Why I let my children go alone to the corner store

Of all the adventures my lucky children had this summer — swimming in two oceans, hanging out on their bearded uncle’s commercial salmon fishing boat, endless Popsicles — the biggest one, they told me, was just 495 feet away in their own Washington, D.C., neighborhood. They got to walk to the corner store on Capitol Hill by themselves. Clutch your pearls, America. The boys are 7 and 10. Apparently, I could be arrested for this.