- We allow our 10-year-old to go places on his own.
- He bikes alone to the library, a place that says that kids under 10 need to be present with an adult.
- It all started during the pandemic, but we agreed with other parents to let it keep happening.
Sure, turning 21 has its benefits, and so does 18. But 10 is the first magic number in our family.
When my son turned 10 in 2024, he entered a new measure of independence. He is now welcome to go on his own to places that had previously required a grownup to accompany him.
He drops in at the local YMCA, where he and his friends of age can swim, play basketball, or participate in board games, pool, or foosball (and eat snacks) in the “teen center.” A voracious reader, he can bike to the town library, which asks that adults supervise children under 10. He and his best friend have permission to walk to the video game arcade that recently opened in the center of our town.
It helps that Northampton is small — about 30,000 people — and largely accessible on foot or bike from our house. School, the Y, the library, and the arcade are all less than a mile away.
We agreed with other parents to let our kids roam
Visiting those places without a parent is the latest development in what I call “Not Knowing Where Our Kids Are Every Second,” a very informal arrangement among some of my eldest son’s friends’ families.
Allowing our children a measure of independence is our conscious but unfussy contrast with the helicopter parenting approach that became so prevalent between when we were young, in the 1980s and early ’90s, and now. Research backs us up — a 2018 study showed that children of parents who hover over their every activity are more prone to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem.
Also, under surveillance parenting, children take longer to learn how to do for themselves. With five colleges and universities nearby, the Northampton area is home to professors, including my wife, with plenty of stories about students whose parents try to intercede on their kids’ behalf, from picking their classes to complaining directly to professors, or even the administration, about a low grade. It makes me wonder how or if those newly minted adults manage to do their own laundry without multiple phone calls home.
It all started during the pandemic
Our journey into independence began, counterintuitively, during the pandemic.
School in the fall of 2020 was limited to classes on Zoom, a wholly ineffective way to engage with 5- and 6-year-olds. A handful of families in our neighborhood formed a pod and had the good fortune to find a teacher with a nature kindergarten background. Our kids spent the vast majority of their time that fall and winter outside, riding their bikes like a gaggle of two-wheeled geese and learning how to handle themselves, with gentle supervision, as they explored the world around them.
These days, as fourth-graders, they’re free to range back and forth to each other’s houses. That’s how they’ve been spending afternoons over the past few months.
Instead of participating in structured (and not inexpensive) after-school activities, they interact on the playground or entertain themselves at one of our houses, as long as a parent is present. Many of us work at home, so someone is generally around.
Though we tend to have a rough idea of where they are when they’re out in the world and when they’ll be home, we’re happy to leave the rest up to them. Most of them have other activities, too, like sports or music lessons. But when they have free time, they’re old enough now to figure out how they want to spend it, without the grown-ups arranging every detail in advance.
I want my kids to have age-appropriate independence
We parents are here to answer questions, offer guidance, and assuage doubts — that’s part of our job. But giving my kids the latitude to make their own decisions when the stakes are low is how they will learn to make good decisions when it matters. It’s part of how they’ll develop the confidence to advocate for themselves and to manage social and academic demands as they grow up.
Ultimately, offering them an age-appropriate sense of independence now is how they will learn to run their own lives in a way that has taken 10 years longer for kids 10 years older than they are.
In my house, at least, the kids are even folding their own laundry.
