Is it too dangerous for your kids to play outside?

With the exception of the last two generations in the U.S., it is safe to say that every child since the beginning of time was able to play outside alone.

Certainly every Baby Boomer remembers walking to school, roaming the neighborhood until the street lights came on (that meant you had to be home), and generally doing anything you could think of outside by yourself or with your friends. Kids even waited in the car, alone, for their parents to come out of a store.

But today, especially in certain urban areas, allowing a child outside alone is unthinkable.

At least that is what New Yorker Lenore Skenazy found out when she wrote a blog column about letting her 9-year-old son take the subway alone. The child wanted to do it. He had money, a MetroCard and quarters for emergency calling. He knew the route and had taken it many times before. He came home safe and he loved the experience.

Nonetheless, Skenazy says she was immediately invited on four television shows to prove she wasn’t America’s worst mom.

Have things changed so much that these things are incomprehensible?

Skenazy points out that information has changed more than anything else. “I can instantly name five girls who met ghastly ends, but our parents could never do that,” she writes in her blog, Free Range Kids. “We’re swimming in fear soup — fear of lawsuits, fear of injury, fear of blame (People love to blame parents for not being responsible enough.)”.