It seems that everyone agrees that a kids maturity and familiarity with their environment is important. And that, in the past, we were all allowed to try and learn from any mistakes. The biggest thing that seems to be preventing us from letting our kids try out their independence is fear of being turned into CPS. I'm not pointing any fingers because that fear is one I consider too but think about it--in the past if we decided to leave a kid home to see how it goes and it went poorly then we clean up the mess and waited a long time to try again. If that kid needed stitches or bandaging we could tell a dr what happened & why expecting dr to comiserate and give the kid a lecture similiar to one we gave. Not today. Why do strangers have such control over parenting decisions? Maybe CPS wouldn't have such a caseload if they didn't have to check out everyone and maybe some overwhelmed parent wouldn't feel so overwhelmed if they could call the 11 yo from down the street to babysit so they could get an hour or two of free time. The world hasn't changed all that much--we are just exposed to every bad thing that happens 100s of miles away and feel like it is all in our own town. Together we get overprotected kids.