”, shocked at the idea that Vols fans would cast their gaze upon her son in that state.