Do you feel safe letting your son or daughter walk to school?
There are plenty of good reasons for letting your child walk to school:
She gets to feel a sense of independence…
She gets to become familiar with the streets in the neighborhood…
It saves you from having to get dressed and drive her to school…
But one big fear has been leading many parents to walk their kids to school themselves, drop them off directly in front of the school, or wait at the bus stop with their kids until the bus comes and takes them away.
It’s the fear of their children being kidnapped or abducted on the way to school.
Read about, Katie, a mother who is letting her 7-year-old walk to school in a small suburban city in Upstate New York:
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.”
And on the other side there are things like this happening:
But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.
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.
Where do you stand? Closer to one extreme than the other? Somewhere in between?
Read the full article and let us know what your thoughts are about letting your kids walk to school…
Why Can’t She Walk To School? [NY Times]
