Cawffee Tawk

Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone:

[New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy] recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy [who "had been nagging his mother for a long time to let him ride home alone"], at Bloomingdale's in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she'd see him when he got back home.

…"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."

…"It's safe to go on the subway," Skenazy replied. [Recent federal statistics show New York to be one of the safest cities in the nation—right up there with Provo, Utah, in fact.] "It's safe to be a kid. It's safe to ride your bike on the streets. We're like brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn't safe. But those are the exceptions. That's why they make it to the news. This is like, 'Boy boils egg.' He did something that any 9-year-old could do."

Discuss. Also: How would reactions to this story differ if Skenazy's 9-year-old had been a daughter, instead of a son?

[Via Atrios.]