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Oh my God. That’s horrible.</p>
<p>I got tapped (not hard enough to hurt) when I was walking up the block in question because it’s a one way street and drivers turning on look only for other cars coming down, but never consider pedestrians coming up, so it’s really dangerous.</p>
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If your teenaged son encourages your company, then I stand and applaud you, and to heck with what anyone else says or thinks – you enjoy and revel in that precious time. In fact, I recommend that you dance back to your house every day when you leave him. Also, consider giving seminars so the rest of us with surly kids can learn.</p>
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Heartbreakingly, the statistics here show that a lot of kids are hit by cars or buses.</p>
<p>My neighbor and I have elementary school kids that we walk to and from school–about 1/2 mile each way. I would let my kids walk alone (together), but since my friend walks them in the morning, I walk them in the afternoon. Most days I enjoy the exercise with my preschooler. We made a “pact” to walk EVERY DAY last year, no wimping out, and we did–no matter what the weather. 100* in August? We did it. Horizontal freezing rain in Dec.? Snow and 10 below in January? We lived it. March winds that crushed the heavy-duty-indestructible-lifetime-guaranteed umbrella? Drenching thunderstorms? We were there. (What are the chances of getting struck by lightning?) We wanted to save gas, save the earth, save $ (I wanted a prize, too, but no one gave us one!) This school is in a residential neighborhood. Sidewalks everywhere. Safe area. Yet I see people who live just down the street driving to the school. Why? Truth is, all of these people are within “walking distance.” (And I’ve observed that most of them could use the exercise. . .)</p>
<p>My neighbor’s kid (kindergarten last year) was almost hit by his next door neighbor who was pulling out of her driveway in her minivan to drive her kid to the same school. That is the worst problem here–people backing out of driveways that cross the sidewalk without even looking–and if the kids are short, they can’t be seen. And kids do forget and run out in the street at times. (Seen that, too. Once saved a kid by screaming at him). Another pet peeve–dozens of people bring their dogs when they pick up their kids. My D’s leg got cut by a dog leash when one dog went after another and the owner couldn’t control it. Dog poop all over the place–hate it.</p>
<p>I make my middle-schooler walk 1.5 miles home no matter what the weather–it builds character. (I walked to school about a mile each way as a kid). I obsess about kidnappings that I hear about on the news. There was an unsolved crime where I lived when I was young. 35+ years later I still remember the girl’s name. Big worrier. But I worry more about 18yo D with a car at far away college.</p>
<p>ZM–I agree traffic is a totally different issue. Having been run down by a car myself, I don’t take it lightly. I believe the going by statistics comments, though, are about whether the world is a less safe place as far as predators, not traffic.</p>
<p>I attended elementary school in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Although we all walked the 10-15 minute trip to school on our own (usually with a few friends who lived nearby), even back then the school would have no part of sending us home completely unsupervised. We were organized into walking groups by neighborhood–“patrols” they were called–that followed a designated route, dropping off each child at home along the way. Two sixth graders served as the “patrol leaders” (no adults were involved except to send off each patrol from the school door). They had to keep the group together and cross everyone at the intersections. Amazingly, this whole procedure was followed twice each day, since we went home for lunch. But it certainly wasn’t a bad notion for elementary school kids, and if implemented today would afford parents the peace of mind to give their kids some small measure of independence for at least for one leg of the school commute. By junior high school, we were considered old enough to handle the walk, in my case 30 minutes, on our own.</p>
<p>Justamom, I agree with what you say…it has entered my mind on more than one occasion about how much our generation has limited the normal growing up expereinces of our kids…not too much of regular neighborhood playing after school or otherwise. Everything is organized play…soccer, dance, etc…
I wonder what our kids will do when they have children of their own ?</p>
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<p>Atomom, I think you should buy yourself and your kids a new pair of shoes (each)!</p>
<p>I walked to school from the time I was 3!!! Can you even imagine? I certainly can’t. I even picked up a neighbor child because her mother thought I was so mature. (Maybe she was two. JK.)</p>
<p>I remember reading someone’s autobiography when I was a child which mentioned walking to school in the snow with a roasted hot potato in his hands to keep warm. It doubled as breakfast. For some reason, that detail has stayed with me all these years. Imagine sending your child off to school through the snowy woods with a hot potato in their mittened hands.</p>
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<p>Yep… we just had a 10-year old in our area hit by a landscaping truck this morning while he was walking to school in a neighboring district before 7AM. Last I heard he’s in critical, but stable condition. Our kids did not get a school bus for middle school or high school since we were less than 1.5 miles away. I never let them walk to high school because it involved a heavily trafficked intersection where the middle school and high school were catty-corner from each other, so traffic was beastly between 7AM and 8AM. Yes, there are sidewalks, but not always plowed, and much of the year, it’s fairly dark still at 7:30AM. Not safe.</p>
<p>I think where we live is just different. We have sidewalks everywhere, and lights and pedestrian crossings where there is traffic. We live right in the city but our kids play outside with neighbors, do kool-aid stands, ride their bikes everywhere. There is definitely more traffic, more driving kids to school, more worry about predators and more programed time than years before, but I think on a smaller scale perhaps than in the US.</p>
<p>When I was in 8th grade, I delivered newspapers with my brother very early in the morning, in the dark. On a cold January morning BTK killed 4 members of a family, including 2 young children, not more than 1 mile or so from my house/where I delivered papers. He continued killing, and taunting in the media that he was going to kill, all the way through my high school years and beyond. I remember how afraid I was to ever be alone at night. It still bring me to tears when I think about the cloud that we lived under back then. Oh, we had fun, but it was never the same again.</p>
<p>As I stated earlier, we have had numerous instances lately (2 at the end of our street). I am just always on higher alert than some people, mostly likely because of the experiences I had in middle/high school.</p>
<p>momlove–BTK–We must be in the same state. (He is now in prison with no chance of parole–but he wasn’t caught until 2005). </p>
<p>Only a couple (not so) scary things happened to me while walking to school. Once a car pulled up next to me and my sisters (rainy day, elementary school) and a man offered us a ride. I didn’t want to go with a stranger, but my sisters eagerly jumped in and told me to get in, so I did. After the man dropped us at the school (I was so relieved and almost surprised that he wasn’t kidnapping us!) my sisters laughed at me and said, “Don’t you know Mr. Jones. . .?!” (lives across the street, our piano teacher’s H, our friend’s dad. . .) .</p>
<p>Another time (middle school) I was with a friend and there was a parked car (unusual) right where we cut through some yards into a cul-de-sac. A man got out and started walking toward us. I was paralyzed with fear. Then my friend said, “Daddy, daddy!” and ran into his arms–her parents were divorced and the mom prevented the dad from seeing his kids. (OTOH, BTK was someone’s H, someone’s dad, someone’s neighbor, church deacon–you never know. . .) Remember being warned about drug “pushers?” I pictured a creepy guy opening his trench coat to display all kinds of brightly colored pills–which he would take and “push” down your throat–then you’d freak out and have brain damage. . .That didn’t happen.</p>
<p>mousegray–I heard the potato hand-warmer story, too–actually offered to make them for my kids last winter, but no takers. (What am I gonna do with a cold potato? Eat it for lunch! Ick!) I think a lot of people did this in the old days.</p>
<p>re: schools looking out for student safety–Once ( in 70’s) our middle school closed early due to bad weather–we were sent out to walk home during a tornado warning! That was a day of deadly tornadoes in our area–lucky we got home before the baseball-sized hail hit.</p>
<p>This has been on my mind for a few months, for reasons I don’t completely understand:</p>
<p>I was driving with my kids (age 16 and 9 at the time) through a hilly, wooded park near my son’s school. A man in running shorts and a tank top waved us down and asked if we could give him a ride to the bottom of the hill (about a mile-long decline) so that he could catch up with his son, who had gone ahead. He said he was winded and didn’t think he’d be able to catch up on his own.</p>
<p>The man was probably around 45, clean-cut, and polite. My kids and I exchanged glances and, sensing that no one was wigged out, I said sure, climb in. Although the area wasn’t exactly filled with people, it’s not very remote, and we had seen cars and people going by, although at that moment there wasn’t anyone else around.</p>
<p>We chatted until we got to the bottom (he said he was a pastor, asked where we were from since our accents aren’t local, etc.), and then, at the bottom of the hill, he said, “There he is!” and we let him out. Thanks and regards all around.</p>
<p>But as soon as he got out, I started second-guessing myself and thinking maybe I had just done something stupid. There’s a long list of reasons I think I shouldn’t worry about it:</p>
<ol>
<li> The guy in no way resembled a criminal.</li>
<li> He was dressed as a jogger, as he said he was.</li>
<li> There was no obvious place to hide a weapon in an outfit like that.</li>
<li> It was not a deserted area.</li>
<li> It was the middle of the day.</li>
<li> There were three of us in the car.</li>
</ol>
<p>So, why is it still bothering me? Should it? Should I be a little bit ashamed that it bothers me? (Ashamed because I worry that I should have more faith in people and be willing to help without becoming paranoid about their motives.)</p>
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go back and read your post #12. You answered your own question.</p>
<p>So it’s the media’s fault? 
But seriously…yeah. I understand.</p>
<p>This morning, as I drove my husband to work… I noticed how many kids were walking to school. Alone, in groups, whatever… what a nice change from my old neighborhood (suburbs! sidewalks!) where I saw moms driving their kids to the neighborhood elementary school–which was a quarter of a mile away and on the same side of the street, with NO crossings.</p>
<p>They often said it was because they were on their way to do errands anyway… and after school, it was because they had to get them to piano lessons. I think it was just the car habit.</p>
<p>Because my mother worked full time from the time I was 6 I walked to school by myself. I had to cross a very busy street (this is Los Angeles) that did not have a crosswalk, crossing guard and forget a light. I walked in the rain alone. </p>
<p>My parents were big proponents of after school activities. So I would walk to a major street (Wilshire Boulevard), take a bus to a street in Santa Monica. Walk 4 blocks to the place where the activites were held and then, in winter when it was dark out walk back, alone to the bus to go home.</p>
<p>We went to New York when I was 14 (during the late 60s). Mom let me go out alone to meet a cousin. Again, alone. I have no idea what my parents were thinking.</p>
<p>My parents didn’t have a choice as to whether my mother worked. (Please know that I loved my mother very much. They were in a difficult situation. My father was clueless and my mother overwhelmed). I was a latchkey kid at six. There is, I believe, a difference in giving kids a sense of freedom and abdicating parental responsibilities. Walking a kid to a bus stop in a gated community three houses away: perhaps not necessary. But I have seen, and heard, too many parents use the “oh, they’ll grow up and be more responsible” excuse because (in our neighborhood) they are (sorry guys) too lazy to get up in the morning.</p>
<p>mantori.suzuki, your story makes me cringe. I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe I’m more paranoid than most, but I would never have given him a lift. I think it’s strange that a grown man would even do something like that (flag down a car in a non-emergency). I know you only had neighborly motives in letting him in your car but would you want either of your kids doing that when they’re old enough to be driving alone? Also, this sentence: “1. The guy in no way resembled a criminal.” strikes me as very naive. </p>
<p>I think it’s important to teach our children that it is OK to say “No” to requests when approached by someone we don’t know.</p>
<p>Just catching up on this thread: When DS was in elementary school, I allowed him to walk home from the bus stop by himself. One afternoon, a van with three men in it stopped and told my son to get in. DS took off running, cut through yards, and made it home. Scared him and me to death. After that, no more walking alone to or from the bus stop. Period. End of story. </p>
<p>m.s: I agree with mousegray on this. I wonder if you worry that you’ve set a bad example for your kids. How do you teach them to tell the “good” hitchhikers from the “bad” hitchhikers? I taught my kids to NEVER pick up a hitchhiker. NEVER. May be a bit extreme, but better safe than sorry.</p>
<p>The influence on my kids is the thing I worry about the most. I was being neighborly, but right afterward I thought, “I’m not sure I’d want my kids to be so neighborly.”</p>
<p>We do, however, live in one of those down-home, open-your-door-to-anyone parts of the country. That’s part of the reason I’m confused. We’re originally from the Rust Belt, where we wouldn’t have given a stranger a lift and no decent stranger would have asked, either. But here it felt natural, until I started thinking about it. Only then did I worry. That makes it a little hard to tell what I’m reacting to: my own naivete, my old irrational fears, or my old rational fears.</p>
<p>So I guess the lesson is, I should think harder next time before deciding what to do.</p>