The Latest Battle Over When and Where Kids Can Walk to School

"Stranger kidnappings" (where someone the child doesn't know kidnaps them) are incredibly rare, a child is at much more risk from traffic, guns, cancer, or swimming pools.

The reason why child kidnappings (non-stranger) are seemingly common is because the vast majority of these are by family members (e.g. parents during a custody dispute, grandparents, etc).

Child molesters are also very rare (although you can make them seem more common by massaging the statistics, as some charities/politicians/media like to do), and on average in a large retailer there won't even be a single one.

There are stories where kids have literally died both because they were scared to approach a stranger, or a stranger was scared to approach them.

I have a kid. I am going to teach them to approach any adult, with a slight bias towards people who work there (simply because they are more likely to know the procedure for lost child, not because they're inherently safer/less safe).

I live in a fairly well-to-do bedroom community, it's a rural area a short drive from some bigger cities in Colorado. The neighborhood nextdoor.com info is an interesting read. The sheriff (we don't have town police, it's a small place, 5000ish people) is called for ringing and running, that's like the main offense. It seems like there are fears when there are work men of color in the area doing things (building new houses, etc..) it appears that their presence correlates to the crime of breaking in to cars in neighboring cities, at least in the minds of some. I can confess there is a slight feeling of isolation at times, like if you had a problem you couldn't solve, it could take 15-30minutes for a police officer to help you but in 8 years I'm unaware of such a problem happening in the town. For the most part it is insanely safe, like you could leave your doors unlocked and expect no issues.

When my son get's on the school bus, he has to swipe a badge. They can track where he get's on a bus and where he get's off. That's what we've come to. They have 4 different kinds of "drills." There is the fire drill we all grew up with. There is "lock down" where they all stay in their class rooms and lock the doors. There is a harder form of that where they stay in the class rooms, lock all the doors and windows and the try to hide. Then there is a drill where they go in the school basement, being that there are tornados in the area from time to time that's not too unreasonable but the staff is open with parents that it's for the event that there is some sort of a disturbance that is used to draw kids outside to attack in the open. The school itself (this is K-5) has locks on all doors, you have to buzz in, or swipe a badge at any time of day.

It's all in how you look at it, I guess. The technology is fairly inexpensive and if it helps with anything, then maybe it seems worth it. It's definitely playing in to the culture of fear that exists though. What's really shocking, at least to me, is how cool everyone seems to be with everything. We got emails from the school when the did some of the drills, just to let us know our kids might tell us about something odd that they did. I can't imagine how they'd possibly let middle-school or younger kids on public transportation around here.

I do find myself wondering what the next social step will be, as social maturity diverges even further from physical maturity...

Edit: I should have been more careful in my wording. Whether it is "the norm" is obviously very location dependent. The US is a large country with all sorts of different norms at the community level.

I happen to have grown up in a suburban Midwest community (incredibly safe) with large residential areas directly across the street from many schools. However, walking to school was prohibited. Any students caught walking were subject to suspension and the school threatened to report parents to law enforcement. Obviously my particular anecdote doesn't apply to everyone, but there are some communities with insane policies in the US.

The worst part is that this feeds directly into "stranger danger" scare tactics that encourage helicopter parenting to thwart some exceedingly unlikely scenarios.

It stems from a multitude of things, like a political climate that caters to the vocal minority, the PC movement that has everyone on edge, and the 24-hour news cycle that lives for a tragic story they can cycle over and over for an entire day/week.

I'd love to have hacker news without all the "rabble, rabble, rabble".

[1]: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=398104

Even as an older parent myself, I will also say that I have some nervousness about letting children walk because I find that drivers are more distracted and careless than they were when I was walking to school. If you are walking at an intersection where a right turn on red is allowed, you better have your head on a swivel because there's a good chance no one is looking at you, at least not where I am. If they need to cross an especially busy street with fast moving traffic, I'm also concerned about drivers with cell phones not paying attention to the road. I'm not sure I trust my 8 year old to have the situational awareness to know that drivers are discourteous or distracted.

But... it's worth the risk for the independence, and it is fairly rare that there's a pedestrian involved accident, but not unheard of where I live.

There's really no downside to putting on a seat belt, or using a child seat. There's a big downside for being overly protective of children - both for their development and for busy parents.

When you say that you're white and middle class, are you implying that perhaps non-white and lower class parents aren't as responsible, and therefore need the police to step in?

I have an issue with "if it turned out that it did on average prevent injuries or deaths" line of reasoning. With 380 M people, it's an easy standard to reach.

"8 year old Becky, with her irresponsible parents, would be alive today if there had been a law." That's going to be easy to say. But what you can't easily measure is something along the lines of "these hundred thousand children are not learning life skills because we codified fear of low risk situations into law."

The costs are disperse and hard to measure, the benefits easily identified. So we have a bias to "do something."

I never even bothered complaining to my parents because in one way it was fun. We ventured deep into woods, caught crabs, put traps for birds and squirrels etc. etc.

It was a wonderful part of my childhood, my kids may not experience the same but I dont want the government to restrict their experience either.