Questions about Children, Safety, and Freedom

Over at AmericanFamily, Amber posed a series of questions about changing parenting norms and when we feel comfortable with certain situations.

I'm transcribing my answers here (with a few minor edits) after each of Amber's questions.

1) At what age is a child old enough to be left alone in a car while you are out of sight for between 5-10 minutes ?  ( for example to run into a store or pick up another child)

I've already left a child or children in a car by themselves in a friend’s driveway or outside the ballet studio for 10 minutes.  They refused to be left alone until the last 12  or 18 months, so it probably started when they were seven, or just before.

I might let them stay as a group in the car in the grocery-store parking lot for 10 minutes now.  But probably not.  They've asked many times to be allowed to do that, and I've always told them that it's illegal and that the police would come if I tried it.  Probably they will be ten before I stop yelling at them to just unbuckle and come in already.

2) At what age would you feel comfortable leaving a child home alone for up to 30 minutes?

As early as kindergarten, I would walk down to the bus stop while leaving a sick child alone back at the house.  The sick child would be alone for 15 minutes and I could not see the house from the bus stop.

We live at the end of a cul-de-sac, have a dog and an alarm, and no one could drive up to the house without my knowing it. There’s only one road into our neighborhood and only 27 houses. So that definitely affects my sense of privacy/control over our surroundings.

I might feel comfortable leaving the kids alone while I left the neighborhood to run a 30-minute errand by the time they are 10. But I probably won’t find that out until the day comes when I need to pick up something at the grocery store, the kids refuse to come, and I say, “fine” and run out.

I will be ready to leave the kids home alone in a planned way at age 12, I think. And then my biggest concern won’t be an outside threat — it will be that the kids might fight with each other.  From talking to other mothers, I think 12 is a common age for this here.

3) At what age would you let your child go play alone (no adults) outside in your yard?

I remember running into the house to prepare a snack or use the bathroom or do something quick in the kitchen --turning something in an oven after so many minutes, or starting something on the stove to simmer -- when the kids were three.  I didn’t let the leave the backyard but there was no gate or fence on the side near the driveway. I would sit and watch them from the windows for a few minutes before going back out, too.  I remember feeling like I was getting away with something.

That was on a tiny lot on a connecting road with minor traffic.

Now we live on two acres of land, the house is set back 250 feet from the road, and the kids have played outside by themselves since we moved here. They were three-and-a-half. But it started with me grabbing quick snatches of time inside, and extended gradually. Sometime around 1st grade, I would let them ride their bikes down in the cul-de-sac without me, as long as they were together and the dog was outside, too. I find that I’m checking on them so often (my greatest fears: skinned knees and sibling battles) that it’s easier just to grab a book and walk down to keep on eye on them.

Wilder goes to play at his friend’s house up the street and the three 2d-grade boys in our neighborhood run all over that corner of the neighborhood for 2 hours at a time. The mom in the corner house talks explicitly about wanting her son to have some of the same freedoms she had as a child.  (She has also allowed her son to carry his air rifle around while playing with friends -- he's not eight years old yet.  I've  had to ask her not to allow this while Wilder is playing there, and it was not a comfortable conversation.)

4) What age would you let them walk 1-2 blocks to play alone in a park?

We don’t live close to a park, but we let the kids walk to their friend’s house down the road and around the corner (a 5-minute walk) in a buddy pair in kindergarten. We gave them whistles and the adults at the other end were waiting for them. They LOVED doing this — they felt very grown-up about it, and still do.

Alone in a park? It would depend on the park. There are small neighborhood parks back in Minnesota where I would let the kids walk to play together now, at age eight.  All the parks around our house here are big multi-use parks with large parking lots and I don’t know when I’d be ready to let the kids play by themselves in those. By the time they were old enough, I think I’d worry more about why a bunch of teenagers wanted to hang out in a park.

None of the parks are within walking distance, but Calder and I have talked about when we'll feel comfortable letting the kids walk down to our creek by themselves.  Wilder has long-range walkie-talkies and we've agreed that, whenever we finally do allow it (probably late middle-school age), they will have to carry one of those.

5) At what age would you let your child have a sleepover with a friend from school if you had only met that child’s parent a few times in passing?

This happened twice with Elba last year, in first grade. She went to sleepovers with girls whose parents I barely knew. Luckily the first and second sleep-over invites she had received were from families whose parents are friends of ours.

---

Amber also asked about factors that affected our decisions.  I listed:

A. What I’ve read about children’s safety and the risks they face at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

B. The crazy amount of freedom I had when I was a kid — the summer after fifth grade, in suburban Minneapolis, I was allowed to bike two miles to go bowling with a friend. And ride the crosstown bus to the library. And ride my bike two miles to the lakes.

C. The fact that I have three kids all the same age. They can watch out for each other when they walk through the neighborhood or wait in the car.

D. The fact that my kids haven’t wanted to do things without me or be left alone until quite recently, so when they do ask to go on a sleepover or sit reading a book in the car instead of coming inside the ballet studio, I feel more comfortable myself.

---

Back in 2005, I wrote about how much freedom I had experienced as a child.  The question sparked a lively discussion and, summarizing some of the comments, I wrote a follow-up post about how class and location might affect our decisions.  Just this fall, I grappled with the choices another parent had made when Elba went on a playdate with a friend.

Comments

[Spacemom]

I also have troubles figuring out what is safe and not. Hard, isn't it?
I've also researched the NCMEC and I was surprised how many teens are considered missing because their boyfriends have "kidnapped" them.

[Jennifer]

This was really interesting.

I won't let my 7yo walk to the bus stop alone (it's 2 1/2 blocks; I can't see or hear the bus; we are new in this neighborhood) -- but that's mostly because I don't trust HIM, not that I don't trust other people. He's spacey. It could take him 1/2 hour to walk 2 blocks. When his sister starts kindergarten next year I think I might let them go together because she'll nag him : )

I would say my protectiveness is motivated mostly by what other people might think -- or rather by what they'd DO if they questioned my decision to, say, leave my 4yo in the car for 5 seconds. I'm convinced that if I left my children alone in the house, protective services would hear about it & whisk them away!

[Stefan]

I am not the limiting factor in what my kids, four, six and eight years old, can do, my wife is. By the standards of what I could do as a kid my kids are very overprotected. As a kid I could -- and I did not live in any crazy underprotected circumstances --: a) walk half a mile to school by myself starting in first grade or kindergarten (not sure), b) go into the city on a bus by fourth grade, c) go around Paris by myself without being able to speak French by sixth grade (and we're not talking about going down the street, we're talking taking the train in from the suburbs when we moved to Paris for one year). I was left at home or able to come home without anybody being home by second grade. I also got to play on building sites by first grade and climb fences to other people's backyards or building material storage facilities by first grade, maybe not with full knowledge of my parents, but I don't think my mother was clueless, especially since I did come back with occasional injuries. It's just what kids did.

So yes, the fact that my kids don't get to go down the street by themselves is pretty shocking.

[elswhere]

We've just recently started letting our 8-year-old stay alone in the house for up to half an hour or so, with our cell phones on and our cell numbers written up big and instructions not to answer the phone or the door or do any cooking whatsoever. She is ecstatic at the freedom.

The "official" age at our school district when kids are considered old enough to walk to and from school on their own is 9, or 4th grade. Before that, the teachers won't let kids leave unless they have someone coming for them, though that can be an older sibling who's 9 or older. We were letting our kid walk *to* school by herself--it's only just over a block away, and we could stand in the yard and watch her until she was on school grounds--but she was dawdling so much that we've started walking her there again. I've often thought that if she had a sibling, even a younger one, I'd give her more freedom--somehow it's more reassuring if there are two or more kids who can look out for each other.

[suze]

The one that surprises me (not just from you Jody but in many of these types of discussions) is the concern about letting kids play unsupervised in the backyard. I let my child be out in the yard alone from the time he could be/wanted to be, which was probably around two or even earlier (can't remember now). I don't remember having any anxiety about it. I'd check on him every so often.
When he was four he took to opening the front door (when he got tall enough to do so) and walking to another house and asking to go in there and play with their kids- sometimes he'd been gone for five minutes before I noticed!
He first walked to a local shop alone (5 minutes away) to buy some milk when he was eight. I think he was about six or seven when I'd leave him home alone for five minutes to walk to the same shop myself.
However, now that he's 10 he's completely regressed! He refuses to go to the shop alone and isn't keen on walking to school alone (he hasn't done so but we've raised it as a possibility with him). I think he's got very cold feet about growing up.

[DaniGirl]

This was really interesting to read, as I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I think I'm going to borrow this one as a meme for next week, actually. I'm pretty much in agreement with you on most of these.

[Michele S]

What an interesting list of questions. I think where you live and if you had your children in packs makes a difference. For instance, my backyard is enclosed with a 6 foot high privacy brick wall and the front yard is enclosed with wrought iron. You can't get in unless you jump over. So I've let my kids out back to play since they were about 18 months, alone, for short periods. It was child-proof and practically an extenstion of our den. But it's not like they were alone. They had each other to sit with in the sandbox. I wonder if I had one kid first, Austin would have wanted me out there with him? KWIM?

[K]

My kids are 6 & 9. The 9 year old is allowed to roam free and go to parks by herself and stay home alone. She can take off on her bike and go have adventures. I'd say she has similar freedoms to the ones I had growing up. We live in Wisconsin and this is not unusual up here.

The 6 year old isn't quite there yet. Our rule is that they can't take off on their own until they can swim. (We live by a big lake.)

We haven't done sleepovers with people we don't know, though. It just hasn't come up yet. All of their close friends live in our neighborhood.

I don't leave the kids alone in the car - It's way too cold here right now to do that! They'd freeze. And I can't imagine what it is like without winter right now. It seems like so long ago that it wasn't winter...

[Jennifer]

I've answered this over at my blog, but what I find interesting is that the thing I worry about most is traffic, which doesn't figure directly in the questions. Maybe that's because I remember a 7 year old around the corner dying in a bike accident on a busy-ish road when I was a child (busy enough to have a traffic light at one end). I can't imagine anyone letting a 7 year old ride a bike on a road that had more than one car every 10 minutes, these days.

[stefan]

Like Jennifer, traffic accidents are a big concern for me, probably the only one I see as justifying serious restrictions on my kids liberties beyond what I experienced. Cars are very dangerous and you don't get enough safe close calls to keep kids careful enough. And I did manager one pretty bad bike-car accent as a kid, hitting a wall trying to avoid a car, and one kid I played with did die as a ten year old from being hit by a car at an intersection, for a long time the only contemporary acquaintance of mine to die.

BTW, I recently learned that the average death hazard for ten year olds in the US is less than 1/10,000 per year, for Germany closer to 1/30,000 or even 1/40,000 in Japan. So older child deaths are very rare, even averaging over everybody. See life tables at mortality.org.

[ccw]

I cannot recall at what age I started leaving kids in the car while I ran in somewhere. No doubt young if I was just running one of them in to a building for a lesson.

Teen L being 8 years older has made this tremendously easier for me. I started leaving her home for a brief time at about 10 and by 11-12 upped this for a trip to the grocery store or Kroger. Now, I have no issue leaaving her with or without the others for hours on end. You're right that the biggest problem I have faced is the fighting that occurs while we are gone. She knows not to answer the door ever and only the phone when she knows who is calling.

I started letting Teen L walk to the pool by herself for practice at 8 or 9. It's only 4 houses away and crossing one street. Her friends are not exactly near by so she usually only walks to their houses if we are at a park closer to their homes.

She has been able to be with a friend without supervision at the mall, etc or the past few years. Give them a phone and a time limit and off they go.

I let all three of the kids go out in the backyard by themselves and always have. Their is no fence but I know the neighbors, the kids have never left the yard, and I'm usually within the house where I can see them or am close enough that I know when they need me.

I would have had no issue letting her have more freedom at an even younger since the crime rate in our area is no different than decades before just more awareness of every single thing that happens but more parents restrict what their kids can do. I love the parents who do allow them to go the park together, etc.

[landismom]

At this point, the only thing stopping me from leaving them in the car while I run into the bank or whatever is that whenever I do it, they are invariably fighting when I come out. Last year was the first year that we let the Bee walk home from school by herself (on days that I was working at home), and it was nerve-wracking the first time she did it. Now, she routinely walks her little brother home from school on days that I'm here.

I think it was 3rd grade when we let her walk to her best friend's house (2 blocks) without an adult. We made her call us when she got there.

[Kirsten]

It's interesting to hear your answers to this. For me I haven't gotten to some of those points yet (with my almost 7 and 2.5 year old) and some of them I've been doing for a while.

For instance I let my 2 year old go out in the back yard by herself, and to even more often in the (enclosed) front yard. There's no way she can get out, so I don't need to worry about that. I'm more worried that she'll get bitten by a red back (like a brown/black widow), or eat chicken pooh. And I have been letting her do that since she was under 2 I think. But I don't think I let my son do this until he was at least 3.

And I've left my kids together in the car while I duck into the store (with strict instructions about keeping the doors locked etc).

But I don't know when I'll feel comfortable leaving either one of them alone in the house - not for quite a few years I think, but it's hard to say.