I can’t help but warm to this mom and her nine-year-old loose in Manhattan:
"No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. 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." Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence."
When I was a kid, my mom would throw me out of the house in the summer in the morning and ask merely that I made it home by dusk (which in England could be pretty late in mid-summer). Of course, I lived in rural suburbia, not New York City. But I feel bad for kids unable to experience risk and freedom the way I did.
The Dish 