When I drive to work in the morning, I often pass children on their way to school. Sometimes, they're in groups, and sometimes, they're alone. And I must admit, seeing kids walk by themselves makes me really nervous.
Often enough the walkers are quite small: elementary-school aged, I'd say, maybe 9 or 10, walking alone down what everyone in my town assumes are fairly safe streets. Maybe it's due to the stories I've heard about kidnappings over the years, the ones that always start the same way: small town, nothing like that ever happens here, walking alone on his way to school, etc, but the sight of a child walking unsupervised makes me worry, and apparently I'm not alone.
In today's New York Times, Jan Hoffman explores the debate between parents who feel their children should be escorted back and forth to school and parents who feel their kids need to experience independence and freedom, even in the face of paranoia stoked by the evening news and the disapproval of fellow parents.
When I was in school, there were two types of students: the bus pass kids and the walkers. When the bell rang, the walkers were free to skip out the door and head directly home, while it was a half-hour ordeal to make sure the bus pass kids got on the right bus, knew their bus stop, and were accounted for. The walkers had the freedom; it was bus kids like me who were fretted over. But as Hoffman notes, walking to school has become a rarity these days, as busing and car pooling have become, in the eyes of many parents, anyway, a "safer" alternative. "In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school," Hoffman writes, "by 2001, only 13 percent still did."
The way you view the world changes as you get older: when I was a kid, I thought nothing of standing at the bus stop unattended for 30 minutes, waiting for the stupid bus to finally arrive. I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where kids left the house at 10am and weren't seen again until a chorus of "Dinnerrrrr!" from various mothers and fathers rang through the streets at 5. We were allowed to be independent, to have adventures, to explore, just as our parents had twenty or thirty years earlier. But the thought of my 6-year-old niece going anywhere by herself, even outside in the front yard to play without supervision, makes me incredibly nervous.
So how do we reconcile our own fears with our children's need to assert their own independence? Lenore Skenazy, who famously wrote about her decision to let her son ride the subway alone, tells Hoffman that "we don't do [children] a service by going to the worst-case scenario in your mind and acting accordingly," and perhaps that's true, but there has to be a way to ensure that your kids are safe without feeling like the world is out to get them at every turn.
For the record, my mother, who used to let my sisters and I run around the neighborhood for hours, now walks my niece to school herself, and I don't blame her. Of course, she's still quite young, and when she's older, she'll be able to go alone, but for now, I think we all feel safer knowing she has someone holding her hand.
So what say you commenters? Do you (or would you) let your children walk to school? And have you found a way to balance your fears with your child's need to be independent? Feel free to recount your experiences in the comments.
Why Can't She Walk To School? [New York Times]