My daughter has been playing outside since she was 4 years old, unsupervised. She's 9 now. A lot of the other neighborhood kids have followed suit (I really suspect our "benign neglect" made the other parents thing "well if nothing bad happened to her our kids will be fine" and we have about 8-10 kids around the same age on the block that are constantly going to each other's houses and hanging out doing whatever it is they're doing (I don't really know, that's part of what makes it so great). It's almost 9pm right now, I have no idea where she is. She comes home when the street lights come on. The other day I gave her a $20 bill and she rode her bike to the Walmart nearby (no major streets on the way there). She bought her friends ice cream and was a hero. Sure there were hiccups, one time she stole the neighbors solar powered lanterns from his front yard, but we made her return them and apologize.

I guess our strategy is we just don't let her have any screens. They make her absolutely insane. So instead she leaves the house as soon as she can and goes out and plays. Even her 5 year old sister who is wheelchair bound goes with her a lot of the time, in the $1200 Thule buggy super stroller we bought (used). I guess we just lucked out, but we also insisted on it and kept letting her go out even after some woman called CPS on us for letting our kid be unsupervised. We live in a middle class neighborhood with people from dozens of countries and every major religions living together, and all our kids play together. I'm sure it's someone's mental image of the ideal childhood.

Thanks for sharing your story, it’s wonderful, seems very similar to how we grew up. We have a 6 yo who does get daily outdoor time but that is supervised because it wouldn’t be possible otherwise, we live in NYC. My son does get screen time only 2 hours on weekends, at this point the cat’s out of the bag. We’ll just try to keep the screen time limited to 2 hours per week.

Out of interest, how did the interaction with CPS go?

You don't also know what is actually happening.

I live near kids like this where there parents aren't around they just roam. They get into trouble. How much parenting are you dumping on others.

One group decided it would be fun to smash glass bottles in the parking lot. So I have to do the job if the parent and either tell them to behave, stop and clean it up or clean up after them myself so I don't ruin my tires. Why aren't the real parents doing this?

Or the kids liter, get stuck in trees,lose their stuff, pee on stuff etc. All problems their real parents should be dealing with but instead others have to deal with it. Randoms like me get the negatives of the unsupervised kids.

Im sure their parents think they had a pleasant day playing tag all day though.

9pm is just a number; street lights are obvious and well-timed for when it's time to stop being outside.

If 6pm and no knowledge was ok, almost 9pm with streetlights still off is too.

It’s summer (no school) and it’s not dark until a little after 9PM, in my mid-latitude part of the continental US.

“Bye, have fun, come in when the street lights come on” is entirely appropriate for a 9-year-old when school’s not in session. It’s playing outside, not playing fortnight or drooling to the YouTube algo. It’s ok for that to run a little late in the summer.

Jumping in here.

Do you home school? Because if you don't home school, surprise! "Bad" kids are everywhere, including in any school that exists.

The best you can do is talk about bad influence. Peer pressure. Tailoring that conversation to the child's personality.

My thoughts on this are, the time to teach self-control and responsibility is when young. It won't take completely when young, as the brain is literally not fully developed in that capacity yet, but the lessons can stick, and be known when older.

Those lessons are action->consequence outcomes, and in a sense, borking up responsibility at times becomes a leaning moment. Put another way, mistakes are how we learn, and small mistakes when young, are better than massive mistakes when 20.

Yes, bad habits are a worry. I don't think there is any simple answer here, except independence is important for any adult mind, and that flows from independence in youth.

And of course, this all depends upon the child too. Some have more sense at 5, than others at 50.

> How is she doing academically? I feel like that much freedom, that early, makes it easy to pick up bad habits with the “bad” kids.

For fucks sake, she's 9 years old, let a kid be a kid and not a productivity machine, she will have her whole life to worry about that later... At that age the worse that can happen academically speaking is taking a bit longer to learn how to multiply and divide numbers.

At that age is easy to pick up bad habits and also easy to let them go, OP seems to be a good enough parent to nudge their kid into better habits if they deem necessary.

Reading wincy's comment above, it seems like their kid is the one that's a "bad" influence on the rest of the neighbourhood.

(Not actually 'bad', but trendsetters that helped some of the other kinds come out to play more.)

This one might have a regional element to it based on how late the days are. For example where I'm at it won't quite be sunset at 9pm, and each phase of twilight will have around an hour to itself. Around now would be about an appropriate time for a young person to make their way home so they get back before dark. In comparison it looks like Houston will be about halfway through nautical twilight and basically be completely dark by 9pm (nautical twilight ends at 920 there).

So yeah, your gauge of what 9pm means might not be accurate for the situation! I doubt you were imagining 9pm being bright and an hour or two before its too dark for a young person to be out riding a bike, but that could well be the case

I mean this happens with my 9 year old. We have a parent group chat and just ask who knows where the crew is

Yep, we have a neighborhood group chat and send over a note with phone numbers when a new person moves in. Works great. She also has an Apple Watch with cellular service in case we need to get ahold of her. I’m happy to say she came home right on time this evening without so much as a phone call though.

So, my kid lobbied for her own cell phone for a year or so when she was in primary school. We finally caved in and got her one.

Then she realized we can now call her and tell her to come home when she's out.

"I'll leave the phone at home, daddy, I'm afraid I'll break it while playing."

That’s technology working to bring people together rather than driving them apart

Such a great use of group chat. Thanks!