Cor, if people started doing that in my city, forget about kids going out to have fun, school attendance would drop like a stone on account of it becoming de facto illegal for you to let your kids transport themselves to school.

That sounds more to me like a thing that happens in the suburbs, where kids need to be chauffeured around in cars everywhere and the streets are too fast and too packed with cars for bikes to be safe, so parents don't even get the opportunity to contemplate letting their kids out of their sight.

I'm pretty sure its a city and suburbs issue (just from news articles), but I am at a loss as to how to get the statistics to prove either case.

Only takes a few reports like this one, where a 10 y/o and 6 y/o are referred to CPS a half mile from home, for parents to keep kids in.

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/M...

Spot on. In Upper St. Clair, Pa., where my daughter/son-in-law/grandson live, any child walking alone who doesn't appear to be a teenager will be stopped and interrogated by a police officer in a patrol car.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that those CPS calls are a chiefly suburban phenomenon.

The original story of that was a 12 year old being allowed to ride the New York subway by himself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Skenazy

From your link, (1) it was a 9 year old, and (2) I don't see anything about CPS calls or any similar panic.

> Skenazy's April 1, 2008 column in The New York Sun, "Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone," described her making the controversial decision to let her son take the New York City Subway home alone, which was completed without incident.

I recall my mother telling me that when I was 8, I used to take my 5 year-old-brother places — just the two of us — on the electric streetcar. I handled the money to pay our fares. This was in Milwaukee in the mid-50s. No big deal.