All Annotations of Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone[Preview]

saved by3 people, first byChris Silano on 2008-04-07, last byStephanie Booth on 2008-07-08

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Well of course I know the story of Carlie Brucia. That’s the problem. We all know that story — and the one about the Mormon girl in Utah and the one about the little girl in Spain — and because we do, we all run those tapes in our heads when we think of leaving our kids on their own. We even run a tape of how we’d look on Larry King.
• “The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.”
• These days, when a kid dies, the world — i.e., cable TV — blames the parents. It’s simple as that.
• Justice Department data actually show the number of children abducted by strangers has been going down over the years. So why not let your kids get home from school by themselves?
• We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.
• A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.

• Meantime, my son wants his next trip to be from Queens. In my day, I doubt that would have struck anyone as particularly brave. Now it seems like hitchhiking through Yemen.

  
  

  Here’s your MetroCard, kid. Go.