By Stephanie H. Murray
Monday, April 20, 2026
Recently, I was invited onto a podcast to chat with some American moms about modern
parenting. At one point in the conversation, I made a comment about how
liberating it is as a parent to give your children freedom. I explained that,
from the time my children were pretty young, I have been allowing them to run
errands or fetch treats for themselves from the corner shop near my home in the
United Kingdom—a practice that is not only confidence-boosting for them, but
useful for me.
In response, one of the hosts told me that she’s started
to allow her 10-year-old to do the same thing. Then she added some details that
threw me off: To get to the store in question, her son has to cross an
intersection where people not only blow through the stop sign, but frequently
do donuts.
I am someone who walks the walk when it comes to pushing
back on a culture of safetyism. The extent of freedom I allow my 7- and
8-year-olds—to go not only to the corner shop, but the park or really anywhere
else in our urban neighborhood—is at the very edge of what’s considered
socially acceptable in our area. My husband or I walk with them to school every
day, and if we were to stay in the United Kingdom, we’d allow them to make the
trip on their own just as soon as the school allows it. But we aren’t staying
here. This summer, after nearly seven years abroad, we’ll be heading back to
the United States. And the podcast host’s comments bolstered my sneaking
suspicion that the free-range parenting style I’ve adopted here likely won’t
survive the trip—not because I’ll lose my nerve somewhere over the Atlantic,
but because the American environment simply doesn’t allow for it.
Much has been written about the highly protective style
of parenting that has come to predominate in America. Often, it’s taken for
granted that so-called helicopter parenting is irrational, the reflection of a
kind of mass paranoia stoked by media-inflated fears about stranger danger and
with little basis in real risk. I think there is some evidence supporting this
view. Various surveys have found, for example, that a frankly shocking
percentage of American parents think a child ought not be left alone at home
until they are well into their teens. It is extremely hard for me to imagine a
home environment so rife with danger that a 10-year-old couldn’t manage there
for a couple of hours.
But what about the public environment? Surely we can
agree that the amount of freedom parents give their children ought to reflect
the terrain they are expected to navigate—it makes more sense, for example, to
hold tightly to a 3-year-old’s hand on a busy subway platform than on a beach
or in an open field. And the terrain—both social and physical—in large swaths
of American society is quite different from that in the United Kingdom, in ways
that inevitably push the timeline of children’s independence back.
The corner shop question—at what age is it appropriate to
send a child there on their own?—offers a concrete way of illustrating what I
mean. For my second child, whose itch for independence emerged quite early, the
answer was 5 and a half. It wasn’t my idea. On a summer day, having failed to
convince her older sister to accompany her, she asked if she could head to the
store by herself to purchase some Skittles. I was a little conflicted, but
ultimately let her go for it. I gave her some pocket change and waited outside
until she returned some 10 minutes later, exuberant at having accomplished her
feat.
Prior to moving to England, I lived in a suburb of
Madison, Wisconsin, a midsized city that is, by American standards,
comparatively walkable and safe. Had I still been living there when my
5-year-old daughter asked to run her errand, I would have certainly said no. In
fact, I doubt she would have asked.
Here, the corner store is not far—a six-minute round-trip
walk according to Google Maps. Getting there doesn’t require my daughter to
cross any streets except the one in front of our house. The streets she has to
walk along are also narrow, two-way roads where surpassing the 20-mph speed
limit is difficult because drivers are constantly having to stop to allow
traffic coming from the opposite direction to pass. In Madison, by contrast,
the closest “corner store” was a gas station that required a 26-minute round-trip
walk across a far wider road where people easily blew past the 30-mile-per-hour
speed limit and that ended in a parking lot bigger than the store itself. These
are fundamentally different trips, requiring different levels of maturity.
My example might seem cherry-picked and overly specific,
but the differing patterns of urban design contained in it hold more broadly.
It is a fact that, on average, the physical distance between a child’s home and
the sort of places he or she might go is greater in America than it is in England, or elsewhere
in Europe for that matter. The mixed-use development necessary for a corner
shop to exist is illegal in most American neighborhoods. The row homes that allow for density in English cities often
are, too. Minimum lot size and parking requirements have the effect of spreading
everything out. This is not to say that English housing development law is
ideal. Far from it: That nation, too, is crippled with a housing crisis. But
the English status quo seems, on the whole, easier for kids to navigate.
This observation comes through clearly when you compare
how English and American children get to school. People often point to the utter collapse in the share of American children walking or
cycling to school—from over 40 percent in 1969 to under 11 percent today—as
evidence of their declining independence. But while the United Kingdom is
certainly no free-range paradise, nearly half (46 percent) of children in England get to school on foot or bike, a figure
that hasn’t budged much over the past few decades. It is likely no coincidence
that, on average, English children live quite a bit closer to school than
American kids do (2.5 miles vs. 4.4 miles, respectively). To put a finer point
on it, more than 4 in 5 American kids live 3 or more miles from their school—a
distance that vanishingly few British kids are walking. We can quibble all day
about what age a child ought to be able to traverse such and such a distance,
but it would be silly to suggest that parents ought not factor distance into
the equation at all. All else equal, the further a shop or school or park is
located from a child’s home, the older a child must generally be to make the
trip alone.
And of course, all is not equal. Consider the horrifying
example of Mary Fong Lau, the 78-year-old woman who killed a family of four
after crashing into a San Francisco bus shelter at 70 mph. The case rightly
ignited outrage over the fact that someone could get off so easily after causing such harm—Lau
received no jail time. But from my perspective, the more striking fact was that
Lau managed to achieve such a speed in an urban environment in the first place.
This is a pervasive problem in America: Streets enable recklessness. Don’t get me wrong: There is plenty of
room for improvement when it comes to ensuring that English streets are safe
for nonmotorists. But generally speaking, I do not have to worry about elderly
drivers reaching highway speeds in residential areas, or teenage boys doing
donuts on any of the streets near my current home. Not because such reckless
driving is illegal (though that, too), but because it is physically very
difficult to accomplish. Regardless of speed limit, the sheer tightness of the
roads tends to limit the amount of damage even the least competent and most
reckless British drivers can do. As a British mum acquaintance recently put it,
“The U.S. makes driving very pleasant and the U.K. makes it highly unpleasant
and stressful.” That’s exactly it: The built environment here makes driving a
more anxiety-inducing experience—but one that is ultimately safer for everyone.
***
Reckless driving is just one part of a more pervasive
phenomenon that hinders children’s independence: public disorder. This is a
broad and fuzzy category of behaviors that can range from the relatively
innocuous—littering, or leaving dog poop on the sidewalk—to more severe
problems like public urination, open drug use, or brawling. Such societal
disarray exists to varying degrees in every country in the world, and the
United Kingdom is certainly no exception. But as others have pointed out, America’s public disorder problem
is palpably more widespread and severe than it is among our peer countries. Dispatch
contributing writer Charles Fain Lehman has argued that public disorder has risen in America since
the pandemic, but I would argue that it was elevated even before COVID started
to spread. Living in Madison, I grew accustomed, as many Americans are, to
sharing the bus with people who were strung out, or simply not quite tethered
to reality. The tendency for welcoming public spaces to become hotbeds for
vandalism, substance abuse, and violence made such spaces a liability to the city.
I’ve now lived in Bristol, a city of half a million
people, for nearly seven years. Again, it’s a city with plenty of problems. But
the buses here do not, as a general rule, function as roving shelters. There
are certainly pockets of the city where you encounter unstable people, but they
are rarer and more concentrated. If my intuition—or the United Kingdom’s much lower prevalence of drug overdose deaths—can be trusted,
the troubled people you encounter are far less likely to be using the sort of
serious drugs that ruin one’s life.
It’s hard to pin down a specific reason for this
discrepancy. While homelessness is higher in the United Kingdom than in America,
street sleeping is lower. Generally speaking, British law also allows
authorities to take a more proactive approach to handling public disorder,
granting them broader civil powers to, say, ban someone from a particular area.
And the threshold for involuntary commitment is somewhat lower in the
United Kingdom than in the United States; it is not only the threat of imminent
danger to oneself or others, but the health of the individual, that is taken
into consideration. But I suspect that some of what separates the U.S. from so
many other countries is not just that it is slower to get people prone to
disorder off the streets, but that it has more disorderly people in the first
place. In the same way that our street design fosters recklessness, it doesn’t
seem far-fetched to say that some combination of lax laws, individualistic
ideals, and access to drugs or weapons might be cultivating a more disorderly
populace.
The risk of being hurt by an unstable person is small.
Still, safety isn’t all that matters. Being accosted by a disoriented stranger
is an unnerving experience. Even in my 20s, I didn’t always know how to handle
such circumstances. Do I look away or will that upset them? Should I get off
at my usual stop or wait for one where there’s more likely to be a crowd? One
reason that it is so much easier to envision allowing my children to use public
transportation on their own here is that these are, by and large, not questions
they’ll need to consider.
The deeper issue, though, is that children’s independent
mobility has never really been independent. It has always relied on the
willingness of adults in the vicinity to look out for the children in their
midst and tailor their behavior accordingly. That might mean watching their
step or their tongue, offering some guidance or even a stern word if need be.
It is this sort of social infrastructure that grants children in places like Japan the ability to roam. In other
words, children can move freely only when adults commit to upholding the social
contract. Public disorder is a visible indication of widespread refusal to do
so. As Chris Arnade writes in his recent essay on America’s public disorder
problem, “there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and
that line is public trust.” And, as he adds: “The U.S. is on the wrong side of
it.”
I can’t fully pin down the ur-cause of America’s public
disorder. But any disorder makes the public realm trickier for children to
manage. I have no plans to abandon my commitment to giving my children
age-appropriate independence when we make our way back to the United States
later this year. But I have come to accept that “age-appropriate independence”
will look quite a bit different there than here.
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