Remember "Lost in Space"?  The youngest Robinson, Will, was always going off on his own with his friend "Robby the Robot" to explore the various places their ship landed.  Robot could sense danger and would suddenly break into a chorus of "Danger Will Robinson, Danger Will Robinson" with his according arms waving madly around when ever young Will got into trouble with local species.

My son does not have a robot to follow him around and keep him out of touble, but one NYC Mom thinks that maybe parents have become the robot.  She recently let her 9yr old son find his way home from Bloomingdales.   She writes:

I 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.

Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.

No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

My wife and I have recently begun to let our 9yr old ride his bike to the library.  It is a 1/2 mile from our house, but we had been resistant to letting him go for all the various reasons.  This little sliver of freedom has in some ways made him a little less "little boy".   Which ultimately is a good thing, although Mom may disagree!