Independence Dividends

I'm sorry that happened! That sounds stressful for everyone!

I read Lily and Anna your comment, and asked if anything similar had happened to them:

Anna: No one has ever actually asked me, but I think it might happen in the future.

Lily: I remember two times when someone asked me. The first time I was coming home from a friend's house and I got confused about directions and I was looking around, and someone asked if I needed help. Another time I was over by the park and an old lady asked if I was okay. I was just walking near the park, not doing anything weird, and they were just curious. There was also one other time when I was putting something in the mailbox in the evening [JK: just a few houses down from us] and someone asked me what I was doing and wanted to watch to make sure I went into a house.

Our kids have pretty different responses to adults asking them questions, and it does sound like that's important here.

(Before they started going out alone we also did some practice on what they would say if an adult asked them what they were doing. Talking to Julia, it sounds like she still practices these occasionally with Lily, especially when Lily is nervous about whether an adult will stop her.)

A third grader (9y) walking to school alone is reasonably normal here, and if anything went wrong in the morning before leaving she could have come in and woken me. This particular situation doesn't seem like one with much risk of conflict with authorities.

On the other hand, at 7y she was the first in her class to be walking to school alone, and we were the first parents (in institutional memory, not ever) to tell the school our kindergartner could walk home with an older sibling (2nd grade at the time). And they've gone to the park by themselves at ages where that's uncommon here.

One of the things I did before the kids started going out alone was casually talk about this with the other neighborhood parents, mostly at the park, to get a sense of how they were thinking about it. They mostly said they thought kids should be more free to go places and the reason they didn't let their kids were either that they had really young kids or that they thought other adults would report them or otherwise cause issues. This meant that once our kids were out alone a decent fraction of the adults who might see them knew what was going on and that it was ok.