Parenting and opinions go hand in hand. Where children are involved, everyone, it seems - whether a parent or not - has advice or criticism. The circumstances are such that when I was put in a situation where my two, then pre-teenage sons had to go to school by themselves on public transport, I kept it to myself.
That afternoon, they came home from school enthusing about their achievement and with a desire to repeat it. I let them. Five years later, they confidently go to every part of Hong Kong with their friends, to run errands and shop. Without adult supervision.
New York newspaper columnist Lenore Skenazy's mind was brimming with such thoughts when, a few months ago, she let her then nine-year-old son go home by himself on the subway. She had reasoned that her two sons needed to be more able to think and make decisions for themselves. New York, she believed, was not as perilous as it was perceived to be, thanks to anti-crime drives started in the mid-1990s; with rates down to the levels of when she was growing up, there was no reason why her children should not do as she had done, and get around by themselves.
Other mothers did not agree. They said that she was crazy, negligent and not caring. Annoyed, she wrote about the incident in her New York Sun column - and was swamped by a storm of comment, some of it hostile. Soon she was appearing on television, defending herself against accusations that she was a child abuser. Some people tagged her 'America's worst mother'.
The attention was such that, in mid-April, Skenazy started her own blog, Free Range Kids, spelling out her views. They hinge on the need for the child-rearing pendulum to swing back to when parents were not constantly keeping tabs on sons and daughters because of safety fears. She told me this week that the pendulum had swung so far that the situation was now 'ridiculous'. 'You shouldn't have to track your child with a GPS system in your brain every second of the day,' she said.
A growing number of parents agree. So much positive comment is coming in that she contends a movement akin to that started by women espousing feminism in the 1960s is under way. I stumbled on her blog recently and found myself in agreement with her sentiments.