From the point of view of a Soviet immigrant to the US, the predominant public reaction the author describes is quite bewildering. It is hard for me to imagine how an 8 or 9 year old child riding a subway could be the basis of a sensational news story; if anything, 8 or 9 sounds like a seasoned, advanced age.

I came here when I was 6, in 1992, and did quite a bit of my growing up subsequently in a well-tended, well-watched family-oriented graduate student housing facility on the campus of a private university. Not exactly the 'hood. My parents, as all the (predominantly foreign) residents there, were busy graduate students trying to make it on a ~$10k/year stipend with student visa-based work restrictions, and, being in the humanities field, faced quite daunting demands to excel so distinctively according to the rules of their field in order to have a stab at staying in this country after their visa ran out. So, of course, they were busy working/studying until 10-11 PM.

Never in my wildest dreams as a Moscow child could I have imagined that leaving me alone in that highly enclosed, heavily security-patrolled, communal environment full of watchful neighbours and fellow parents would be considered "child neglect" under Indiana state law, nor that, in fact, it would be so until the age of 12 to leave me home alone for _any_ amount of time, strictly speaking, as a statutory matter.

In fact, I was one of the very few children of ex-USSR or Eastern European extraction who was not, at some point during this tenure, essentially kidnapped by university security with no notice given to the parents and placed in a foster family for a few days while the shocked and aggrieved parents were badgered with saber-rattling about child neglect by whatever state agency. I avoided it narrowly by a stroke of luck; on many occasions, e.g. winter nights, when I was playing outside - in the dark! - at the precarious hour (!) of 8 PM, I saw the university cops peering out of their patrol cars, eyeing me like prey. Honestly, these keystone cops were a far greater danger to my welfare than any conceivable predator. They were often unpleasant and openly contemptuous, amplifying the psychologically traumatic fear of police and other martial authorities that is already built into any child of Soviet parents by inheritance. To this day, I still have this reaction to cops that I must surely be "guilty" of something, even though I'm innocent. The way that they provided foundations for that feeling, with their hostile dispositions, abrasive lines of questioning, etc. was a lot more injurious to my development as an individual than free association with other kids until mid-evening in a protected communal yard.

It is difficult to imagine a safer environment for a child than the kind of place that this was. If there were ever a place where there were some adults around at almost times, and neighbours you knew and could count on in case of an emergency, this was definitely it.

The stream of sanctimonious busybodies from the state child/welfare agency that would occasionally come around to harass these poor, tired foreigners was just unbelievable. Now that I've lived in Georgia for 10 years, I make an analogy to what Georgia's agency - DFACS (Department of Family and Children's Services) - spends its time doing in predominantly working-class Hispanic-occupied trailor parks and poor black neighbourhoods down here.

Some of this is just an incorrigible cultural and institutional defect, as other comments have pointed out. Another important difference with the USSR specifically, though, is that we had households with two working parents for a lot longer than has been normative in the US; our entry of women into the workforce dates back almost to the revolution, in keeping with the Marxist gender equality premise. So, Soviet society developed institutional solutions and accommodations[1] for this relatively early. A necessary consequence is that children had to lead a parent-independent existence much earlier in their lives than if the premise of a full-time stay-at-home mother is granted.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Russia#Pre-school_... -- see the paragraph ("The Soviet system...")