As a child, Ashley Thomas loved to go by herself to a meadow about a 10-minute walk from her house in Ojai, California. Playing on her own let her imagination soar. “You can pretend you’re the Queen of Sheba,” she says. Exploring made her feel independent and grown up. Once, when she was in about the first grade, she even found a snake. “There’s no way I would have picked up a snake in front of my parents,” she says. “The reason I knew it was OK was I had also gone by myself to the library to take a snake safety class.” (Yes, a snake safety class.)
Ah, the olde-time memories of the days when kids could play on their own without someone posting a video online to shame their parents — or calling the police to have mom arrested and the children seized by social services. But Thomas isn’t an aging baby boomer telling tales to her grandkids. She’s just 30.