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'm not disputing the fact that parents' concerns are not proportional to the real risk.
But what exactly are the great benefits of letting your children roam free unprotected? I can see the benefits of my childhood, in theory, being able to get on my bike, ride for miles, being out from under adult supervision for hours at a time, but those theoretical benefits pale when stacked up against being abducted/raped/murdered.
In our county, yes. Too many of our communities have no sidewalks and the schools are often on busy streets. The school board decided years ago to transport all students, even those who live less than 1/2 mile away
I believe it, based on firsthand experience. See post #78.
We must have gone to the same school :>)
I agree with everything in your post. Kids were abducted and murdered even when I was a kid (back in the dark ages). The difference was, you only heard about the stuff locally, because there was no internet and only the nightly news. I understand about parents being concerned for their kids, but are we scaring them to death?
Teach them how to deal with strangers (stay away from them, don’t talk to them), have them walk in groups and on routes that are not out of the way.
You cannot protect your child from every danger. Better to teach them how to stay as safe as possible. And for younger kids I would recommend walking with them until you feel confident that they can do it without you.
What's better...a society where parents are naive and kids are confident or a society informed 24/7 by the MSM news cycle and kids are insecure.
“Homeschooling advantage #795.”
Homeschooling advantage # 17,950.
Fixed it.
You had dirt? Lucky!
I would bet most parents are watching them play in the front yard. I know my neighbors do, and we live in a safe neighborhood.
Good for you. So did I, and my siblings, in New York City, no less. By the time my kids were ready for school, in a much safer place than NYC, it was too far to walk, too expensive for the (private school) bus (since the public schools were and are so inferior), and too damn dangerous.
Celebrate bravery all you want, but when it comes to kids, parents are all they've got between them and the world as it is, not how we wish it could be.
I had the same problem. One more block, and I could have ridden the bus. At least I could ride my bike to school, but some of those cold mornings were miserable.
It is a nice neighborhood. Unless we can wall out people who don’t belong (and drive miles to find us), there is little to be done.
I remember back in High School, when I could not get my Dad’s car to drive, I hoofed it 20 blocks each direction.
Far as I know, it didn’t kill me.
As others have already posted here, the problem is not so much that there are more perverts than there used to be. The much bigger problem is that TV news used to be just 30 minutes a day.
Getting struck by lightening is rare too, but I wouldn’t purposely stand out in the middle of a storm.
I would go with a society in which my children are alive, healthy, and with me. And one in which I am not destroyed by grief.
As for children being insecure, I don't really see that.
That being said, this is really a moot point for me, as my children go to private school, and ride with their mother, who works there. Even the public school they would attend is too far to walk to, and even if it were close enough, the road they would use is not suitable for pedestrian traffic.
Sometimes my kids did take the bus (we were in a school system that was under court order to desegregate and the way they did it was bus the kids to various elementary schools i the cluster starting at 4th grade—it was way too far to walk, and so sometimes I drove them, but that’s difficult when all 3 go to different schools in different parts of town) and sometimes I let them walk to the home school and take the bus to their cluster school).
All this to say is that, for the most part, they HATED riding the bus. They would have rather walked.
‘Cause its three miles one way with no sidewalks along a heavily traveled state highways that have to be crossed at some point?
LOL, but you can prevent them from wandering around unattended.
We homeschooled - but even when my kids were "roaming" the small neighborhood, a large group of our neighborhood moms had eyes on the kids and phones ready to report any potential problems to each other. I loved that neighborhood - it was like the 60's in some aspects with a Mom telling agitated kids to go home and tell their Mom's what had happened. Gotta love that kind of connection with other moms!
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