Posted on 09/14/2009 7:40:44 AM PDT by Arec Barrwin
September 13, 2009 Why Can’t She Walk to School? By JAN HOFFMAN
TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.
She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: ‘Are you sure you want to be doing this?’ Katie said friends ask.
‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so ... blond.’ A friend said, ‘I heard that Jaycee Dugard story and I thought of your daughter.’ And they say, ‘I’d never do that with my kid: I wouldn’t trust my kid with the street,’ said Katie, a stay-at-home mother, who asked that her full identity be withheld to protect her children.
Katie, too, is tormented by the abduction monsters embedded in modern parenting. Yet she wants to encourage her daughter’s independence. Somehow, walking to school has become a political act when it’s this uncommon, she said. Somebody has to be first.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’d wash my hair everyday before school and it would be frozen by the time I would get to school...didn’t have hair dryers back then and didn’t want to wear a hat because it would mess up the hair!
“I’d have to move, for sure.”
We’ve run out of world to move to.
Move, make it nice, 50 years later trouble follows.
Hence, Zionism.
No I have not. I’m a damn good driver. I’ve been driving for 35 years and never had an accident. My husband has been driving for 33 years and the only accident he ever had was an idiot in Miami who bumped him - not a big deal. No one in my family has had a wreck - both sisters, their kids, their husbands - maybe the bad drivers keep having accidents to run that stat up.
Oh, that would have been doubly miserable! At least I was only in 3rd grade and didn’t care how my hair looked!
You can bet on it, and I don’t text or talk on the phone either while driving.
There you go!
Otherwise risky activities can be rendered much LESS risky. Wear a seatbelt and drive your car safely. Wear a helmet and ride your bike safely. Use a safety rope and go mountain climbing safely.
Proper education of your child (walk directly to/from school, choose a public and visible route, no sight-seeing, no alternate routes, walk with at least one other friend, etc..)
It's a bigger disservice to your child to teach her to live in fear rather than to reduce the risks and live her life.
But given what I've seen from my own classmates, and those of my children, walking to school adds very little that can be observed.
On a weekly basis, we hear of someone following a child in Houston, or a situation where a kid walking alone was harrassed. I was in elementary school in a much smaller city than Houston in the 60’s. Even way back then, we had a man sitting in his car in front of the school offering candy to kids. I remember it well because the teachers came outside and watched us all cross the street for a few weeks - watching all the cars. Back then most of us walked home - I remember running and staying closer to the houses than the street because I was afraid.
Thank you. I wish more people would be like that.
Have these people never heard of a walking school bus?
You let your kids take the chances, I opted not to.
That's all terrific, if you're the only driver on the road. You'll avoid any accidents that YOU might have caused.
What about the others?
I've been hit by another driver and my wife has been hit four times so far. None of these accidents were our fault.
Life has risks. We reduce the risks as much as we can and get on with living. I think letting your child walk to school fits in that category as well.
I teach my daughters (I have two) to make good decisions and to avoid risk while living life.
Drive your kids to school, and the risk of harm, from walking to school, is not lessened, but eliminated.
if you could do something that not just mitigates risk, but eliminates it altogether, wouldn't you do that, especially where your children are concerned?
I can’t speak for all walkers, but our oldest son learned responsibility from walking to school. Even when he was 7, he was the one who made sure that his older/younger siblings were doing what was right during their trek to school. (this is not to say he didn’t do stupid things when he wasn’t on that walk! when it was play time, he did do some questionable things involving the road, but I digress . . .) When our second son was suddenly the only walker to the school down the street, he also became responsible though not in the same way. He was 6 and had been walking to school with siblings for 1 3/4 years, and he continued to walk to school each day, making sure that he was on time and prepared for school. He continued to be responsible for himself each year after that. I can’t say that he did a very good job taking care of his younger sister the next year. The crossing guard occasionally let me know when he tormented his sister on the way to school. Son learned that there were people watching him even if was unaware.
I saw very little risk in our children walking to school or to the bus stop. (the middle school/high school bus stop) I miss living in a neighborhood like our old one. We have lived in places where I would not let the children play outside unattended.
Do you REALLY think that's what I'm doing?
OMG - what you are describing sounds dangerous! What type of moron parent encourages their kids to play in the street? That sign isn’t going to do a bit of good when some idiot comes flying around the corner.
What happened to playing in backyards?
However, the risk from a car accident increases. You have only substituted one risk for another.
Best of luck to your daughters - I hope they never experience anything scary while walking alone.
In our community we had a family that lived on the driveway into the school and the bus stopped for their child and then drove the two hundred feet to the school.
I’m sorry to hear all of this. And I know this is far from comparable, but I thought I’d share this with you.
When we moved here from Europe 40 years ago, kids in the neighborhood used to throw tomatoes at us and call us “Foreigners”. One of the kids threw a rock once, my dad said, enough was enough - and gave the boy a time out in the corner. (he called the parents and advised them of the situation). He tolerated tomato throwing, but rock throwing a a huge no-no in our family.
Little did those boys know that the reason we were in Europe was because my father was serving his country overseas.
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