I don't know. Maybe this is going away in some places, maybe I just have my own anecdata, but my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood.
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live. I dropped my daughter off at the mall to hang out with their friends and one of the moms followed them around the whole time. They're all 13!
This behavior is probably overrepresented in the bougie places reporters live.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Whenever these conversations come up, I've always noted that they don't really seem to apply to the PNW. My neighborhood (in Seattle proper) has lots of kids running around as well. Neighborhood kids will stop by to pickup my son and whisk him off to some adventure down the block. Getting your kid back involves listening for the correct sounding screams of joy as you walk around and figure out whose yard they are in.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
It is a function of road design. If the neighborhood is just houses with all the places to go located on 40mph+ roads (meaning people are driving their high grill head height SUVs and pickup trucks at 50mph+ while looking at their phones), possibly without sidewalks, I’m not letting my kids go out there alone until they are teenagers.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
I have a family member in a new neighborhood in northern Indianapolis suburbs, and the housing development has 15k sq ft lots with 5k sq ft houses on them, and the backyard of the houses are not (yet) fenced in, and all the houses had various Costco playground sets with their own swings and trampolines and whatnot, at least 5 that I counted, with probably numerous more across the other houses in the neighborhood.
I asked my family member why they didn't just build one playground for all the kids, and they said the HOA voted against it (for whatever reason, ongoing costs, legal liability costs, etc). I look at that waste and can only laugh at the "efforts" to be green or pro environment as a joke to appease those who can be easily swayed.
That's why I'm quite happy to live in Vancouver BC as well. No kids (and I'll never own a home), but if I did, I can't think of a better place to raise them compared to other car-dependent hellscapes where nobody trusts each other.
I love explaining to Americans how Vancouver suburbia is slightly better than American suburbia in so many ways that matter like trees, real traffic calming, and walkability
People decry this as socialism but remember that gated communities with security guards also cost money.
Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.
> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.
The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.
And I will keep voting to benefit myself, my family, and my country in that order.
It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.
To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.
I've noticed the less American and less wealthy people are, the more normal their kids interact with the world, i.e. "free range".
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
'Feral' seems like an odd choice of word, given the activities you're describing. It sounds like they're just out and about doing totally normal stuff. I bet you wouldn't appreciate someone describing you as 'feral' if they saw you in public walking to the store or getting on a train.
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
I live in suburb of a metro area, as safe as it gets (my front door is unlocked overnight often and almost never locked during the day, my garage is also frequently open). my 12-year old (5’8” 125lbs) went to walk the dog to the park about 1/2 mile from my house, someone called the police and I had to deal with social services…
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
My kids walk/bike to school, take public transport and are pretty free-range. But that’s absolutely nothing compared to my childhood. I was born in 1975. We dug up literal explosives from WWII and made our own small bombs (some matches, two large bolts…). Access to all sorts of chemicals was easy and we would set things on fire or just mix stuff to see what happens. Playing around on construction sites. Taking someones boat out to go fishing. Making bows and arrows, that would go straight through plywood. All _that_ is definitely gone. Some of it for good - kids loosing their fingers or worse was a common occurrence. So there definitely is a trend in case of me and my friends.
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
I do know. No kids play outside in my neighborhood. The story resonates because your personal annecdote is not very common. (Not as the sibbling comment says, that reporters all out of touch elites).
I have a 10 year old boy and I'm facing these issues right now. I'm also in Canada so culturally adjacent to the US and similar enough with regards to this topic.
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50 years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was five. I also learned to ride a bicycle when I was five, so that took the place of walking for the latter part of the kindergarten school year.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
When my child was an infant, my wife parked in a parking lot and starting chatting with a friend about 10 yards away. Minutes later a woman came by and starting claiming the child was not safe and was going to call protective services. This freaked both of us out that a stranger could potentially have the power to cause the government to become involved with our family.
Fortunately, we didn't let that experience prevent us from letting our kids wander freely. But it does just take one over-concerned parent, to get you into trouble.
I’m reasonably convinced this explains basically everything currently attributed to social media, for children at least, and likely can also help explain some concern around birth rates and child rearing costs. Starting with the satanic panic the US has slowly closed down children’s lives because of concern that terrible things will happen to children if not continually under supervision. And the true is that yes sometimes bad things happen and have always happened. But if you look to many other countries they do not have the same extreme expectations of parents or the state to keep children’s lives locked down.
It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of, say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was happening, because it was too slow to notice.
I think Maryland deserves a special shoutout. It's illegal, and not just in a CPS-steamrolls-your-rights-and-family sort of way, for an 8 year old to be left with children <13.
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
As a parent you feel the push and pull of not ignoring your child while also not mollycoddling them. For me let the kid do what they want - if your kid wants to stay home let them, if they want to climb trees and go off on their bike let them. Help them learn what is safe (which rods can they cross), what are their boundaries. Hopefully they get it, maybe they don’t. Don’t restrict access to devices or screens too harshly. Encourage games of any kind. Wear sunscreen.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
My free range childhood friends and I would have been all _get bent_ to that lady—even at 6 yro. I can tell you this because I was also getting a whooping at home from da for saying the same to my ma. I was a dreadful child.
Blame a litigious culture where agencies have far too much power to "fix" other people. People in many places in America live with a fear of losing their children or getting sued and losing everything.
As a kid in the 80's and 90's, I biked up and down deserted, steep mountain fire roads before cell phones were widespread.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
As a relatively "free range" child in my youth and now the parent of children, even I find it hard to reconcile how I feel differently that my parents.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
This has to be a limited area where this idea of “free range” is a problem. Where I live is middle to upper middle class and there are kids everywhere. Electric motorized bicycles have made them even more mobile.
In the late 70s early 80s I went to school in another town from ages 11-13 and would take a train + bus to get there. Was perfectly normal. This was in France though, not US.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
>What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray proposed some factors that began reshaping parents’ attitudes and children’s behavior around the middle of the century: “the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected.”
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
Social media, and instant news media (scary news sells), amplify the perception of danger, where the numbers don't back it up.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,
282 comments
I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of small Metro. Nothing special about it at all.
Every time I see one of these articles I always wonder who they're talking about.
I always feel like this is just one of those news headlines that won't go away, but isn't quite tethered to reality, but people really like to feel bad about modern life and so we keep talking about it as if it's real. I suspect the real reason kids aren't playing outside, if there is one, is not because they can't, it's because they choose not to. Just as adults are no longer choosing to go to third spaces. Screens came for everyone.
I live in Redmond, WA. Bougie? My rube Midwestern ass thinks so. And there are feral kids all over my neighborhood. Plenty of kids walking to school in groups, or solo. Neighbor kids talk about riding the bus/train to places. Granted, there are a lot of immigrant families around here (hello, Microsoft, et al.), and I'm sure that skews things.
Seattle also has a pretty decent policy around the radius for kids walking to school, so there are always gaggles of kids walking together to and from school for elementary and even some middle schoolers. The high schools are spaced far enough out that kids use buses at that age.
My coworkers in lower CoL areas seem mystified why I'm paying an arm and a leg to live in Seattle to raise a kid. And yeah there are some serious downsides (20-30k a year daycare, restaurants are too expensive to go out to often, even take out is insane), but there are kids playing soccer in the streets after school and kids setting up lemonade stands in the park.
That's what I'm paying for - A city that is built for people to live in, not just for cars to drive around.
Also, places are just too far due to the aforementioned 6 lane roads and 100ft+ wide intersections. And crossing those intersections on foot, in daytime, is daunting as an adult.
I asked my family member why they didn't just build one playground for all the kids, and they said the HOA voted against it (for whatever reason, ongoing costs, legal liability costs, etc). I look at that waste and can only laugh at the "efforts" to be green or pro environment as a joke to appease those who can be easily swayed.
Whenever I get angry about 40 percent of my paycheck going to the government I try to make a list of countries that are better and it's not a long list.
> The economic growth and so-called advanced economies (think Germany, The U.S, Japan, etc. What's been referred to as the “Global North”) relies by a large proportion on a significant net appropriation of resources and labor from the “Global South” (think Kenya, Peru, the Philippines, etc). This appropriation reaches astronomical levels. In 2015 alone, the north appropriated 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labor; worth [a total] $10.8 Trillion in northern prices. Enough to end extreme poverty 70x over.
The West steals $10-$12 Trillion/yr in embodied raw material equivalents, embodied land, embodied energy, and embodied labour.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802...
It’s their own fault that they do not have visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew or a dynasty like the CCP that’s willing to sacrifice entire generations for future generations.
To not allow a country to govern itself into oblivion is the peak of western paternalism.
I don't know what it is about rich white people and freaky helicopter parenting. I also notice it with homeschooling and those crazy borderline eating disorder diets. There seems to be an association there between rich white people and pushing self-destructive behavior on kids.
> But I actually find ideological bias to be less concerning than the more fundamental problem that the class of people who determine the boundaries of debate share a set of demographic and experiential traits that they don’t recognize as distinctive.
> This class of people includes journalists, yes, but also people who work in the tech industry, academics, nonprofit leaders, influencers, and those who work in politics. From now on, I’ll refer to this group broadly as “the messenger class.”
> The messenger class’s distinctive experiences — like living in downtown Washington, D.C., or living in one of the parts of New York highlighted in red — shape the boundaries of normal in ways harder to counteract than pure ideological or partisan bias.
> The messenger class plays a fundamental role in any democracy. Democratic self-governance requires not just fair procedures for making decisions but an accurate and shared picture of social reality to reason about. That picture is revealed through the communicated experiences of citizens, filtered through the messenger class, which decides which experiences are urgent and require intervention.
One would expect that after your first sentence, the second sentence would be a counterexample.
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time
"free range kids" doesn't mean playing outside in a suburban cul-de-sac; it's the ability to go outside the immediate neighborhood on their own (walking, cycling, or public transport) -- stuff I did all the time as a 11-13 year old that is pretty rare these days. I don't think I've ever seen a preteen on the local city transport alone
> my kids play outside unsupervised all the time, as do all the kids in my neighborhood. I live in just a regular suburban neighborhood
Your kids are hardly free-range. Let me guess, there's no way for them to actually meaningfully leave the area (no train, bus, etc)? It's like dumping kids on a 5 acre farm and saying they can do whatever they want. hardly free-range in the way described in the article.
Presumably you live in a suburb for the reasons the person in the article checked in on the free-range kid.
my personal litmus test is if you'd let your 13 year kid explore Manhattan alone during the day. Many say no because it's dangerous, and yet Manhattan is safer than most American suburbs. just FUD all the way down sadly.
I don't see child welfare agencies personally as a particular threat when it comes to this topic. Maybe they ARE more likely to get involved in cases of more free range parenting where before they weren't, but it doesn't register as a real worry.
The major difference I see between when I was growing up and now is that when I went out onto the streets, there were other kids on the streets. My parents didn't know exactly what they were sending me out to, but they knew that there as a general crowd of kids that would be out on the street until some point in the evening, and that they would all go home at around the same time, and that's also when you were expected home.
The draw of smartphones and video games as indoor entertainment can't be understated, but I can exercise some parental tyranny here and always kick him out of the house to go play like my folks used to do.
But there are no other kids out there. I'm sending him out into streets empty of kids.
To mitigate this I'm trying to nudge things in the direction of him and his friends forming some sort of after-school crew that finds outside activities to do together, undirected. There are other like minded parents that I've found that are also interested in enabling something like this.
On the subject of risks - I strongly believe that the role of parenthood is to mediate a child's exposure to the real trauma of a hostile, often absurd reality that they will grow up into. Controlled exposure to risk, to self-directed decision making in times where they feel like someone won't be there to help them out and they need to figure things out on their own, these are critical requirements in parenting IMHO. And all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy, and that's a burden we as parents have to bear: to expose ourselves to the emotional trauma of the possibility of our children getting hurt, however small the chance, so that they are able to grow into healthy well-adjusted adults.
I feel like I have to work a lot harder than my parents did to enable that exposure.
I arrived at the school just as it was getting out for the day. I did not see a single student of any age leave without an adult.
Like so many people of my generation, I can only wonder at the cost, and be grateful that I was born when I was.
Growing up, I think many girls had ended their babysitting careers by 13.
> “We work in tech,” she says. “Our kids [aren’t] getting any cell phones, no smartphones, no Instagrams. I write the algorithms. I don’t want my kids to touch those algorithms.”
It's disgusting that this has become a casual attitude and admission by the tech worker class. No one should be getting this free pass.
"I am actively harming children and society with my livelihood (except my own, because I am so smart). Here I am proudly and smugly stating this in a news article."
Depends on your risk appetite and your systems tolerance for the inevitable consequences of errors...
A 5 year old free range kid on a scooter died outside a nearby school a few months ago.
Hit by a SUV
Was riding back from primary school on a scooter, without the mother.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-14/islah-metcalfe-rouse-...
A massive investigation, police, social services, traffic consultants, a million plus spent on upgrading safety, mother and father demonised in the community,etc ...
Teachers involved who responded or gave CPR ( I know some of them) given counselling.
The mother is likely to have lost custody of her other children.
I hear that risk-tolerance normalization and freedom of kids in the 70's was even greater, so this trend appears to be a multi-decade decline.
What I miss most though is cool stuff like interactive art installations and improvised playground features made for kids that were ripped out in the 90's and 00's. Decommissioned Korean war jets, telephone pole obstacle courses, and a myriad of other things without so much as a web page anywhere lost to history.
e.g. at 10 years old, my cousins and I were running around in the woods at my gradparents' home in rural Pennsylvania. I was the oldest of the group with my youngest cousin probably being 6. No cell phones. No Apple watches etc. We were outside of that house around 9am and would come back for lunch and then dinner when my grandmother rang the bell.
My oldest has an Apple watch and is both reachable able trackable yet the above still feels little strange to me.
I let my 13 year old go out by himself, walk to places, take the street car; he has a phone so he can contact us if he needs help, and we can see where he is if we're concerned. It's ironic that parents are more worried today when technology makes it much _easier_ to track/communicate with your child (back in the day at that age, when I was out of the house my parents had no way of reaching me).
>What changed? In a 2023 article for Psychology Today, Gray proposed some factors that began reshaping parents’ attitudes and children’s behavior around the middle of the century: “the arrival of television, the rise of adult-directed kids’ sports, the gradual exclusion of kids from public spaces, the declining opportunities for gainful employment or meaningful contributions to the family economy, and, finally, the increased mandate that kids must be constantly monitored and protected.”
You will see lots of kids free-ranging in Lakewood, NJ. A lot of families there have banned TV from the home.
> Stranger kidnappings are exceptionally rare. They occur roughly 100 times per year, which works out to a 1-in-720,000 annual risk of a child being kidnapped — less likely than being struck by lightning at some point in their life.
> A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 found that about 60% of U.S. parents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about their children being kidnapped,