You're reading a post titled “Mom lets 9-year-old son ride subway alone” from the archives of Big Contrarian. It was originally published on April 15th, 2008 at 04:38 PM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Mom lets 9-year-old son ride subway alone and encounters some flak from we-watch-the-news-too-much parents:

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.

Brilliant bit here:

These days, when a kid dies, the world — i.e., cable TV — blames the parents. It’s simple as that. And yet, Trevor Butterworth, a spokesman for the research center STATS.org, said, “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.”

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