http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

http://www2.nysun.com/article/73976

Left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale's (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun! And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.

Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn't strike me as that daring, either. Isn't New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It's not like we're living in downtown Baghdad.

http://www2.nysun.com/article/74347

When I wrote a column in this paper last week, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone," I figured I'd get some emails — pro and con.

Two days later I was on the "Today Show," MSNBC, Fox News, and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: "America's Worst Mom?"

Yes, that's all it took for me to learn just what a hot-button issue this is — whether good parents ever let their kids out of their sight. But even as the stations (and Web sites and Web logs) were having a field day with the story, people kept pulling me aside to say that they had been allowed to get around by themselves as kids, and boy were they glad.

They relished those memories — and thanked their parents! — and then in the next breath they admitted: They would never let their kids do the same.

Why not? Has the world really become so much more dangerous in just one generation?

Where will the next hang glider pilots come from, if parents are so scared that their kids have no understanding of their freedoms and capabilities?