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{{trope}}
[[File:famous five bike.jpg|link=The Famous Five|frame|These kids get around.]]
{{quote|''"Eighty percent of the reason being a kid sucks is you can't drive. You can't just zoom across town whenever you feel like it, you've got to wait for Mom or Dad to get home, or save up your allowance for cab fare, or latch onto the back of a garbage truck. Your ability to participate in adult-level adventures is thus severely limited."''|'''[[Cracked.com|Cracked]].com''', [http://www.cracked.com/article_16694_6-horrible-lessons-hollywood-loves-to-teach-kids_p2.html 6 Horrible Lessons Hollywood Loves to Teach Kids]}}
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In fiction, this is usually ignored. A good deal of fiction features children who are between the ages of 7 and 9, perhaps in order to help them relate to their younger audience. At this age, such children ''should'' fall under the situation mentioned above; however, in fiction, they will wander about their town, the country, or even the world with little adult supervision or even ''concern''. They'll ride down to their friend's house on the other side of town and go to local venues that aren't anywhere close to their own house. Hell, if plot calls for it, sometimes they'll go down to the next town by themselves, or even the next state or ''country'', with little to no outcry from parents, guardians, or child protection services.
This trope is often justified up until the mid-eighties, when media-promoted fears of kidnapping and strangers caused parents and society to clamp down on the freedom of children to wander unsupervised. Before then, kids were commonly allowed much more latitude, particularly in the summer months, concerning what they did and where they went, often taking off on their bikes to local shopping centers, swimming pools, libraries, or woods. Particularly in a [[Close-Knit Community]] where other adults would notice and intervene in cases of danger.▼
In periods after the onset of these fears, these children will have [[Open-Minded Parent|Open Minded Parents]] who practice [[Hands-Off Parenting]]. Other times the parents will seem to be just like typical parents, reflecting the fact that [[Most Writers Are Adults]] who are writing from the experience of their youth, when children going off alone wasn’t anything remarkable.▼
When taken to extremes, like long distance travel to other states or communities, or remarkable freedom in more recent times, this is an [[Acceptable Break From Reality]]. A show involving Timmy and Sally being driven everywhere by their parents and going out only with their family (or their friends with parents in close tow), with them ending their day in their rooms, only to repeat the process the next day wouldn't be very exciting. Audiences want to see their cast do something different, and there is only so much one can do about the home.
Particularly in animation it can happen over time as an inversion of [[Not Allowed to Grow Up]], with the characters remaining the canonical age they were conceived at, being drawn as they always were, but being given more adolescent storylines as the writers run out of child-appropriate ideas to put them through and take the next logical step.
▲This trope
▲In periods after the onset of these fears, these children will have [[Open-Minded Parent
In modern years this is beginning to return, thanks in part to widely-available [[Cell Phone]]s which permit children to be in touch even when they're off by themselves, and in part due to various parenting movements which actively reject the hysterical fears behind the seclusion of modern children. One such organization -- [http://www.freerangekids.com/ Free Range Kids] -- is the near-[[Trope Namer]], in fact.
Compare [[Adults Are Useless]], which shows up in this Trope for some works and compare with [[Toy Ship]], which is when kids have relationships that wouldn't happen until they were several years older. Sometimes overlaps with [[Parental Abandonment]] and [[Wise Beyond Their Years]], and frequently with low-age instances of the [[Competence Zone]]. May involve [[Kid Hero]]es. See also [[Staying with Friends]]. If the reason for this is that adults don't exist, that's a [[Teenage Wasteland]]. When combined with [[Dawson Casting]], can lead viewers to thinking the kids are older than the production team intended.
{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Pokémon (anime)|Pokémon]]'': Ash is only 10 years old, yet he is given an incredibly powerful monster to keep as a companion and
** Keep in mind that most of these children have god-like monsters at their beck and call, giving them enough power to utterly destroy the world if they had half a mind to do so (the less said about why there are no "Poke-Al Queda" the better). We must all hope that none of them ever get dumped or depressed.
*** There ''is'' a "Poke-Al Queda". [[Goldfish Poop Gang|They just suck.]]
** Yeah, but it's kinda obvious that you also need basic survival skills along with the monster bodyguards. The main characters would have starved to death ages ago if not for Brock.
** Parodied in [[Manly Guys Doing Manly Things]] Jared Kowalski's parents were shocked and upset that he wouldn't take off to [[Walk the Earth]] with his pet pokémon.
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