Ask a lot of Americans what the minimum age someone should be before they ride the New York City Subway alone, and the average answer is probably around 37.

Some probable reasons:

1. Most Americans have never actually ridden the NYC subway recently.
2. New York City used to have a significant crime problem.
3. New York City is the most popular setting for fictional crime drama in television, books, and movies (e.g. the entire Law and Order franchise).
4. Modern news and media is fond of sensationalizing individual missing children cases for months surrounding a single incident, as this topic is very popular with ratings.
5. Consensus on child safety has arguably gotten extreme in our modern ultraconservative society.
6. Internet predators and their sensationalism (i.e. To Catch A Predator).
7. One of the greatest human fears, and most personally traumatic events, is the harm to one’s children.
8. Growth in litigation has insured that any official recommendation of safety err on the side of unreasonable caution.

Ironically, however, New York City is now one of the safest large cities in the world, approaching that of Salt Lake City, Utah.

The question is, do we as a population have the capability of recognizing when our world becomes safer, and do we have the will and intelligence to roll back overly conservative protection of our children towards improving their (and our) quality of life?

New York Sun Columnist Lenore Skenazy does – so much so that she did something which is the buzz of moms all over New York .

She let her 9 year old boy ride the subway home.

Alone.

And I think she’s a hero in some areas which are sorely lacking in modern society – rationality, perspective, respect for children, and intelligent self-thinking.

In 1999, the Justice Department did a survey which reported that there were only 115 ‘traditional’ child kidnappings in the United States that year – i.e., kidnappings where a stranger or semi-stranger abducted the a child. Out of those 115, about half were sexually abused and/or killed, or about 57.

Since the time of those statistics, violent crime in NYC has gone down about 25%.

Without taking anything away from the horrific aspect of that type of crime…it just isn’t a common crime.

A common fear? VERY. A common crime? Not at all.

Furthermore, about 60% of attempted child abductions were foiled simply by the child fighting back, or through adult intervention. So, teaching your child to kick, scream, and fight off strangers puts them in a much better statistic. Add a mobile phone, and I’m sure its even better. Oh, and then there’s the expansion of the Amber Alert system, which has been responsible for recovering over 135 abductees.

To put it in perspective, a child is 1500X more likely to be abused in the home. At least for some kids, the subway is probably safer then coming home for dinner.

Of course, abduction is a great fear in having your child ride the subway alone, but there are other, greater, risks, like crossing the street or being in some other sort of accident, which far eclipse the statistical rarity of stranger abduction – but teaching them to cross a street safely is probably something a NYC kid should have been trained to do properly by age 4-5 (whether they are alone or not).

Which brings up the question – when is too much protection too much?

Personally, I think we’re already there, and have been for some time.

Employers and experts alike have been reporting some observable adult personality traits which have come about because of our trend towards ’structured activity / child safety / positive reinforcement’ child-rearing.

For example, employers have complained that young graduates are showing a lack of competitive spirit and qualitative evaluation of their work and the work of others. Some say this is related to our tendency to make sure we include all kids in structured activities and not measure them by skill or achievement but rather congratulate them all equally on their participation and sportsmanship. Similarly, a trend to de-emphasize testing and grading in schools has the same effect, as well as failing schools which seek to ‘bell curve’ the entire class rather then report failure.

Modern parents are judged much more by what their child does not experience - exclusion, inferiority, bullying, drugs, accidents, alcohol, bad grades, sex, violence, – than what their children do experience – which today is officially limited to chaperoned play dates and soccer (no wonder they spend most of their time in their bedrooms with videogames – even simulations of everyday life (Like The Sims) is far more adventurous than their daily lives).

On a peer review, parents are judged by how well they sheltered their children – how much they played it safe – sometimes at the expense of the child’s achievement and happiness in adulthood. As a parent, if you got them out of the house alive at 18, you win. If they grow up into an timid anti-social agoraphobic depressive, that’s their own doing – the statute of limitations expires when they hit 18, even if you planted the time bomb.

Skenzy suggests:

“The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself.

A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.”

Bravo.