A new survey of nearly 24,000 American parents found that at age 12, one in five children still aren’t allowed to leave the house without an adult. Only two percent can go anywhere on their own. At 17—the age you can enlist in the US military with parental consent—8 percent still can’t leave the house unsupervised.
I read those numbers and felt two things at once: That’s insane, and I completely understand.
I’m raising young kids in Crescent Heights. I want them to walk to the park, ride their bikes to a friend’s house, and learn the neighbourhood by feel.
Everything I’ve read—Jonathan Haidt’s work, the free-range childhood research, decades of developmental psychology—tells me that independent mobility is how children learn to assess risk, navigate the world, and become competent humans. I believe that, and I want to act on it.
But I also live on a street where drivers treat stop signs as suggestions, and I’ve watched enough near-misses at our local intersections to know that my fear isn’t irrational. It’s evidence-based.
I stood there and counted.
On a recent afternoon, I spent 30 minutes at each of two intersections in Crescent Heights: 1 Street NE at 8 Avenue, and 1 Street NE at 7 Avenue. Both are near a park, are stop-sign-controlled, and are crossed regularly by parents and children on foot.
At the first intersection, I counted 52 vehicles in half an hour. Of those, 29 rolled through the stop sign without stopping. Three ran it at full speed. Only four stopped for a pedestrian or cyclist.
At the second, 41 vehicles. Twenty-two rolled through. Three stopped for a person on foot.
Across one hour, at two intersections beside a park, I watched 93 vehicles pass through. Seven stopped for a human being. That’s a 7.5 percent compliance rate for the most basic rule of the road: stop, and yield to the person in front of you.
I would not send my child across either of those intersections alone.
This isn’t a parenting problem
In Finland, the majority of seven-year-olds walk or cycle to places on their own. By eight, most cross main roads alone. By 10, they ride the bus. In Japan, six-year-olds walk to school in groups while community volunteers stand at crosswalks with flags. These aren’t braver parents. These are countries that built streets where a child can exist without being killed.
The conversation around the Anxious Generation data tends to frame this as a parenting culture failure, as though parents simply chose to be afraid, and the solution is to choose differently. But the international research tells a different story. The countries where children have the most independence—Finland, Norway, Sweden, Japan, Denmark—aren’t the ones with the most courageous parents. They’re the ones with traffic calming, lower speed limits, separated cycling infrastructure, and a driver culture that expects children to be present in the road environment.
We don’t have that.
Calgary recorded 15 pedestrian deaths in 2025, a 10-year high. The number has been climbing since 2017. Our Safer Mobility Plan talks about Vision Zero (zero fatalities), but the trend line is going in the wrong direction, and the infrastructure on residential streets in neighbourhoods like mine hasn’t meaningfully changed.
What I actually need
I don’t need to be told to relax—and I don’t need a parenting philosophy. I need to know that if my child crosses 1 Street NE at 8 Avenue, the driver approaching that stop sign will stop.
That means physical infrastructure, not just signage. Raised crosswalks. Curb bump-outs that shorten crossing distances. Speed tables on residential streets that serve as cut-throughs. These aren’t experimental ideas—they’re standard practice in every country that outperforms us on childhood independence.
A Parachute Canada survey found that 75 percent of Canadian parents prevent their kids from walking or cycling to school, and the primary reason is fear of speeding cars and traffic.
But the answer isn’t to shame parents into letting go. It’s to build streets where letting go is a reasonable thing to do.
I want my kids to roam. I just need Calgary to make it survivable.
- Cody Littlefield is a dad and strategic designer based in Crescent Heights, Calgary. Originally from San Diego, California, he spends too much time thinking about how cities are built and whether his kids can safely cross the street.
