When I was ten, I had two paper routes.
Not one — two.
Up before sunrise, folding papers in the garage, rubber bands snapping against my fingers. Then out the door on my bike, hoping the wind wouldn’t tear the Observer in half before it hit the porch.
By thirteen, I was mowing lawns for extra money and, as the oldest kid of divorced parents, running the house most afternoons. My brother, my sister, and I — latchkey crew. No babysitters, no trackers, no “parental monitoring apps.” The key was under the mat, and the only rule was: don’t burn the place down before Mom gets home.
And somehow… we survived.
So when I read about a Pennsylvania mom getting placed on the child abuse registry because her 13-year-old brother watched her baby while she ran an errand, my first thought was: what the hell happened to common sense?
Her name’s Alice (not her real one). She’s a single mom, working hard, doing her best. She leaves her teenager — who she also cares for — in charge of her baby for a short stretch. No danger, no neglect. Just life. Yet the state treated her like a criminal.
Lawmakers are now pushing the “Reasonable Independence for Children” bill to stop this insanity. It’s basically a legal memo reminding bureaucrats that kids being responsible doesn’t count as abuse. The fact that we need a law for that should make every parent’s head spin.
One representative said he was raised by a single mom who worked multiple jobs and had to get himself to school. Another grew up on a farm where the kids looked out for each other. You could hear the nostalgia bleeding through the testimony — that lost era of scraped knees and bike rides that lasted till dinner.
Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist, told lawmakers what most of us already know instinctively: when you take away independence, you take away confidence. Kids who never get to test themselves grow up anxious, dependent, unsure. You can’t build resilience through supervision alone.
I think about that every time I see a playground with a “no unsupervised children” sign. Or a parent scolded online because their kid walked to the park. We’ve built a culture of parenting panic, where fear outweighs faith.
When my parents split, my mom didn’t have a choice. She worked, I watched my siblings, and that was life. We weren’t neglected — we were trusted. I wasn’t a victim; I was responsible. That’s how I learned to handle things, to make decisions, to grow up.
Alice eventually got cleared. But the damage — the fear, the stigma — lingers. Every time the system overreacts, it tells parents: don’t trust your instincts. And the cost isn’t measured in legal bills. It’s measured in the slow disappearance of confident kids.
We’ve confused protection with paranoia.
And the only cure might be remembering what responsibility used to look like — a ten-year-old kid with two paper routes, a bike, and a Coke waiting in the fridge when the job was done.