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It depends, of course, on the child’s maturity and temperament, the distance to school and amount of traffic. But generally around age 9, children are less impulsive, more attentive and have the cognitive ability needed to cross a street safely, explains Pamela Fuselli, a vice-president at Parachute , a charity focused on injury prevention. “It’s a good milestone to think about,” she says.

And, for many parents, a frightening one. They’re concerned about strangers and bullies as well as traffic. In some studies, Toronto parents pointed to 11.5 years and older as the preferred go-alone-to-school age.

“Parents would tell me their kids couldn’t handle it,” says Aurora Mendelsohn, whose daughter regularly walked home, about 40 minutes, solo at age 9. “But I think it’s the parents who are scared.”

That kids should walk was taken for granted a generation ago. Now it’s a nail-biting parental dilemma: What’s too protective and what’s too permissive?

A 2011 Metrolinx study on school travel in Hamilton and greater Toronto found parents who live within two kilometres of school were more likely to let kids walk alone, starting in Grades 4-6 (ages 9 to 11 years old). In that two-kilometre radius, 59 per cent of kids in Grades 4 to 6 walked or biked unaccompanied by a parent.

Among those living further than two kilometres, only 40 per cent of parents said their kids could travel alone before the age of 13.

The humble walk back and forth to school has taken on new importance as parents and childhood experts worry about kids’ lack of physical exercise. That twice-daily trek offers a convenient chance to get muscles moving.

And a kid who walks without an adult gains self-confidence and sense of responsibility. “Independent mobility is crucial,” says Guy Faulkner, professor of health and exercise psychology at the University of Toronto. “Beyond the physical activity, there’s a host of benefits such as discovering the world, being aware of traffic, and interacting with the environment.”

Parents are so barraged with danger information, they assume being a good mother or father means driving kids, says Pamela Gough, school trustee Ward 3, Etobicoke-Lakeshore. Ironically, that actually creates risky traffic jams around schools.

“Parents aren’t aware of another body of information: Children need a sense of their own ability to get themselves from one spot to another. They need exposure to the outdoors in unstructured ways,” says Gough. “These are strategies for good physical and mental health.”

That still doesn’t make it an easy decision. Naomi Lieberman’s eldest is 8 years old and Lieberman doesn’t foresee letting her daughter walk alone any time soon. The child would have to go down a busy street and cross a high-traffic intersection. But it’s the fear of strangers that worries Lieberman most. “You hear all the time about kids going missing,” she says. “When I drop her off at school, I watch that she goes through the gate.”

Even though child abduction by a stranger is exceedingly rare, it’s what Parachute’s Fuselli hears about the most from parents. “It overwhelms almost everything else,” she says.

In 2013, according to Canadian Police Information Centre data, nine children were abducted by strangers in Ontario. That’s out of 14,362 children and youth who went missing, about .06 per cent.

After a lot of discussion, Anthony Humphreys and his family decided the kids could bike or walk without a parent, starting at age 8 then more regularly at 9. The junior school was an easy five-minute trip with no busy streets. “Kids need to be responsible,” says Humphreys. “I didn’t want to baby them all the time.”

He also wanted them to be experienced and confident before they went to middle school, about 1.6 km away.

His wife believed the girls should have cellphones, and he agreed. “When I grew up there were pay phones on every corner, parents were at home and the block parent program was active,” he explains. “Cellphones are a reasonable compromise considering how times have changed.”

In deciding to let a kid set off alone, the big factor should be the child’s skills and temperament, not just age, says psychologist Barbara Morrongiello, Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Injury Prevention.

It requires sustained attention and complex thinking to cross a street safely. The brain has to take in a lot of perceptual information — such as cars coming in different directions at various speeds — then make sense of it all and plan behaviour accordingly, she explains.

“Those skills improve with age. They may be sufficient for easy traffic conditions around age 9 or 10,” says Morrongiello, a psychology professor at the University of Guelph.

Among leading reasons for children’s deaths, pedestrian accidents are tied with drowning for the No. 2 spot, says Fuselli. Top deadly cause: children as passengers in motor vehicle crashes.

Before letting a child walk alone, Morrongiello advises that a parent travel along, like a movie director, talking out loud about decisions and possible risks. On other walks, let the child be the movie director describing the action as the parent tags along behind.

“You can see how they’re thinking. If they stop at a curb but it’s not for the right reason, then they don’t understand the issues,” says the psychologist.

A common fallacy among children: Drivers will always see them and stop. Also kids pay more attention to distance than to speed. “They get fooled to think they’re safe because a car seems far away,” she says.

They also tend to take more risks when they’re with other kids. A child should be independent enough to make safety decisions apart from the group, says Morrongiello.

Chris Mark’s three children, ages 8, 7 and 4, walk with a parent to the school bus stop at the end of the street, visible from the front of their home. “We hector them along. Our biggest fear isn’t something sinister, but that they’ll be distracted and miss the bus,” he says. “Maybe next year we’ll let the eldest go ahead on her own.”

Mark walked to school alone at 6 years old, crossing Mt. Pleasant Rd. and Lawrence Ave., he says. “It’s funny to think that 9 is too young. We live in the helicopter generation. Nobody wants to be the one in a million that something happens to.”