Parenting

Amtrak's War on Childhood

Amtrak recently raised its unaccompanied minor age fromeight to 13. Seems harmless enough, right? Not according to Lenore Skenazy, whowrites in The Wall Street Journal, “We live in a society that insists oninfantilizing our children, treating them as helpless babies who can’t do athing safely or successfully without an adult hovering nearby.” Adults are,Skenazy argues, sucking the fun out of childhood—in Europe,for instance, the European Union recently ruled that children under eightshould be supervised when blowing up a balloon. “Children are not being allowedto grow up and do the normal things we did as kids, out of the fear that, justmaybe, something bad could happen.”