Hacker News Reader

Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

i feel like parenting keeps regressing. at my kids school many parents walk their kids in. i get that for kindergarten, but 3rd grade? you live 3 blocks away. your kid could walk. and biking is out of the question, too dangerous. only 2 kids bike to school. and they wouldn’t let their kid walk home (probably a quarter mile) without a gps device. air tag is not enough because it’s not realtime and has no communication.

this isn’t an exaggeration. so many of my parent friends think this way. “they can’t bike to school because what if they fall and need help? they need a phone”

why as humans do we create more barriers and goalposts?

View on HN

Humans evolved to constantly identify threats and ward them off.

A side-effect of this is that as real threats dwindle and disappear, brains will naturally fill the gap with progressively more paranoid and unfounded fears.

I think this is almost 100% born out of fear of liability. From the school side it’s fear that parents will sue them for neglect or injury or any other failure. Parents fear that the state will charge them with neglect and take away their children. Compounded by a generation of news over-coverage and fear-generating reporting, you end up with anxious parents desperate to protect their children from anything and everything.

It’s because drivers are all on their phones and unless your 3rd grader is 5 ft tall, they will be easily unseen and plowed over.

You don't actually know that, and it depends drastically on the car and pedestrian infrastructure around the school, as well as the child himself.

It’s anecdotal, sure, but I don’t think you’re appreciating how bad this problem is.

Fair enough, though I do think I appreciate the problem. I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.

I was sort of imagining a neighborhood and school near me that does actually have great sidewalks with a single conflict-producing crossing that is managed by a guard in the mornings. I admit this is totally our of the ordinary though, especially for a public school in the SE USA.

I apologize for the assumption, that was quite rude of me.

That said, you’ve just described my neighborhood. We’re about 2 blocks from my son’s school. One major road, with a crossing guard at school time. The 2nd-to-last day of walking him home from school I come up to the guard who’s calling in a driver who blew past her.

As an aside, I’ve begun to notice cars leaving huge gaps between them and the car in front of them. In every case I see the driver looking down, oblivious to the 20+ feet between them and the next car.

>I've ended up in contact with vehicles twice this year through no fault of my own walking in my downtown area.

Ugh. Are you alright?

Yea. I live in a downtown area on one of the most popular streets in town and I was pushing my luck and essentially had to hop on the hood in both cases. A lot of situations where drivers are waiting to turn left against cross traffic and don’t then look to make sure the pedestrian crossing is clear. Appreciate the question.

The parents of Madeleine McCann were completely assraped in the media for not watching their 4-year old like a hawk 24/7. In various online discussions (including HN) I somewhat frequently see parents be blamed for all types of things, from a child committing a crime (or generally being "bad") to victim-blaming when something bad happens, like with McCann. I'm pretty sure you can see the horde of victim-blaming after something bad happens to a 11-year old "but he didn't have a phone".

Parents are the Tour de France cyclists: we expect them to do the impossible and are then surprised they're all doped up. Surprised Pikachu.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com