Recently, in Silver Spring, Maryland, drivers at a busy intersection witnessed a spectacle you don’t see much these days, outside of the “Hunger Games” franchise: two children, aged ten and six, walking alone. An onlooker alerted the police. The cops scooped up the kids, drove them home in a patrol car, and reprimanded their father, Alexander Meitiv, a physicist at the National Institutes of Health. Within an hour, five squad cars had arrived.

Meitiv insisted that he was not guilty of negligence. He’d dropped off the children at a nearby park, with the idea that they would walk home. He and his wife are devotees of Free-Range Kids, a movement committed to rolling back the excesses of the helicopter-parent era. (From the group’s Web site: “Fighting the belief that our children are in constant danger from creeps, kidnapping, germs, grades, flashers, frustration, failure, baby snatchers, bugs, bullies, men, sleepovers and/or the perils of a non-organic grape.”) The movement was founded by Lenore Skenazy, a former columnist for the News and for the New York Sun, who achieved mommy-blog infamy when, seven years ago, she wrote a column about letting her nine-year-old son, armed with a map and a MetroCard, find his way home from Bloomingdale’s. Skenazy published a book and now has a reality show, “World’s Worst Mom,” on the Discovery Life Channel. In it, she swoops into the homes of overprotective parents and persuades them to let their offspring perform such retro tasks as riding city buses alone and setting up a lemonade stand. “The kids are thrilled,” she said the other day at her family’s apartment, in Jackson Heights, Queens. “And the parents are happy you’ve replaced their dystopian horror story with reality.”

The Meitiv children own, but were not carrying, the I.D. cards that come with Skenazy’s book: “ ‘I am not lost! I’m a Free-Range Kid,’ ” Skenazy said, reading from a card. “ ‘The adults in my life know where I am.’ ” She added, “Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the phone number of a lawyer.”

Skenazy is wispy, and had on big tortoiseshell eyeglasses. She and her husband and two sons moved to Queens from Murray Hill five years ago. A pan of brownies sat on the stove. “They said something I loved,” Skenazy went on, talking about the Meitivs. “They said they wanted to raise their kids the old-fashioned way.” She ran through a few statistics, emphasizing that children are safer today than they were a generation ago, in the carefree days before “To Catch a Predator.” “If you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped, how long would you have to keep him outside for him to be abducted by a stranger?” A week? She shook her head. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand years.” She derided the “back-door anti-feminism” of expecting mothers to monitor their children all the time.

She was interrupted by the appearance of two curly-headed teen-agers in snow gear. Skenazy introduced them: Giovanni, an Italian exchange student, and Izzy (short for Isaac)—the kid whose journey from Bloomingdale’s started everything. Izzy is now sixteen and a student at the Academy for Careers in Television and Film, in Long Island City. He recalled the fateful trip, in 2008. “It was great!” he said. He’d asked the station attendant for directions to the downtown 6 train. Then TV crews appeared at his school. His classmates asked what was going on. “I told them, ‘I took the subway. And they want to interview me.’ ” Izzy said that his free-range childhood has made him more competent. “Just now, I was planning a trip for me and a couple of friends to snowboard in New Jersey.” Skenazy raised an eyebrow.

“It’s fine,” Izzy said. “I talked to Dad.” He went on, “I found a hotel room, and we’re going to split it between the four of us. I have it planned down to the dollar.”

“Bring peanut butter and bread,” Skenazy advised. “Otherwise, you’re stuck buying all your meals out.”

Skenazy’s time is taken up mostly by speaking gigs these days, and she blogs for reason.com. In a way, she said, the free-range movement came just in time: she was laid off from the News, and the Sun closed in 2008. “My husband says I’m a civil-rights leader,” she said. She has several new projects: a parents’ bill of rights, to reassure her followers that they won’t end up like the Meitivs (“I spent the first four years of Free-Range Kids trying to reassure people that there wasn’t a pervert behind every bush. And now I have to reassure them that there aren’t police behind every bush”), and Free-Range Friend, a Web site that will allow parents to coördinate. “The hope is to get a critical mass of kids playing outside, so it becomes normalized again.”

Skenazy served the boys a dinner of barbecued chicken, and Izzy discussed his school film projects. He said, “I built a snowboard rail after school.”

“You’re doing stunts?” Skenazy asked.

Izzy shrugged. “We wear helmets.”

She sighed. “Statistically, they’re going to be safe from predators. But I’m always scared of accidents.” ♦