It looks like some sanity has arrived.

Hats off to Texas: Over the weekend, it became the third U.S. state, after Utah and Oklahoma, to make reasonable childhood independence the law of the land. Now parents who live there cannot be investigated for neglect simply for giving their kids some -fashioned freedom.

Amazingly, the bill became law on the th anniversary of "Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day," a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous—that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News. The paper quoted the of an eight-year-, saying: "Never in a million years would I do something that . When the kid turns 18—fine. Until then you watch them." And it spoke to an "expert"—the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn—who said that "a seven-year- shouldn't be left alone in a backyard, much less a park."

Too bad for that shrink. When the Texas law goes into effect in September, more than one tenth of all Americans will live laws passed with the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, that insists our kids are smarter and safer than our cowering culture gives them credit for.