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It happened last spring. Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for The New York Sun, left her nine year old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdales in midtown Manhattan, with a Metro card to ride the subway, a subway map, quarters (for a phone call), and $20 (just in case) and then told him that she would see him at home. Forty- five minutes later, he arrived home. Izzy had wanted to prove that he could find his way home and his mother had given him the opportunity to do so. She used this adventure for a column in The Sun and reports that “little did I realize this would be the Subway Ride Heard Round the World.” (Readers Digest, October 2008). The range of responses was wide as the story both intrigued and infuriated the media, reporters, and bloggers.

“How could you? You are a bad mother” versus “bravo for letting your boy grow up.”

The question posed by The Today show was, “is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?” Reacting, Skenazy deplored how controlled by fear parents had become causing kids in many neighborhoods to be almost “vacuumed up” or kept in isolation. How did this happen? She and others were surprisingly specific as they pinpointed “TV” as the culprit. Trevor Butterworth, an editor at stats.org..says, ”Cable TV exists to scare the pants off you.”

They are right. Kids aren’t kids anymore. Even more, people are not acting like people. I’m not trying to put any more responsibility on TV than it deserves, but it seems contradictory to work to free oneself from fear, while ingesting a healthy dose of the very thing that causes fear!

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