My 11-year-old daughter and her friends need pedometers. I want to know how many steps these girls are clocking on an average day. They’re walking everywhere, to each other’s houses, the local pizza shop, the nail salon — all over the neighborhood.
I give my children this freedom very mindfully: I want them to be confident, resourceful, and independent. Once, another mother wanted to have her daughter join a walk the girls were taking to the pizza shop. She asked us, “Is it OK if I follow behind them in our car?” Thankfully, the other mothers and I were on the same page and simultaneously replied, “No, we’re not OK with that. The point of the outing isn’t the pizza. There’s a greater purpose behind letting them have the freedom to get there on their own.”
I track them with an AirTag in her fanny pack. Sometimes, I get a call from the pizza shop’s landline:
“Mom, can we go to the drugstore and buy candy with our leftover lunch money?” or “Mom, it’s really cold. Can you pick us up?”
Once, I even called the pizza shop myself to ask if she could grab something for me on the way home.
They’re living a wonderfully retro, ’90s-style childhood — one that feels increasingly endangered by helicopter parenting and overzealous legal authorities who seem to have forgotten their own childhoods.
Just 10 years ago in my county, Danielle and Alexander Meitiv were actually accused, even charged, with neglect for letting their children do exactly what mine do every day: walk around unsupervised in broad daylight.
