
Why Can’t She Walk to School?  - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/fashion/13kids.html?_r=1&hpw
======
m_eiman
_Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice
rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the
boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest
of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce._

To me, this is just insane. Walking a mile alone when you're ten years old
shouldn't be an issue unless there's a riot going on or something.

What are you telling the kids about the world around them when you're
terrified of letting them out into it? Not that people in general are decent
people who can be trusted to not cause them any trouble, at least. Maybe this
is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect
themselves?

~~~
lutorm
This was exactly how I felt when I moved to CA from Sweden. It reminds me of
that passage in "Bowling for Columbine" about how the US is a society filled
with fear.

------
anatoly
"About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal
statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents."

The single most effective sentence in the entire story; in fact, it could
probably _stand_ for the entire story.

~~~
dcurtis
I'd like to see a list showing each kidnapping, the motive of the kidnapper,
and the result of the situation.

Is it mostly for sexual abuse? Child labor? What percentage occur in middle
class suburbia compared to a poor inner city area?

~~~
neilk
Are you talking about the 115 abductions by strangers? Can you even get
statistically significant results out of that small sample?

~~~
throw_away
It's a sufficiently small sample that we could study each case, figure out how
it may have been prevented, and maybe get the metric up from four nines to
five.

Also, I wonder what the historic measures are. Back in the eighties, we
weren't coddled nearly this much, but there was a reasonable amount of crime.
How many children were abducted then?

~~~
scott_s
When you're already at 115 out of _all of the children in the United States_ ,
there's not much else you can do that a free society would accept. (There are
things that, unfortunately, a free society does accept, but I doubt those have
an actual impact.)

It's similar to school buses and child fatalities. On the face of it, making
school buses safer sounds like a noble goal and something we should do. But
when you consider that less than a dozen children die each year in school bus
accidents out of, again, all children in the United States, there's probably
not much that can be done. (Source:
[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-
there-...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-there-no-
seatbelts-on-school-buses))

~~~
throw_away
I agree that there probably aren't any top-down things at a societal level
that can be done, but I'm not convinced that this information wouldn't be
useful for parents who want their kids to be independent, but to take the
proper precautions. For example, were the children lured or were they forcibly
taken? Were they alone? How old were they? If there is info on failed
attempts, how did the child get away?

If I had children, I wouldn't want them to live a sheltered life and,
obviously, there are a lot of common-sense precautions, but I still think that
analysis of this information could be useful to the public.

------
truebosko
"Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents
drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school
official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out."

Plus calling the cops because they saw a young kid walking alone? What the
hell is wrong with these people?

I think this whole fear is a simple case of the media over-reporting child
abductions. I'm curious as to the numbers of abductions over the past 30
years. Article states only a couple hundred / year in present day.

When we moved to Canada I walked to school alone all the time when I was in
Grade 2 and up. My mom was in English classes or at a job so we could survive.
I don't see an issue with it to this day and I believe it made me a more
independent person in the long run (I'm 24 so I wasn't a child that long ago)

~~~
dmix
Most telling statistic from the article:

"About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal
statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents."

Most parents have no time to read well researched articles/books on raising
children. Their lives are (generally) very hectic and what they learn usually
comes from sensationalist media stories and from other parents sharing horror
stories they read about.

~~~
dagw
_Most parents have no time to read well researched articles/books on raising
children._

Most parents probably cannot find well researched articles/books on raising
children. As a soon to be parent I've been shocked and dismayed by the total
lack of books showing any sign of scientific research or rigor and the
incredible amount of unscientific snake oil being pushed on the market If you
have any recommendations I'd be most grateful.

------
patio11
Japanese parents will happily let six year olds navigate to their school
across town. Middle schoolers and high schoolers routinely go to schools in
other cities, via trains.

Nobody believes me when I say middle class Americans would call that child
abuse.

~~~
akirk
I think the Pedibus (or walking bus,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_bus> ) is a good idea for having
children walk to school.

It's a group of children walking to school accompanied by two adults along
predefined routes. There are bus stops where children wait for the Pedibus to
arrive and then they walk along with the group.

~~~
nkassis
Piedibus ;p Pedibus isn't exactly a name parents would like ;p

Pied is foot in french.

~~~
akirk
Hm, it's called Pedibus in German <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedibus> and
Pédibus in French <http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pédibus>

pes, pedis: foot in latin.

~~~
fburnaby
He's pointing out that it souds like "pedobus". Exactly what the parents are
trying to avoid.

------
e40
My son is 8. One Saturday he had a play date with a friend at his school, a
few blocks away in a safe neighborhood. He and I met the kid and his mother at
the school. I suggested that we could let them play there (there were lots of
other kids around, too), and then they could walk home together to our house.
I got a look, but she really wouldn't talk about it.

Before this first play date, she and her son had literally been hounding me
for it. After, not only have I not heard a single word from her, but my
advances for further play dates have been ignored.

I've started to let my son walk most of the way to school by himself (I walk
him part way, then go a different route to my bus stop). I don't dare tell my
wife. She would completely flip out. She is completely irrational when it
comes to this subject. She is mistaking her fear for parental instinct.

------
fsniper
Sometimes I think you US citizen's are out of your minds. Why is it so hard to
be a community and trust each other? Is it about the mainstream media,
Hollywood, or something else that makes you feel so unsecured? A child walking
to school just a few blocks is a question? In my child hood I walked to school
more than fifteen minutes with all my friends. Also I would go out after
school and would not come home untill it was dark (also same for all my
friends).

I'm not sure about nowadays parent for my country. But I believe they are not
that unsecured yet. And let their children walk or travel by themselves
whenever it is possible.

(I live in Turkey.)

~~~
dcurtis
Honestly, I am getting sick of people starting comments like yours with a
negative sentence about the US. Don't let ridiculous stereotypes get in the
way of intelligent discussion.

I grew up in the US and I did all of those things you mention.

~~~
david927
It's not negative anymore than the article itself was negative, and that's
because it's actually a problem.

I grew up in the US, did all those things you mention, and yet I know that
it's a big problem in the US. Thus the NYT article. Thus the debate. My sister
says Halloween gets less and less popular every year. Fewer and fewer kids
come around -- because of the problems of tainted candy. There is no tainted
candy. There is no boogey man. America's suburb, move-often nation has made it
a big collection of individuals who don't know and don't trust their
neighbors. What's wrong with America that it's always looking over its
shoulder? What's wrong with a culture that drives their kids to school two
blocks away? It's a valid question and deserves less people getting "sick"
about the asking of it and more dedicated to the discussing and solving of it.

------
dougp
In my old school system it was against the rules to walk until high school. I
vividly remember that they knew someone was riding their bike to school but
couldn't figure out who so they confiscated the bike to see who came for it.
My wife was waiting at her nephews bus stop to pick him up in the rain just
yesterday (first week of school) the bus driver says I don't recognize you and
has to call the school to see if she is on the list (she is) 30 minutes later
they let her take her nephew and say "Can't be too careful!". It is mind
boggling

~~~
fsniper
Is'nt it seems to be insane to you?

~~~
dougp
It absolutely does.

------
edw519
_They often encounter disapproval by other parents, scoldings by school
administrators, even visits from local constabularies._

To whom they must say, "Mind your own business," "Do your own job," and
"Unless you're here to arrest me for committing a crime, get out of my house."

At what point do you stop caring what the neighbors think and start living
your own life?

~~~
yellowbkpk
...after which the other parent, school administrator, or local constabulary
reports you to the government's local social services liaison who begins
proceedings to remove your children from your custody.

~~~
riffic
not if you're not breaking the law.

~~~
tptacek
Ah, the words of somebody who has never had or known anybody who had a social
services case opened on them.

~~~
riffic
yeah the system sucks. I don't plan on introducing crotch spawn into this
meaningless existence either, so I guess I'll never know.

------
davi
Relatedly, suburban fears of swimming in natural pond water -- residents want
to replace town pond with man-made swimming pool:

"Surveys ... showed that too many people view Graydon as unsafe and unclean.
Younger residents in particular want a thoroughly disinfected pool with clear
waters so they can always see their youngsters."

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/nyregion/07towns.html>

------
mallipeddi
I grew up in India. I biked to school that was a mile away alone. After I
turned 14, I used to take a train since this other school was at least 5 miles
away. These were those crazy kinds of trains that were so crowded people hang
outside the trains clinging on to anything they can find. You can actually
jump out through the doors on to the other side so you can run across the
tracks and not take the over-bridge (of course I never told my mom I did this
:)

I don't think my mom was ever that afraid/nervous. Neither were the moms of
all my friends. Letting your kids commute to school alone is a very common
thing. I'm sure not all American parents and not all American neighborhoods
are like this but still concerning that it's big enough for NYT to write a
story on it.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
A large part of it is regional variation and part of it is media
sensationalizing. My 8 year-old walks 1/2 mile from school bus stop to our
house if the weather is good (we live in a rural area). A neighbor's kid keeps
his bike near the bus stop and rides home from there. But even if we lived
only 1/2 mile from school they wouldn't be allowed to walk/bike there. Not
because of kidnapping worries, but road safety: there is a lot of bus & parent
traffic around the school and the administration is justly concerned about
mixing high traffic and elementary school kids who aren't used to that
environment.

------
gaius
_Children are driven to schools two blocks away_

This reminds me of that story we discussed the other day, about obesity.

~~~
hughprime
The best part was the last story, about the kid who walked five houses down
the block to play with a friend, but got driven home. The article does note
the absurdity that she wasn't allowed to walk home herself, but... well,
couldn't the adult have at least _walked_ her home? How does it even save time
to get into a car for that kind of distance?

------
martincmartin
It's heartening that the book mentioned in the story, "Free-Range Kids: Giving
Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry," has 5 stars
from 61 reviews at Amazon. From what I've seen, it's incredibly hard for a
book on any topic to get 5 stars from a statistically significant number of
reviews. Hopefully this portends that many feel the same way.

Now if I could just get my wife to discuss child raising without her getting
defensive. (She went through a bitter custody battle with her first husband
who continually accused her in court of being a bad mother. And hey, I'm not
perfect, I could probably approach things better with her.)

------
zck
I love the school that had parents write their kid's name on a piece of paper
and put it on their windshield. 'Cause, absent further checking ("your ID,
Mrs. Jones?"), no one can write a child's name on a piece of paper unless it's
eir kid.

------
cromulent
You can't guard your children from the one-in-a-million. You have to let go at
some point. Hard as it is.

This is a good topic for communities to discuss.

One of the best things I have found since moving to a different country is our
kids can travel (on their own) safely and freely to school and back without us
being judged as irresponsible.

The more kids that do it, the safer it is. Good on these people for going
first, I hope others follow.

Here's a relevant article from Aus where the coroner recommended banning 4WDs
(SUVs) from near schools: [http://fddp.theage.com.au/news/national/coroner-
urges-curbs-...](http://fddp.theage.com.au/news/national/coroner-urges-curbs-
on-4wd-drivers/2005/05/17/1116095948185.html)

------
nazgulnarsil
government run systems devolve into bureaucracy and Orwellian rules of social
conduct. Our children are treated more like government employees than
children. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest and will continue to get
worse, bureaucracy does many things but spontaneously shrink and become more
responsible it does not.

------
jleyank
If it's really two blocks, is it so hard to walk to school and back? Call it
parent/child bonding, use it to point out things in nature/things changing in
the neighborhood - possibly even a time for the adult to bond with neighbors?

------
octavia
Great article. Aren't there surgically embedded gps chips for tracking
children?

~~~
truebosko
How would you feel when you found out your parents have been tracking your
every move since you were 6?

~~~
nkassis
You could use that to your advantage. Ex: make a clone chip and leave in under
your pillow when you go out all night.

~~~
Novash
That's what I love in HN... great idea!

------
christofd
The U.S. needs the technologies and the explicit and implicit fabric of rules
that Europe uses to govern people in crowded areas (hint: it works! go on a
visit).

Individualism doesn't work anymore in the U.S. - not in litigation,
healthcare, transportation, crime, city planning etc. The U.S. needs to become
more European.

My two cents.

I'll decipher this: if the U.S. would have effective city planning, crime
prevention and a social welfare system, there'd be less bad neighborhoods to
worry about and in result less crime. Further, if employers would actually
hire people for longer periods of time then longer standing communities of
people could form where several generations would know what's going on in the
neighborhood. Further, if you would add good public transportation and kids
who know how to ride on a bicycle, you would finally have European conditions
=> kids could go to school on their own.

~~~
martincmartin
On the other hand, this comes at a cost. My name is Martin C. Martin. I was
born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar, and changed it in college. A dutch friend
remarked that changing your name is very very hard in Holland: a roofer whose
last name was the Dutch word for leaky had to go through all these hoops to
change his name. He said that, in general, Europe has a kind of conformity.

From what I've seen, many European countries are also racially homogeneous,
and a little xenophobic. Even Geoff Hinton, a big name in Machine Learning,
had to move back to Canada after a few years of living in England because his
black son encountered an overwhelming amount of discrimination. And I think
England is more racially diverse than a lot of European countries.

~~~
christofd
Yup. That's why I moved to Canada for a while at least. Want to try out the
so-called freedom you guys in North-America have. Pros and cons.

EXAMPLE: 1/2 h ago somebody stole my mountainbike right out of my garage. Here
in North America nobody saw the guy. In Germany, usually the neighborhood
widow next door lady would have seen the guy looking through the kitchen
window.

~~~
martincmartin
Yeah, there are definitely pros & cons.

------
lsc
edit: poorly worded "doesn't belong here" comment removed.

~~~
pg
This type of comment seems to me more of a problem than this type of article.
The article may or may not be interesting to the intellectually curious, but
yet another comment about something not being hacker news definitely isn't.

Though the article is a bit superficial, the question it explores is an
interesting one. Kids' lives have become dramatically more circumscribed in
just one generation. I've spent a good deal of time wondering about that: why
it happened, and what the consequences will be.

~~~
lsc
My comment came from a place of arrogance, something that is wholly
inappropriate when I'm talking with someone like you.

Now, clearly, your opinion of what hacker news ought to be counts a lot more
than mine, but I will explain my opinion anyhow. I am here because this site
attracts a reasonable proportion of people who are better than I am (or, at
least measurably better than I am at something.)

My problem with the article was that it's a subject that anyone can talk
about, with no real 'right' or 'wrong' answer. there's no provability. When
speaking of politics or religion everyone has equal authority.

Articles like this attract the sort of people who make slashdot mediocre,
which is to say, everyone. I could write a few pages on childhood
independence, and how that shaped me. But I don't know any more about it than
the next guy over, so unless you have some personal interest in me, I don't
think what I'd have to say would be interesting.

The thing is, articles like this, where anyone can comment are inherently more
popular, and will take over any site on which they are tolerated, because
people like being the authority. I do it too. Hell, I'm doing it right now.
The thing is, it's not very much fun reading someone write about something
they know little about.

~~~
petercooper
I agree.

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic._

It's not _intellectually_ curious, is vaguely a "crime" story, and it's
_exactly_ the sort of story they bring up on TV news editorials.

 _Personally,_ I'd only want to see social science, crime, or general news
stories here if they have just a smidgen of specific relevance to hackers,
programmers, techies, whatever. This story is prime time news all over. The
fact that it's gotten voted up quite a bit says a lot, however, but many
stories that _are_ relevant to techies have been voted up and then killed
nonetheless.. so I don't see any consistency here.

