Young children also walk to the elementary schools near me. When I’m at the park with my kids, it’s common to see other very young kids show up alone on their bikes or on foot to play in the park. This is in the US.

I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.

The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.

Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we happen to be free sometimes an adult will walk with them, sometimes we start walking with them and then stop for coffee with a neighbor while the kids continue on, sometimes they go by themselves.

I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.

I live in Colorado, we have a "free-range" law that protects parents allowing their children to play outside unattended. It's a bit sad that such a law needs to exist, but I'm glad we have it here.

In our neighborhood it's very common to see kids (including mine!) outside doing things by themselves. We bike with our oldest son to school (he's 7), but plenty of other parents let their kids bike to school on their own. I think it helps that we live in a city with good pedestrian infrastructure and lots of green spaces. The whole city is better for it and I wish more US cities would do the same. My sister's neighborhood in a different state feels like a very fancy prison, nice homes, but you can't even go to a park without getting in a car.

> If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit.

It depends of the town/location and region. In our town, police had to be involved several times due to different issues with creeps targeting 12yo or less.

Edit:And I forgot, as it's Switzerland, police moved only because parents were accompanying their kids and almost done justice by themselves. Protecting creeps is a national sport here too.

That's lovely. Also all the heartwarming ways things work in Japan where kids get a lot of autonomy and live their own little lives on the way to school, among other things.

>> It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.

In Japan they call it a Katamari.

> Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.

Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.

Parents and Adults in America are often afraid. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not.

There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely, and it could be dangerous to even try to walk in areas that barely have walkable streets.

Europe can let this happen since their city planning is much better for people who either walk or bike to different areas. Some, like in Switzerland, even have extremely low crime rates as well. Still, a sentencing seems rough for letting a kid walk, in a probably safe area.

Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.

I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.

> One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together.

That's what I did when I was in first grade. Suburban US, late 70s. Lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Met with the other kid who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, walked to the house of a kid who lived at the other end of the street. Then the three of us got on the sidewalk of the main road and walked to the school.

This is the way.

Pedibus. So civilized. People in California don't believe half the things I tell them about life in Switzerland, such as "if you try to drive your kid to school the cops will chastise you" and "if you drive 40 in a school zone you'll automatically get a year in jail" and, of course, "gas is nine bucks".

When I was a kid, about 3 decades ago, walking to school was a blast.

I had so much fun going there and going back on foot.

So much that when I was a teenager and my mother drove by my school one day and decided to pick me up, I was super unhappy, because I wanted to walk the 20 or so minutes with my friends to the bus.

When I had 9 hour school, I would need to wait 50 Minutes for a bus... or I walked the 5 kilometers home.

I always choose to walk, even when it rained, because I was faster and I loved it!

I am curious how it will be with my daughter, once she goes to school.

Because today this is totally frowned upon. But I will not play taxi for her all the time. Occasionally, sure. But CERTAINLY not every day.

It's a high trust homogenous society without lots of different groups with all kinds of grievances about the past, present and the future. And it's probably rural, where everyone knows each other.

When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.

Stranger kidnappings are basically unheard of. It's never been a safer time for kids in terms of crime like that.

I swear human brains are programmed to have a "fear bank" of things to be scared of, and an allocation of fear that must be spent on items in the fear bank.

As society has weeded out all the things to fear over time, more and more far flung things get put into the bank, and more and more fear is allocated to the dwindling amount of things to be scared of.

I'm sympathetic with this sentiment but surely it's pretty rare the law actually gets involved? Our kids play outside a lot and no cops have ever raised an eyebrow (except for at our crazy drunk of a neighbor, where eyebrow raising is appropriate).

You should not be scared around dogs. Being scared may trigger a dog and then you would be responsible for attack!

There is no real reasons to be scared. Chances something bad happens are very low: almost no deaths, in worst case child gets mimor reconstructive surgery, and a fake trauma!

Here in Florida there's no just letting my 4 year old wander to a nearby lake, it might be the last time I ever see her. There's an assumption that alligators are in every lake, and next to my house I have two lakes visible the moment I come out of my front door.

If it's not the alligators, it's the careless older kids in e-scooters or e-bikes, if you're rolling your eyes, just note that one of those careless kids drove into my neighbors four year old, who went flying back because some kid was not paying attention, he was also by chance wearing a helmet because he wanted to ride his bike so he did not hurt his head, but he definitely had a bruise on his lower back.

Do I think there needs to be laws around this? No, though, should a child suffer because they have negligent parents? Also no. It hurts me more to think that having these laws is the only way to get some people to pay attention as parents.

This is proof to me this world is Hell.

It happened because a neighbor was so disturbed by a child walking alone to report it, the police thought it was serious enough to refer for prosecution, and a prosecutor decided it needed to be charged using their office's limited resources. All insane.

The part that really gets to me is that the neighbor was so "concerned" about the child's safety that they called the police, but for some reason, in their urgent concern, they didn't take the simple step of approaching and talking to the child to see where they were going or if a parent knew where they were.

They charged her criminally instead of civilly, because in 2023 VA passed a 'free-range parenting' amendment to allow for actions that appropriate for the child's maturity and are not done in a grossly negligent manner that endangers the child. This is likely why the defense asked for comments from others on the child's maturity.

The criminal definition apparently has no such modification.

E: removed a double ‘likely’

Virginia also has a free range kid law.

And in particular, the conviction here was delinquency of a minor. That's usually used to convict parents of teenagers whose kids do serious crimes.

I caveat to say, we don't know the full details. But it all seems pretty weak sauce.

I'm not sure if this just bias from news stories but in general it feels like absurd things which would be avoided with just common sense from authorities tend to happen in the US.

> How does this happen?

Simple. Evolutionarily, the dumber you are, the higher the risks of dying, because you do stupid shit. Inversely, the safer the environment, the dumber people become, because not doing stupid shit stops being evolutionarily advantageous. Nature is pretty brutal so there is evolutionary pressure not to be dumb, but in modern civilization we have pretty much infinite resources dedicated to safety, which means there is a feedback loop "people are dumber -> more safety measures -> people are dumber -> more safety measures".

When you go to poor countries you'll realize just how much knowledge children posses on the topic on how not to die.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279

depends. my kids school in china didn't allow me to let my kids bike to school without supervision. (well, actually, they couldn't stop me from sending them to school alone, but they would not let them out unless i was there to pick them up. (there was only one crossing on the route, and that was close to the school and didn't have a lot of traffic)

in germany on the other hand, there was a case where parents demanded a school bus for a 7yr old, but the court said the kids could take the public train to school on their own.

In the US, if you are in a residential neighborhood with a lot of kids, its also fairly typical for them to be out finding their playmates.

I would say if you're in a neighborhood where there's just like 1-2 kids, it may not be that typical. The kids parents might do more scheduled playdates.

Unfortunately in the US there are people that get annoyed about kids playing. And they are also the same kind of person that escalates things to the authorities / complains a lot about trivial things.

There's a Netflix documentary about one such sad case https://www.netflix.com/title/82018736

American modern life. Vast swathes of the rest of the planet doesn't suffer from our unfortunate pathology.

The person who thought they cared about the child's welfare turned out to be the actual danger, and made the child's life much worse.

I think I've seen that anime.

Sounds like there is very little crime happening in their precious gated community that they've got to trump up everything they can to justify the budget wasted on them

I agree. It's one thing to think her action was riskier than you would like for your own child. It's another to think it should be a crime.

American here, it seems to vary by location. I walked to school as a grade school student (Midwest) and where I live now (Orange county, California) I regularly see swarms of kids biking to school.

This particular situation seems ridiculous. I’d be furious if I lived there.

FWIW - Virginia has a free range kid law. And does not have a minimum age for supervision.

They charged the mom with delinquency of a minor to get around this. Usually reserved for teenagers that commit crimes.

We don't really know all the facts, and we only get one side of the story here. So we all need to keep that in mind too.

That sounds like a reasonable thing to say in a free society.

This is true; we should strive for this not to be true.

She was also 8 months pregnant, her 5th kid, and studying to become a lawyer... Thats a lot of stress right there....

Yeah, it's not really clear from the article. Wild that you can get on some list of abusers without a jury trial. Maybe she waived her rights? Can that even happen?

I would have also immediately asked for their policy on how long children of different ages can be unsupervised.

I feel even if CPS or cops got involved, they can just take the kid home, no need to escalate things to charging the mom.

That said, there may be details we don't know here. This particular article is written from one bent, and the officials didn't comment on the case as is common in child-related prosecutions.

CPS type agencies all around the world wield immense power and are staffed by power hungry narcissists who get off on threatening to take parents' kids and coming up with demands they must follow

"Gated community" tells you everything you need to know. If you want to live amongst busybody, nosy, fearful and controlling people, move to a gated community.

> the system prefers to breed anxiety

a happy consumer consumes less than an anxious one :(

All the kids in my neighborhood do this weekly in the US.

Have you ever taken care of a 5yo? They are certainly safer in public alone than a 3yo. How much more, hard to say.

The article really glosses over the fact that the kid was 5yo walking to a pond. It mentions it at the very start and then never brings it up again. That's the part that got me: the mom gave her 5yo permission to go to a large body of water unsupervised.

I'm a parent of three and strongly believe in letting your kids roam around (indeed, I live on acreage and taught my kids about the venomous snakes and spiders in our area, and then let er rip). But a 5yo who specifically asks to go back to a large body of water unsupervised is a bit too much for me.

Reason always strikes me as an opinionated libertarian media outlet, and this article really feels that way to me, where they keep playing up the "walking on the street" type stuff, the "we're too afraid of kidnappings" part, but not the fact that a 5yo unsupervised at a pond is by far the most dangerous part of this entire story.

Even as a kid of the 80s, I never saw 5yos out and about unsupervised, let alone by a pond. 5yo is possibly preschool.

Religious conservative, likely politically so, whose college degree was in family science at BYU—a degree Mormons steer their daughter into for her Mrs Degree—with experience in conservative politics at the state level who is responsible for passing a law giving parents a lot of freedom to let their little kids run around by basically saying "unless they're in immediate danger, YOLO"? So of course a reasonable judicial system tried to find a way to stop this wild behavior perpetrated by a woman with self-dealing political sway.

Article does not pass the vibe check. Letting your PRESCHOOL age kid go to a pond alone is pretty damn irresponsible, and Reason is trying to gin up anti-gov't feelings when this is probably the best possible outcome. Mom gets slapped on the wrist for fucking up in a way that just barely skirts a law she helped get passed and politicians were too stupid to think about before passing.

I wonder if people who are down-voting you actually have children. I even know someone who's kid just died in a pool when no one was watching... My kids almost drowned themselves multiple times when they were below 5 yr old and they are trained to swim... My brother fell into a pool when he was little, and had to be saved... the list goes on and on... edit: Apparently it's the leading cause of death for 1-4 year olds...

I agree. The word "pond" is what immediately got my attention.

That is a matter of practicality of just enforcing the laws around protecting migratory birds. You can't possess the feathers of protected birds, and it doesn't matter how you got them.

Research the massively destructive bird feather trade in the 19th century if you want context for why the law is that broad.

How do you prove that feathers were shed naturally, without harming a bird?

You should check out a Japanese show called "Old Enough!".

I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old. The 7 year old started back at school after the summer holidays and some of her friends had to be taken into class early, showed signs of having anxiety attacks and distress. While I'm slightly hypocritical here, we live on a busy road so it's not really suitable for them to go wandering alone, we do try to give them as much autonomy as we can.

I'm pretty sure the societal pressure to helicopter around children constantly is a net negative to their well-being.

Here's the thing: It doesn't matter how comfortable you are, you're not the child's parent.

I walked to school alone when I was 4, crossing several streets. I bicycled when I was 5. This was typical of the time.

Really depends on the kind of upbringing of the child. In Mongolia 5 year olds are teaching their younger siblings how to ride a reindeer.

I don't know how old you are, so maybe you've forgot how it's like to be that old, but by 7 you're way past that age... crossing streets is not like going to war..

I think this is probably the reason why these cases come up

people age and then they think that a 10 year old is a toddler, and then they enforce that belief upon them

Not at all. We all did it when I was child that age in the 80s.