History Main / FreeRangeChildren

* ''TabletopGame/KidsOnBikes'' is a rules-light RPG about free-range kids solving mysteries and saving the town.
* ''Creator/HyperRPG'', a professional tabletop RPG streaming channel, is running ''Series/Kollok1991'', which is a ''Series/StrangerThings''-esque game / campaign using Kids on Bikes RPG.

* *TabletopGame/Kids on Bikes* is a rules-light RPG about free-range kids solving mysteries and saving the town.

* Kids on Bikes -- Tabletop RPG about free-range kids solving mysteries and saving the town. Very rules-light system. ''Creator/HyperRPG'', a professional tabletop RPG streaming channel, is running ''Series/Kollok1991'', which is a ''Series/StrangerThings''-esque game / campaign using Kids on Bikes RPG.

** In the later books, however, played perfectly straight. In ''The War with Lilliputs'', Alice, Pashka, and Arkasha (all of them aged twelve) live fully by themselves in Arkasha's country house, and the grownups are okay with it because at least the kids stay on Earth and close to Moscow. In ''Alice in Gusliar'', children are even allowed to make long-distance time travel on their own with the adults' full consent.

* ''Franchise/LyricalNanoha''. Nanoha's parents practically let her join the enforcement branch of an [[TheMultiverse interdimensional]] government at age 9. And the government branch seems to have no problems sending out a pair of children to deal with an ArtifactOfDoom that's already killed hundreds of trained soldiers, which is guarded by a LadyOfWar with a ''[[FlamingSword flaming]] [[CoolSword chain sword]]'', among other things. For backup, they get another 9-year-old. Granted, said children are the biggest guns in the dimension.

** Just like the games, being ten in ''Anime/PokemonTheSeries'' is seen as an appropriate age to be given an incredibly powerful monster to keep as a companion and to travel around a world inhabited by many species of such monsters. School is never mentioned whatsoever outside of Pokémon-based ones and even these seem to be optional. This is a JustifiedTrope in that traveling around the world is only allowed ''because'' the child is accompanied by a powerful creature that can protect them if things go wrong. The Hoenn seasons of the anime had May hate and fear Pokémon at first, but unable to fulfill her dream of traveling the world unless she received a Pokémon for her own protection. Meanwhile, her younger brother Max was only able to travel with her, Ash, and Brock because she agreed to have custody over him for the duration of the journey; being too young to have his own Pokémon, he was forced to go home when May decided that she wished to continue her travels alone at the end of ''Advanced Generation''. WordOfGod has people are considered of age for journeys once they turn ten, though not all children will choose to travel like Ash does in the anime. The (albeit non-canon) [[DarkerAndEdgier novelization]] by head writer of the original series, Takeshi Shudo, even explicitly mentioned that the legal age of adulthood is, indeed, 10, with all of the privileges and responsibilities that come with that. All that said,

* A big problem for the 2007 ''Literature/BridgeToTerabithia'' film, which is set after 2000. Nowadays, the well-off city-born Burke parents would '''never''' have allowed Leslie (their only child and only ten) to even go near the rope or in the woods by herself (or even with Jess), ''precisely'' out of fear that something might happen, despite the natural tendency of country-born parents often letting their kids do exactly that, after of course teaching them how to do so safely (or not, it's pretty much Russian Roulette). As with the ''Harriet The Spy'' example below, the book was written in the seventies, where one could arguably see this happening, but the movie is clearly set in the year it was released.
** It implied that Jess and Leslie snuck out to the woods without their parents knowing, and they somehow managed to keep their parents completely uninformed about their little adventures. Which is somewhat justified, since the Aarons are too busy watching over their other four children and consider Jess, their only son, to be capable of taking care of himself, whilst the Burkes, being from the city, are on the eccentric side and thinks Leslie is independent enough on her own despite her age. The trope still fits though.

** In ''How the West Was Fun'', the 8-year-old twins ride horses from a rural dude ranch to Denver and back, and regularly roam around said ranch by themselves.

*** That said, Ben and Mike at least have strict curfews.

* In ''Fanfic/FindingDad'', [[SickeninglySweethearts Phineas Flynn and Isabella Garcia-Shapiro]] travel 900 miles from their home in Danville to New Orleans, and are even allowed on domestic flights.

* ''ComicBook/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: Diana comes across some kids sledding when one loses control and goes across a road, nearly getting killed. They learn she's never sledded before and offer to teach her so she spends quite a while with them playing in the snow and trying to keep them off the road and there is zero indication of any adult supervision outside of Diana. When they're done playing for the day the kid who nearly got killed earlier goes to his mother's place of work to wait for her to get off so they can go home together.

* ''Fanfic/TheTwilightChild'':
** The main character, when she was a foal, as the first flashback shows. In one instance, she runs off just seconds after being lectured for wandering off.
** The Cutie Mark Crusaders, naturally, but Scootaloo most all, at one point she's found wandering around town on a school day.
* ''Fanfic/Gensokyo20XX'': Subverted. If Reimu were younger than her assumed age-regression age (which is implied to be either five or six), she would be a StrayingBaby, she is clearly not allowed to be free-ranged and they do worry about her when she goes missing but that didn't stop her from getting out anyway. Same thing occurs with the other children, given their circumstances, and the adults do worry and often go out to find them.
* ''Webcomic/KillLaKillAU'': Satsuki, Nui, Ryuuko, and Mako (although mostly the latter three, especially Ryuuko) are seen going here and there, i.e, seeing how many times Ryuuko has been thrown in jail and in one comic the kids are seen going places at night, then again, their parents didn't know that is what they were doing. We also had this with Mako's mother, Sukuyo, as a child, according to Ragyou, due to her parents being loving yet painfully absent-minded.
* [[SickeninglySweethearts Phineas Flynn and Isabella Garcia-Shapiro]] in ''Fanfic/FindingDad'' travel 900 miles from their home in Danville to New Orleans, and are even allowed on domestic flights.
* FanFic/PokemonJohtoQuest: Protagonist Emily Hawthorne is one of these for a majority of the series as she travels freely through the Johto region.
* In ''Fanfic/IfIOnlyHadAHeart'', Izuku and Mashi are basically given free rein to do whatever they want after school because their parents are busy at work. Izuku mainly uses this time to design new machines while Mashi watches, but he also has Mashi help him install new prosthetics during these unsupervised hours. Inko becomes painfully aware of this after [[spoiler:Izuku gives himself a seizure with his new artificial eye]]. After this, she has her neighbor Aizawa as well as his friends Nemuri and Hizashi walk to and from school and look after him in her absence.
* In ''Fanfic/NeitherABirdNorAPlaneItsDeku'', Izuku and Bakugou used to hang out together unsupervised when they were kids, as per canon. It gets horribly deconstructed when Izuku doesn't learn to control his newfound SuperStrength before brawling with Bakugou for bullying someone, which ends with Bakugou nearly dying after Izuku accidentally throws him through a brick wall.
* In ''Fanfic/MyHuntsmanAcademia'', Izuku and Katsuki used to go for romps in the woods around Mountain Glenn when they were kids, even though Grimm are known to prowl around the area.

-->''The sun’s dying down, but Mikoto has lived here her whole life, and it’s Hinamizawa, and everyone knows everyone, so Keiichi, who has to lock up, sees her off to walk home alone without a worry. Little Mikoto scampers off down the path with her little backpack, but then she turns back, and very swiftly, without a word, hugs Keiichi tight. It lasts a few moments. Then she rushes off, faster than before.''
* ''Fanfic/HerMax'':
** A 6-year-old Ruby convinces her parents to leave her home alone with her 2-year-old brother for a few hours.
** After the death of their parents, Ruby and Max become fully free-range. The only adult supervision they have is their grandmother, who doesn't live with them.

* The differing Japanese and American perspectives are discussed in a Halloween chapter for ''Fanfic/AGameOfCatAndCat''. Nine to eleven year old [[VideoGame/CastlevaniaAriaOfSorrow Soma]] [[DubNameChange Kurusu/Cruz]] recently moved from Japan to America; while his parents still allow him to go off on his own, his new neighbors don't agree. When Soma is trick or treating alone, he avoids a group of classmates accompanied by adults because he knows he'll be forced to join the group 'for his own safety.'

* Calvin of ''Comicstrip/CalvinAndHobbes'' is more deeply philosophical than most 6-year-olds, and is allowed to ride his wagon all over creation, because behind his house apparently there's some kind of national park. This may be a case of an UnreliableNarrator (in addition to the time Calvin runs away from home and figures he must be in the next state by the time he's a few hundred feet away, he also believes he's been to Mars, traveled back in time, and transformed himself into an owl, for example). Everything looks bigger to 6-year-old Calvin.

* Done in [=LadyLarson=]'s ''[[Website/GoAnimate Caillou Gets Grounded: The Movie]]'', which involves WesternAnimation/{{Caillou}} (a ''4-year-old''), [[WesternAnimation/DoraTheExplorer Dora]] ('''ANOTHER''' 4-year-old), and [[Series/BarneyAndFriends Barney the Dinosaur]] going to '''LAS VEGAS''' without their parents, and to top it all off, Caillou uses ''his own [[HairTriggerTemper da]][[AbusiveParents d's]] credit card''. You can guess [[YouAreGrounded what the outcome was]]. The movie was given a [[KinderAndCleaner profanity-free]] remake with higher production values by Spencer Everly.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRCNNZGlZeA This video]] found on Website/YouTube {{discusse|dTrope}}s both sides of this trope.

* ''WebVideo/NotJustBikes'' discusses the incredible benefits of allowing kids to have the independence to ride their bike to school or a nearby park without parental hovering, pointing out that kids in the Netherlands are considered the happiest kids on earth.

* Done in the now-deleted ''[[Website/GoAnimate Caillou Gets Grounded: The Movie]]'', which involves WesternAnimation/{{Caillou}} (a ''4-year-old''), [[WesternAnimation/DoraTheExplorer Dora]] ('''ANOTHER''' 4-year-old), and [[Series/BarneyAndFriends Barney the Dinosaur]] going to '''LAS VEGAS''' without their parents, and to top it all off, Caillou uses ''his own [[HairTriggerTemper da]][[AbusiveParents d's]] credit card''. You can guess [[YouAreGrounded what the outcome was]]. The movie [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes no longer exists on [=YouTube=], however, so the only way to watch it is to manually make a duplicate]].

* ''ComicBook/Robin1993'': Tim Drake being essentially unsupervised while he is not at school allows him to follow ComicBook/{{Batman}} around on his bicycle when he is concerned that the Dark Knight has become reckless. His parents' [[ParentalNeglect constant absences]] are what gave him the time to occasionally follow Batman and Robin around on patrols when he was younger as well, in Gotham.

* ''Franchise/WonderWoman'' [[ComicBook/WonderWoman1942 Vol 1]]: Diana comes across some kids sledding when one loses control and goes across a road, nearly getting killed. They learn she's never sledded before and offer to teach her so she spends quite a while with them playing in the snow and trying to keep them off the road and there is zero indication of any adult supervision outside of Diana. When they're done playing for the day the kid who nearly got killed earlier goes to his mother's place of work to wait for her to get off so they can go home together.

* {{Deconstructed}} in ''WesternAnimation/TheRescuersDownUnder''. Cody is free to run around the local areas of the Australian outback... but runs into the film's villain (a poacher) and... then you have the plot of the movie.

* Justified with the kid racers of ''Sugar Rush'' in ''WesternAnimation/WreckItRalph'', in that they are InUniverse video game characters with no programmed parents. It's unknown what they're up to when they aren't racing.
** Averted in [[WesternAnimation/RalphBreaksTheInternet the sequel]], in which they are adopted by Fix-It Felix and Calhoun when ''Sugar Rush'' gets unplugged and they are without a place to live.

* ''Film/TheGoonies'': An entire gang of them go out on a last adventure following the trail of Pirate Treasure on the northern Oregon coast.

* In the ''Franchise/PowerRangers'' universe the parents aren't seen or even acknowledged unless they're relevant to the plot. A perfect example is the final episode of ''Series/PowerRangersTurbo'' where the team boards a rocket to go into [[Series/PowerRangersInSpace space]]. Justin stays behind to stay with his father. Nothing is mentioned about the other parents, so apparently they wouldn't miss their kids. Granted the Rangers are all high schoolers who spend most of their time in a popular high school hangout and they all have cars. Though the kids going off in space definitely counts (though they return to Earth in a matter of hours due to Artistic license on space travel)

* ''Series/DonkeyHodie'' and her friends frequently do activities without the supervision of adults. In addition, very few of the kid characters have their parents mentioned, and in the case of Donkey, she only has a grandfather.

* {{Exaggerated}} in Atshi's backstory in ''Webcomic/AnecdoteOfError''. Her sister, Mishmai, took her halfway around the world to another continent all by herself, to get her medical treatment from a healer friend free of charge. Mishmai was twelve and Atshi was five at the time.

* ''Webcomic/{{Project 0}}'' [[http://www.centralcitytower.com/#!13-home/cbqg this scene]] only starts to feel out of place when you realize that they're 13.

It was in [[TheEighties the mid-Eighties]] when [[MediaScaremongering media-promoted fears]] of [[TooSmartForStrangers kidnapping and strangers]] ("Stranger Danger"), which caused parents and society to clamp down on the freedom of children to wander unsupervised.[[note]]The disappearance of 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979, when he was walking two blocks to his school bus stop, was a huge story and helped whip up fears. The 1980-81 "Atlanta Child Murders" by a serial killer helped the change immensely. Also, media fear tactics included FBI statistics on missing children ''reports'' -- not on missing children ''cases''. If Bobby stops off at Carol's house on his way home from school to play video games with her, and his mommy gets frantic and notifies police, it doesn't matter if Bobby shows up at home an hour later; if he does this four times in a year that's four missing children reports to the tune of zero missing child.[[/note]] Before then, kids were commonly allowed much more latitude, particularly in the summer months, concerning what they did and where they went, whether in a city or in the countryside. City kids were allowed to play games in vacant lots and explore local streets. Kids in the countryside could bike all around their small town. While the freedom kids had to run about town still wasn't necessarily as great as it tends to be in fiction (at least some parents still needed to know where they were going, when they were going to be back, etc.), they were often allowed to at least take their bikes to local shopping centers, swimming pools, libraries, or woods. This was the particular case in a CloseKnitCommunity where other adults would notice and intervene in cases of danger.

* ''Comicstrip/{{Peanuts}}'':
** The strip began in 1950 but hit this trope due to being a [[PrintLongRunners long runner]] and with the introduction of Peppermint Patty's CastHerd, who take the bus across town by themselves whenever they visit Charlie Brown's neighborhood. Then again, adults barely exist except for the "wah-wah" speech in the cartoons, or a few brief appearances in a few of them. Linus's Halloween tradition of spending all night in the Pumpkin Patch was cut short by being forced inside at 9 PM the year his Gramma was babysitting. The opinion his parents have of the matter is never brought up.

* ''Webcomic/KillLaKillAU'': Satsuki, Nui, Ryuuko, and Mako (although mostly the latter three, especially Ryuuko) are seen going here and there, i.e, seeing how many times Ryuuko has been thrown in jail and in one comic the kids are seen going places at night, then again, their parents didn't know that is what they were doing. We also had this with Mako's mother, Sukuyo, as a child, according to Ragyou, due to her parents being loving yet painfully absent-minded

* {{Deconstructed|Trope}} in ''WesternAnimation/LiloAndStitch''. Nani [[PromotionToParent takes over as Lilo's guardian]] after the death of their parents. She has to take care of her 6-year-old sister, but work often leaves her away from home. As a result, Lilo walks home a lot, though Nani usually walks her home from dance rehearsal. Nani and Lilo have issues with CPS because they don't believe Nani is in the best situation to be a good guardian for her sister.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Alma}}'': The title character, a little girl, is running around in the middle of town without any adult supervision. [[spoiler:Maybe if she had someone with her, she wouldn’t have fallen into the clutches of the evil toy shop]].

* ''Anime/SailorMoon'': Chibiusa and (even more extreme) Chibi Chibi, whose strolling off becomes a plot point of one episode.

* ''Manga/{{Gals}}'': Sayo, about 11, is allowed to trail her big sister around the streets of Shibuya.

* Very much averted in Switzerland, where children are expected to walk to school, alone, starting with kindergarten at age four. This is considered an important part of social development, and they are carefully coached in it with parental and police involvement. (Parents are actually [[i]]forbidden[[/i]] from taking children to school themselves.)

* Very much averted in Switzerland, where children are expected to walk to school, alone, starting with kindergarten at age four. This is considered an important part of social development, and they are carefully coached in it with parental and police involvement. (Parents are actually [i]forbidden[/i] from taking children to school themselves.)

* {{Justified}} with the kid racers of ''Sugar Rush'' in ''WesternAnimation/WreckItRalph'', in that they are InUniverse video game characters with no programmed parents. It's unknown what they're up to when they aren't racing.

* Most of the ''VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog'' characters are minors (Tails is 8, Amy is 12, Sonic is 15, etc.), and very few of them have legal guardians. Cream (6) lives with her mother Vanilla, Charmy and Espio have Vector, and Blaze is a princess and is stated to have a living family, though they are unseen. In some cases, an explanation is given; Tails is an orphan and was the only inhabitant of a very small island before meeting Sonic, and Knuckles is the last of his species. The rest are unexplained.