If a high schooler needs to be driven to school by their parent, there is a serious street safety/transit problem which should be solved.
A plurality ~35% of high school students are driven to school, though not necessarily by a parent.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0739456X1772514...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/how-dista...
EDIT: This is nationwide, there's reason to believe this percentage is probably higher in California.
Bus was awful. Kids had no respect for the driver or other kids. Plus it easily tripled the commute time.
If I drove them (or when they were old enough to drive on their own), they could sleep nearly an hour later than if they had to take the bus. Since it wasn't much of a detour on my way to work, that's what I did.
I spent most of my school aged years in an city with a mediocre transit system. Most parents did not drive their kids to school except in very bad weather. Also, most people attended the school closest to their home. This meant the mediocre transit system used buses for special school routes usable only by students. I rarely took this bus as I preferred to bike or walk in about the same amount of time the bus would take.
Where I live now, something similar happens at least for the kids that are bussed across town to achieve a somewhat consistent racial mix in all schools.
Has everyone driving their kids to school eroded the viability of walking, biking, or taking a school bus?
Exactly. Similar to the problem many adults have trying to get to work by bus, it often doubles or triples a commute time.
If they're in after school activities and/or have a job, then it seem unlikely that they would get into trouble anyways. Pushing the time back will make these after school activities unfeasible for many, and limit opportunities.
If you can't leave them unsupervised in the mornings, surely they can't be left alone after school either. Net net, there's going to be some time they're unsupervised. May as well let them get some rest. Maybe the lack of sleep deprivation will even encourage better decision-making.
After school has after school activities. It also typically means they don't need to cook if the parents are home for dinner.
Dictating diet by limiting options doesn't sound like a great plan to me.
You know what else is a non-problem? The current start times.
Their voice at the state level is highly diluted by non-interested parties. Voting for school board members tends to be more focused and doesn't have as many people voting based on non-school issues like you would for a general representative.
if a 15 year old can't be unsupervised at home, then their parents have different problems besides letting them cook for themselves.
As an anecdote, 100% of my class was coming to the school and back without being supervised since age 8. This was in 90s and not in the US, but the gap of "mature enough to go to school" between my experience and the statement feels a bit high, somehow.
> The American obsession with helicoptering their kids all the way through their first job is super weird and unhealthy.
My kids, along with many others, were getting themselves to & from school without my supervision starting in third grade. Earlier, even, for my son since his sister is two years older and was with him.
This is normal. What is the fascination that so many Europeans (and others) have with making wild unsupported assertions about what Americans do and then build an entire critique from that?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Modern parents would have a heart attack.
That's insane. I walked to school at 6. At 8, I walked to the bus stop and rode a public transit bus to school. The helicoptering has gone way to far and it is creating generations of crippled kids. I wonder if this is solely caused by the media pushing fear or if there are other factors.
In most cases, this should work out better for parents. With elementary school starting latest (as was the norm in many places a decade ago), the little kids end up in pre-care AND after-care. Now, they’ll start earlier, possibly avoiding pre-care.