Governments at all levels—city, state, and federal—have a patchwork of laws surrounding kids being alone. Some states have legislation prohibiting leaving children under a certain age in homes by themselves. (The cut-off in North Carolina is 10, in Illinois, 14, and Maryland, 8.) But most leave the question of what constitutes too much trust in children up to local agencies and law enforcement.

But legislation regarding unsupervised kids is “intentionally vague, because there are so many contextual and fact-specific determinants” to each case, Vivek Sankaran, who directs the University of Michigan’s Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Detroit Center for Family Advocacy, told Hurley last year. “The downside is, it gives parents very little guidance about when they can get into trouble.”

And indeed, there are consequences. In April of last year, police picked up 10-year-old Rafi Metiev and his sister, 6-year-old Dvora, while the kids were walking home from school in their D.C. suburb. It was the second time authorities had intercepted the children, so Child Protective Services (CPS) opened up a second investigation into their parents, Danielle and Alexander Metiev. Though the agency eventually dismissed both charges, the Metievs went on to sue CPS and the police department for Fourth Amendment violations. (That’s the one that deals with unreasonable searches and seizures.)

Sankaran advocates for a more collaborative child-welfare model, one in which authorities only get involved in “those extreme situations where … it’s below the standard that any parent should be treating [a] child.”

There still are no bright lines here, though the newest amendment is a motion toward that direction. Which leaves an important question: Should you let your children travel by themselves?

In September, the journalist Selena Hoy tackled the unique independence of Japanese children for CityLab, noting that kids in that country often venture onto public transit by themselves at age 6 or 7. She found the big difference between Japan and the U.S. to be an “unspoken” sense of community. Hoy writes:

What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.

The path to giving American kids greater autonomy may have nothing to do with laws, but with parents putting trust—misplaced or no—in the kindness of strangers.

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In the late 1960s, nearly half of American children walked to and from school each day.

This article appears courtesy of CityLab.

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Aarian Marshall is a transportation reporter at WIRED and former CityLab contributor. She lives in San Francisco. Connect Twitter