I have such a hard time letting my kids go out on their own. Even though we live in the same house I grew up on, which sits on a dead end street. I was left entirely to my own devices at like 8 years old. But I could never with my kids.

My eleven year old son brought home two friends yesterday. The played Brawl Stars for a little bit, but then they went out to a nearby park and played hide and seek for two hours (this is Germany). He came home very happy, telling me and his siblings about his hiding places and how the friends couldn't find him. We were all stunned - this simple game, a staple of my childhood, has become so exotic.

As a New Yorker, I miss the small-town, low-traffic neighborhood I grew up in in the Ozarks. I'd love to let my kids run around my hometown streets, but Brooklyn just feels like it has so many more unknowns.

We learned so much when we moved from Canada to Germany with a 6-year-old. In Canada, we could never let her out of our sight, and other parents in our gated courtyard looked at me askance because I would watch her in the courtyard from my kitchen window rather than being physically present outside. In Germany, the streets in our neighbourhood were all cul-de-sacs so the row houses all backed up on one another, and the kids ran wild in the back, going from house to house without parental supervision (yes, even at 6 -- kids walk to school on their own, too). Explaining the situation in Canada again when we moved back was hard. I think this article does a good job of capturing what is lost -- in Germany, I was forced to go talk to other parents to figure out whose house my kid was in, and that was a good thing!