By what metric? This is a normal everyday thing in some countries. I was running to the corner store and grabbing milk, cheese or beer, among other groceries, when I was under 10. This was Spain in the 80s/90s and afaik is still a thing. Or walking clear across town to hang out with friends or go to school. In what way is teaching kids independence and giving them your trust not beneficial?
I was leaving the house alone by 5 and 6. I'd go hours in the local forest, down by the lake, through the neighborhood, and to the city. My mom made sure I understood landmarks and what places that could help me looked like. Of all the trauma I experienced in my early life, none of it was from those activities. If anything they taught me a lot about getting along on my own.
It seems to have stopped being a thing in the US in the `90's, for whatever reason. I recall walking to and from school as a 1st grader, although everyone was doing it which made everyone inherently more likely to reach their destination.
If I was in charge, I would set the residential speed limits to 20mph and have the Police enforce those speed limits 24/7.
Life has many risks. Some risks can be recovered from, and others are life long damage. It’s the latter, catastrophic risks that parents should be curating the environment from.
Kids learn from failure. It’s letting them fail and learn that grows strong adults.
Some risks can be mitigated. Learning to tumble and take a fall, for example, mitigates risks of falling well into the elderly years.
And as for 5 or 7 year old, yes. Or flip to the other side— traditional society, including indigenous societies, start training their toddlers on chores. Toddlers already want to help, and these are often behaviors they are already doing, like pulling clothes from laundry baskets.
Five year old and seven year olds are capable. In Japan, two year olds are sent on errands.
And, I have heard at least one story of an American family where the mother had her 7 and 8 year old kid take over meal planning and prep for dinner, and paying the bills. (She didn’t just throw them into the deep end either).
Are you a parent? Part of a child growing up is developing independence in sometimes controlled, sometimes impromptu scenarios. Most 7 year olds are entirely capable of cruising around a couple houses where the adults all know each other.
If you put your child in a bubble you not only stunt their development you also rob them of so much joy.
The tl;dr is that helicopter parenting is relatively new — only something that's come into play in the last few decades — and in all the time before that kids had far more freedom to roam compared to today. Even factoring in an uptick in the murder rate in the last couple years that came about during Covid policy, it's still half of what is was in the early 90s or prior to that.
It seems like the world is more dangerous now because of the outsized attention crime gets in media, but objectively speaking, it's not.
And keeping kids at home on their screens is having definite negative consequences on their maturation and later ability to succeed in the world. Here's a good article on the subject:
There was an article about a parent who tried to do exactly that, in America. But the parent did not throw the kid into the deep end. For at least a year, the child was taken on those errands, being familiarized with the rule of the road, introduced to store clerks.
Ideas this author generated include — sending an older child along; secretly following to observe without intervening on anything less than catastrophic risks; sending the kid to neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar (and acquaint them to the neighborhood), and so forth.
