![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
They're all here, I'll just pick and choose
If it is indeed normal today that parents in bucolic suburban neighborhoods do not even let their children walk alone a few blocks, then North American society either has a deep paranoia, or society has truly broken down. Here in Belgium, children walking and taking public transportation by themselves is commonplace, as I remember in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. This is a sign of a mentally-healthy and safe society. Achieving such a society must be be the highest priority of any government.
Philadelphia in the 80s must have been much less safe than Philadelphia now. I'll check the stats later.
I wonder if there could be any studies done on the comparable risks of letting your child walk to school alone, and driving them? Certainly the risk of a car accident is much higher than that of being abducted...
Indeed.
My 11 year old is still slight of build. I won't allow him to go to men's public toilets unless I've checked the facilities myself. I don't care. Call me overprotective, but at least he is still alive and well.
Alive and well enough to put you in a nursing home when he's grown. The kid's ELEVEN. For crying out loud!
As parents the goal is to teach children to be cautious, not afraid. Walking or driving your child to school is being cautious. You can point to the statistics of child abductions vs. car crashes, but in the end, it’s your child and he/she only needs to be abducted once.
He only needs to die in a fatal car crash once. When you're cautious about things that rarely happen, and cavalier about things that happen to a lot of kids, that's called being afraid.
I was walking to school since I was seven and everywhere in town and in the mountains surrounding my home. It would be a very sad narrow childhood to be imprisoned in house and alternately school and never get to be out on your own.
Ditto.
By insisting on 24/7 adult supervision, this is what the parent takes away from their child:
- a chance to learn and practice the incredibly important skill of independence
- a chance to feel trusted by their parents
- physical activity
- environmental responsibility
- an opportunity to notice the world around them
- confidence in themselves
That is a lot to take away from a child in order to prevent an event as rare and unlikely as being struck by lightning.
Ditto this as well.
Insanity. The chances of abduction are infinitesimally small. The damage done to kids' ability to navigate the world and be independent, let alone their physical health (walking and biking are good exercise!) is huge.
Yes, that. People talk as though there's no harm to being "cautious" or "overprotective", but I think there is - real, tangible harm.
Some say the threat does not match the reality. Try telling that to any parent who has a perfect angel they must deliver to the school house step every morning. Observe the all middle-aged perverts that slow to look at children. Where did they come from?
Um, I'm gonna guess they come from whatever the fuck you're smoking, brother. I have no idea what you're talking about. Has anybody else ever witnessed this? (There's more! I have no intention of posting more of his garbage, though.)
Stranger abduction is not and has never been statistically significant in harm our children can suffer. Children are most likely to be hurt by their own family members. I suppose parents have to foist their worries on something? In the meantime, we raise our children to believe in the Boogeyman and live full of some unnamed fear.
Now we're back to reality.
Parents who don't let their kids walk or bike to school are the ones being irresponsible.... A parent's job is to encourage independence, responsibility, self-sufficiency.
Not sure it's that simple, but let's go with it.
What sort of useless, degenerate parent in this day and age lets their 7-year-old walk to school by herself while she stays at home? Yes, things have changed since we were kids, but for the better. What next? Is this stupid woman going to reject booster seats, preschool, pediatric dentistry, and Amber Alert as some sort of political statement because they weren't standard when we were young?
One who pays attention to the facts and thinks it's better for her child to do things on her own? And yes, I will reject Amber Alerts so long as they keep being used for things they were never intended - they were ONLY supposed to be used for cases where the abductor could be identified and the child was known to be at risk. That's not the case now.
Indeed, the statistic that 115 children are abducted in the U.S. PER YEAR should be lectured loudly to this generation's paranoid, helicoptering parents.
They don't listen, they just don't.
How soon we forget what many children endured walking to school in the 1940s--black children, I mean. It took my mother and her siblings an hour to walk to school--one way--during America's era of legally sanctioned separate and unequal education. The white kids rode buses to school and peppered them with insults and racial epithets as these valiant children pressed on.
All of which is terrible, but what does it have to do with the topic of discussion other than involving the words "bus" "school" and "walking"?
Here's a quote from the handbook for my 12-year old daughter's new middle school which is located "on a busy throughway without sidewalks for pedestrians. Therefore no students are allowed to walk to or from school for any reason. All students must take the bus or receive a ride from a parent or guardian".
If being on a busy street makes it inaccessible to anyone not in motorized transport, they should have picked another site. When the roads around the school were improved a few years ago, why were provisions not made to allow pedestrians to also safely use the new improvements. This is a failure in our planning and engineering process. These design decisions are having huge long-term impacts on the behavior of the residents of this particular community and influence how these children are being raised without any prospect of change at this location for years to come.
Yes, this. What on earth were they even THINKING not to put any way for kids to get to school (in middle school!) without help?
It is very risky to allow a young child to walk the streets alone. the statistics alone show that young children should be accompanied by adults.
1. What statistics? Don't name 'em if you can't cite 'em.
2. How young is young? Some of the children in the article and comments are in their double digits.
There are over 75 registered pedophiles living within a 10 mile radius of my daughter's home. Perhaps there are dozens more that are unregistered. Happily the school bus picks up my granddaughter at the end of her driveway, and if that were not the case, she would have to be driven the 3/4 of a mile to her elementary school.
1. Registered pedophiles or registered sex offenders? There's some overlap, but not as much as you'd think. What did these people do, exactly - is your granddaughter the type of child they targeted (assuming any of them even did target strangers at all)?
2. You "have" to drive her the 3/4 of a mile? She and her mother can't walk that short distance? That's absurd. It's insane!
I'm white and live in a primarily black neighborhood and all the black kids walk to school—mostly in small groups—with the youngest being kindergarten age. I've never seen a white kid walk to school in our neighborhood.
Interesting point.
I know it must be tough on working parents, but if you care for your child, the least you can do is to walk them to school, if it's at a walking distance from home. Or make arrangements for someone to pick them up and take them, etc. And back. Please.
Six-year olds alone, Jesus! Only if its across the street and you are watching. It just takes a little planning and talking with your neighbors and making arrangements for someone to walk or drive them to school.
Talk about missing the point! It's not always about lack of options, sometimes it's about conscious, reasoning choice telling you that your kid needs a little independence and responsibility.
I want to end with the closing paragraphs of the actual article:
Recently, Amy Utzinger, a mother of four in Tucson, Ariz., let her daughter, 7, walk down the block to play with a friend. Five houses. Same side of the street.
Afterward, the friend’s mother drove Mrs. Utzinger’s daughter home. “She said, ‘I just drove her back, just in case ... you know,’ ” recalled Mrs. Utzinger. “What was I supposed to say? How can you argue against ‘just in case’?”
I'll tell you how you argue against 'just in case'. You point out that the risk of dying in a fatal crash is so insanely high that you never let your child enter a car without your permission and stare at this woman as though she's deluded - which she is if she has to drive your kid five houses instead of, you know, walking her... or watching from the porch.
If it is indeed normal today that parents in bucolic suburban neighborhoods do not even let their children walk alone a few blocks, then North American society either has a deep paranoia, or society has truly broken down. Here in Belgium, children walking and taking public transportation by themselves is commonplace, as I remember in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. This is a sign of a mentally-healthy and safe society. Achieving such a society must be be the highest priority of any government.
Philadelphia in the 80s must have been much less safe than Philadelphia now. I'll check the stats later.
I wonder if there could be any studies done on the comparable risks of letting your child walk to school alone, and driving them? Certainly the risk of a car accident is much higher than that of being abducted...
Indeed.
My 11 year old is still slight of build. I won't allow him to go to men's public toilets unless I've checked the facilities myself. I don't care. Call me overprotective, but at least he is still alive and well.
Alive and well enough to put you in a nursing home when he's grown. The kid's ELEVEN. For crying out loud!
As parents the goal is to teach children to be cautious, not afraid. Walking or driving your child to school is being cautious. You can point to the statistics of child abductions vs. car crashes, but in the end, it’s your child and he/she only needs to be abducted once.
He only needs to die in a fatal car crash once. When you're cautious about things that rarely happen, and cavalier about things that happen to a lot of kids, that's called being afraid.
I was walking to school since I was seven and everywhere in town and in the mountains surrounding my home. It would be a very sad narrow childhood to be imprisoned in house and alternately school and never get to be out on your own.
Ditto.
By insisting on 24/7 adult supervision, this is what the parent takes away from their child:
- a chance to learn and practice the incredibly important skill of independence
- a chance to feel trusted by their parents
- physical activity
- environmental responsibility
- an opportunity to notice the world around them
- confidence in themselves
That is a lot to take away from a child in order to prevent an event as rare and unlikely as being struck by lightning.
Ditto this as well.
Insanity. The chances of abduction are infinitesimally small. The damage done to kids' ability to navigate the world and be independent, let alone their physical health (walking and biking are good exercise!) is huge.
Yes, that. People talk as though there's no harm to being "cautious" or "overprotective", but I think there is - real, tangible harm.
Some say the threat does not match the reality. Try telling that to any parent who has a perfect angel they must deliver to the school house step every morning. Observe the all middle-aged perverts that slow to look at children. Where did they come from?
Um, I'm gonna guess they come from whatever the fuck you're smoking, brother. I have no idea what you're talking about. Has anybody else ever witnessed this? (There's more! I have no intention of posting more of his garbage, though.)
Stranger abduction is not and has never been statistically significant in harm our children can suffer. Children are most likely to be hurt by their own family members. I suppose parents have to foist their worries on something? In the meantime, we raise our children to believe in the Boogeyman and live full of some unnamed fear.
Now we're back to reality.
Parents who don't let their kids walk or bike to school are the ones being irresponsible.... A parent's job is to encourage independence, responsibility, self-sufficiency.
Not sure it's that simple, but let's go with it.
What sort of useless, degenerate parent in this day and age lets their 7-year-old walk to school by herself while she stays at home? Yes, things have changed since we were kids, but for the better. What next? Is this stupid woman going to reject booster seats, preschool, pediatric dentistry, and Amber Alert as some sort of political statement because they weren't standard when we were young?
One who pays attention to the facts and thinks it's better for her child to do things on her own? And yes, I will reject Amber Alerts so long as they keep being used for things they were never intended - they were ONLY supposed to be used for cases where the abductor could be identified and the child was known to be at risk. That's not the case now.
Indeed, the statistic that 115 children are abducted in the U.S. PER YEAR should be lectured loudly to this generation's paranoid, helicoptering parents.
They don't listen, they just don't.
How soon we forget what many children endured walking to school in the 1940s--black children, I mean. It took my mother and her siblings an hour to walk to school--one way--during America's era of legally sanctioned separate and unequal education. The white kids rode buses to school and peppered them with insults and racial epithets as these valiant children pressed on.
All of which is terrible, but what does it have to do with the topic of discussion other than involving the words "bus" "school" and "walking"?
Here's a quote from the handbook for my 12-year old daughter's new middle school which is located "on a busy throughway without sidewalks for pedestrians. Therefore no students are allowed to walk to or from school for any reason. All students must take the bus or receive a ride from a parent or guardian".
If being on a busy street makes it inaccessible to anyone not in motorized transport, they should have picked another site. When the roads around the school were improved a few years ago, why were provisions not made to allow pedestrians to also safely use the new improvements. This is a failure in our planning and engineering process. These design decisions are having huge long-term impacts on the behavior of the residents of this particular community and influence how these children are being raised without any prospect of change at this location for years to come.
Yes, this. What on earth were they even THINKING not to put any way for kids to get to school (in middle school!) without help?
It is very risky to allow a young child to walk the streets alone. the statistics alone show that young children should be accompanied by adults.
1. What statistics? Don't name 'em if you can't cite 'em.
2. How young is young? Some of the children in the article and comments are in their double digits.
There are over 75 registered pedophiles living within a 10 mile radius of my daughter's home. Perhaps there are dozens more that are unregistered. Happily the school bus picks up my granddaughter at the end of her driveway, and if that were not the case, she would have to be driven the 3/4 of a mile to her elementary school.
1. Registered pedophiles or registered sex offenders? There's some overlap, but not as much as you'd think. What did these people do, exactly - is your granddaughter the type of child they targeted (assuming any of them even did target strangers at all)?
2. You "have" to drive her the 3/4 of a mile? She and her mother can't walk that short distance? That's absurd. It's insane!
I'm white and live in a primarily black neighborhood and all the black kids walk to school—mostly in small groups—with the youngest being kindergarten age. I've never seen a white kid walk to school in our neighborhood.
Interesting point.
I know it must be tough on working parents, but if you care for your child, the least you can do is to walk them to school, if it's at a walking distance from home. Or make arrangements for someone to pick them up and take them, etc. And back. Please.
Six-year olds alone, Jesus! Only if its across the street and you are watching. It just takes a little planning and talking with your neighbors and making arrangements for someone to walk or drive them to school.
Talk about missing the point! It's not always about lack of options, sometimes it's about conscious, reasoning choice telling you that your kid needs a little independence and responsibility.
I want to end with the closing paragraphs of the actual article:
Recently, Amy Utzinger, a mother of four in Tucson, Ariz., let her daughter, 7, walk down the block to play with a friend. Five houses. Same side of the street.
Afterward, the friend’s mother drove Mrs. Utzinger’s daughter home. “She said, ‘I just drove her back, just in case ... you know,’ ” recalled Mrs. Utzinger. “What was I supposed to say? How can you argue against ‘just in case’?”
I'll tell you how you argue against 'just in case'. You point out that the risk of dying in a fatal crash is so insanely high that you never let your child enter a car without your permission and stare at this woman as though she's deluded - which she is if she has to drive your kid five houses instead of, you know, walking her... or watching from the porch.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-09-16 12:52 am (UTC)Okay, I am 23 now, and my younger sister is 21. We walked to school together from the time she was six and I was eight. Crossing three roads, one of which was very busy, and a car park. We never got hit by cars or kidnapped by strangers. She walked to school on her own from the time she was nine, while I was taking the school bus for a twenty-mile round trip to high school. On my own.
This generation's parents - the majority - appear to be doing something wrong if they're not teaching their kids basic common sense.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-27 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 08:21 pm (UTC)Do they know the way - the path from my home to my Elementary School was a little bit tricky (and long enough that the school bussed me, so it may not be a fair example) and memory capacity is still developing quite significantly at that age. It's going to vary from child to child whether they actually can handle the path and whether having to do it themselves is going to stress them.
How busy are the streets? - when I was substitute teaching you'd have to cross highway-like roads to get anywhere from where I lived. It was absolutely horrible for either foot or bike travel. I consider this a deep flaw in city design, but if you're stuck living somewhere like that, well, you are going to have to drive your kids. I don't want a 5 year old having to cross huge major roads where the drivers tend to be shocked to see pedestrians (an unfortunate cycle, it's unfriendly to pedestrians so there are few, so the drivers don't expect them, so it's even more unfriendly, but I'm not using a six year old to try to break that cycle).
How functional/zombielike is the kid during the morning / are there any relevant health issues?
But assuming a fairly easy path and a child who seems up to it, sure. My family moved during my last year in middle school and I had input into where we moved to. I wanted a house really close to my future high school. The thing is, the school buses left when the school buses left, and that was that. And my father had to be at work into the evening. My mother doesn't drive. I had found that if I could get myself home from school, then I felt more comfortable doing after school activities if I wanted to. Without the ability to transport myself, my options were a lot more limited. Maybe my parents would have made arrangements, but I didn't want to inconvenience them. The ability to walk home from school in high school (which was not especially controversial being High School and my living 3 houses away) meant that I was in every school play I got into and explored some after school activities. That was really nice. I probably would have just passed on them if I couldn't have transported myself.
Of course, by the time I was in high school I was also making much longer trips on my own. And for one research project using the LIRR to get into NYC and use cabs on my own to regularly go to the Museum of Television and Radio. I still have my results somewhere about the actual changes across decades of insults, obscenity, profanity, etc. in the most watched comedies. That was fun. Sometimes I'd go home on my own and sometimes my father would meet me there and we'd have some food and then head home. It'd depend on his schedule. Him meeting me was a little on the protective and unnecessary side, but it was also quite pleasant.
Well, that turned into a ramble on my part.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:49 pm (UTC)I do think cell phones and locator devices for the children are appropriate, as they don't restrict the children but can be used in need.
Otherwise, in some situations, the best thing might be to watch from a distance with cell phone in hand. The child gets the experience of independence but the parent can intervene if any danger turns up.
For the anal neighbor, actual statistics might be useful. We'd need figures for:
1. children killed while in cars
2. children abducted by strangers
3. children injured by cars or other hazards while walking
4. children injured in cars
1 and 2 are comparably serious, 3 and 4 are comparably serious. 2 and 4 aren't comparable. (Imo it's reasonable to assume stranger abduction is likely to be very serious if not fatal.)
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 04:53 pm (UTC)And I'm with you completely on all of this. It doesn't mean it doesn't make me NERVOUS to send Kira out to play with the neighbor's boys because I do worry about her, but the look on her face when she comes home is worth it. A month or two ago, we were at the neighbor's house, 2 houses up. We had to go home but she didn't want to. The neighbor was fine with her staying, so we left her there. When it was time to go, her 7 year old son walked Kira home, and Kira was ELATED that she didn't need a grownup to walk her home. And logically as well, I know that she knows to look before crossing the street, there wasn't a need to even GO in the street, and the chances of someone grabbing the kids in the 45 seconds they took to run happily home is SO unlikely.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-16 12:26 am (UTC)Sound the duh, Ralph. Newsflash: you're SUPPOSED to slow down in school zones.
I wanted to slap a friend of ours once--she let her kindergarten-age daughter walk down the block, turn left for a block, turn right and walk four more blocks to the bus stop alone, on narrow roads with no sidewalks (just ditches). When the ditzy kid had no street sense at all and wouldn't walk on the side of the road (I babysat her, and when I walked her to the bus she kept running out in the road). Once she got a notification that a Sexxx Offender had moved into the neighborhood, THEN mommy got paranoid about walking her to the bus.
I thought it was far more likely that the daughter would get splatted by a car because she neither stopped, looked nor listened before darting out in the road.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-16 12:31 am (UTC)I suppose that wasn't the time to point out how rare stranger abductions are.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 05:10 pm (UTC)They're probably pediatricians or pedicurists.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-14 09:21 pm (UTC)If they're anything like the people in my parents' neighborhood (a development that was deliberately built around an elementary school) they are probably just everyday people going home/going to work who are slowing down and watching so they don't hit anyone.
My parents' neighborhood has a really nice paved trails system going through all the wooded areas between houses and schools. I was homeschooled, so it's a moot point, but every morning, the other neighborhood children would gather together and walk the trails to school. I always thought this was normal if you lived in walking distance of a school. Not many children do this anymore, but that's largely because the immediate neighborhood is now populated by empty nesters, and the children are being bussed in from the surrounding areas.
Related, I learned this while living in Japan: in most areas (there are some exceptions), parents or a teacher will walk with children from house to school the first day (or first week sometimes), and children are expected to gather at a chosen meeting point and walk on their own after that. Naturally, by middle and high school, children are so accustomed to walking on their own that they frequently learn the route in groups without any sort of adult help. The only real exception is kindergarteners, who will walk with their parents everyday to a specific point (usually a park that is about halfway between everyone's home and the kindergarten), at which point the group (10-20 children) is met by 2 or 3 teachers who walk with the children the rest of the way. I thought this was a great system, not only because it helped foster a sense of independence and responsibility in the kids, but because it helped the children learn their neighborhoods better (thus teaching them safe walking routes as well as reducing the risk of them getting lost!).
no subject
Date: 2009-09-15 12:49 am (UTC)My parents used to send the dog to collect us from the neighbor's house when it was time for bed in the summer. Worked perfectly for everyone. :)
But really, I'd be more reluctant to let a kid walk to the schools around here, not because of abduction, but because the morons with the luxury SUVs would run them over without even noticing (they seem to have a hard enough time noticing my car). Also, there are no sidewalks or streetlights, and it's kinda dark in the mornings.