The case for letting children out of our sight to grow in confidence

Kids play on the playground at Peacock Park in the Morris Farm neighborhood in Gainesville, Virginia. Photo / Craig Hudson, The Washington Post

Every summer as a child, I waved goodbye to my parents, jumped on a bike and disappeared with friends into the woods and mangroves near my house. Rarely did we run into (much) trouble. Once I broke my wrist tumbling off a rickety tree fort. Another time we started a small fire in a nearby field. A neighbour wisely dispatched the fire department, unconvinced that “we had it under control”.

Those experiences anchor my memories of childhood – and my sense of self. If my parents trusted me enough to go out on my own, make mistakes and learn from them, I could believe I was someone capable of doing so. Once I mastered my “home range”, I was ready for the world. My first job after college was in Cambodia.

But the home range most children have is shrinking. Coined in the 1970s, the concept describes how far from home children can travel, play and explore on their own. This independence was once measured in miles. Today, it’s often in feet – if kids may leave home alone at all.

Researchers in Britain have mapped this diminution. Helen Woolley, a landscape architect at the University of Sheffield, interviewed three generations of the same family in the summer of 2012. The grandparents recalled travelling up to 3km from home without adult supervision in the 1950s. A few decades later, the parents’ unsupervised range shrank to about 500m, mostly to parks, playgrounds and friends’ homes. The latest generation – a girl, 6, and boy, 10 – could not go anywhere without permission, even to a friend’s house next door.

Along with a decrease in roaming distance, researchers have documented a narrowing of the types of activities and destinations children are allowed to pursue on their own. And in many societies, the age of independence has been creeping higher and higher.

Researchers at London’s University of Westminster studied children’s mobility in 16 countries. They found that a large proportion of children under 11 could not cross main roads, walk around their local area or travel home from school in nearly all of them. In several countries, even 15-year-old children weren’t allowed to do these things.

Children may have never been safer. But at what cost?

Limits on independence, argues Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, have gone hand in hand with a rise in childhood anxiety and depression. Without unstructured time to play outdoors and among themselves, children may have a harder time developing into confident adults. They are also more likely to grow up disconnected from the natural world, and more likely to suffer mental and physical health harms from spending less time in nature.

“Risky play is essential to growth,” agrees Pooja Tandon, a paediatrician and researcher at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. “Children need some exposure to test their boundaries.” The goal should be to keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.

Here’s how to give children back their home range and keep them safe.

Why home range has shrunk

Is the world really more dangerous than it used to be?

Stranger danger looms large in the minds of some parents. But there’s little empirical evidence to support it. The risk of children being abducted or killed by strangers is vanishingly small – as it has been for decades. The average child would have to play outside unsupervised for about 750,000 years, as Warwick Cairns points out in How to Live Dangerously, before they’re statistically likely to be abducted by a stranger.

Traffic has a more legitimate claim on parents’ fears. Roads in the United States have become more dangerous as speed limits have risen, vehicle size has increased, and drivers have grown more aggressive and distracted. In 2023, the US Transportation Department reports, 249 children were killed while walking or biking.

Blame the lack of safe infrastructure: The fatality rates for bikers and pedestrians in the United States is at least five times higher than in Europe, where protected lanes for walking and biking are prioritised alongside cars.

But that doesn’t fully explain the loss of home range. Not everyone lives on busy roads. Many children aren’t allowed to walk down sidewalks or play alone in their own front yards.

The culture has changed, argues Lenore Skenazy, an advocate for free-range kids, whose 2008 column “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone” ignited fierce attacks. Parents can face condemnation – and even criminal charges – for allowing kids to go out in the world on their own. Shifting ideas about what counts as reasonable independence for children have translated into societal norms, policies and laws.

Over time, that has turned many childhood experiences into structured, sanitised exercises devoid of opportunities for children to learn on their own. What they’re getting instead – supervised, structured time created by authority figures – isn’t the same. “We keep substituting kids’ actual experiences with two things: field trips and going online,” Skenazy said. “How are you supposed to fall in love with the world? What was interesting has turned into SAT prep.”

Loosening the leash on kids

How do we give kids greater freedom to explore while keeping them safe?

For me, one answer was forest school. Several times each week, I drop my 3-year-old off in Golden Gate Park, where he joins a horde of toddlers roaming the woods and fields, rain or shine. Curiosity is their “curriculum”. Teachers often follow behind from a distance or encourage whatever they’re doing. When we go on walks now, he goes first. Soon, I may struggle to keep up.

If you want to plant the seed of free play in your neighbourhood, you could follow the example of Piedmont, California, where parents have co-ordinated to let their kids play unsupervised at a park every Friday. “Play clubs” – parent-free spaces at churches, libraries and schools – let kids spontaneously organise their own fun with minimal adult supervision limited to “lifeguard” roles. Organisations like Let Grow and the New Jersey-based Balance Project help parents launch these.

If you’re struggling to envision this, try resetting expectations. In Finland, children’s independence is “striking,” the University of Westminster researchers say. By age 7, most Finnish children walk or cycle alone. By age 8, the majority cross main roads and travel to school by themselves. By age 10, they ride local buses. The United States is not Finland, but children get frustrated when we deny their capabilities.

The Japanese reality series Old Enough! features children ages 2 to 5 running their first errand – often buying food for the family or delivering a package. While many struggle with the task (I recommend the “troublesome cabbage” episode), this “errand tradition” is widely seen in Japanese culture as building children’s confidence. It will leave you inspired by the awesome abilities, and eagerness, of even the youngest children.

How much of that would be legal in the United States? At least 10 states have passed free-range parenting laws, explicitly allowing parents to let their children walk to school, play in the park or stay home alone. Laws elsewhere remain vague or inconsistent. California has no minimum age for leaving children home alone, for example, while Illinois says age 14 or older. You’ll have to consult the laws in your jurisdiction, but in some cases, parents have successfully lobbied for change.

If we’re going to expand children’s home range, we’ll need to treat children’s independence as a right, not as an afterthought. That’s what Vancouver did when it placed children at the heart of its plans to revitalise its downtown.

In the late 1980s, Canada’s third-largest city began converting commercial and industrial buildings into mixed, high-density developments connected by walking, biking and transit routes. More than a quarter of this housing was designated for children and families. Homes or condominiums featured multiple bedrooms; nearby amenities such as parks, open space, day cares, libraries and schools; and small but meaningful features were added to accommodate growing families.

It worked. Families flocked to the new developments, reversing the exodus to distant suburbs. By 2011, census data showed, Vancouver’s urban neighbourhoods housed nearly five times as many children as Seattle’s and almost nine times more than Portland’s. Affordability remains a challenge, but Vancouver’s strategy serves as an exemplar of how to revitalise a city without losing families that are fleeing almost every other major city.

“If you design places that work well for children,” said planners in Vancouver, “they seem to work well for everyone”.

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