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 ...
Perhaps you missed my post where I related that this walking to school question, in my case, is a purely hypothetical exercise.
I could say the same about the imagined benefits of one's idyllic childhood.
Wow, TChris - all this information about us being overprotective yet aren’t you the one who is always pushing for Gardisil so the “kids will be safe”? lol
I said the risk from walking to school could be eliminated altogether, not ALL RISK FROM EVERYTHING.
Please don't put words in my mouth.
Umm... No.
I'm guessing you've never taken a statistics course.
Also, consider:
Some are abducted from their own homes. Do you allow your children to go outside?
Some are abducted at school, from the playground. Do you allow your children to play outside at school?
Some are abducted in stores, while their parents are shopping. Do you take your kids shopping?
Some are abducted from their own homes, in the middle of the night. Do you keep your kids in a barred and locked room?
Some bad things will happen. We CAN'T stop ALL of them. We CAN stifle and smother our kids' growth and experience in an attempt to do so.
I want my girls to have experience, be wise, and SEE the world with their own eyes.
Same to you, FRiend. :-)
Homeschooled - sorry Tchrissy - and again, walking TO and FROM school, your girls have 100% greater chance than mine of having a problem.... sorry you are having a difficult time understanding what I type
The wife’s inner-city school district provides busses if you live 3 CITY BLOCKS AWAY from the school.
Growing up, you had to be OVER 1 Mile away to get a bus.
Yep. ...and for the same reason.
The chance of a problem is very small compared to the benefit.
Risk vs. reward analysis is a very valuable tool for decision-making.
Emotional reaction to scary stories is not.
No, it can't.
“I’ve never been on a school bus, and I’m thirty-something. Homeschooling advantage #795.”
You missed out on all those daily Sociology examples of DARWIN’S LAW: The rule of the fittest?
C.r.o.s.s.i.n.g . G.u.a.r.d.s
Part of the problem with this discussion is that you INSIST on saying that a child walking to school is simply wandering around. There is a great deal of difference in letting a child go somewhere specific and just letting them roam at will wherever. But, if you have to use such tactics to make your point, it indicates to me that you don’t really think you can make your point on its merits.
No, the problem is YOU don't understand statistics. It's NOT 100% greater chance.
Let me put it another way.
If there's a 20% chance of rain today (assuming the forecast is accurate), do I have a 100% greater chance of getting rained on by going outside than someone who stays inside all day?
No!
My chances go from 0% to 20%.
Understand?
(Oh, and your kids could still be abducted FROM your home. That's a very rare event, but still greater than 0%.)
We send our children to school, and that’s as much a risk as letting them walk to school. Our oldest children were taught social studies at a middle school by what I thought was a creepy guy. Sure enough, he turned out to be obsessed with child porn. His girlfriend turned him in. I don’t know if he’s in jail now or not.
I live in a different part of VA than SoftballMom and the only places you will find sidewalks in this entire county is in some of the incorporated towns. Because we are so rural most of the roads don't even have shoulders.
The road we live on is very busy, but even though it has no shoulders it is wide enough that I will allow my 11yo daughter walk to the store (which I can see out my back door) and to her girlfriend's house (the other girl's grandmother picks up sight of my daughter at the curve in the road where I lose sight of her.)
Letting her walk to school will not happen.
Voting makes no never mind, there just isn't room to put in sidewalks unless we pave over most of this rural county, and sidewalks are not on a list of priorities or even desires of most that live here.
So, not letting your child walk to school has nothing to do with sidewalks?
“my father was serving his country overseas.”
Let me fix that - “serving our country” - overseas.
Please explain. I must be too stupid to figure out what you're getting at.
bttt
LOL, what?
I concede your point that walking to school is NOT just walking around aimlessly.
OK?
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