In the early 60s, we walked across a very busy street and through a several acre park, along a driving range and tennis court to get home from school every day from when I was in kindergarten. No adults accompanied us. My sister was 3 years older, brother was 2 years older. No other options were considered. Seemed quite normal to all of us.
Really sad we’ve come to this. Those walks to and from school with friends was always the best part of my day. Especially if you had a crush on one of the girls in your friend group.
We live in a fairly affluent community. One main road (with great sidwalks, bike lane, etc.) with several neighborhood extensions (most behind gates). Do kids walk to school? Nope. The car line gets so backed up you don’t want to go anywhere near the place mid afternoon. Really a shame. Parents queue up for at least a half hour before school lets out and the line just grows and grows (at least a quarter of a mile). Never understood why the parents don’t just let their kids walk (they’d all be together - only one road) at least to their individual neighborhood where mom could be waiting by the gate instead of in a long car line.
Once my kids were able to ride bikes the rode to school. Sometimes i’d ride with them in the morning (just because it was fun) but never in the afternoon. If they had friends joining them, I wouldn’t even consider it.
“In the early 60s, we walked across a very busy street and through a several acre park, along a driving range and tennis court to get home from school every day from when I was in kindergarten. No adults accompanied us. My sister was 3 years older, brother was 2 years older. No other options were considered. Seemed quite normal to all of us.”
Yep. No other options considered for me riding in cars with no seat belts. Turned out fine for us and almost everybody else. Wasn’t something that was really safe though. We know better now. The fact that it turned out ok isn’t evidence that it was a good idea. The study I link to shows why it probably wasn’t. This isn’t about the strawman of stranger danger. It’s about the very real lack of judgement of young kids and the overwhelming power and might of automobiles.
Mid / late 70s - shortest route to elementary and Jr. High (hate calling it Middle School) took us through a trail in the woods that bordered a neighborhood and the schools. Never even thought not to do that.
Definitely different times. When I first started working at a real job, 15, I had to be there at 5 am Saturday and Sunday (breakfast restaurant). It was a few miles from my house. My dad basically said, “Geez I already have a job, thanks for ruining my weekends.” I told him he didn’t need to drive me, I’d ride my bike. Of course it was dark out so the solution…he got me a bike light and added reflectors to my wheels (of course no helmets back then). All was good 
I wouldn’t do that with my kids but, like I said, different times…
I can’t imagine there are many kids today that have jobs starting at 5AM… Most of my kids friends don’t have jobs and won’t until they graduate from college. Parents are happy to pay for their overpriced lateés, $100 leggings, gas, and insurance expenses indefinitely. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine subsidizes her college graduate (no college loans) who has a decent paying full time job and sometimes gets unappreciative jabs about being forced to live unlike what she’s become accustomed to (apparently subsidy is too small).
I too occasionally walked to school alone in a not super great neighborhood.
Isn’t this kind of an upper middle class parent trap where providing the kid(s) with a relatively luxurious lifestyle growing up sets them up for a big letdown when they actually have to earn their own income (that will almost certainly be much less than their parents’ income, both because entry level jobs pay less and because future generations are mostly getting poorer now) to live on? (Or earlier, if the parental spending on the relatively luxurious lifestyle means that the first time the kid has cost constraints on his/her choices will be in choosing a college.)
Is it just my neighborhood, or do everyone’s parents drive them to the school bus stop so they can wait together in the heated car until the bus comes?
We lived almost a mile from the elementary school I started at in first grade. All the neighborhood kids walked to and from school together. I definitely think kids are missing out by not getting to do this any longer.
“Isn’t this kind of an upper middle class parent trap where providing the kid(s) with a relatively luxurious lifestyle growing up sets them up for a big letdown when they actually have to earn their own income (that will almost certainly be much less than their parents’ income, both because entry level jobs pay less and because future generations are mostly getting poorer now) to live on? (Or earlier, if the parental spending on the relatively luxurious lifestyle means that the first time the kid has cost constraints on his/her choices will be in choosing a college”
This is probably true for some of the upper middle class but not for the many one percenters in the area I live in. These kids do not have financial constraints on college and they often gone to colleges that leads to consulting jobs that give them the ability to have the same lifestyle they were raised with. Plus many on top of that get “ family estate planning” annual gifts. Those who don’t have the ability for those jobs are often highly subsidized by parents
And here it’s often the “ only” upper middle class parents that are often in the “ trap”. They live lavish lifestyles, take out loans so that their kids can attend the college of choice and really have no retirement savings… “ downsizing “ to a condo from the McMansion is often seeing after the kids leave the nest and these are the people suddenly struggling more. Their kids who weren’t capable of the top school/ consulting route are the ones doing gig work on top of their jobs to pay the rent.
Growing up in Brooklyn in the 70s my friends and I all walked to/from school together starting in 1st grade. I lived the furthest away (8 blocks) and would meet/pick-up other kids as we got closer to the elementary school.
By the end of elementary school we took public busses and trains to the movies, Kings Plaza shopping mall, etc. and knew how to read schedules and make transfers, and could get pretty much anywhere by ourselves. Starting in 7th grade, I had a 90 minute subway commute each way from Brooklyn to school on Manhattan’s UES.
My kids have grown up in the suburbs in a much more car-oriented world. When we go on family trips into NYC they’re amazed that we thought nothing of navigating through the boroughs as kids.
My husband walked the kids to elementary school. It’s a 1/2 mile away. I picked them up. Usually walking though I often timed it with other errands so I was in the car. They took the bus to middle school (1/3 mile). Older son walked to and from the high school (1.5 miles). Younger son only walked home as he had a zero period orchestra class and DH would take him on his way to work. Later in high school they got rides home a lot with kids who had cars. (Although my younger son said there were some kids he wouldn’t ride with because their driving was too scary.)
My 5th grade daughter walks around our town. She and her friends have discovered that rather than riding the bus from school to the town library they can spend their bus fare on junk food at the store and walk the 1.5 miles. She also walks home from after school activities and goes out on the trails by herself. My wife and I encourage the independence, though it does increase our stress occasionally when she does not get home when we expect.
I grew up in a rural area that was just turning suburban. Walked half a mile to school and played in the woods alone and with friends after a quick “going out” to my mom. Kids did have all kinds of accidents in our carefree late sixties/ early seventies world: dirt bike crashes, drownings, even snake bites and literally shooting an eye out.
My kids rode the bus to school whenever possible but didn’t walk the three miles. At one school they were young and had to cross too many busy streets, at the second, the school was located on a highway access road and was not walker friendly at all. (I was astonished that a school would be placed in such a location. There wasn’t even a back way that was walker friendly.It was new when they went there so the traffic wasn’t too bad, but it was clear to me then this location would be terrible as the city grew.)
This thread reminds me when I was on business trip in Japan. I saw some children, alone or in group, wore a yellow flag on their clothes. I asked my Japanese co-worker what does that mean? She said that is to let everyone know that they are minors and traveling alone on the streets. This way they can be protected by adults (Cars will drive slower, random adults will look out for them on busy streets, etc… basically just help them out in any situation because the kid(s) are alone). This wasn’t just around walking to school, it included bus, train, etc…, it works like that in general, the co-worker told me.
I was in awe - in the US, we would do everything we can to hide the fact that the child was alone, don’t talk to stranger, etc. Imagine what human could achieve, if only we chose to.
The US does have higher crime rates than Japan… but US fear of crime is probably enormously greater than actual US crime rates. People in the US fear crime as if they were living in the highest crime parts of New York or Los Angeles in 1991.
Kids in both suburbs I’ve lived in do walk or bike to school by themselves. Not all, but some. I’m always glad to see that. My D did not walk to school by herself, but that was only because she didn’t want to. I would have allowed it at her second elementary school, but not the first. The first was across a major boulevard. I allowed her to play outside by herself as early as K though. We lived in a gated community and all the other kids played outside as well after school.
In the 80s, I walked 10 blocks by myself and with friends to and from school as early as 1st grade. I started taking music and dance lessons in the third grade after school and on weekends and mostly walked or took public transportation to and from.
I have a family member who is paranoid about stranger danger. Her kids have never even gone outside to play or gone to a store by themselves (they are now young teens). It’s very sad and I worry about the types of adults they’ll become.
In our school district, kids who live within 1 mile of the school do not have school bus provided, so they don’t have a choice but walk, and many do. Some parents decided to drive them anyway, but i think it is b/c of the kids not wanting to walk, not about safety.
Salaries for young college graduates seem relatively stable. The median earnings for those 25-34 employed full time and with a Bachelors declined only 9% from 2000-2017 in inflation adjusted terms. Preliminary NACE data shows a 10% increase for the class of 2019’s starting salary compared to the previous year.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cba.pdf
https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/compensation/preliminary-average-salary-for-class-of-2019-shows-large-gain/
Back in the day ('60’s) there were many kids in a neighborhood (we were suburban) and we walked to school, to swimming lessons at the lake up and down many hills as a group. Families did not have a second car available for moms to take kids anywhere (much less a “kids car” when we were teens). I recall kindergarteners were bused while the others walked the few blocks to the nearby elementary school- deciding whether to climb a steep hill or take the longer way in some cases. In HS there were two bus stops further away at the 2 mile limit- again the climb the hill or go around. Walking was up and down several hills.
No one had two wheel bikes until they were 8 or 9 so you didn’t get my pet peeve of kids not having any road sense out on bikes (I still don’t see why there should be miniature bikes for 5 year olds who shouldn’t be on roads with them). Plus those riding on sidewalks (when available) who should be yielding to pedestrians, sigh.
btw- middle school is 3 grades while most jr highs were 7th and 8th only. Useful terms for knowing where 6th graders go or went in our day.
Have you read “Little Shoes?” It’s the true story of the disappearance of 3 young girls from a public park near their homes in 1937. The girls were found dead. They had been sexually assaulted.
One of the most horrifying parts of the book is the discussion of just how common the disappearance of children was at the time.
The definition of jr high and middle school posted by @wis75 Isn’t what I’m familiar with. Junior high to me is 7th , 8th and ninth grades. Middle school is 6th, 7th, and 8th.