When Freedom Became Fear: How a Generation Lost Its Courage to Let Go

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Last week, I was driving through Cary, North Carolina, according to FBI data, it’s the 6th safest city in the country.

And yet, I saw something that made me pause.

Two boys, maybe eight or nine years old, were walking side by side on the sidewalk, laughing and chatting as they carried grocery bags from a local store.

There were no parents in sight. And, perhaps most surprising of all, not a phone to be seen either.

My immediate internal dialogue screamed, Where are their parents? 

I looked a few hundred yards ahead of them and behind them. No adults. No one trailing behind or waiting nearby. And as I reflected on that, I caught myself wondering: Why did I feel so uneasy about two kids walking down a sidewalk in broad daylight? Why did I feel fear for them at all?

When I was their age (oh yes, I just used that annoying maturer-than-you generational quip), growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, this was normal. My friends and I would bike for miles across several towns, on trails and side streets, without any parental supervision and, especially in the early years, without a cell phone in our pockets.

We’d ride up to the local farm feed store (yes, even Chicago had those), where Buddy the Parrot would squawk the dial‑up tone as we walked in. I’d spend the money I’d earned from my lemonade stand or whatever small entrepreneurial venture I had going that week.

As I reflected on those two boys walking together, I found myself reminiscing on my own childhood and wondering what had changed. When did this simple act of independence start to feel unusual? When did we start seeing freedom as danger?

That question sent me digging into the research.

Fly in the Helicopter Parents

A single statistic illustrates a cultural turn: in 1969, about 41% of U.S. students walked or biked to school. By 2001, that number had dropped to 13% (McDonald, 2007). The most recent national survey, conducted in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Transportation, found that just 9.6% of students usually walk to school, while another 1.1% bike (U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration [FHWA], 2018).

What changed wasn’t traffic or school distance or physical ability. Arguably, our entire narrative of risk changed as did the parents’ outlook on child safety.

As the 70s and 80s unfolded, “moral panic” swept the United States, unleashing an onslaught of media coverage, documentaries, movies, and legislation.

In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared on his first solo walk to his bus stop, a case that immediately became a national obsession (New York Times, 2017). Two years later, in 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was abducted from a Florida department store, the headline turning into one of the most publicized crimes of the decade (FBI, n.d.; History.com Editors, 2021). These cases ignited a wave of fear and attention that reshaped American parenting and policymaking for a generation.

Criminologist Kristen Zgoba (2004) describes this as a “moral panic,” a period when “child safety” became less about empirical risk and more about emotional reaction. Her research argues that child safety laws from this era were, as she puts it, examples of “panic legislation.” 

Congress passed the Missing Children Act (1982), and advocates and lawmakers launched the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 1984. By the early 2000s, the AMBER Alert network went nationwide, formalized under the PROTECT Act of 2003 (Congress.gov, 1982; NCMEC, 2019; U.S. DOJ, 2003).

What the Numbers, not the Algorithms, Tell Us

While national awareness has, on many occasions, expedited the safe return of many abducted children, the true data, while still devastating, does not sound the same alarms that the media has portrayed.

An estimated 25 children each year are abducted by a complete stranger in the United States, an annual risk of roughly one in 3,000,000 (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, 2021). While still overwhelmingly tragic, you have about the same odds of getting attacked by a shark in your lifetime than getting abducted by a complete stranger as a child. And yet, these are the abductions that dominate the news cycles.

Communication scholars Duvall and Moscowitz (2011) found that news stories about abductions overwhelmingly focus on young, white, middle- or upper-class girls taken by unknown male perpetrators. Audiences were conditioned to see specific victims and villains, reinforcing cultural myths about safety, danger, and control.

The pattern persists: today we blame social media algorithms for distorting reality, but traditional media has long optimized for the same thing: attention.

Each of these moments cultivated the perfect storm. We know, by applying the Pendulum Theory, that a generation will often challenge its upbringing by overcorrecting what it perceives as shortcomings for the next generation.

The result? A generation of parents raised on independence (Gen X) vowed to be deeply present for their kids (Millennials and Gen Z). Gen X, eager to be more present than their own parents had been, became the first helicopter parents.

From Latchkey to Latched On

Gen X grew up with keys around their necks and instructions to be home by the time the streetlights flickered on. When they became parents, they traded streetlights for dashboards, apps, check-ins, and GPS pings. Kids were unable to experience freedom or independence. They were always being watched, monitored, and chauffeured around.

To be fair, some of this caution reflects progress. We know more about abuse. Society places an extremely heavy emphasis on kids’ emotional lives. We have better tools to mobilize a community when a child is truly in danger.

But there’s a cost when every unaccompanied moment is treated as a crisis.

A unique shift has also happened, almost penalizing parents for giving their kids autonomy. Over the past few decades, the legal definition of “good parenting” has quietly changed. As David Pimentel (2012) notes, rising cultural fear, fueled by rare but sensationalized child abductions, has blurred the line between caution and criminality.

Vague child-neglect laws, written to punish genuine harm, have been stretched to police everyday judgment calls, from walking to school to staying home alone. The Pendulum is in an overcorrect phase. It has swung from benign neglect to borderline required supervision, where failure to be latched on and helicopter can be mistaken for endangerment.

In 2021, a mother left her children, ages 5-12, at home while she went shopping. The abridged version of the case is that the police were called while she was gone, and she was ultimately charged with child neglect.

Fast forward to 2024, the Iowa Supreme Court reversed a conviction against, writing that “no parent can shield a child from all risks.” That ruling signaled what many parents already feel: our system has overcorrected. The law now reflects not the realities of danger, but the anxieties of a culture that has forgotten what ordinary childhood freedom looks like.

A few states have started to recalibrate. Utah passed the first Reasonable Childhood Independence law in 2018, clarifying that normal independent activities (walking to school, playing outside) do not, by themselves, constitute neglect. Texas (2021) and Virginia (2023) followed with their own versions (Utah Legislature, 2018; Texas Legislature, 2021; Virginia General Assembly, 2023).

The Safest Place to Feel Afraid

As mentioned, Cary is one of the safest cities in the country (MoneyGeek, 2025). In other words, if there’s a place where you might expect to see kids walking home with groceries, this is it.

And yet my gut reaction: “Where are their parents?” arrived before my rational brain kicked in. That tells me how far our cultural baseline has moved.

Here’s the paradox: fear is part of growing up.

Do you remember the first time your parents left you home alone? The house seemed to breathe. The water heater clicked on, and your heart spiked. Shadows that you didn’t notice yesterday were now moving and growing.

And yet, you survived. Eventually, the fear subsided, and ultimately, you obtained confidence that comes only from doing something a little scary and surviving.

Closing Thoughts

At some point, every child should get to feel that pulse of fear when the door first closes and they’re home alone (at a reasonable age). The hum of the HVAC, the creak of the floorboards expanding, the rush of realizing no one else is coming to fix things. That’s how courage is born.

But over the years, our pursuit of safety became a culture of surveillance. We replaced scraped knees with parental dashboards. We’ve quelled childhood curiosity with parental precaution. Now we’re watching the downstream effect: a generation that craves autonomy but has never practiced it.

Gen Z was raised with helicoptering oversight. Every step, click, and coordinate was observed in real-time. They’ve grown up waiting for permission before taking action. As leaders, we are faced with this dilemma in society and in our offices.

But leadership, like parenting, isn’t about removing every risk or creating an unrealistically safe world through bubble wrapping and protection. It’s about helping others learn to navigate risk wisely. If we never let people stumble, they never learn to stand. I’ve often heard that failure is the best teacher. And let me tell you, from experience, I agree.

Maybe the best thing we can do for our kids and our young teams is to stop trying to eliminate anything that is scary and instead teach how to walk through it.

As those two boys in Cary disappeared around the corner, I realized they weren’t an exception to be alarmed by, they were a reminder.

They were A glimpse of the ordinary freedom many of us once had. If we want to raise resilient, wise adults, we can’t outsource all of childhood to oversight and monitoring.

We need to give kids the space to hear the creaks…and learn that they can handle it and that they will be okay.

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