Is it responsible for a parent to let a 12-year-old child ride the NYC subway alone?

by Natalie Delia

Created on: July 18, 2009

I grew up in New York and it was perfectly acceptable to ride the subway at 12. I was 12 in 1992, if anything a more dangerous time in the city and the subway than today. In those not-so-long-ago days, many young New Yorkers took the subway to high school everyday from the age of 14 - not hopping on for a stop or two so they could avoid walking in the snow, but traversing the city. I went to Stuyvesant High School, in downtown Manhattan, and literally 95% of the students took some combination of ferry, subways and buses to arrive at school.

We didn't grow up afraid of our world and the people around us. We were independent young people with independent lives, complete with places to go and people to see. Taking the public transportation available to every citizen was the most natural thing in the world.

We live in Florida now and I have my own child. Everyone is constantly afraid of children falling off their bicycles, children getting hit by cars, children getting abducted, children getting molested, children being obese, children having eating disorders, children suffering from learning disorders, children suffering from depression and, finally, afraid of children committing suicide.

Between all these paranoias (and they are paranoias - contrary to what the news would have us believe, victimization of children by strangers is quite rare), our children have no independence at all and lack the freedom to create even basic senses of selves. They don't play with one another without our helpful supervision, because we take them wherever they go. They don't survive illnesses or injuries and, when they do, we feel guilty because they suffered because it should have been within our control.

Then, shockingly, we give them cars when they are 16 and give them the keys. They go from being shuttled around to owning machines capable of killing people from one day to the next. Two years later (if they haven't been killed or seriously injured in a car which, unlike victimization by a stranger, is very common), we pack them off to college and hope that the whole adult thing works out for them.

In New York, among native New Yorkers, 5 is about the appropriate age to go to a friend's apartment when the friend lives in the same building. Mothers call one another to wait the 2 minutes for their child to arrive, but this is unbeknownst to the child, who must develop independence. After another 2 years or so, walking 2 or 3 blocks in considered reasonable. At about 8, children walk to school when school is close to the house and by 11, the bus to middle school is an everyday event. In this world, twelve year olds going from 116th Street to 96th Street on the Number 1 doesn't seem so outrageous. In this way, they are prepared to travel to high school in two years and then move out four short years later.

We're moving back to New York shortly, because I am refusing to raise my son in the bubble of our best intentions. He needs to take the subway when he's 12 so he's ready to confront the world, as his own person, when he's 18.

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