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I don't know that there is a law in KY, but this is annoying. My neighbor's let their three girls (ages 3, 5, 7) play in the front yard without the parents being out there the whole time and it never occurred to me to call the cops on them. Because their kids are fine, they are not leaving the yard, and they are staying away from the street.

I am so paranoid about this that I don't let my son play outside with the neighbors even though I know they would be fine. He's 4.

@tlcbaby: How/where do you look this up?

I think there is a big difference between playing in the yard alone and being home alone. That site was crazy. What in the world is wrong with people. By the time I was 7 we had full run of the neighborhood. We knew where we were allowed to go and where we couldn't. I can definitely see letting my kids have that kind of freedom at that age. We have a small playground a 5 minute walk away, and honestly I was thinking that by 5 or 6 my little guy would be competent enough to go play there by himself. Calling CPS because a 9 year old is in the yard?! Insane. By 9 my mom was locking us out of the house and leaving a pitcher of kool-aid or water on the front porch and we weren't allowed to come in until dinner!

The fear mongering in this nation is getting completely out of control.

@tlcbaby: I knew the law in Oregon was 10. I had no idea it was not a standard rule. I wonder if there is an age for watching a younger sibling or babysitting?

One other thought: The recipient of this letter could go to the police station with the letter and make a report of harassment.

This is unfortunately the only real option for doing anything about it because the letter is anonymous. If it had been signed, I would recommend going to the neighbor and asking them what concern they have about the way the kids are being cared for.

@Mrs. Lion: Your mom sounds like my mom!!! When I was little (like 8-9), my mom would make me breakfast and tell me to go away. I could come back for lunch and dinner, but I was otherwise expected to entertain myself outside or at the local library for the entire day unsupervised. This new paranoia is so stressful for moms- we should not need to be worried that CPS is going to take our kids away if they play soccer in the yard after dinner. Children NEED to have alone time to develop their imagination, deepen their friendships, and get free play time. I would have been so annoyed at 12 years old if my mom was staring at me all day long.

Illinois law requires children to be 14 (14!) before being left home alone. Sheesh, I must be really old, because times have definitely changed!

@tlcbaby: Yeah, I can see 10, but 14 seems pretty extreme to me. It must especially stink for low income families, to the extent that it's enforced, as after school care can be expensive.

I read more about it here: the law is super, super vague: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/leave-your-13-year-old-home-alone-police-can-take-her-into-custody-under-illinois-law/

Apparently Kansas has a law that a child must be at least 6 to be left alone, which is going quite a lot in the other direction...

@Kemma: I read that more like you shouldnt leave a 14 year old to go on vacation for a week...not to go to dinner or to the grocery store. interesting.

@macintosh: yeah, it seems almost like a law they wrote to never be enforced, except when they wanted to get someone on some other charges of neglect that they couldn't prove and needed something more general... or maybe I just have a poor understanding of it based on the article's description!

I will be honest, I was absolutely not allowed to free range all over town when I was a kid. I wasn't even allowed to ride my bike around the block. I think it's because we lived on a busy-ish road, but I think my parents just thought I had no business being unsupervised. We were never left alone, either.

Granted I am 40 years old, but I don't think a lot has changed in the world, I think there were always creeps around, but we didn't have social media the way we do now, we didn't have the sex offender registry, so there was just a lot less information out there.

@looch: @tlcbaby: Look up the WaPo Wonkblog story on 'There's never been a safer time to be a kid in America' (2015).

I wasn't free range, but by age 12, I came home alone on the school bus and did my homework for a bit until my mom got back. And I definitely got to walk a few blocks to my friends' homes in elementary without Mom watching me. I didn't check in when I got there, either.

@hitchhiker: @mrsbells: I was going to mention that same study- we are actually safer than we have ever been!! It's just that you are able to see so much media/ social media coverage of bad things that happen to make it appear as if the world is less safe.

I was reading an interesting book lately, All Joy and No Fun, that hypothesized that really protective attitudes towards children today - relative to in the 80s when crime rates were much higher - is in part a result of ongoing cultural ambivalence about the role of women in the workforce. Do our children, even the somewhat older ones, need us to be their supervising them instead of working? It's human nature to worry and fear we're missing out, and it's natural when women are working at historically unprecedented rates over the past 25 years to worry, "hey, maybe they should be doing something else instead, like closely supervising the kids." In the 60s and 70s when women were by and large at home, most kids were running around free range while their mothers socialized or tended to housework, and nobody seemed to think much of it.

I don't know if it's true, but I thought the idea was intriguing.

My attitude towards this is moderation. I don't want to be either free-range or really protective, just somewhere in between...

@hitchhiker: you cant just look at overall crime rate as an idicator for safety for children. Back then everyone was outside playing. and more people were outdoors. Now hardly any kids are outdoors so theres less peer supervision happening. It takes second for a predator to grab a kid, theres no way I would be inside and my kids would be outside by themselves. Everytime something happens to a kid the first question people ask is where were the parents and what were they doing.

This might be helpful - list of laws by state:

http://www.freerangekids.com/laws/

I was just thinking about this this morning. I'm sitting outside with my kids (2 & 3). I think by next summer I would let them play in the backyard for a bit by themselves. Definitely by age 5! I think kids need independence and autonomy to develop important skills. I'm not sure when I would let them have free reign of the neighborhood. Our neighbors' kids are outside all the time at age 10.

I'm reading How to Raise a Wild Child right now. It's a great book. The author (Dr. Scott from Dinosaur Train!) talks about how we have effectively put kids under house arrest.