I’ve never been arrested. But if I was a child today there is a good chance that my parents would be arrested, or at least threatened with the potential of arrest, for child neglect.

Which, I must admit, I find pretty hilarious, because they were the least neglectful parents I know. Sure, they didn’t hover, they gave my siblings and me at least the appearance of freedom, and they were, by their third adolescent girl, well versed in the idea of “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” But none of those things translate directly into neglect. Quite the opposite, in fact. They were on point, they knew what was up and were tuned into what we needed, and they were engaged as parents. So much so, that they knew when to disengage.

There’s been a lot of talk in the US media recently about Free-Range Parenting, as if letting your kid do something on his or her own is an entirely novel idea. Which, it seems, it actually is since parents are being arrested for letting their kids play outside or walk around the block alone. We have, I must assume, accepted the idea that the 10 year olds who fought in wars, worked grueling jobs, and managed households only a few hundred years ago were of a completely different species than those that we’re popping out in 2015.

No, kids shouldn’t be in battle, or working, or burdened with ridiculous levels of responsibility, but if kids had the mental capacity to take care of themselves then, I think it’s pretty fair to say that we haven’t digressed to the point at which we seem to think we are at now. Children today are, I have to believe, no less capable of not making idiotic decisions that those 100 years ago.

If you are about to argue, “But what about frontal lobe development?!?” I think that that is a great argument for putting age barriers on things like driving and owning a gun, but if your kid is so limited by his lack of frontal lobe development that he can’t realize that it’s stupid to cross the street without looking both ways by the age of 7, then you better be ready to house him until he’s 25.

I was 11 or 12 the first time that I rode the train, from my little suburb in Westchester, NY, to New York City by myself. I was old enough to look up the train schedule, to buy my own ticket, and to find my dad at Grand Central after I arrived. I was not, however, old enough to stop people from staring, whispering, and making me feel completely uncomfortable with what I felt was a safe and well-planned adventure. It wasn’t perfectly smooth sailing, as I only learned on the train that “children’s tickets” can only be used with an adult present (side note: that’s a dumb rule) and had to haggle with the ticket collector, but it taught me a lot and I didn’t get maimed, abducted, or die. Success!

My jaunt on the train wasn’t my first solo mission, having been sent around the block (no streets to cross!) for groceries regularly for years. My sister’s and I weren’t afraid of running errands, going to the hair salon, or going over to a friend’s house alone because we were taught to see our neighborhood as an extension of our home – a place we should respect the rules of, be courteous in and, more than anything, explore. It was, for us, an adventurous childhood that seems to have become rare with children disappearing from yards across America at a pace that is completely incongruous with the fact that rates of violence, abductions, and general crime are dropping across the board.

As a family, we embraced these little adventures, hiccups and all, and I believe that they prepared us for life in a way that watching Anthony Bourdain travel the world on TV never could. Many years later, when my sister Martha was a freshman in college, she found herself sleeping on the floor of a Geneva airport, with no family or friends in the city, after accidentally booking a ticket for a month after the date she needed to fly and not realizing it until trying to check in. It was a rough 72 hours, and my parent’s were more than a little nervous, but she was a trooper. She fixed the problem, got on a new flight, and arrived home a little shaken up but in one piece. Maybe she would have gotten home without having picked up parsley at Mrs. Green’s at 8 years old, but I like to think her composure came from having been in that moment of panic before, having survived before, and having built up a level of confidence that, in moments of crisis, kicks in to show her the way.

While we saw our neighborhood adventures as de rigueur, other people in town thought very differently, and were our parents to have raised us 10 years later, it’s likely the police would have been called. A frightening thought that, unsurprisingly, is keeping parents who want to give their children more freedom from even trying to do so.

Locking our children indoors and turning on the TV isn’t working, and it isn’t creating more self-sufficient or motivated young people. Not a week goes by that I don’t see a headline that decries today’s teens and 20-somethings as being lazy, but no one seems to be questioning why they might be that way. Is it possible that by withholding freedom and autonomy at a young age, we’ve created whole communities of young adults who are failing to launch? Whose fault is it then that a 22-year-old college grad is moving home, asking for an allowance, or stalling on finding a job? Blaming the kid seems, to me, to be a little absurd. If they never knew any different, if they see their home as a safe nest that they’ll never be pushed out of, why would they try to make it on their own?

Maybe adventures with neighborhood children would have made the difference. Maybe the ignition switch wasn’t hit early enough.