The 2008 Subway Ride

On a Sunday afternoon in April 2008, Lenore Skenazy handed her nine-year-old son a MetroCard, a subway map, twenty dollars, and quarters for a pay phone, and let him find his own way home from Bloomingdale's at Fifty-Ninth Street. The ride took thirty-five minutes. He arrived home fine. Skenazy wrote about the experience in her New York Sun column, and within forty-eight hours she had been interviewed by every major American media outlet, dubbed "America's Worst Mom" on national television, and subjected to debate on talk radio across the country. The event's significance was not the ride itself but what the reaction revealed: a cultural immune response so calibrated to imagined danger that a statistically ordinary decision by a competent parent became evidence of negligence.