We all like to complain about helicopter parents, who hover around their children and don’t allow them to develop the independence and skills to navigate the world. Now we have to worry about the helicopter government hovering around parents, forcing them to hover over their children.

That’s what we’re looking at in the case of Vancouver father Adrian Crook, who has been advised by the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development that he can no longer allow his four eldest children — aged 7 to 11 — to ride the bus to school unsupervised. In fact, he writes on his blog 5kids1condo, after investigating the supposed endangerment posed to his children while riding transit, they told him that no child under 10 can be unsupervised in any situation — walking to school, or to the store, or staying at home. And his oldest child won’t be considered an adequate supervisor until he is at least 12.

Read more:A dad in B.C. let his kids ride the bus alone — and it sparked a national debate about parenting

It wasn’t the case that Crook’s kids were found to be in any actual danger — as he details on his blog, the bus stop where they boarded was in front of his house, the one they got off at was in front of the school. He spent months making the trip with them, and then more months making the trip with them partway, so they knew the route well. They were armed with GPS-enabled cellphones. They had befriended bus drivers. And as Crook details, buses are by far the safest form of travel (bus trips resulting in orders of magnitude fewer injuries than cycling, walking, or driving in a car or motorcycle).

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It’s just that the ministry would insist they could not be unsupervised, ever.

Not even in the playground in the courtyard of the condominium building where they live. When someone reported they were alone, the authorities say they had to stick their threatening nose into it.

“Everyone has a duty to report a situation in which a child may be at risk. In assessing the nature of that risk, social workers exercise their professional judgment within the parameters established by ministry policy and the Child, Family and Community Service Act,” a ministry spokesperson told my colleague Wanyee Li at Metro in Vancouver.

Crook is Crowdfunding a legal challenge of the ruling, but plans to obey it and helicopter over his children in the meantime. What choice does he have? These people could impose the harshest punishment you could impose on a parent. They could take away his kids.

“Being a divorced, single dad who has his kids 50 per cent of the time, I have little recourse to challenge the ministry’s decision,” Crook writes on his blog. “Disobeying it even in the slightest (i.e. allowing a trip to the corner store by my 9.75 year old), could result in the ministry stripping me of equal custody of my children, a remarkably draconian outcome I would never risk.”

As someone who walked alone to school — supervising younger relatives on the trip, in fact — to school beginning at age 6, this strikes me as bizarrely invasive. I began riding public transit to my hockey games alone before age 8. Around the same time, my 10-year-old cousin and I began taking the TTC downtown to the movies at the Eaton Centre or Imperial Six at Yonge and Dundas or the Uptown or University theatres at Yonge and Bloor.

Looking back, the sense of freedom and independence, the maturity we felt and developed, plotting routes and navigating transfers and conducting our own ticket purchase transactions — ordering and paying for snacks, and so on — seems to me to be an essential part of growing through childhood.

I know, I know, you can already sing the next lines. Gee our old LaSalle ran great, thoooooooooose werrrrrrre the daaaaaaays. I hear you saying, “It used to be common to have kids running around unsupervised, Grandpa, but it is not common anymore. Times have changed.”

Friend, I know it. I have three children — among them an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old, so I know well the age levels Crook is dealing with — and they are not setting off about the city like adventurers. I walk them to the school bus stop in the morning. My wife and I get a babysitter when we go out. In their interactions with the world, I imagine they can hear ever-present whooping of the helicopter blades of our parenting.

We do this in part because of our own estimation of our children’s individual maturity and behaviour. We do it in part because of our estimation of the risk of traffic death at the very busy intersections near our home.

And we do it in part because, like most parents, we have fears that are sometimes rational and sometimes less so, about the dangers the world holds. We know that their odds of being kidnapped by a stranger are something like one in 14 million, as developmental psychologist Dr. Mariana Brussoni told CTV in reference to Crook’s case. We know the odds of them being injured in a car accident are far higher than of being hurt playing in the park when we aren’t watching them. But we’re human, with human fears.

But more than that, I think we also closely supervise our children at almost all times because that is what is expected of us as parents today — we fear the judgment and scorn of those around us. And I especially fear the power of the state child protection agencies if some random busybody were to call them and tell them our kids went to the park at the end of the block by themselves. The stranger danger I fear most is not kidnappers, it’s holier-than-thou whistleblowers who might call authorities to complain about my parenting.

In that last respect, Crook’s case seems to show the fear is justified. And it’s outrageous. How to parent your children — when to give them responsibility and freedom and how much — is a personal and difficult decisions. It’s one that, in the absence of actual neglect or endangerment, should be left to parents, not dictated under threat by authorities.

As I said, my own children are not loose on the TTC making their way to school or anywhere else. But I very often think we are letting them down with that approach.

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A whole Free Range Kids movement has sprung up in about the past decade, citing experts on how children learn about themselves and the world when they have to get around and figure things out and solve problems on their own. How they overcome anxiety and fear and develop self-confidence by learning independence. How they learn to socialize and communicate and compromise by interacting with other children when adults are not around.

There’s a reason, I think, why many of our most beloved coming-of-age novels and movies involve pre-teen children facing down danger, mostly without the help of grown-ups. From Stand By Me and E.T. to Charlie Brown and Jacob Two-Two, from Peter Pan and Stranger Things to Harry Potter and Lyra Belacqua. You find yourself — and really become the hero of your own story — when you don’t have your parents or teachers around to butt in on your behalf.

In the real world, of course, we don’t want this process to centre on facing down pirates and evil wizards. But taking the bus, wouldn’t that be a good start?

Yes. Yes it would.

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