A columnist for The New York Sun, Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home. She wrote a column about it and has been amazed at the chord she struck among New Yorkers who remember being kids in those more innocent times.

“So many people – the ones who aren’t castigating me as crazy – are all regaling me about the first time they took the subway,” she told TODAY’s Ann Curry on Thursday in New York. “And for most people, it’s a great, happy memory. People love that independence.”

Izzy, who is now 10, nodded in agreement and insisted it was no big deal. He had been nagging his mother for a long time to let him ride home alone, and finally she agreed to let him take the downtown Lexington Avenue subway and then transfer to a crosstown bus to get home from Bloomingdale’s.

“I was like, ‘Finally!’ ” Izzy said of his reaction when his mom finally caved in to his nagging. “I think that it’s a really easy, simple thing to get home.”

And that was Skenazy’s point in her column: The era is long past when Times Square was a fetid sump and taking a walk in Central Park after dark was tantamount to committing suicide. Recent federal statistics show New York to be one of the safest cities in the nation – right up there with Provo, Utah, in fact.

“Times are back to 1963,” Skenzay said. “It’s safe. It’s a great time to be a kid in the city.”

The problem is that people read about children who are abducted and murdered and fear takes over, she said. And she doesn’t think fear should rule our lives.

As she wrote in her column about Izzy’s big adventure: “Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”

When she said goodbye to Izzy in the handbags department, Skenazy didn’t even leave him with a cell phone. Instead, she gave him a couple of quarters so he could call home on a pay phone if he got lost.

Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better – and safer – ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.

“I’m not so much concerned that he’s going to be abducted, but there’s a lot of people who would rough him up,” she said. “There’s some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner.”

“It’s safe to go on the subway,” Skenazy replied. “It’s safe to be a kid. It’s safe to ride your bike on the streets. We’re like brainwashed because of all the stories we hear that it isn’t safe. But those are the exceptions. That’s why they make it to the news. This is like, ‘Boy boils egg.’ He did something that any 9-year-old could do.”

YR News Wire: Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone

So just how long is it going to take for some organized effort at a legal minimum age for riding subways or buses without an adult?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 4:20 am and is filed under Age Restrictions, Parenting, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.