"Free-range kids" Used to be the "Old Normal"

I grew up in NE Philadelphia on a pretty basic row-home street three blocks away from my elementary school. From the age of six, I walked it myself. The deli we got our lunchmeat from was across Colgate Avenue, and my mom would sometimes send me there with a list since I was seven. The recreation center (with pool) was two blocks up the Avenue. I went alone from the time I was ten. I also went to the library, or to my friends' houses, who lived usually five or six blocks away, by myself since about nine or ten.

So to me, this thing where "free range children" are picked up by the police for being some walkable distance away from their homes without adult supervision strikes me as absolutely bizarre. (I don't have kids, though. But I do know that violent crime has gone down since I was a kid. Seriously--why aren't people raising their kids to do stuff like play outside?)

Now, I'll admit that some of the ways kids in my day were raised might have been ill-advised. I will admit I played with matches, threw rocks, ate Rio Snappers on a dare, jumped off of second-story porches onto hard-ass lawns, and had monumental schoolyard fights where faces were rubbed with snowballs and permanent scars were received. But this helped me get that being older meant sometimes dealing with consequences. I was followed by a presumed perv from a card shop up Rising Sun Ave three blocks from my house when I was nine--ducked him. I got knocked over by a sixth-grader when I was in second grade and chased his ass with a piece of ice like the size of my head and plastered him.