In 1967, my mother was 10 years old. By that time, she had for about a year been taking a city bus alone, from her residential neighborhood to Philadelphia’s city center, where she would walk and window shop. She had also been babysitting her two younger siblings—alone in the house, not as a mother’s helper—from the age of seven.

　　Even by 1960s standards, this was a lot of childhood freedom and responsibility. More than most of her friends got, and more than either of her younger siblings would get at the same age.

　　I reached age 10 in 1997, also the oldest of three siblings. That was the point when I was finally permitted to ride my bike by myself around my neighborhood. I understood boundaries that stretched a little over half a mile in each of three directions, at the tip of one of which my paternal grandparents lived. Not until the summer of 1999, at nearly 12, would I be babysitting my siblings on my own. 

　　I thought then that my parents were overprotective. By the standards of the 1990s, they were. Other kids were riding their bikes around the neighborhood unaccompanied at eight, not 10, and watching siblings solo at ten, not 12.

　　But by today’s standards, apparently, my parents were practically free range.

　　According to a 2023 poll, only 50 percent of parents of nine to 11-year-olds today will allow their child to find an item in a grocery store when a parent is in another aisle. Just 33 percent will let their child walk or bike to a nearby friend’s house, and a mere 29 percent will permit their child to play unsupervised with a friend at a park. 

　　Apropos these new norms, a mother in Georgia was recently arrested for letting her 10-year-old son walk a mile from his home unaccompanied and without a tracker on his cell phone. Essentially, that is, for doing what even my parents allowed. Except that I had not only no tracker but also no cell phone.

　　What explains this rapid shift in our perceptions of the appropriateness of 10-year-olds out and about unaccompanied? How did something so commonplace turn into a thing that inspires a call to the police? Of course, there are a multitude of explanations. I want to highlight one that I think is implicated in them all: The politicization and attendant secularization of nearly all aspects of American life, parenting chief among them. 

　　We are now possessed by a social-media-spawned cultural and political discourse in which the guardrails of decency and reason have fallen off on all sides. This impacts for the worse how we think (or don’t) about many things—among them childhood, adulthood, and the proper path from one to the other.

　　Today, we no longer have any common understanding of what freedoms and responsibilities children ought to have and when. Moreover, we no longer have any common understanding of how and when people should achieve the increasingly indeterminate markers of personal, familial, and societal adulthood. The absence of accepted milestones on the way to becoming a well-functioning adult is in part a result of our collective failure to agree not only on what those markers ought to be, but on what respectable adulthood looks like.

　　Childhood Unbound

　　In 2008, when childhood freedom advocate Lenore Skenazy let her then nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway unaccompanied, she was not merely a parent near one end of an established, if unspoken, freedom and responsibility continuum (as both my maternal grandparents and my own parents were). Instead, Skenazy was a cultural lightning rod, dubbed “the worst mom ever” by many—and a heroic advocate for an old-fashioned childhood by others. This makes sense, since few 10-year-olds today are permitted even to play unsupervised at a park. 

　　As Jean Twenge argues in iGen, these lesser expectations of kids, in terms of both freedom and responsibility, have made the average 18-year-old of today about as capable as the average 14-year-old of 30 years ago. This, of course, perpetuates a vicious cycle: Kids are less mature because we fail to offer them opportunities to build competence, which leads us to deem them insufficiently competent for the next opportunities.

　　The defining down of age-appropriate levels of competence and maturity begins early, due to a pervasive new norm of “gentle parenting. ” This was invented and is most holistically practiced by progressives, but conservatives are by no means impervious. The worldview from which this ethos springs dictates making excuses for immature or selfish behavior that previous generations expected kids to outgrow.

　　It is now considered enlightened, for example, to treat the three-year-old who screams repeatedly in a restaurant “because she’s tired” (and thus can’t be expected to behave) like the one-year-old of not so long ago (i.e., just don’t take her to restaurants when she’s tired). It is similarly trendy to treat the five-year-old who “has so much energy” (that he doesn’t sit still when told to do so and is often rather free with his hands) like the three-year-old of generations past (i.e., avoid situations that require much sitting, and offer consistent and calm reminders about keeping our hands to ourselves).

　　Having been permitted to act like an erstwhile one-year-old at three, and an erstwhile three-year-old at five, children are not deemed ready to act like even a comparatively sheltered erstwhile 10-year-old until they are teenagers.

　　Yet, as the continuum for children’s freedom and responsibility has moved to demand less of them, it has also widened regarding what they (and the state) can demand on their alleged behalf. Mainstream educators cry “book banning” when parents attempt to excise pornographic material that would merit an “R” rating in a film from elementary school libraries. Activists insist that children have a “right” to the pronouns (and sometimes medications) of their choice without parental notification.

　　It is only if one is invested in the 10-year-old’s independent maturation that one will accept the hardship, the work, and the risk of judiciously preparing him to walk that mile.

　　As Abigail Shrier illustrates in Bad Therapy, medical doctors often ask children invasive questions—and mental health professionals even commence treating children—without parental consent. Indeed, the therapeutic establishment turns many of these minors into patients for life based on diagnoses of questionable, subjective ailments and identities—ones often opposed and rejected by their parents. Meanwhile, as family doctor Leonard Sax explains, parents in thrall to progressive theories of consent and bodily autonomy now allow their elementary school-aged children to refuse compliance with the doctor’s request to see a sore throat, such that he is unable to examine or treat them. 

　　Centrists and conservatives do push back on these expansions of childhood sovereignty. But our successes beyond our own children are limited, and our positions can seem to confound without a shared sense of what a well-functioning human adult is—a throughline that wide religious observance once provided. 

　　Conservatives are against genital mutilation under the guise of gender-affirming care even if the child’s parents are for it, which might require action from the state. Simultaneously, we want decent parents to have far more control over their children’s educational and political formation, and the state via the public schools to have far less. Finally, we know that compliance is prima facie the correct disposition to expect of children, given their youth and inexperience. 

　　But threading the needle between these positions requires a very clear distinction between what sorts of parenting imperatives it’s important to get right, and what sorts of parenting decisions it’s okay to leave at right for me. Progressives, when it comes to a vision of well-functioning adulthood, have no concept of “right;” for them, all “lifestyles” (including those that involve rights but not responsibilities) are created equal. Meanwhile, conservatives also won’t articulate a concept of “right” due to our own disagreements, contradictions, and shortcomings. Hence, “right for me” in all its ideological and identitarian illogic reigns supreme.

　　As a result, we now live in a country where many 10-year-olds have access to R-rated reading and digital material, and to unnecessary, life-altering medications—but not to parental permission to ride a bike around the block.

　　Adulthood Undefined

　　Part of why we are no longer clear about what kinds of freedoms and responsibilities are appropriate for children is because we are no longer clear about what kinds of freedoms and responsibilities are attendant to adulthood.For example: Are traditionally aged university students children, or are they adults?

　　Until the 1960s, colleges related to students in loco parentis, assuming the position that though the students in their charge could and often did go to war, get married, and purchase alcohol, those students were, for their purposes, children. In the 1960s, colleges abandoned that posture, essentially conceding students’ freedom to engage in sexual activity without sneaking around. Ostensibly, this was an acknowledgment of students’ adulthood. But by the 1990s, there were Take Back the Night rallies everywhere, with many female students insisting on exactly the protections that had been abandoned several decades before—only, impossibly, without giving up any of their own sexual or logistical freedom.

　　Now, 60 years removed from the sexual revolution, we try to maintain maximal autonomy but in a risk-free way. We offer students free condoms and workshops on consent. And trigger warnings on novels that depict racism or sexual violence. And safe spaces when conservative speakers come to campus.Today, the young people most privileged and poised for success are offered endless autonomy—but with no attendant intellectual, logistical, or other reality principle or responsibility. This makes sense, as we have prepared them throughout childhood not for actual life, but for a fraudulent simulator thereof.

　　If that ended after college and led into the adult responsibility attendant to adult freedom (as it mostly did for people my age ), that might be largely harmless.But as Andrew Sullivan presciently pointed out nearly a decade ago, “we all live on campus now.” No wonder the kids—including and especially those who did not even attend college—are no longer growing up.

　　No wonder they are not moving out, pairing up, and starting families of their own. When these things are all questions of mere lifestyle choice and identity, and when all lifestyles and identities are deemed equal, there is no universal mandate and no societal impetus to adopt the responsibility of adulthood. Just like there is no universal mandate and no societal impetus to make one’s children do so.

　　After all, if adulthood as it was once understood is now merely an option, rather than a vocational necessity, why not let the five-year-old act like a three-year-old, and keep the 10-year-old as parentally protected as would befit an eight-year-old? It’s easier, and it’s way less scary.

　　Talk about a vicious cycle.

　　It is only if one is invested in the 10-year-old’s independent maturation—in his eventual ability to be a provider, protector, partner, and parent himself—that one will accept the hardship, the work, and the risk of judiciously preparing him to walk that mile. Literally and figuratively.

　　Meanwhile, we increasingly live, parent, and relate to others (including children) within politically inflected cultural siloes. We relate ever less, and ever less well, to people who live, parent, and conceive of adulthood differently than we do. Parents who do not allow their 10-year-olds to fetch an item one aisle over in the grocery store tend to find one another. So do those within the growing cadre of people who deem providing, protecting, partnering, and parenting as unimportant markers of adulthood. Friends reinforce shared parenting priors and shared worldviews.

　　As parents congregate in their like-minded silos, and kids have ever-less freedom, it is possible to be a rational adult without malice or rancor and call the police because a 10-year-old is out alone. This might really reflect the same sense of duty with which I might call the police if I saw a three-year-old out alone.

　　The fact that significant numbers of people now hold such a perspective is dangerous and divisive. It threatens both societal fracture and civilizational devolution. One ray of hope: Per Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly, those of us who reject an ideal of fragile childhood and undefined adulthood do tend to have more kids. 

　　My husband and I have our oldest turning 10 this year. Thanks to our Catholic parish and school, and to having had our first children in our 20s (uncommon among people of our educational and geographical background), we are fortunate to exist in a mild counterculture where it’s about 1998 in a whole host of respects—including the fostering of limited but growing freedom and responsibility for fourth graders.

　　This is a counterculture that I hope will grow as my children do, as more thoughtful parents endeavor to raise capable adults. Preferably without undue fear of arrest. 

　　And admittedly, at least in my case, with one of those watches that keeps your kid off the Internet but renders him able to call you in an emergency and you able to track his whereabouts. 

　　I know, I know. But, as in all things, let’s be grown up enough not to let the perfect be the enemy of what we pray is the good enough.