A Manhattan mother leaves her nine-year-old son at Bloomingdale's with a transit pass, a subway map, $20 and several quarters, and tells him to find his own way home.
Is she a hero for raising an independent kid in an age of mollycoddling, or a neglectful parent who should be reported to Child Protective Services?
Lenore Skenazy has been called both after she wrote a column in The New York Sun titled "Here's your MetroCard, Kid."
The solo subway ride landed Ms. Skenazy and her now-10-year-old son Izzy - who pronounced his journey "really easy" - on NBC's Today show, where she defended herself to a skeptical Ann Curry and a disapproving parenting expert who fretted about the possibility of Izzy being roughed up while on his own.
"The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that overprotectiveness is a danger in and of itself," Ms. Skenazy wrote. "A child who thinks he can't do anything on his own eventually can't."
The hullabaloo illuminates a deeper debate over protecting kids versus encouraging independence. Whether you're raising children in Manhattan or Moncton, you've got to figure out how and when to take off the training wheels. When are kids old enough to take the subway, ride a bus, or simply walk home from school alone?
For Ms. Skenazy, the moment arrived after much nagging from her son and some contemplation of crime statistics showing that abduction by strangers is very rare.
She didn't give him a cell phone: "Didn't want to lose it," she writes.
"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.'"
That's an awful lot of trust, parenting experts say. Izzy did fine, but what if the subway car had broken down, he had lost his MetroCard, or he had twisted an ankle on a curb - can you expect a nine-year-old to roll with the punches?
"If something upsetting happens, your child is a walking target," says Ann Douglas, author of The Mother of All Parenting Books and a mother of four. "I would not let my child go across Toronto on a subway. … You really need, as an adult, to be there with a young child, because they just don't know what to do."
Don't get her wrong; Ms. Douglas is all for giving children opportunities to be independent. Her children all made their own lunches at age 9. But when it comes to setting them loose in the wider world, she's cautious.
So is Sara Dimerman, founder of the Parent Education and Resource Centre in Thornhill, Ont.
"Nine seems so little," Ms. Dimerman says. In a survey of more than 300 parents for her forthcoming book, Am I a Normal Parent? she found that 60 per cent sometimes feel they're being neurotic about their children's safety.
Still, she believes too many parents are too lax, whether by allowing their 11-year-olds to watch R-rated movies or by letting their teenagers get away with vague answers about their whereabouts on Saturday night.
"When it comes to our children's safety, we need to make deliberate choices," she says. "When children have too much freedom at too early an age, they can skip through their childhood and into teenagehood or adulthood too soon."
There's no magic age for granting such freedoms as riding the subway alone, both experts say. Every child is different, and parents need to know when their child is ready to tackle the challenge of public transportation alone.
Ms. Dimerman believes that 11 would be a more appropriate age for a child to ride the subway unsupervised - those two years can make a big difference, she says. For her part, Ms. Douglas says nine-year-olds may be ready to start walking to school alone, but only after numerous conversations and trial runs with parents following at a distance.
Perhaps it's a matter of geography. On the New York City blog Gothamist, city-dwellers hailed Ms. Skenazy as a parenting maverick in an overprotective world, and traded fond elementary-school memories of riding the subway.
"My bet is that this kid is going to grow up to be very well-adjusted and successful because his parents are actually doing what parents are supposed to do: help the kid gain life experience so they can survive in the world on their own," one Gothamist commenter wrote. "Forcing their kids to stay inside all day and play video games because they're afraid of some phantom child molester isn't gonna cut it."
In a subsequent piece in The New York Sun, called "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," Ms. Skenazy says she thinks high-profile kidnappings, and the breathless media coverage they receive, fuel parents' unrealistic fears. Sure, she knows the horror stories: "… 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."
But on the other hand, she's also horrified by tales of parents who do their 20-year-olds' laundry every weekend, and of university students who can't make decisions without calling mommy or daddy on their cellphones.
Striking the right balance between protecting and over-protecting can challenge even the most sure-footed parent. For his part, Izzy's own reaction to the Today show's questions about his independent jaunt was understated: "I was like, ' F inally.'"
What do you think?
How old is old enough? Would you let your nine-year-old navigate public transit on their own? Join the conversation here .