Why Can’t She Walk to School? | Hacker News Reader

Why Can’t She Walk to School?

nytimes.com

88 pointsmhb122 comments

Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce.

To me, this is just insane. Walking a mile alone when you're ten years old shouldn't be an issue unless there's a riot going on or something.

What are you telling the kids about the world around them when you're terrified of letting them out into it? Not that people in general are decent people who can be trusted to not cause them any trouble, at least. Maybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves?

A coworker of mine refused to fly on the 4th anniversary of Sept. 11. When I suggested it might actually be safer due to heightened security, he became defensive. "When you have kids, you'll understand."

Well, I now have two kids (aged 2 and 3 1/2), and I still don't worry about breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder, or flying on Sept. 11.

I also want my kids to have a kind of self confidence and basic trust in the world. I think the local news is addictive, in the sense that it feeds a fear of not going out in the world, but instead staying glued to the TV.

This was exactly how I felt when I moved to CA from Sweden. It reminds me of that passage in "Bowling for Columbine" about how the US is a society filled with fear.

Maybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves?

It could also be related to how many Americans are afraid to trust others to have guns.

An intriguing hypothesis. It would seem sensible to suppose then that Canadians are a people so paralyzed with fear that all their children are homeschooled and they communicate with each other only over the Internet, looking at the gun laws in that country.

From your snarky remark it would seem sensible to conclude that you are not aware that Canadian schoolchildren don't seem terribly more likely to be walking to school than their American counterparts.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/131723.php

You are aware that your link is of a study that covers only two municipal regions, both in Quebec. Not to say that Canadian children definitely walk more (I don't have the evidence to state that), but this is hardly representative of Canada as a whole.

Gloob, can you expand on this?

Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US. The impression I received from the post I was responding to was that the poster was suggesting a positive correlation between the general level of fearfulness in a population and the strictness of the gun laws in the region. Canadians would presumably be much more fearful than Americans in that case. I don't have any statistics to compare, sadly, but at the very least I would think it safe to say that any such relation is decidedly less than linear (or my neighbourhood would be overrun by paranoids), if such a relation exists at all.

"About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents."

The single most effective sentence in the entire story; in fact, it could probably stand for the entire story.

A number of other numbers, that puts this into even more perspective, are missing:

1) How many children walk or bike to school every day? ~10 million?

2) How many of those 115 were kidnapped while on their way to or from school? Half?

3) How many of the answer to 2) were kidnapped while they were on their way to or from school alone? Half again?

Also: How many children were kidnapped by a non-custodial parent who grabbed them by picking them up from school?

Your point does not change the numbers in question. "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers." A non-custodial parent would not be a stranger.

No, but it does put the number in perspective. The amount of kidnappings by non-custodial parents is in the 100000's a year.

I have no idea whether non-custodial parents are primarily to blame -- these stats cited by ABC News just say family members or parents.

"203,900 kids were abducted in 1999 by family members or parents. Approximately, 58,200 were 'non-family' abductions — only 115 were defined as the frightening kidnappings by strangers." -- http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91365&page=1

Unless almost all of the family cases are non-custodial parents, your claim of hundreds of thousands seems a bit exaggerated. Some of these must be custodial parents, uncles, grandparents, siblings, and so on.

I think 'non-family' means acquaintances, minus the 115 cases of abduction by a stranger.

One non-profit that works in this space estimates that 78% of the "family member or parent" abductions are due to a non-custodial parent. That would put the total around 159k, which puts the parent poster in the right order of magnitude.

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm

Citation needed.

BTW, in addition to wikipedia's contribution to society of a free encyclopedia, I think this phrase is a great contribution. As Gerry Sussman says, "once you can name a spirit, you have power over it."

Citation not needed, because this is a conversation, not an encyclopedia article, and he gave a rough order of magnitude estimate which happens to be reasonably correct.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-cost-of...

http://childfindofamerica.org/Information.htm

And millions of them will end up dying of obesity-related diseases exacerbated by the fact that they don't go outside and move their bodies.

I'd like to see a list showing each kidnapping, the motive of the kidnapper, and the result of the situation.

Is it mostly for sexual abuse? Child labor? What percentage occur in middle class suburbia compared to a poor inner city area?

Are you talking about the 115 abductions by strangers? Can you even get statistically significant results out of that small sample?

It's not really a small sample, is it? You're sampling (allegedly) 100% of the stranger abductions in the United States, so your sample is perfectly representative of stranger abductions in the United States.

But yeah, I would expect the numbers to change quite a bit from year to year.

It's a sufficiently small sample that we could study each case, figure out how it may have been prevented, and maybe get the metric up from four nines to five.

Also, I wonder what the historic measures are. Back in the eighties, we weren't coddled nearly this much, but there was a reasonable amount of crime. How many children were abducted then?

When you're already at 115 out of all of the children in the United States, there's not much else you can do that a free society would accept. (There are things that, unfortunately, a free society does accept, but I doubt those have an actual impact.)

It's similar to school buses and child fatalities. On the face of it, making school buses safer sounds like a noble goal and something we should do. But when you consider that less than a dozen children die each year in school bus accidents out of, again, all children in the United States, there's probably not much that can be done. (Source: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1289/why-are-there-...)

I agree that there probably aren't any top-down things at a societal level that can be done, but I'm not convinced that this information wouldn't be useful for parents who want their kids to be independent, but to take the proper precautions. For example, were the children lured or were they forcibly taken? Were they alone? How old were they? If there is info on failed attempts, how did the child get away?

If I had children, I wouldn't want them to live a sheltered life and, obviously, there are a lot of common-sense precautions, but I still think that analysis of this information could be useful to the public.

Only if the circumstances of the abductions were random, which seems doubtful. If, say, a significant number of those kids were taken by strangers in cars who lured them over verbally, simply informing parents to push the "Don't talk to strangers" bit might alone prevent some future occurrences. Just because the number is small relative to the overall population size doesn't mean that there isn't some correlation between many of the incidents, on which some acceptable measures could be taken.

A good chunk of the time, it's the result of a divorced/estranged parent trying "get" their child back.

Don't you think it would have been more honest to say:

* …115 kidnapped… 2,000 are killed in auto accidents… *

(Presumably that number is correct. I got from some ambulance chasing lawyer's site, but he suggested it was a real number.)

It depends on the point you want to make. 250,000 is presumably the number of kids injured in all automobile accidents, 2000 sounds reasonable for the 2-block drive to school. But it goes to show that parents will willingly and without a thought of the risk involved subject their kids to an activity that hurts 250,000 kids per year (and presumably also without any risk of being charged with child endangerment.)

Actually, the point I failed to make was that the original statistics compare the serious event of kidnapping to all injuries, however minor. They should compare to the serious injuries, like death, which is less than 1% of the larger number.

I wonder how many get hit by cars careening onto the sidewalk, while walking to school alone, while evading would-be kidnappers?

This is just another reflection about how people will avoid doing things they think are "dangerous" when they will without a thought spend enormous time driving, which considering the time spent doing it is quite close to the top in risk of fatality or serious injury.

According to the US Census Bureau's statistics[1], an annual average of 43,800 people have died within thirty days of a car accident in the years surveyed between 1980-2006. To put this in perspective, 58,228 Americans were killed during the entire Vietnam War.[2]

Likewise, for injuries, an average of 3.1 million were injured per year in car crashes[3], and 153,452 Americans were wounded during the Vietnam War.[2]

   [1]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s1063.pdf
   [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#United_States_Armed_Forces
   [3]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s1066.pdf Covers 1990-2006.

But also "How can you argue against ‘just in case’"

Will society really forgive the responsible person if really something happens? I hope I would let my kids walk to school, but I think there is some kind of "tragedy of the commons" at work here. It's also why there will always be more and more stupid laws (like security cameras everywhere, privacy on the internet and so on) - because if you reject a law that is supposed to enhance security, you could be blamed if something happens.

FWIW, I haven't seen any security cameras near schools (in the US), let alone inside. I've also become pretty adept at spotting them in places like stores. Also, its unlikely that the school district will do anything like that in the near future since they're basically broke.

People will always make mistakes. Two years ago a single school computer had it's configuration messed up so that it mounted the school office's storage for everyone. That meant anyone who entered the school could potentially download a database containing the home address, phone number, full name, and other information on every single student there (over 1500). After thinking long and hard I decided not to report it. The reason? I'd most likely be expelled for stumbling across it since they could term it attempted hacking. I only share this here because this alias has rock-solid anonymity (or is that just hubris?).

I know that there have been cameras in the schools where I live(a 4,000 people town in Tennessee) at least since I was in sixth grade(six years ago) and in the buses since elementary school. Our school district is quite short on funds as well.

> "About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents."

Maybe. My question is that how many of those children that are in auto-accidents are pedestrians? The problem is that a lot of motorists do not drive carefully around pedestrians (since there is no risk to you by a pedestrian).

I have driven with people who do not even attempt to slow down when there is a group of kids walking along the side of the road. I would rather have my child in a vehicle than on a bicycle when he is in an accident. A guy in an SUV will not even notice that he drove over a ten year old.

Only 13.5% of the traffic deaths were pedestrians and bicyclists in this study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_crash#Common_types_of_colli... whereas the main causes of death are stroke and heart attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Causes_of_death_by_age_gro... both of which are to some extent prevented by exercise. So it seems probable that parents who stop their children walking to school are more likely to kill them than save their lives.

That's for the full population. It would be more relevant to know the breakdown of in-vehicle vs pedestrian / bicyclist deaths for children.

That's a good question, and goes to show that sensible parents who worry about letting their children walk alone should be worried about traffic. And yet, in the article, so many of the quotes are from parents worried about paedophiles.

Much of that traffic seems to be the parents. Every year when school starts, there are articles in the papers where the police and school officials remind parents to PLEASE obey speed limits and traffic laws when dropping their kids off.

Yes, this.

Our school also requests parents driving their kids to school to consider parking a couple blocks away and walking the remaining distance. A few people seem to do this, but it seems that the majority still can't fathom doing anything but dropping their kid off at the curb in front of the school.

For such accidents within the US, check the census bureau statistics:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/m...

Not really. The quarter million kids injured in car accidents are most of the reason kids get escorted to school.

How do you figure?

I figure that the kidnappers are a red herring. Parents do think about them, and do mention them in conversations about their kids walking to school. But i figure that the "closer" in the discussion is the idea that our little kids are walking across busy streets unsupervised.

We're not totally irrational. We know our kids aren't going to get stolen off the street. But it's hard to dispel the idea that they could get hit by a car. Because they totally can.

A 9-year-old crossing a street implicates two very scary variables: the fucking morons driving down our residential streets at 40mph to get around traffic on the main drags, and the fucking morons we've kept alive for 9 years who will still occasionally run out into the street without looking.

I suspect you are incorrect. I think a lot of parents focus in on the sensational media reports of kidnappings and don't think about that street crossing. After all, a child hit crossing the street probably will not make national news, and very few people have any real understanding of statistics or probability. They worry about the sensation rather than the real risk.

Some parents I have spoken with prefer the death due to head trauma over sexual torture.

There's also the guilt factor. If something common happens to your kid, it's an 'accident'. If your kid gets kidnapped, people put more of the blame on you. I mean, I have lots of designs for safer transit, but it's a lot easier to keep the kid on a leash than change people to focus on the safety of automotive travel above the need for a status symbol. Why do only pros wear helmets?

Well, consider me a data point in the other direction, Tim. And everyone else on my block (it was block party night) --- we're all worried about cars. Sex maniacs not so much.

I am a data point in the other direction myself, but while I have no statistics I strongly suspect we are in the minority, and people's behaviors tend to support that.

Instead of doing things that would help reduce cars hitting pedestrians and traffic accidents in general(more sidewalks, longer yellow lights, more crosswalks, more traffic enforcement, more required training which includes focusing on sharing the road with non-cars....) many communities spend more time on things to prevent kidnappings which are already incredibly rare (the article goes into many examples.)

And mattmcknight has an excellent point.

All good points, thanks. I guess I don't have a good handle on how much it's kidnappers vs cars in a typical parent's mind. I have some intuitions, and they seem to differ from yours, but I can't back that up with anything. And I probably did underestimate cars as a factor, being used to living in a large city with orderly traffic lights all the way.

Well, I might let my 7 year old walk the 3 blocks to school on her own (or with the neighbor kids) except for the last street crossing onto the school grounds, which I'm not comfortable letting her cross on her own because of the crazy scene from all the other parents dropping their kids off in cars. (Ironic, isn't it?) So, I walk with her to make sure she gets across that street safely.

(Before you ask: there are 6 potential street crossings onto the school grounds. The school can only afford to staff one of them with a crossing guard.)

Where I grew up it was common to have the school organize a rotation of somewhat senior kids to act as (unpaid) crossing guards (standing in small groups) on the major crossings within a few blocks of the school. They'd stand there in the mornings and sometimes right after school. Does this sort of thing ever happen in the US?

Yeah, it does. And having seen those kids blindly step into the road without looking, as if their reflective vests would magically stop the cars, I'm not sure that it makes me feel that much better. :-(

That number is such a lie. The true number is exponentially higher. Most cases go unreported by the authorities so as not to terrify the communities in which they occur. My friend, whose son was about 30 seconds away from being abducted in grocery store parking lot here in San Diego, was told by the police that approximately 30 children a year go missing in San Diego alone (many of which are taken over the border and sold.) You think all those children on milk cartons are living in hiding with their "non-custodial" parents? This problem is so much larger than anyone wants to accept.

"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."

Plus calling the cops because they saw a young kid walking alone? What the hell is wrong with these people?

I think this whole fear is a simple case of the media over-reporting child abductions. I'm curious as to the numbers of abductions over the past 30 years. Article states only a couple hundred / year in present day.

When we moved to Canada I walked to school alone all the time when I was in Grade 2 and up. My mom was in English classes or at a job so we could survive. I don't see an issue with it to this day and I believe it made me a more independent person in the long run (I'm 24 so I wasn't a child that long ago)

Most telling statistic from the article:

"About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents."

Most parents have no time to read well researched articles/books on raising children. Their lives are (generally) very hectic and what they learn usually comes from sensationalist media stories and from other parents sharing horror stories they read about.

Most parents have no time to read well researched articles/books on raising children.

Most parents probably cannot find well researched articles/books on raising children. As a soon to be parent I've been shocked and dismayed by the total lack of books showing any sign of scientific research or rigor and the incredible amount of unscientific snake oil being pushed on the market If you have any recommendations I'd be most grateful.

Most parents aren't very good at thinking critically, just like the population at large.

> I think this whole fear is a simple case of the media over-reporting child abductions.

While I don't have a reference for this off the top of my head, sometime roughly a decade and a half ago the statistics for American child abductions spiked. This wasn't due to any increase in actual abductions, but rather because the rules for counting them changed, and now abductions by relatives or parents without legal custody were counted as abductions by strangers.

The news media, naturally, blew it up into a story about a dramatic increase in child abductions by strangers. Most people aren't great at reading between the lines with statistics, particularly threatening ones, and most parents understandably err on the side of caution when it comes to protecting their kids. This paranoia about strangers, coupled with the common alienation from walking developed by decades of living in car-centric suburbs, means that "protecting kids from abduction" typically takes the form of chauffeuring them about rather than letting them walk alone.

My son is in a district-run preschool. When he's picked up by car my wife puts a card in the window that matches the ID number on his backpack. A teacher or aide walks him to the car and even loads him in so that my wife doesn't need to exit the car.

The reason for this system? He's four years old. It's easier to keep the kids inside the building and seated quietly on benches until the car drives up and is ready to receive the child. No responsible school would turn 200 kids that can barely speak into a parking lot and let them sort it out. It's also more efficient, with 50 cars lined up in a queue they can move kids in and out of these without a traffic jam.

I think it's misleading to put the idea of children being escorted into cars into an article without giving a little more context.

Japanese parents will happily let six year olds navigate to their school across town. Middle schoolers and high schoolers routinely go to schools in other cities, via trains.

Nobody believes me when I say middle class Americans would call that child abuse.

Nobody believes me when I say middle class Americans would call that child abuse.

I don't believe that either, because I am a middle class American (who used to live in east Asia). When we lived in Taiwan, as soon as Taipei's MRT system was extended to our neighborhood, our then eight-year-old oldest son rapidly learned how to take the mass transit trains all over Taipei by himself. Here in the United States, my four children (youngest age six) walk or bike to the public library (about a mile away) or to shopping (same distance, different direction) almost every day. We are homeschoolers, so our children are out and about a lot during school hours. It is unremarkable here and as safe as can be. By far the greatest risk to walkers in most parts of the United States are drivers who don't pay attention to how they endanger pedestrians. We live in a very safe neighborhood with a good city trail system, and we take advantage of that to get exercise and avoid burning gasoline.

Hey tokenadult, are you homeschoolers for primarily religious reasons, or primarily non-religious reasons? If the latter, please consider writing up a blogpost or a comment here about your experiences, what works/what doesn't, what's your view on the "but won't they lack social interaction", any regrets etc.

(I don't mean to offend you if your reason is religious by the way; it's just that I suspect not many people here will share it).

I'm a fresh parent, living in a country where homeschooling is lawful, but very difficult to arrange, and viewing with dismay some of my options a few years down the line.

My reasons for homeschooling are mostly for better academic challenge. (One example: my oldest is now able to be dual-enrolled at our state university at the age of a twelfth grader, taking the upper division abstract algebra course and the algorithms and data structures course for his "high school" program.) I have changed in religious point of view over the years, and my personal website reflects a point of view that is not my current view. By working from my name (ascertainable from my HN profile) to my personal website via Google you'll find my large website on homeschooling, Learn in Freedom (oh, well, I just told you the name), which is NOT current but is nonetheless informative. My oldest son would like to bring the web technology on that site into the twenty-first century, as I would like to bring some of its facts and figures a decade more up to date, but it will do for a start.

Thank you!

I suspect it depends very much on where in America you live.

I think the Pedibus (or walking bus, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_bus ) is a good idea for having children walk to school.

It's a group of children walking to school accompanied by two adults along predefined routes. There are bus stops where children wait for the Pedibus to arrive and then they walk along with the group.

Piedibus ;p Pedibus isn't exactly a name parents would like ;p

Pied is foot in french.

Hm, it's called Pedibus in German http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedibus and Pédibus in French http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pédibus

pes, pedis: foot in latin.

He's pointing out that it souds like "pedobus". Exactly what the parents are trying to avoid.

One word from Greek:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedophile

Another word from Latin:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pedestrian

Pedibus is Latin for "by feet".

That doesn't help give kids a sense of responsibility and independence, though.

It might be okay for very young children. Even I don't think that five-year-olds should be walking to school alone -- preferably their parents should walk with them, but if that's not an option due to work schedules then a walking bus isn't a terrible idea.

At eight or so, though, sensible children start to have their first rebellious streak and realise how stupid the idea of a "walking bus" is. I figure that when they're smart enough to figure that out, they're old enough to walk alone.

... yeah, I can't see that name catching on in the US.

The Japanese also make their children clean up their classroom, which I think is great. In my country, Brazil, parents have fits if someone suggests something like that. It is likened to slave labour.

My son is 8. One Saturday he had a play date with a friend at his school, a few blocks away in a safe neighborhood. He and I met the kid and his mother at the school. I suggested that we could let them play there (there were lots of other kids around, too), and then they could walk home together to our house. I got a look, but she really wouldn't talk about it.

Before this first play date, she and her son had literally been hounding me for it. After, not only have I not heard a single word from her, but my advances for further play dates have been ignored.

I've started to let my son walk most of the way to school by himself (I walk him part way, then go a different route to my bus stop). I don't dare tell my wife. She would completely flip out. She is completely irrational when it comes to this subject. She is mistaking her fear for parental instinct.

Sometimes I think you US citizen's are out of your minds. Why is it so hard to be a community and trust each other? Is it about the mainstream media, Hollywood, or something else that makes you feel so unsecured? A child walking to school just a few blocks is a question? In my child hood I walked to school more than fifteen minutes with all my friends. Also I would go out after school and would not come home untill it was dark (also same for all my friends).

I'm not sure about nowadays parent for my country. But I believe they are not that unsecured yet. And let their children walk or travel by themselves whenever it is possible.

(I live in Turkey.)

Honestly, I am getting sick of people starting comments like yours with a negative sentence about the US. Don't let ridiculous stereotypes get in the way of intelligent discussion.

I grew up in the US and I did all of those things you mention.

It's not negative anymore than the article itself was negative, and that's because it's actually a problem.

I grew up in the US, did all those things you mention, and yet I know that it's a big problem in the US. Thus the NYT article. Thus the debate. My sister says Halloween gets less and less popular every year. Fewer and fewer kids come around -- because of the problems of tainted candy. There is no tainted candy. There is no boogey man. America's suburb, move-often nation has made it a big collection of individuals who don't know and don't trust their neighbors. What's wrong with America that it's always looking over its shoulder? What's wrong with a culture that drives their kids to school two blocks away? It's a valid question and deserves less people getting "sick" about the asking of it and more dedicated to the discussing and solving of it.

It's also kinda hard to make other observations if you've never been to the US and all you've been fed is what the media has chosen to serve you.

Not that I feel he was right to make that statement, but speaking as one with relatives in other countries, sometimes stereotypes are all they have to work with. I've stopped counting the number of times I've had to explain to them that not every block in L.A. looks like 'tha streets of compton!'.

Agreed and I'm a Canadian who has lived in the US for a while. Every time I go up to see family I get 50 comments like this.

And what Fox News reports isn't a representation of Americans as a whole opinion wise. 8 million viewers =/= 300+ million people.

I'm sorry to bother you. But this negativity caused because of you media, your state politics, your peoples reactions. It does not come from thin air.

He is not being any more negative about the US than the article itself was, and yes as I child I did all those things in the US.

To a certain extent it's an artifact of cities like New York which have a very high population turnover. There's little chance for communities to form.

I think the article was talking about suburbia. In a mega metropolitan city it's hard to be a community. I've never seen an US city but I believe in these big ones schools and children are located in distant places generally. So walking children must be mostly out of question there.

The opposite is true: kids in big cities live near their school, generally, while suburban kids - owing to sprawl, are more spread out.

Oh, there are plenty of communities in large cities. The problem is that you're not necessarily a member of the ones with the firearms.

In my old school system it was against the rules to walk until high school. I vividly remember that they knew someone was riding their bike to school but couldn't figure out who so they confiscated the bike to see who came for it. My wife was waiting at her nephews bus stop to pick him up in the rain just yesterday (first week of school) the bus driver says I don't recognize you and has to call the school to see if she is on the list (she is) 30 minutes later they let her take her nephew and say "Can't be too careful!". It is mind boggling

Is'nt it seems to be insane to you?

It absolutely does.

They often encounter disapproval by other parents, scoldings by school administrators, even visits from local constabularies.

To whom they must say, "Mind your own business," "Do your own job," and "Unless you're here to arrest me for committing a crime, get out of my house."

At what point do you stop caring what the neighbors think and start living your own life?

...after which the other parent, school administrator, or local constabulary reports you to the government's local social services liaison who begins proceedings to remove your children from your custody.

not if you're not breaking the law.

Ah, the words of somebody who has never had or known anybody who had a social services case opened on them.

yeah the system sucks. I don't plan on introducing crotch spawn into this meaningless existence either, so I guess I'll never know.

Probably never, because they'll marginalize your child in their disapproval of you. It's valuable for children to start from a decent status in their peer group.

Relatedly, suburban fears of swimming in natural pond water -- residents want to replace town pond with man-made swimming pool:

"Surveys ... showed that too many people view Graydon as unsafe and unclean. Younger residents in particular want a thoroughly disinfected pool with clear waters so they can always see their youngsters."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/nyregion/07towns.html

I grew up in India. I biked to school that was a mile away alone. After I turned 14, I used to take a train since this other school was at least 5 miles away. These were those crazy kinds of trains that were so crowded people hang outside the trains clinging on to anything they can find. You can actually jump out through the doors on to the other side so you can run across the tracks and not take the over-bridge (of course I never told my mom I did this :)

I don't think my mom was ever that afraid/nervous. Neither were the moms of all my friends. Letting your kids commute to school alone is a very common thing. I'm sure not all American parents and not all American neighborhoods are like this but still concerning that it's big enough for NYT to write a story on it.

A large part of it is regional variation and part of it is media sensationalizing. My 8 year-old walks 1/2 mile from school bus stop to our house if the weather is good (we live in a rural area). A neighbor's kid keeps his bike near the bus stop and rides home from there. But even if we lived only 1/2 mile from school they wouldn't be allowed to walk/bike there. Not because of kidnapping worries, but road safety: there is a lot of bus & parent traffic around the school and the administration is justly concerned about mixing high traffic and elementary school kids who aren't used to that environment.

Children are driven to schools two blocks away

This reminds me of that story we discussed the other day, about obesity.

The best part was the last story, about the kid who walked five houses down the block to play with a friend, but got driven home. The article does note the absurdity that she wasn't allowed to walk home herself, but... well, couldn't the adult have at least walked her home? How does it even save time to get into a car for that kind of distance?

It's heartening that the book mentioned in the story, "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry," has 5 stars from 61 reviews at Amazon. From what I've seen, it's incredibly hard for a book on any topic to get 5 stars from a statistically significant number of reviews. Hopefully this portends that many feel the same way.

Now if I could just get my wife to discuss child raising without her getting defensive. (She went through a bitter custody battle with her first husband who continually accused her in court of being a bad mother. And hey, I'm not perfect, I could probably approach things better with her.)

I love the school that had parents write their kid's name on a piece of paper and put it on their windshield. 'Cause, absent further checking ("your ID, Mrs. Jones?"), no one can write a child's name on a piece of paper unless it's eir kid.

You can't guard your children from the one-in-a-million. You have to let go at some point. Hard as it is.

This is a good topic for communities to discuss.

One of the best things I have found since moving to a different country is our kids can travel (on their own) safely and freely to school and back without us being judged as irresponsible.

The more kids that do it, the safer it is. Good on these people for going first, I hope others follow.

Here's a relevant article from Aus where the coroner recommended banning 4WDs (SUVs) from near schools: http://fddp.theage.com.au/news/national/coroner-urges-curbs-...

government run systems devolve into bureaucracy and Orwellian rules of social conduct. Our children are treated more like government employees than children. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest and will continue to get worse, bureaucracy does many things but spontaneously shrink and become more responsible it does not.

If it's really two blocks, is it so hard to walk to school and back? Call it parent/child bonding, use it to point out things in nature/things changing in the neighborhood - possibly even a time for the adult to bond with neighbors?

Great article. Aren't there surgically embedded gps chips for tracking children?

How would you feel when you found out your parents have been tracking your every move since you were 6?

You could use that to your advantage. Ex: make a clone chip and leave in under your pillow when you go out all night.

That's what I love in HN... great idea!

I think it was just plain old irony :)

Fair enough. If the comment was, I'm going to blame my reaction on it being morning. Still going through my coffee so not quite stable yet :) Sorry!

The U.S. needs the technologies and the explicit and implicit fabric of rules that Europe uses to govern people in crowded areas (hint: it works! go on a visit).

Individualism doesn't work anymore in the U.S. - not in litigation, healthcare, transportation, crime, city planning etc. The U.S. needs to become more European.

My two cents.

I'll decipher this: if the U.S. would have effective city planning, crime prevention and a social welfare system, there'd be less bad neighborhoods to worry about and in result less crime. Further, if employers would actually hire people for longer periods of time then longer standing communities of people could form where several generations would know what's going on in the neighborhood. Further, if you would add good public transportation and kids who know how to ride on a bicycle, you would finally have European conditions => kids could go to school on their own.

On the other hand, this comes at a cost. My name is Martin C. Martin. I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar, and changed it in college. A dutch friend remarked that changing your name is very very hard in Holland: a roofer whose last name was the Dutch word for leaky had to go through all these hoops to change his name. He said that, in general, Europe has a kind of conformity.

From what I've seen, many European countries are also racially homogeneous, and a little xenophobic. Even Geoff Hinton, a big name in Machine Learning, had to move back to Canada after a few years of living in England because his black son encountered an overwhelming amount of discrimination. And I think England is more racially diverse than a lot of European countries.

Yup. That's why I moved to Canada for a while at least. Want to try out the so-called freedom you guys in North-America have. Pros and cons.

EXAMPLE: 1/2 h ago somebody stole my mountainbike right out of my garage. Here in North America nobody saw the guy. In Germany, usually the neighborhood widow next door lady would have seen the guy looking through the kitchen window.

Yeah, there are definitely pros & cons.

edit: poorly worded "doesn't belong here" comment removed.

This type of comment seems to me more of a problem than this type of article. The article may or may not be interesting to the intellectually curious, but yet another comment about something not being hacker news definitely isn't.

Though the article is a bit superficial, the question it explores is an interesting one. Kids' lives have become dramatically more circumscribed in just one generation. I've spent a good deal of time wondering about that: why it happened, and what the consequences will be.

My comment came from a place of arrogance, something that is wholly inappropriate when I'm talking with someone like you.

Now, clearly, your opinion of what hacker news ought to be counts a lot more than mine, but I will explain my opinion anyhow. I am here because this site attracts a reasonable proportion of people who are better than I am (or, at least measurably better than I am at something.)

My problem with the article was that it's a subject that anyone can talk about, with no real 'right' or 'wrong' answer. there's no provability. When speaking of politics or religion everyone has equal authority.

Articles like this attract the sort of people who make slashdot mediocre, which is to say, everyone. I could write a few pages on childhood independence, and how that shaped me. But I don't know any more about it than the next guy over, so unless you have some personal interest in me, I don't think what I'd have to say would be interesting.

The thing is, articles like this, where anyone can comment are inherently more popular, and will take over any site on which they are tolerated, because people like being the authority. I do it too. Hell, I'm doing it right now. The thing is, it's not very much fun reading someone write about something they know little about.

I agree.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

It's not intellectually curious, is vaguely a "crime" story, and it's exactly the sort of story they bring up on TV news editorials.

Personally, I'd only want to see social science, crime, or general news stories here if they have just a smidgen of specific relevance to hackers, programmers, techies, whatever. This story is prime time news all over. The fact that it's gotten voted up quite a bit says a lot, however, but many stories that are relevant to techies have been voted up and then killed nonetheless.. so I don't see any consistency here.

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