[kbsletten]

My 2 year old is learning road safety and how to walk on the side of the street, but she's still safer when I'm with her because as an adult, I can understand things like getting hit by a car that I haven't experienced first-hand and I'm much less likely to get distracted by a cat or bird or whatever. Honestly on our street enough chickens and dogs and horses and tractors get out that I'm not actually worried about her getting hit, but she's also infatuated with irrigation canals and cannot swim, so I don't let her walk alone. I strongly disagree that this makes me a bad parent, despite your assertion that "she'll need to be autonomous someday, why not today?" Sure, she'll learn all this and more, but teaching takes time, and there's more to life than ensuring your kids could survive alone at the earliest possible age.

She still wants her mommy to kiss her knee when she scrapes it, my priority is not teaching her to clean and bandage a wound.