Let's see:
* I walked back and forth to school alone when I was in the first and second grade---in the Bronx.
* For crying out loud, I sledded in the Bronx down the single worst road drop in the borough---the wicked big drop from Sedgwick Avenue down to Bailey Avenue on Kingsbridge Road.
* I walked back and forth to school when I was in third through sixth grades, junior high school and high school, the latter two when I didn't feel like the bus--on Long Island.
* I never met a snowball fight I didn't like.
* If I went to the stores on my own, sometimes my mother might happen to be driving by and she'd stop and I'd hop into the car. I wasn't exactly being kidnapped.
* The worst thing about any trick or treat candy I ever got was black licorice, which I still can't stand.
* My parents thought nothing worse than I was being adventurous playing on 5-and-up playground equipment when I was three and four. Except maybe for a couple of scraped knees. (The flip side: they were absolute basket cases if they saw me riding my bike out in "the gutter" as we used to call it, even if I knew what I was doing out there, which I did.)
* We didn't have cell phones when I was a kid, and walking around the woods or the lakes on summer vacations was a freaking rite of passage when I was a kid.
* So I once had messy hair while wearing shorts in the summer. What did that make me, neglected? Name one kid who didn't get his hair mussed up a bit playing baseball and other summer games or going to the beach to swim, for God's sake. (And I'd go to the beach alone when I was like nine or ten to meet friends there, since I lived walking distance from it after we moved out of the Bronx. Oh, the horror!)
* I got kissed on the lips all the time from my parents, my grandparents, assorted aunts, uncles, cousins. Nobody thought they were trying to make out with or molest me. Including me. (If they'd go wild in the media now over one football player just being a loving father, they'd have hung my family.)
* I've had dogs most my life, from age seven. I walked my first dog alone all the time. Jeez Louise, you'd think someone might rub two brain cells together and figure out that a seven- or eight-year-old kid walking man's best friend kind of has built-in security protection.