We live in the city and let our 10-year-old go on walks alone.

Why childhood should be (sort of) risky

Autumn’s Way by Loré Pemberton

As I type this post, it’s Tuesday afternoon, the day after New Year’s, and the world is back to work. I went grocery shopping this morning, as I do every week, then made some lunch and sat down to write just as my ten-year-old daughter burst into the room and begged, “Mom, can I pleeeease take the dog out on a walk?”

My first impulse when Lucy poses these sorts of questions is to want to lock her in her bedroom. She’ll be safe there. She’ll never take walks alone, never be out of my sight, and never be put in a situation in which she might get hurt…or worse. (Not only am I a mother with an active imagination, I also have OCD. Double the fun.)

I decide against my fearful impulses. “Take my phone,” I say, handing it over.

“Oh, and I have my pocket knife, too,” Lucy replies with a mischievous grin, the kind that tells me she’s confident she won’t ever need to use it.

As she walks out the door, I say a little prayer for her safety and go back to writing. I resist the urge to go stand at the window and watch for her. I count the seconds. I listen for the sound of screams. I take a deep breath. I keep typing.

Our kids were born in Atlanta and have been raised in the city all of their lives. They’re used to busy streets and busy places. We live on a quiet side road that people only come down if they’re residents or if they’ve made a wrong turn, but right outside our neighborhood is one of the busiest highways in the city. Fifteen minutes down the road is the world’s largest airport. The amount of unknown, and potentially unsafe, people who pass us daily numbers in the tens of thousands.

Statistically speaking, however, child abductions by strangers are increasingly rare. Even though my dad had an idyllic childhood which he often romanticizes (as one should, if possible), he was much more at risk for abduction by a random passerby in 1970 than my daughter is in 2024. The difference between then and now is we have round-the-clock access to every horrible event that takes place in the world, so when kidnappings or trafficking by strangers does happen, it’s so digitally present we get tricked into thinking the world is worse off than it’s ever been. We keep our children inside. We never leave them at home alone. We make them sit in car seats until they’re in third grade. Funnily enough, we often have no issue buying them phones where a simple tap of the screen will give them access to all sorts of horrific violence, “but that’s different.”

It’s hard to be a parent, I know. It’s scary as hell having your soul walk outside of your body all day long, liable to break a bone, get sick, be bullied, have her heart broken, or be mistreated in any number of ways.

But the answer to our fears is not to prevent our kids from taking risks.

It’s to help them learn how.

In Linda Åkeson McGurk’s phenomenal book, There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom’s Secrets to Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids, she details the significant social, economic, and political distinctions between her home country of Sweden and the United States. In her book, which is part-memoir/part-cultural analysis, she underscores just how risk-averse parents in the U.S. have become.

McGurk writes,

“The difference [in how risks are approached in the two regions] is that in Scandinavia fears regarding such dangers are fought with familiarity, both at school and at home.” (Emphasis mine)

Avoidance doesn’t create safety. It only creates anxiety. In McGurk’s view, and in the vast number of case studies she cites, reasonable risk-taking is what allows children to grow into thoughtful, resilient adults. It’s what teaches them their limits and gives them the courage to try again, perhaps in a new and better way. It’s in the very act of taking risks that our children discover and learn to live out their capabilities.

I was raised in a small town with a population of about 5,000 people. I attended the same school system from kindergarten through twelfth grade and matriculated with a grand total of 82 other students, most of whom I’d known my entire life. I am also part of the last generation to grow up without smartphones or social media. Facebook, which launched my sophomore year of college, was a long way off when I was an adolescent girl beginning to explore the world around me. I remember a few terrible news reports from back then (like little JonBenét), but those were either committed by a member of the victim’s family or by someone close to them. Only one case comes to mind in which a child was kidnapped by a total stranger, and that had taken place before I was even born. In the nineties, just as the internet was becoming a mainstay in our homes, the biggest story on the news was Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

But the world wasn’t actually safer then; it just appeared to be.

The house I grew up in was on a semi-busy street across from the railroad tracks, so I was never short on penny-smashing adventures or bicycle races. The end of the sidewalk was about half a mile down the road and a favorite pastime was to ride my bike there and back again, which I did at least a few times per week. The freedom I felt on those rides, wind-whipped hair flying behind me as my skinny legs pumped the pedals, was delicious. I knew not to trust adults who might stop their cars to chat with a nine-year-old. (Which never happened.) I understood there were bad people in the world. What gave me confidence was not the lack of danger in my environment, but the opportunity I was given to navigate it on my own.¹ I learned how to trust my instincts, to listen to the still, small voice within me, and to assess situational risk to greater and greater degrees. It paid off in later years when I left for university four hours away and built a new life for myself, confident I had the skills to do so because I had been trusted with so many circumstances in which I could have gotten hurt or made a fool of myself. (Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. The point is I learned.)

Our children are growing up simultaneously more sheltered and more anxious than ever before, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s up to the individual family to decide what risks are most appropriate for their children; what’s best for one child’s environment, personality, and skill level might not be best for another. Regardless, the need for healthy risk remains if we hope to raise wise, capable humans in a world that tells us the worst is around the corner at every possible turn.

A major reason why I left social media a year ago was the constant, low-grade fear it instilled in me. The tragic makes its home there—forever—and it doesn’t take much scrolling to find it. My mental health took a big hit, no matter how hard I tried to make those apps work for me. I would pick up my phone and practically feel my body start to hum, readying itself with cortisol for whatever sad news story, angry rant, or judgment it would find there. It was all so elevated, all the time, and I became less willing to take risks in my real life—as a writer, a mother, and a woman—because of it.

I don’t deny that sometimes we need to see what pain people have endured. It’s how we bear witness to the suffering of others and honor their experience of it. But we must also ask what harm this surveillance culture has done to our perception of our neighbors, families, cities, and selves. We’re losing our ability to take risks, and, worst of all, we’re passing that trait onto our children.

By its very nature, taking risks can, and sometimes does, cause real pain.

But it’s also where the greatest rewards are found.

I’m happy to report that my daughter returned from her walk within fifteen minutes—which felt like a lifetime near the end—with pink cheeks and a bright smile on her face.

“How was it?” I asked, feigning nonchalance.

Lucy handed back my cell phone. “It was great!” she replied. “And I didn’t even need to use my knife.”

1. My mother confessed years later to sometimes following me and hiding behind trees so I couldn’t see her. I’m grateful for the perceived freedom I had, at any rate 😆.