I looked at the author’s Google map view of the 2 miles they couldn’t walk to school, and the enormous grassed area next to the road would have meant I’d be walking that quite happily in the UK.
You don't need a pickup truck to be on the phone! It's truly shocking to see just how many (usually speeding!) drivers are on their phones on the highway and elsewhere.
See here, and deer were hit regularly on the 4m road I walked... but even as a kid I recognised it was kind of dangerous, and I wouldn't want my own kids to do the same.
School?!? Well fiddledeedee which luxury part of Yorkshire are you from?
When I were a lad I used to walk sixteen miles just for a kick up the arse and then have to walk home again to work under t’spinning machine at t’mill for the other 14 hours of the day.
Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective) but that country road with ample green space left and right? It's fine. Would benefit from sidewalks and bike lane of course, but the author makes it sound like there is a steep cliff left and right of the road.
> Yeah, this is much better than the numerous suburbs without sidewalks (such a weird thing from a European perspective)
As children in such a situation, we would have a lot of fun as pedestrians to be a nuisance to the cars that drive on the road, too. :-) Having this perspective, I rather think that the reason why sidewalks are built is because of the complaints of car drivers.
As someone who has done a bunch of long distance walks in the UK, I’ve encountered any number of relatively rural or small town roads with no shoulders along walls or hedgerows that are at least as scary as a pedestrian as anything I’ve encountered in the US.
It's not very safe if you can't get off a curvy road with no shoulder, especially in poor visibility. You're probably OK as a bet as a sometimes thing but not something I'd, have especially a kid, do on a daily basis. One reason I didn't learn to ride a bike as a kid because that basically described the road our house was on and fatalities associated with kids riding bikes wasn't rare.
Yeah, "I didn't die taking a jump in a wingsuit" isn't actually a recommendation that's a safe thing to do. Or, hey, plenty of people survived climbing K2.
During nice weather, surely, but it might be very unpleasant when raining.
When I hear these stories about how children in USA go to school, I am always astonished.
In Europe, my parents took me to the school one single time, for the first school day, when I was 6 years old. Everyday after that I have gone there and come back alone, for a walk of about one mile and a half. Several years later, I continued my studies at a more distant school, to which I was going alone using the public transportation of the city, by bus, the same as most of my colleagues.
Even during the 1st grade (i.e. at 6 to 7 years old) any child would have considered very shameful to be brought to the school by their parents, as an indication that they would have been somehow helpless or handicapped.
Rural property owners in the US are somewhat likely to shoot first and ask questions about trespassers only later. In some parts of the country the Road is the only obviously public land. (Even that can't be taken for granted sometimes, as private streets exist in some areas, too.)
It varies from state to state. See "Castle Doctrine" and its variants, including the worst "Stand Your Ground" ones. The US has more pockets of dystopia than are necessarily obvious.
No they are not. That is what happens in the movies, but in reality those people are just like anyone else - mostly nice people. Even stand your ground laws which allow you to shoot without asking questions only apply in specific situations and are unlikely to apply (though without specific details I cannot say for sure)
Sure, small numbers, low statistics, but it is still in the list of reasons why "Americans don't trust cutting through a random field and see only a dangerous road in a picture like that street view" in some parts of the country. The US has a fascinating relationship to "private property".
We can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm. We'll look back on the primitive times when kids couldn't just click a button or whisper an instruction for a ride like anyone else.
500 manually driven cars and 500 robocars take the same space. Building schools, cities, and communities in the US that are pedestrian based is the only real solution. The author summarizes as "We need to thicken up our places, slow down cars, and install pedestrian or biking infrastructure" which I couldn't agree with more.
I'm not in disagreement, robot cars would be awesome, but why do we need scifi technology here in the usa to solve something that is already a solved problem the world over.
It really is a mental problem more than anything else. The inability to imagine a virtuous public realm welcoming to children, conjure its value in one's mind eye, and commit to the necessary material changes.
> can just wait for this problem to go away as robocars becomes the norm
I live in a well-to-do community where many kids are chauffeured to school. The problem isn't just the parents' wasted time. It's the congestion and lack of agency this behaviour bestows on children. Head to head, I'd bet the kid who can navigate themselves to and from school outcompetes the one chauffered in a robotaxi in novel environments.
Busses are slow as snot in many cases, because the routes are insane.
We can walk to school and see the bus when we leave the house and easily beat it by many minutes.
(Busses being slow and routes taking long is probably a design feature, allowing schools to let out at 3PM but parents to not have to be home until 5PM or later).
But the real final solution won't be robocars, it'll be robokids. Then if you lose one you can just get a replacement.
I used to be in this camp, but when it comes down to it busses, trains, and other shared transportation options are both the past and the future. Kids from all economic backgrounds can use them at once, they are extremely space and energy efficient, and the necessity of walking the final leg to the central access point is healthier for our bodies and our communities.
I think this article misses the one big problem (as I understand it). It's that schools need to dismiss the kid to their parent. I have family in North Carolina and I understand that cars have the family number displayed, and someone with a radio communicates to the school staff "Car 315 is here", they then find that kid and dismiss them. Just do away with that. When the bell rings, send the kids outside and they will just find their parent. That's how my kids school works and there is no traffic jam.
> What's more ridiculous is someone probably sued them
I'd almost bet nobody sued them. (I'll extend: I'd be surprised if a parent has ever won such a case.) An idiot parent made a stink at a PTA meeting and nobody could be bothered going head to head with Karen.
First of all another parent making a stink at PTA is a genuine situation to want to avoid. The facebook smear campaigns I've seen against teachers are incredible. Also, they absolutely have been sued, and if I remember I'll link a handful later when home. Or the even more fun phenomenon is other parents calling CPS on parents when they witness their children walking home unattended, and that report is actually pursued and adjudicated.
It's not like they're great at it, either. My wife is very visibly hispanic, and on multiple occasions when she went to pick up our (half white but not at all hispanic looking) kids, they'd send the wrong kids to the car because there were only two hispanic-looking kids left.
In roughly 2009 my (mostly very well run) school was freaked out when me and my brothers, all age 9-11, wanted to walk the 1.2 miles home. And honestly the teacher and principal involved were/are among the most reasonable, experienced, pragmatic educators I know. I genuinely think the issue is paranoid parents watching them allow such a behavior just as much as the small chance we get clipped on the sidewalk by an out of control car. Aka they were 99% sure my mom would be fine with us walking home, that we weren't lying about her approval, and that if we were lying and something happened while unaccounted for my parents wouldn't hold her responsible, but we live in a silly society, and people are watching.
Normally I’d ding a comment like this as low-effort, but… I honestly can’t think of any more appropriate reaction.
I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door… apparently they train the babies on this.
I wonder what led up to a system like that—overcompensation for a really big mistake in the past? Abstract fears? The genuine wishes of the parents?
(Edit: looks from sibling comments like this [the pickup line technique] might be a hangover from the excesses of the COVID times…)
There's no incentive not to take unreasonable precautions.
If something happens and you didn't do everything people imagine could have prevented it, you'll be fired, you'll be sued, and your name will be dragged through the mud.
If you take a bunch of unreasonable precautions and nothing happens, you're fine.
> I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door
It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.
That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.
Uff. I can't even imagine. I'm so sorry for you and your kids alike. And I guess it's not the precautionary floor lines that strike me, it's that this style of violence really is so pervasive—and we've concluded that it's such an inevitable part of childhood now—that the reasonable thing to do is to reify it in the physical architecture of their day-to-day lives. And in training young minds to imagine themselves unarmed in a situation of combat...
Of course we don't get to just choose innocence and be surprised by a style of evil behavior over and over again. But I wonder also sometimes if, just as suicides can inspire people who hear about them, large-scale and permanent institutional response to kids-shooting-classmates gives form and legitimacy to that avenue of acting-out, when disaffected kids think about acting out.
> it's that this style of violence really is so pervasive
Agree, and it's tragic that this is were we are in the US, and the only concrete action we're willing to take (thoughts and prayers don't count) is to try to mitigate the impact of a shooting rather than preventing it.
So about 12 people were curious but not too surprised when our American friend told us her experience of a school shooting at her university. She was in a different building to the shooter.
The room was shocked into silence when she said "oh, and there was the time at my elementary school..." and had another experience of guns at a school.
These numbers don't remotely pass a smell test. The same study claims 2% of Americans have been injured in a mass shooting, and cites 500 mass shootings a year.
2% of 340mm = 6.8mm injured in a mass shooting
Conservatively assuming that's equally spread across all ages, and assuming a lifetime of 80 years, implies 6.8mm/80 = 85,000 people injured a year
85,000/500 mass shootings a year = 170 people injured per shooting
This is absurdly high - the Pulse nightclub shooting for instance injured 60 people.
It's obviously harder to analyze the number of people that 'witness' a shooting, but it also seems implausible that an average of ~595 people are witnessing each of these 500 shootings.
The problem here is that self-reported studies like this are incredibly unreliable. Interestingly, the same effect appeared in a pro-gun study, which cited an insane 2+ million defensive gun uses a year.
School shootings became very publicized twenty years before the pandemic, Columbine in 1999. School shooting drills and lockdowns became more common afterwards as few realistic solutions have been passed and nothing has been done to mollify the fears of parents.
But it does cause it because every car needs to get checked off. When I was a kid in the 80s, there were still quite a few kids that got picked up, but no one was picking them up from the door. They'd park somewhere around the school within a block or two.
I dunno... I grew up in the 80s/90s and most of us took the bus or walked if we lived within a mile or so. A parent drop-off/pick-up was the exception - going to a doctor appointment after school or something.
My school said you must be at least 2 miles away before they would route buses for pickups. There were exceptions which my neighborhood qualified as there were no sidewalks, and we would have to cross a single lane bridge to cross a 50 foot creek with no pedestrian path. I lived in the boonies, and it was faster for me to cut through cow pastures in a straight line than walking the roads. We just had to make sure the rancher's bull was not going to notice us (or sneakily hang a red handkerchief on one of your buddies' backpack).
And the vehicles are limited by the roads that are available to line up on.
And the roads are limited by the school's ability to acquire land.
And no reasonable school is ever going to set aside any more land for a car line than is absolutely necessary that could otherwise be used to provide more school building/field.
I’m across the street from a school and there is always one parent that parks in my condo building’s driveway and blocks it. It would be too much for them to be in the line!
Then sometimes, they leave their car and go in the school and we are trying to home or leave and they get angry with us!
Yeah, you can see a lot of creativity depending on what's available. Where I once lived in Houston, parents would park at a nearby strip center and huddle around the school exit. And then walk their kid across the 6-lane road (3 lanes in each direction) that Houston is obsessed with building back to where they parked their car.
This sort of thing drives me insane. The people on the polar extremes are (I suspect) part of why we can't have nice things. I've both lived by the school and been a parent, and I badly wish people would practice some empathy and common sense. For example there are some people that will literally sit outside during pickup hours on a lawn chair and yell at people for parking on the street in front of their house (which, btw, is completely legal and there's nowhere else to park within several miles of the school). I've also seen parents park right in front of driveways, blocking people's access to their homes, which is absolutely not ok. It kills me that we can't just have a simple compromise.
Parents: It's never ok to block somebody's driveway! Residents: It's not illegal for people to park on the street in front of your house (assuming they aren't blocking your access of course)
I live near a school. Soccer practice, parents routinely park up and down the street at the far end of the field where their kids are practicing, because the school car park at the other end of the field would be a good two minute walk away. "No parking this side" doesn't apply to soccer practice parking, either, apparently.
And if you want to just do a drive by pickup, sure, no worries, stop in the middle of the street (with cars either side), and have your kids younger sister hop out, leaving the car door open, and go wander down the slope to help her brother with his equipment and carry it back up the slope. No-one else is using the street or lives there, after all, so they can wait a few minutes. Bonus points if you get belligerent with them or flip them off for being "impatient".
That's a lame take from this. Kids/parents fill out forms that state the typical way the students arrive/depart the school. If they are on a bus route, those kids exit the school from a different exit (side/rear of building) so that the buses queuing up do not interfere with the car queue. Walkers typically exit yet a different set of doors.
The parents that arrive early but have kids that are not ready to be picked up is precisely why the queues get out of control. At least with this method the cars are moved along much faster. If a car arrives in the queue but the kiddo is not yet found, when the car reaches the front it is asked to move to a holding spot out of the queue--much like fast food places do when your order is going to hold up everyone else in line.
If kids have to be released to their parents and are no longer turned out en masse like they used to be, that will absolutely cause traffic and could very well be the root cause of traffic that exceeds the designed capacity of the school pickup circles.
When I was growing up kids within a mile of the school would walk themselves to school and back home with very few exceptions, often starting with first graders. But even a half mile is a long enough distance that many busy parents in the suburbs would choose to drive it rather than walk it four times a day.
And yet less 40% of students who live within a mile of school walk regularly. For kids who live <.25 miles, that number is still <50%. Walking a quarter of a mile takes ~5 minutes, maybe a bit longer for a small kid with a large school pack.
Many should be able to walk almost as fast as loading up the car, waiting in the queue, etc.
It may be short as the crow flies but incredibly unsafe due to e.g. having no sidewalk or having to cross 6 lanes of traffic. When everything is designed around the car it's no wonder people have no choice but to drive.
Many of them can't walk home from school. As the article says, most students now live too far away from school (greater than three miles), and many rural/suburban areas have underdeveloped sidewalks and traffic systems.
If three miles sounds like not a big deal, it certainly is when you have short legs, a backpack full of books, and uncooperative weather. I was lucky enough to walk to/from school for most of my schooling. It was only around one mile and it still took 30 minutes. As an adult I would probably balk at a 90-minute commute.
Indeed. My kid could theoretically walk to/from school, but they carry a musical instrument every day along with a backpack full of all of their books. The school doesn't offer lockers anymore because they deemed it "unsafe", so all books and a big Chromebook need to come home each day (and be carried between every class).
I played the trombone in sixth grade. Your kid will be fine carrying anything short of a baritone by that age. It sucks to carry. Switch hands as necessary. Be selective with your books on instrument days. But he or she can manage.
Where I live all schools must provide bus service for kids more than 1 mile away, or if the route to school crosses a busy road. Some kids to get a city bus pass, but the yellow school bus is common. I know other states do it differently.
Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid. Then they went to the call out the car as it arrives system as you describe, and they never went back. It is so much worse. Thankfully, my son drives himself to school now so I don't have to deal with it any longer.
The call-out has been around at least since the early '00s.
Just like all security theater, it's easy enough to get around. All you need is the same looking card and the identifier. Most of the time, that's just the kid's name on the card. Some color code the card by class grade as well.
I know this as I was helping a friend scoop their kiddos up from school, and they just sent me to the school with the card. Nobody questioned who I was. They just saw the card, radioed the name, and the kiddos were waiting at the curb when I eventually crawled up to the spot. Since the kiddos expected me, there was no "who is that guy" situation. Otherwise, just fake a card and get a prize is how lame this setup is
The pre-school my youngest has this. The middle school my oldest goes to is much more relaxed. I'm fine with treating my 4 year old like she can't be trusted to run around alone, but my 11 year old can.
What I'm not fine with is there is no bus service for the 4 year old, we have to drive her (I bike, but it isn't a great route - we have to cross a busy 4 lane)
Yeah, this seems like a pretty surprising omission from the article. In particular, it stuck out to me at this point:
> In fact, in 2022 only about 28% of US students used the school bus to get to school.1 Using the school bus is trending down, as shown in Chart I. In 1969, about 38% of students used the bus, similar to 2009 with 37.5%, and further dropping in 2017 to 36.5%.
In other words, for nearly half a century, the percentage of students taking the bus only fell by 1.5%, and then five years after that, it fell by an additional 8.5%. It _might_ not be covid, but clearly something became a factor between 2017 and 2022 that wasn't at least as far back to 1969, and I feel like it's the obvious hypothesis that would need to be addressed first.
>Just letting the kids out en mass is how my son's school worked until Covid.
My kids school worked like that and it was still a mess, primarily because the parents were too stupid to follow the rules as to how to park their cars. I was set up so that everyone parked in parallel rows ||||| but the ones on the right were closest to the exit, so a bunch of people would pull into those rows to the point that they'd wrap around behind the other rows ___| and prevent people from getting into those rows. It was stupid and the school would send out notices and have employees walk down to the end of the row and tell people to move to the next one but it never stayed fixed.
This sums up all of the school pickup problems I see and/or deal with daily.
I also see many parents making dangerous decisions, most of which fit into the “I’ll go now” category, including accelerating quickly to get to the crosswalk before the kids crossing the street do. Just this school year, I’ve seen multiple near misses, with kids jumping back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a parent who just picked up their own kid.
Schools (EDIT: feel the) need to dismiss the kid to someone. That could be another parent, in the case of carpooling. It could be a bus driver. The root problem is parents chauffering their kids to and from school.
Sure, yes, didn't mean to imply schools have to do this. Just that a school can satisfy its need to look paranoid while sidestepping the problems cited in the article. The root problem isn't the schools' paranoia. It's the lack of a solid bus system.
Agreed. We don’t have much of a car line since it’s a walk-to-school neighborhood (90% walk). Still, k-2 are dismissed to parents. Once 3rd grade hits it’s open.
The parent has already signed a release form at the beginning of the school year that designated their kiddo as a walker, and did not need the parent present. Just like your DoorDash option to not be needed to be present
That's still a huge step back from previous generations, where all kids were expected to find their own way to their parents, whether waiting at home, waiting in the pickup loop, or waiting a few blocks away where it's not as busy.
Maybe you're misremembering some of the details of being a kid, but I know my parents signed forms that told the school that I would be walking to/from school. That was in the early 80s.
I never experience being picked up after school by a parent. Both of my parents worked, so I rode the bus or walked.
What exactly is your problem here though? The fact that kids are kept in a staging area so they are not congregating in the same space that kids that are actively being placed into cars? That's an issue? You'd rather have that area congested with kids not paying attention doing kid things with their friends after school?
Yet that are kids that walk at most schools because they live across the street. Or at least there used to be. And how does that work for a high school that has the same ridiculous lines? 15 year olds know which car takes them home, and sometimes they're riding with peers?
Certainly, at a certain age they do. I remember picking up very young cousins. But after a certain age, parents should be able to write a permission slip that allows them to walk home. Just because radio communcation is used does not do away with traffic jams. You're still driving, you're still lining up, and there are still a ton of cars which is what the article was talking about.
Well that headline sums it up. After 10 years of dealing with it and wondering "how the f did we get to this point", it's satisfying to hear it called what it is.
A small win in our family was in my son's final year of elementary school when he finally decided to try walking home 1.5 miles; that Spring was a delight for him. He was properly decompressed and had logged a minimum amount of physical activity for good sleep and all the rest.
Pay for the buses! Build the greenways! Normalize walking! And stop worrying about abductions for the love of gawd!
That kind of upbringing worked out really well for the boomers, we are in this mess because of that.
Kids should have agency and independence, but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security. You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
> You cannot force a kid to work against their own safety instinct because of your own selfish comfort.
I got this kind of reaction from my son for all kinds of things I made him do by himself that made him uncomfortable. Now that he's 18, he thanks me for it and wonders why all his friends are so entirely unable to do almost anything out in public without help.
Providing a feeling of "safety, trust, and security" contradicts "Kids should have agency and independence." The only way they have safety is if you are with them 100% of the time which means 0 independence. I'm not worried about kids because they will natuarally avoid danger. I'm more worried about adults causing harm to kids (America).
“but also a feeling of safety, trust, and security”
i agree a little bit. But at what point does the “growing up” part happen? you know…when they turn 18, and have to get a real job (or go to university), doing things that are uncomfortable and maybe not fun?
The process of growing up and becoming more mature is accomplished by challenging yourself and pushing boundaries, to grow as a person.
i guess im saying, it depends. its not as black and white as you suggest. Is the fear irrational? Maybe therapy would help. Or a buddy to walk home with. But you need to _somehow_ help kids grow independent.
Parenting isn’t just about defending your kid’s boundaries on their behalf. It’s also helping your kid to grow and expand those boundaries, and giving them the skills to manage them independently.
The end goal is to create a happy, fully functioning adult.
His choices were bus or walk (my experiences in the car lines are from days when kids needed to picked up for an occasion) before you jump to too many conclusions.
Everyone here should watch the Japanese TV series, Old Enough!. 2-4 year olds are sent out on their own to run errands, etc. Yes, really, 2-4 years old. And they succeed and are fine.
Push this out thirty years. One set of kids was navigating the real world since they were 4. The other has been mollycoddled with overparenting and screen time. Which cohort do you think will be happier, better adjusted and better off?
Then realise that it's not uncommon to see grade schoolers taking the subway to and from school in New York.
There's more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child, for example the freedom to explore who you are without the "nail that sticks up is hammered down" treatment. I also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan.
Forget Japan for a moment. Walking to and from school unattended is perfectly normal in many countries in the EU. The normalisation of car journeys in the US is bizarre
.
There is no "US" where something like this is normalized, it's down to region, weather, urbanization and perception of safety. I grew up walking and biking to school because I was lucky enough to live in a nice suburb close to my school. For people who need to take a 20 minute *drive* to school obviously that isn't feasible.
The US is a massive country with a huge number of different climates and layouts, which is partly what makes articles and conversations like this so painful to read. Instead of the skeptical, critical thinking you'd expect from HN you get mess of "Car bad" "I wish we had European public transit" and broad generalization talk.
> more to growing up and being "well adjusted" than walking around as a child
Sure. Which of those cohorts do you think has more freedom?
> also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan
You’d have a point if Japan were the only culture in the world with competent 4-year olds. They’re not. We’re the exception. To the extent there is a bubble it’s the American culture of isolating and surveilling kids to and from school.
Consider that the fact that there’s a tv show about it means it’s a novelty in Japan as well.
It’s great that Japan has a civil society that makes a show like that possible, but don’t mistake it for more than it is. It’s the same mistake as generalizing from what you read in the news: it’s news because it’s unusual.
No, it really is commonplace in Japan. It makes good TV because little kids are cute as heck. Not everybody has kids, and even if you do, they don't remain five years old forever. So even mundane stories about little kids can stay popular.
I really dislike it when Japan is brought up as a comparison with the US, especially when it comes to crime or schooling. The cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates are so vastly different that it's never helpful.
There is much to learn from them. However there are dark sides of their culture too. They have high suicide rates, and are very xenophobic (much worse than Trump in the US) for starters. We can learn, but be careful as it isn't always clear which factors you want to emulate are tied to things you don't.
America has an obsession with being different and has a thousand answers to why things that work elsewhere would not and could not possibly work here. It's the size, if it's not the size, it's the density, if it's not the density it's ... repeat ad nauseam.
Yea, when someone claims “this could not possibly work in the USA! It’s too large and the population not dense” or whatever, then ask why it wouldn’t work in just New Jersey which is about as large and dense as some European countries.
Japan is a monoculture and strictly traditional, not to mention very xenophobic. Everything works because the social penalties for violating those norms are severe. It’s effectively an ethnostate and not that long ago revered their god-emperor.
The U.S. is by contrast a diverse (geographically and demographically), broad culture of immigrant communities based on a concept of rugged individualism where states and townships run things as they see fit.
If you want to reshape the U.S. in the model of Japan … well
Not to reshape America into Japan, but attempt to keep the parts that are nice while integrating the best parts of other nations. America loved to claim it was a nation of immigrants; the French even sent you a gift for how much America would take the best of other countries (the brightest minds, the hardest workers), and build with that.
Maybe that's not how the country works any more, but it was a nice fantasy.
It is if you consider cultures, poverty levels, and crime rates to not be immutable geographic traits, but a result of policy choices. The US can't take a giant leap to kids having Tokyo-like freedom, but it can look at what Japan does differently that results in such a society (eg. its public education system, public transit, policing, street design, typical vehicle size, etc).
You cannot legislate positive cultural attributes into being. There's no way to fine people into reading to their kids, picking up trash when they see it, deciding to put the grocery cart back, prioritizing academic achievement, etc.
It takes a lot more than legislation, but Japan's modern culture is in large part the product of its education system. It has a strong focus on teaching exactly that sort of prosocial behaviour.
> You cannot legislate positive cultural attributes into being.
You can legislate environment, e.g., when all you have is car-centric sprawling suburbs, it's harder to walk / cycle to school.
I grew up in a 'streetcar suburb', and was walking to school on my own (or with friends) by grade four (my dad woke me up, made breakfast, and then left for work: I knew I had to leave for school after G.I. Joe finished (at 8:30, for 9:00)).
In grad school, a friend from China explained that he stayed home on his own starting at like age 3. He was going down to the market outside his high rise apartment, buying basic groceries, and entertaining himself all day. It blew my mind, he saw nothing wrong with it.
That’s quite a tale you were told. As a parent I can tell you my children barely even remember being 3yo, let alone have the ability to reach the shelves and pour their own beverages at that age
That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes. An individual family may do this, and then someone will call child protective services because there is a lost, unaccompanied child.
Happened to my coworker: kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them. Not clear if they really thought the kids were in danger, or just did it out of spite, but what ensued was a nightmare of CPS calling the workplace and a few follow-up house visits. The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim "we were worried about the children" and use that as a shield for whatever overzealousness or maliciousness may hide underneath.
>That wouldn't work in US until the whole culture changes.
This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
It works for Utah (and to a point, Texas); it can work for your polity, too.
When children are at far greater risk of abuse and abduction by concern trolls and the State, and they very much are in New World countries, your society is broken.
Free range laws say the opposite: that a kid over a certain age is allowed to be alone and the parents CANNOT be charged for it. It’s to encourage free range parenting.
People who call CPS just because children are outside unaccompanied? It's obvious taking children away from the parent is a possibility when one makes that call.
I think in this case ‘concern troll’ means someone who can’t mind their own business and chooses to troll someone by stirring up unnecessary drama or conflict, using insincere concern as a pretext.
We know the concern is insincere because the OP’s example (children playing in their yard) cannot be considered concerning by a reasonable person.
I think you're creating a fine definition but based on context and your own intellectual sophistication; we don't know what the author of those words meant.
Based on my experience with children who actually need protective services help, calling about kids playing outside is not even close to getting a home visit let alone anyone taking your kids. Maybe it happens, but not in my east coast state.
> This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
How? Those idiot Karens are the ones writing the laws. They get on your state legislature and local town ordinances, and prevent more housing from being built too.
They have no competence and they do everything in the name of "safety", so you can't challenge them with logic or reason.
They are usually very privileged people with plenty of time on their hands so you can't play asymmetric warfare with them and expect to win.
> The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim
As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
This of course means the experts have to spend a lot of time/effort investigating where it is obvious there is nothing but they have to get enough evidence of that to close the case. This time is taken away from all the kids that really need help. Note that I have no idea how many kids who need help are discovered this way.
> As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
There are some issues here with what you're saying.
Mandatory reporter classifications are a legal construct. Activities can't make people into mandatory reporters. Only some mandated reporters are subject to reporting requirements when off-duty (for example, in many jurisdictions, your scout camp 'chaperones' may well not be obliged to mandatory report. Teachers and HCPs may, however, be. And it may vary for WHAT they are reporting.)
I am a mandatory reporter (healthcare provider), and I specifically called out that jurisdictions, occupations, and events or situations may tweak that.
> Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters
I was specifically commenting that an activity doesn't make someone a mandatory reporter. That is you are a mandatory reporter based on your occupation, status, and what is happening. The OPs comment makes it sound like "if you're camping overnight with children, you become a mandatory reporter"
versus, for example, "The BSA's policy is to only allow people who are already designated mandatory reporters to chaperone camping overnight with scouts". The BSA cannot ... mandate ... that you are a mandatory reporter (in the legal sense, with protections and responsibilities accompanying) just by virtue of you saying "I'll chaperone this event" (though they can certainly say "it is our policy that you act as-if").
Their policy is probably only act as if. The training I'm given doesn't go into such details though.
Come to think of it, they say it is mandatory to report, but are careful to avoid talking about the law. However it is recorded I have training. I would honestly expect the courts decide that I'm legally a mandatory reporter if it was discovered I should have seen something, even if I don't technically meet the law. (at least if they can find any way to read the law to get me)
That makes absolute sense. And I think it's quite deliberate to not talk about the law. And I have no objections to a policy that 'we expect you to report concerning things' and disqualifying you if they learned you didn't.
All of this is of course on top of any moral or ethical imperatives about reporting suspected abuse, mandated or otherwise.
I understand that’s terrifying in the moment to have CPS at your door, but maybe the erroneous CPS visit is a one time cost we have to pay to change the culture, until CPS learns to ignore phone calls with no more details other than “children are outside”. If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
Change requires someone that doesn’t accept the status quo
(I don’t have kids, but hope to have some in the future, so this is me talking out of turn)
> If they don’t learn to ignore them - that sounds like lawsuit territory
It's the reverse. CPS could be found liable if they ignored a report where there were indeed problems.
Also, I have family that work in CPS and it's really not the bad guy everyone that's "anti-CPS" seems to think. They have a HIGH bar to go over before they'll remove kids from a home. Things have to be particularly bad. And even then, the organization is slanted to get the kids back into the home ASAP. The state doesn't want to have to take care of kids.
Most of the time, it's work with the parents to make the environment safe.
If a single report from a source of unknown credibility is enough to send agents to upend an innocent person’s life, then that system is broken. The same is true for swatting. A single phone call should not result in an armed police response.
CPS agents didn't come in guns ablaze (that aren't armed). It's a simple investigation and interview with the parents.
It's quite literally the same thing as a cop checking up on someone for a reported domestic disturbance.
It's not as instant jail sentence or separation of parents from their kids.
Like I said, those are literally tools of last resort. Things have to be really bad. Like, for example, a kid that shows up with bruises and stories of violence from the parents won't instantly be removed. That's how far CPS bends over to avoid family separation. The research is pretty clear that family separation is about the worst thing you can do to a kid. That's why instead CPS generally will deploy things like mandatory therapy (if that). Or life skills lessons. And that's assuming they see major problems at the initial interview. If it's a false claim the actual most likely thing that will happen is they'll show up and say "looks like a false claim" and leave, probably ignoring future reports.
Family separation is the most extreme outcome. There is a long spectrum of stress and uncertainty between "CPS merely knocks on your door and leaves" and "Forcible family separation." You really don't want to land anywhere on that spectrum. Encounters with the government and law enforcement tend to escalate depending on how busy/belligerent/bored their agents are, so what might be a routine "checking up" today can snowball into a series of more and more serious encounters and harassment as time goes by.
I'm not really anti-CPS as much as I'm anti unnecessary involvement with unaccountable people who can wreck other people's lives.
> depending on how busy/belligerent/bored their agents are
Or on how caring, responsible, and capable they are. You're making a lot of assumptions about a lot of people.
People say these things casually but let me point out that it's not at all trivial: Demonization is the first step used by the right-wing to oppress and harm people: Democrats, liberals, LGBTQ (esp trans people), immigrants, FBI, CDC, any regulators, high-ranking government officials in national defense, government workers, city residents in blue states (when will the National Guard be sent in?), ...
The casual spread of such ideas, which makes them more insidious because few people notice their significance, is a big part of demonization.
>kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them
The worst part is that someone would thing this is the appropriate thing to do rather than observe the kids and in any case approach them and ask if they’re OK. The US has grown a culture of “don’t get involved” cowards hidden behind the legal system.
The coworker never found out who that was and talking about he kind of suspected it was a just a neighbor that didn't like them. And like you said, they can always hide behind "I don't know I was just worried about the children".
This seems community specific. In my town, kids as young as 2nd or 3rd grade walk home alone, and one of the biggest issues in town are the roving gangs of bike kids riding through town en masse. This is mostly only possible due to tight zoning. No big yards or huge McMansions, but it allows independent kids without child services being called.
Sure, but if you spend time in Japan you really will see five-year-old kids walking long distances and taking transit to school and running errands unaccompanied.
Agreed, I saw it firsthand while I was there. The elementary school was near the train station I had to take to get to university, and there was always a line of little kids walking themselves there every morning.
TFA seems to be making the point that it could become more common in the US if the school commute were more walkable - shorter and safer from cars.
I have observed many kids walking and biking to and from schools when these conditions seem to exist. Crossing guards help out for crossing busier roads near the school. However, there is also a car queue, perhaps for students who live farther away.
The exact same people calling CPS on kids walking down the street claiming it's too dangerous are the people who advocate for turning communities into low-trust economic zones.
The reason it's more dangerous now is because of them.
They privatized profit (in this case, the warm fuzzies of addicts shooting up on playgrounds) and socialized risk.
That is pollution. We should clean up that pollution, and ban those who created it from causing more.
My dad grew up in 1930’s Detroit and would tell us about how when he was five his mother would give him a little money and have him walk a few blocks to the baker to get a loaf of bread.
I grew up in the 70’s where after maybe eight we had pretty much free rein. I rode my bike several blocks away and crossed two busy four lane roads to get candy at 7-11.
The world is no more dangerous now than it was then, and yet here we are, with parents being treated like criminals for letting their kids play in their own front yard.
When they started the pickup lines, I started just parking about half a mile away from the school. He knew exactly where I would be and we completely avoided the traffic and insanity of that nonsense.
We live about a mile from his current school, so he rides his bike whenever the weather permits. He's always in a good mood when he gets home.
I think it's funny that when he gets older, he'll be able to say that it was uphill both ways since we have a sizeable hill between home and school.
My kids having been cycling a mile each way to school since they were 5 years old. It's definitely doable, although we're fortunate enough that we aren't both working long days, and are well off enough that school is that close.
A mile is not close. Disclaimer: I am european. Grew up in ireland. Lots of cars, but unless you're in the countryside or its raining, it's generally walk/cycle to school. In Stockholm now, you are 'shamed' if you drive to school to drop your kids off. "Normal" parents have cargo bikes to bring their small kids to school if it's a long distance (like 500m or more).
You must have a lot of schools. I walked or biked about a mile each way to school starting in third grade (age 8-9), and the only reason I didn't do it a year earlier was that the two other kids who would accompany me were a year younger.
I only got dropped off if it was raining (that can be quite severe and thunderstorms are common) or if I was so late that I couldn't make it. In the latter case, I walked home.
Four years later, my school was miles away. No choice but dropoff lines (private school, no bus service). Had I been in the public school system, I would have needed to bus or be dropped off for junior high (that year and two after it, ~4 mi/6.5 km away traveling on and crossing multiple arterial roads without bike lanes or sidewalks for most of the way), but could have walked/ridden/driven myself to high school.
Housing in Europe is very different from what it is in the US.
A lot of it will look something like this [1].
In England, it's actually somewhat unusual to have any space between two homes. Semi and fully detached homes command a fairly high price.
Roads were also not built for cars, so they tend to be much narrower than what you'd find in the US. All that means you'll find a much higher population density. You can even find a bunch of cobblestone roads without much effort.
I'd also say that cities are FAR more walkable than they are in the US. It's almost the reverse of what it is here, it can be easier to walk to the store than drive simply because there's a billion little pathways that lead everywhere.
I've traveled enough in Europe, and not just major cities, to understand this about housing.
However, what is the average size of a graduating class from secondary education? My high school class was quite small, just under 100, but it was an oddity and classes before and since were more like 120-150. Even in elementary school we had around 75 in each year. It is not unusual in larger metro areas in the US to have over 1000 students in each graduating class.
Stockholm is a high density urban environment. Appartment living. 4-6 floor high buildings is the norm. Schools every mile or so would be my guess. Ours is like 300m away. Next closest is 1km and 1.5km. Quite normal, i speculate.
I mean, walkability is a big problem for me. My kid would have to cross multiple busy streets in order to get to school (which is ~3 miles away). We don't have crossing guards either, the only ones we do have are literally at the school property.
And bicycles! A bike path takes half the width of a single car lane, there is absolutely no excuse not to have a network of bike paths almost everywhere there is a road. Literally just throw concrete barriers on one of the outermost lanes and you're most of the way there.
The impact this has on the quality of life of everyone, but particularly those that can't/won't drive, is enormous.
It’s awful. Big long line where I live and it used to be handled by one school bus and kids walking home. Imagine the waste of human productive time, fuel, etc. I’m always astounded this many people don’t have a job to be at at 3pm.
I used to walk or take the bus, even in elementary school. I am not sure at what point parents decided they must take their kids to school. We did have parents dropping kids off and it was busy but not like it is now. I know then, at least to me, there was a sort of an air about about seeing kids being picked up or dropped off because they didn't have to ride the bus. Maybe that's it, parents gave in to not wanting their kids to feel less about themselves because they had to ride the bus?
Great article. It wouldn't be that difficult for schools and cities to encourage walking or biking. There are lots of easy things that could be done. My daughter's school doesn't properly clear the sidewalks during winter. The giant parking lot is always immaculate though. They actually renovated and rerouted traffic to make it less safe for pedestrians. My daughter's friend was hit in a crosswalk (with a crossing guard!) by a parent leaving school after dropping her kid off. No penalty to the driver.
An odd choice of dates in the charts: 1969, 2009, 2017, 2022. 40 years between the first two and less than ten between the other ones. I would have liked to see more uniform spacing between the first two to understand whether the change across those 40 years was gradual.
Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely refuses to budge on: she won't let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague "danger" that the news media is pumping into her. School is only 3 miles away and we live in a peaceful rural-to-suburban area. The kid could walk that distance at midnight and not be even remotely at risk. No facts, statistics or reasoning works.
It's not always easy to find the data you want. When you're writing a blog post like this, you do research and find the studies that you can, published when they were.
I totally understand the anxiety. If you get "DANGER!" pumped into you constantly, it's going to be hard to rationalize your way out of that.
Have you two ever tried walking along the road at around the same time? A calm walk along the same path your kids would be taking would put me at ease about the situation if I was in the same spot.
I know those gaps are often due to the data coming from different sources and it's not always possible to normalize it and what not, but I'm always super suspicious when they do that. Also when you see results that are like 1953-1986, like maybe the results from 1952 and 1987 invalidate whatever point they want to make, so they used only the section that helps their case.
The bus service is completely unreasonable. They shopped it out to the lowest bidder and the stops are all in terrible spots on busy streets. It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
> It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
I don't know how your bus driver would handle it but even back in the 80s, some parents would drive their kids to the bus stop and let them wait in the car until the bus came. As they got older, like 5th or 6th grade, they would be taught to dress warm for the wait.
Putting the bus stop on a major road without adequate place to stand is a problem. But a 5 year old is totally capable of waiting for a bus, given the appropriate location to do so. Even more so in a typical suburb, where there's likely several of them waiting at the same place (when I was a kid, we walked half a block to the corner and waiting in a group of ~5-~15 kids).
Our school system wouldn't send buses if you were within two miles of the school. We were (seriously) 1.99 miles away, so we had to drive our kids back and forth.
Our child was being bullied on the bus by kids twice their age because there was no one other than the driver to monitor. I will not subject a kindergartner to that.
One time the bus arrived a full hour late and the people we could call to ask where it was had already went home. I was considering calling the police. Turns out the bus was late because they didn't have enough busses and it had to complete a different route first.
Counter point: I used to walk home from school. Got robbed at gun point several times. Jumped for my skin color numerous times. Had a neighborhood buddy who got stabbed three times on his way home and survived. I can go on and on and on. I had to learn to walk an extra 20-30 minutes to avoid these situations. I will never let my kids walk home in 2025.
Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.
The vast majority of the US is not like this. Yes, there are some (generally poor, urban) areas with crime problems. The average middle class town or suburb? Walking to school would be safe, if we simply built sidewalks instead of 6 lane highways.
The majority of the US is absolutely not like this.
You keep accusing other people of living in a bubble, but you're indexing your entire experience on to anecdotes of where you grew up as an individual experience.
In all honesty, statistically, that person's assertions are highly likely not to be fact.
It's like the man who has happened on "several" three-alarm fires in his life. How many times does a person happen on even one three-alarm fire in a lifetime? Let alone "several". The likelihood you're either speaking to an arsonist or a liar is very high.
Same is true for people who are robbed at gunpoint "several" times. The statistical likelihood that you're either speaking to a criminal or a liar is extremely high.
Hmm. I don't know the race of the poster you are referring to. I do know from friends who were not White, their experience living in the South was vastly different from mine.
I'm sorry for your experience, but this is extremely location dependent.
Walking home from school in many areas is perfectly safe. In other areas it's not. Making blanket statements or restrictions without context doesn't make sense.
So you’re conceding this is location dependent. So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent? Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping or missing children in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice. By the way, 80% of US population live in urban areas so your experience living in 20% is not representative.
> So in effect you’re saying the article is also location dependent?
The article is literally about how location effects are driving the changes.
> Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice.
Child abduction is extremely rare in the United States.
You might be confusing sensational headlines with statistics. It's common to report missing children or parental disputes as kidnapping, which people conflate with children being abducted off the street
For some perspective: The number of children abducted by strangers in the United States every year is similar to the number of children who die from head injuries from riding a bike: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/
More people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year.
There aren’t many places in the US where it is safe AND practical for kids to walk home. If you don’t understand this, then you basically live in a bubble.
this is simply not true. I personally am in 12th town I’ve lived in the last 25 years, every single place I lived was walkable to school. it might just be you that lives in a bubble :)
You seem to be missing the point. In the vast majority of cases locations being unsuitable for walking/cycling to school isn't an immutable law of nature - it's a result of deliberate choices made by humans.
Building primarily low-density car-dependent suburbs is a choice. Building horribly oversized car infrastructure is a choice. Not building bike or pedestrian infrastructure is a choice. Building one megaschool instead of a handful of smaller local schools is a choice.
People voted to have slightly lower taxes and spend a few hours a week waiting in the pickup line. That's a lifestyle choice, even if they weren't aware they were making it.
The statics on kidnapped or missing children in the US say most are taken by a family member, not by a stranger in public. I rode my bike to school in fifth grade but had to stop because of my mom's anxiety.
When I was young, my family was on food stamps when my parents were laid off.
It took them some time to find work. For some people, they have no choice where they live.
My parents used to live in a city where violence and crime was common, and I received all sorts of lessons from them about how I shouldn’t go outside, don’t talk to strangers, always be guarded, etc. But my family had moved to a quiet, crime-free suburb and everything they told me seemed like the complete opposite of what I was experiencing in reality when growing up.
>I used to walk home from school. Got robbed at gun point several times. Jumped for my skin color numerous times. Had a neighborhood buddy who got stabbed three times on his way home and survived.
Where was this? Most places in the US are not this susceptible to random violence. In the suburban city I grew up in, I'd walk home from school and I never saw a firearm in public when I was a kid, aside from those carried by police.
This is why I was adamant that my kids took the school bus when it is an option.
Even though my family has the flexible schedule to handle dropping kids via car, by using the bus system I help support the community and others who might not have that flexibility.
Plus, the school bus is one of the first places a kid might be without (much) adult supervision. A tremendous growth opportunity, where you learn how to deal with discomfort, difference and drama.
I live in a relatively residential neighborhood in NYC next to a school (outside of the congestion zone). The morning dropoffs and afternoon pickups are insane. It literally causes a gridlock for a couple hours in a part of the neighborhood that has like 4 intersections. Somehow we have to get back to the days when parents trusted the community that their kid is going to get home safe, otherwise this nonsense is never going to end.
Except that many NYC public schools have yellow buses that park in the narrow streets during pickup or dropoff which are the cause for 20 minutes of gridlock along those streets. "A couple of hours" seems to be rather unusual.
The article makes a lot of great points, but looks to miss that kids are enrolled in a lot of after school activities these days.
I was never enrolled in any as a kid and never really expected for my kid to be, because I thought parents were the motivating factor for kids to get into a bunch of activities, but IME they aren't. My kid loves her activities and picking her up to shuttle her directly to it is a lot quicker than using a bus or walking.
Surely behavior of children on a busses plays _some_ role in this decision. Not sure how they would even gather stats on this but busses in my youth were total zoos.
Further, schools near me won't allow many children to walk home even within a safe walking distance with parental consent for (and I quote) "liability reasons". Absurd.
You have to enact protection for the schools from that, or their insurance goes insane (or refuses to be available for any money).
Where I am the school line is mainly to prevent kids from running between the cars; anyone who has been authorized can just be let free and walk home - some of whom just walk a block to where their parent is waiting.
The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
I went to school in a semi-rural school district, one of the largest in the state by area. I just checked Google Maps and the high school is 13 miles away, 16 minutes by car (much of it highway), and maybe a half hour by school bus if I remember correctly. It could be a bit tedious, but it wasn't a terrible commute by any means.
> Parents are not simply choosing to drive their children to school because it’s fun to sit in a long line. It is becoming more of a necessity because schools are more spread out than before, or at least families are living further from their schools.
Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas. They work for all ages, in any weather where the school is open at all.
> The bar chart is pretty funny. "Over 3 miles" is the highest bucket? That's supposed to be far?
The buckets were chosen because 3 miles is farther than you'd reasonably expect kids to be able to walk to and from school every day. They say this right under the chart.
It's not helpful to do chest-thumping to compare whose farthest away from school when the entire point of the section is that 80% of people fall into that bucket.
> Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas.
Again, you've missed the point of the article. In cities, students are spread out in all directions. It's not feasible for a bus to loop around an entire city to pick everyone up when they're spread all over.
Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school? Seems like that’s a pretty blinkered view by someone who never leaves the city? In a rural district, very few kids can do that, and that’s why there are buses for everyone else.
Also, why wouldn’t school buses work in a denser area? That’s why they have multiple school buses doing multiple routes.
All the usual arguments for mass transit should apply for school buses, too. Density should make providing bus service easier, not harder.
> Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school?
Because we typically don't let kids drive. If they're able to walk to school then they can walk themselves to and from school without the help of an adult (even one driving the bus), once they are responsible enough to.
My kids' school used to let parents into the yard during dropoff and pickup. It was wonderful: a time for the kids to play with their friends and the parents to mingle and catch up. Now we have the car dropoff/pickup line. I'm for "everyone park and walk your kid into school" or "let kids go home by themselves if it's safe to do so" [0]. The car pickup and dropoff is the absolute worst.
[0] Our current bike route from home to school isn't optimal -- too many busy streets where drivers routinely run reds. That's a rant for another day...
Thinking through where I've lived -- a lot of the original school buildings built in circa 1950 were more in city center. The article touches on the move of schools to the outskirts of town as a cost savings measure but I think the opposite may be true.
As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.
There's an appetite for more and we've relocated schools to make more room not save money.
Schools relocated as parents moved to the suburbs. The schools saw this coming and built schools near those new houses. Schools sometimes see things coming and buy farmland 10-20 years in advance so that when the suburb expands they have the land to build on, but the schools are not built until it is obvious that the parents are coming.
My mom walked me to school until I was in 4th grade. She was a single mom and needed to work, so she decided to let me walk to and from school from then on. I made friends on that walk. 30+ years later, I am still friends with many of them even though we live hours away from each other.
I'm not a parent, so I don't know what I don't know; but, I've observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, "play dates" where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent's sight. Everything is being curated to "ensure" the kids are safe or on the "right" path.
I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.
I grew up in a suburban area so I am out of touch with the rural experience.
Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?
I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.
Yea. I get it. Schools are getting farther away. I was lucky to be 2-3 miles away which I think is a reasonable distance. But it really depends on what people are comfortable with which is what this whole article comes down to.
I wonder if this also takes into account families choosing to send their kids to schools farther away. In particular, sending them to private or charter schools that are farther away.
It's in part because every major US city has spent decades underbuilding housing (usually through zoning and permitting that makes middle-density housing implicitly or explicitly illegal), pushing everyone out into the burbs just to find homes they can afford.
I think we have cause and effect mixed up. The greater of highways post WW2 and the riots of the 60s, and increased affordability of vehicles drove suburbanization.
With less people putting housing pressure in cities, of course you get unbuilding of houses in the cities
It might be due to the school consolidations and schools being moved to cheaper areas.
The article does have a chart that shows distance from their school. I'm curious if there are closer schools that parents chose not to let their child attend. I have known a couple people that drive miles away to drop their kid off to private schools when they have a public school a mile away.
zoning and economies of scale in building out larger schools overall which from a bigger area. throw in pedestrian hostile suburban road design...voila
I disagree it is caused by sub-urbanization or zoning. Housing tracts are built with schools.
I would argue the primary cause is an attempt at "school optimization"; the choice to attend the "better" school over the closer school. Also, standardization of schools has decreased with the great variety of charter, private and magnet schools now, increasing the reasons to skip the local school. Personally, I think standardization is best. You could make the same argument about how people choose colleges.
At least where I live, most families are moving to new development areas to get more square footage per dollar. So the schools in the established part of town are seeing declining attendance and having to consolidate to prevent high administrative overhead. The new development areas are car-only hellscapes (neighborhoods on random parcels of land that have been bought up and developed with no forward thinking) with pickup lines as described in the article.
It's also fashionable for parents to choose a school across town for arbitrary reasons in order to signal that they care more about their children (in my opinion). We have tried advocating for the local options and the positives it has had for getting to know others in the community but most don't even consider.
I'm lucky to live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school, middle school, grocery store, and a few other shops. There are also safe ways for kids to cross from adjacent neighborhoods so there is still a lot of autonomy for the kids getting to and from school.
Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.
I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.
It doesn't, in the early 90s I was even younger in the US and I had to walk to school about a mile along a busy street. There was no other way for me to get there, no bus or anyone around to drive me.
80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.
Because road crossing are genuinely terrifying today. The automobiles are too big and the drivers are too distracted. I have a hard time walking my kids across the street for school sometimes and that's with a crossing guard.
People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.
Yeah, it's just insane that within .25 mile of a school, there is insufficient sidewalk and signaled crossings to allow walking. It's a complete failure of urban planning.
Growing up we don’t have sidewalks on most of the roads around school, but they were mostly low volume residential roads.
What we did have was the sixth grade kids acting as the school safety patrol. Those kids would be dismissed 5-10 minutes early, walk in pairs to pick up these bright orange flags, and then fan out around the school to a number of intersections where they were trained in how to be a crossing guard.
It made it safer for even the littlest kids (I walked to school by myself for half day kindergarten in the 80s) both at the crossing and along the roads because you had kids watching kids.
Today my kids’ school has one adult they hire to work about 90 minutes in the morning and afternoon to watch one intersection at the middle school and one at the elementary school. Would be much easier to have kids do it.
You also can't really choose to opt out without leaving the country because lots of places make it illegal for your under <13 kid to go anywhere on their own.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadAlthough, that specific picture’s grassy area is sufficiently large that there is room to walk far away from the cars.
That is why an SUV is chosen over a minivan.
I used to dream of walking just 4 miles to school.
I had to walk SIXTEEN miles in the wet, cold snow AND pay teacher for permission to come to school!
(edit: It's the Four Yorkshireman sketch. A joke, people...)
When I were a lad I used to walk sixteen miles just for a kick up the arse and then have to walk home again to work under t’spinning machine at t’mill for the other 14 hours of the day.
As children in such a situation, we would have a lot of fun as pedestrians to be a nuisance to the cars that drive on the road, too. :-) Having this perspective, I rather think that the reason why sidewalks are built is because of the complaints of car drivers.
Plenty of space to build a separated bike path for minuscule cost, though.
When I hear these stories about how children in USA go to school, I am always astonished.
In Europe, my parents took me to the school one single time, for the first school day, when I was 6 years old. Everyday after that I have gone there and come back alone, for a walk of about one mile and a half. Several years later, I continued my studies at a more distant school, to which I was going alone using the public transportation of the city, by bus, the same as most of my colleagues.
Even during the 1st grade (i.e. at 6 to 7 years old) any child would have considered very shameful to be brought to the school by their parents, as an indication that they would have been somehow helpless or handicapped.
Especially noted:
> Overall, rural counties had the highest rate of gun deaths.
- Large metropolitan counties had the highest gun homicide rate compared to rural counties.
- Rural counties had the highest rate of gun suicides compared to metropolitan counties.
:)
It really is a mental problem more than anything else. The inability to imagine a virtuous public realm welcoming to children, conjure its value in one's mind eye, and commit to the necessary material changes.
I live in a well-to-do community where many kids are chauffeured to school. The problem isn't just the parents' wasted time. It's the congestion and lack of agency this behaviour bestows on children. Head to head, I'd bet the kid who can navigate themselves to and from school outcompetes the one chauffered in a robotaxi in novel environments.
If it has to be techy-flashy, would it satisfy you if the bus was self-driving?
We can walk to school and see the bus when we leave the house and easily beat it by many minutes.
(Busses being slow and routes taking long is probably a design feature, allowing schools to let out at 3PM but parents to not have to be home until 5PM or later).
But the real final solution won't be robocars, it'll be robokids. Then if you lose one you can just get a replacement.
Though you are correct a bus is slow, done right they are faster than walking.
I'd almost bet nobody sued them. (I'll extend: I'd be surprised if a parent has ever won such a case.) An idiot parent made a stink at a PTA meeting and nobody could be bothered going head to head with Karen.
I know I’m behind the times, but I was surprised recently when, at an elementary school in the US, they showed me painted lines on the floor of the classroom, indicating the zones out of the line of fire for somebody shooting through the small, jail-like window in the door… apparently they train the babies on this.
I wonder what led up to a system like that—overcompensation for a really big mistake in the past? Abstract fears? The genuine wishes of the parents?
(Edit: looks from sibling comments like this [the pickup line technique] might be a hangover from the excesses of the COVID times…)
If something happens and you didn't do everything people imagine could have prevented it, you'll be fired, you'll be sued, and your name will be dragged through the mud.
If you take a bunch of unreasonable precautions and nothing happens, you're fine.
It all seems overdone and ridiculous, but when you get a phone call from your child as they sprint from the school building to the safety of the woods due to shots fired in the building, you're glad they did prepare for the "when to stay" and "when to run" decision...and then after you realize that it's even more ridiculous that they had to use that training.
That was the longest couple hours of my life, but knowing that the kids got the f** outta there made it a bit more bearable.
Of course we don't get to just choose innocence and be surprised by a style of evil behavior over and over again. But I wonder also sometimes if, just as suicides can inspire people who hear about them, large-scale and permanent institutional response to kids-shooting-classmates gives form and legitimacy to that avenue of acting-out, when disaffected kids think about acting out.
Agree, and it's tragic that this is were we are in the US, and the only concrete action we're willing to take (thoughts and prayers don't count) is to try to mitigate the impact of a shooting rather than preventing it.
The room was shocked into silence when she said "oh, and there was the time at my elementary school..." and had another experience of guns at a school.
We had been surprised by this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/one-in-15-amer...
2% of 340mm = 6.8mm injured in a mass shooting Conservatively assuming that's equally spread across all ages, and assuming a lifetime of 80 years, implies 6.8mm/80 = 85,000 people injured a year 85,000/500 mass shootings a year = 170 people injured per shooting
This is absurdly high - the Pulse nightclub shooting for instance injured 60 people.
It's obviously harder to analyze the number of people that 'witness' a shooting, but it also seems implausible that an average of ~595 people are witnessing each of these 500 shootings.
The problem here is that self-reported studies like this are incredibly unreliable. Interestingly, the same effect appeared in a pro-gun study, which cited an insane 2+ million defensive gun uses a year.
The system you describe isn't necessary to cause the traffic. It's not the root cause.
And the roads are limited by the school's ability to acquire land.
And no reasonable school is ever going to set aside any more land for a car line than is absolutely necessary that could otherwise be used to provide more school building/field.
Then sometimes, they leave their car and go in the school and we are trying to home or leave and they get angry with us!
Parents: It's never ok to block somebody's driveway! Residents: It's not illegal for people to park on the street in front of your house (assuming they aren't blocking your access of course)
And if you want to just do a drive by pickup, sure, no worries, stop in the middle of the street (with cars either side), and have your kids younger sister hop out, leaving the car door open, and go wander down the slope to help her brother with his equipment and carry it back up the slope. No-one else is using the street or lives there, after all, so they can wait a few minutes. Bonus points if you get belligerent with them or flip them off for being "impatient".
The parents that arrive early but have kids that are not ready to be picked up is precisely why the queues get out of control. At least with this method the cars are moved along much faster. If a car arrives in the queue but the kiddo is not yet found, when the car reaches the front it is asked to move to a holding spot out of the queue--much like fast food places do when your order is going to hold up everyone else in line.
When I was growing up kids within a mile of the school would walk themselves to school and back home with very few exceptions, often starting with first graders. But even a half mile is a long enough distance that many busy parents in the suburbs would choose to drive it rather than walk it four times a day.
80% of kids live too far away for walking to be feasible.
Many should be able to walk almost as fast as loading up the car, waiting in the queue, etc.
If three miles sounds like not a big deal, it certainly is when you have short legs, a backpack full of books, and uncooperative weather. I was lucky enough to walk to/from school for most of my schooling. It was only around one mile and it still took 30 minutes. As an adult I would probably balk at a 90-minute commute.
Just like all security theater, it's easy enough to get around. All you need is the same looking card and the identifier. Most of the time, that's just the kid's name on the card. Some color code the card by class grade as well.
I know this as I was helping a friend scoop their kiddos up from school, and they just sent me to the school with the card. Nobody questioned who I was. They just saw the card, radioed the name, and the kiddos were waiting at the curb when I eventually crawled up to the spot. Since the kiddos expected me, there was no "who is that guy" situation. Otherwise, just fake a card and get a prize is how lame this setup is
What I'm not fine with is there is no bus service for the 4 year old, we have to drive her (I bike, but it isn't a great route - we have to cross a busy 4 lane)
> In fact, in 2022 only about 28% of US students used the school bus to get to school.1 Using the school bus is trending down, as shown in Chart I. In 1969, about 38% of students used the bus, similar to 2009 with 37.5%, and further dropping in 2017 to 36.5%.
In other words, for nearly half a century, the percentage of students taking the bus only fell by 1.5%, and then five years after that, it fell by an additional 8.5%. It _might_ not be covid, but clearly something became a factor between 2017 and 2022 that wasn't at least as far back to 1969, and I feel like it's the obvious hypothesis that would need to be addressed first.
My kids school worked like that and it was still a mess, primarily because the parents were too stupid to follow the rules as to how to park their cars. I was set up so that everyone parked in parallel rows ||||| but the ones on the right were closest to the exit, so a bunch of people would pull into those rows to the point that they'd wrap around behind the other rows ___| and prevent people from getting into those rows. It was stupid and the school would send out notices and have employees walk down to the end of the row and tell people to move to the next one but it never stayed fixed.
This sums up all of the school pickup problems I see and/or deal with daily.
I also see many parents making dangerous decisions, most of which fit into the “I’ll go now” category, including accelerating quickly to get to the crosswalk before the kids crossing the street do. Just this school year, I’ve seen multiple near misses, with kids jumping back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a parent who just picked up their own kid.
Schools (EDIT: feel the) need to dismiss the kid to someone. That could be another parent, in the case of carpooling. It could be a bus driver. The root problem is parents chauffering their kids to and from school.
"Back in my day" the bell went and we walked out the gate and went home.
Do they? What's the citation for that law? Who are the schools dismissing the kids to when they walk home by themselves?
Seems like a fine balance to me.
Do they? What's the citation for that law? Who are the schools dismissing the kids to when they walk home by themselves?
What exactly is your problem here though? The fact that kids are kept in a staging area so they are not congregating in the same space that kids that are actively being placed into cars? That's an issue? You'd rather have that area congested with kids not paying attention doing kid things with their friends after school?
A small win in our family was in my son's final year of elementary school when he finally decided to try walking home 1.5 miles; that Spring was a delight for him. He was properly decompressed and had logged a minimum amount of physical activity for good sleep and all the rest.
Pay for the buses! Build the greenways! Normalize walking! And stop worrying about abductions for the love of gawd!
I got this kind of reaction from my son for all kinds of things I made him do by himself that made him uncomfortable. Now that he's 18, he thanks me for it and wonders why all his friends are so entirely unable to do almost anything out in public without help.
i agree a little bit. But at what point does the “growing up” part happen? you know…when they turn 18, and have to get a real job (or go to university), doing things that are uncomfortable and maybe not fun?
The process of growing up and becoming more mature is accomplished by challenging yourself and pushing boundaries, to grow as a person.
i guess im saying, it depends. its not as black and white as you suggest. Is the fear irrational? Maybe therapy would help. Or a buddy to walk home with. But you need to _somehow_ help kids grow independent.
The end goal is to create a happy, fully functioning adult.
https://www.ntv.co.jp/english/pc/2011/02/old-enough.html
Push this out thirty years. One set of kids was navigating the real world since they were 4. The other has been mollycoddled with overparenting and screen time. Which cohort do you think will be happier, better adjusted and better off?
Then realise that it's not uncommon to see grade schoolers taking the subway to and from school in New York.
The US is a massive country with a huge number of different climates and layouts, which is partly what makes articles and conversations like this so painful to read. Instead of the skeptical, critical thinking you'd expect from HN you get mess of "Car bad" "I wish we had European public transit" and broad generalization talk.
So did I. Have you been back? The kids in my school are dropped off when I biked.
Sure. Which of those cohorts do you think has more freedom?
> also enjoy a certain amount of diversity (in every sense, from thought to people) that simply isn't tolerated in Japan
You’d have a point if Japan were the only culture in the world with competent 4-year olds. They’re not. We’re the exception. To the extent there is a bubble it’s the American culture of isolating and surveilling kids to and from school.
Yes, and have agency and think for themselves - a key requirement of democracy and freedom.
It’s great that Japan has a civil society that makes a show like that possible, but don’t mistake it for more than it is. It’s the same mistake as generalizing from what you read in the news: it’s news because it’s unusual.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgBne2KTlDUyxLPg3oalg...
Japan is a monoculture and strictly traditional, not to mention very xenophobic. Everything works because the social penalties for violating those norms are severe. It’s effectively an ethnostate and not that long ago revered their god-emperor.
The U.S. is by contrast a diverse (geographically and demographically), broad culture of immigrant communities based on a concept of rugged individualism where states and townships run things as they see fit.
If you want to reshape the U.S. in the model of Japan … well
Not to reshape America into Japan, but attempt to keep the parts that are nice while integrating the best parts of other nations. America loved to claim it was a nation of immigrants; the French even sent you a gift for how much America would take the best of other countries (the brightest minds, the hardest workers), and build with that.
Maybe that's not how the country works any more, but it was a nice fantasy.
Are they teaching 'lifestyle' - how specifically? Does the US not teach it? And do you have any evidence that homogeniety has something to do with it?
Often "homogeneity" is a dog whistle for blaming minorities.
You can legislate environment, e.g., when all you have is car-centric sprawling suburbs, it's harder to walk / cycle to school.
I grew up in a 'streetcar suburb', and was walking to school on my own (or with friends) by grade four (my dad woke me up, made breakfast, and then left for work: I knew I had to leave for school after G.I. Joe finished (at 8:30, for 9:00)).
It's actually impressive that you can entertain yourself at 3-4 years old.
My perception of time at that age would have been such that I'd probably be very fearful of being abandoned if left alone for more than 2-3 hours.
But kudos to him.
Happened to my coworker: kids were playing outside and a neighbor called the authorities on them. Not clear if they really thought the kids were in danger, or just did it out of spite, but what ensued was a nightmare of CPS calling the workplace and a few follow-up house visits. The sad part is everyone involved can turn around and claim "we were worried about the children" and use that as a shield for whatever overzealousness or maliciousness may hide underneath.
This is one of those things laws are great at. Delete the power of idiot Karens and the culture will return to normal.
It works for Utah (and to a point, Texas); it can work for your polity, too.
When children are at far greater risk of abuse and abduction by concern trolls and the State, and they very much are in New World countries, your society is broken.
Free range laws say the opposite: that a kid over a certain age is allowed to be alone and the parents CANNOT be charged for it. It’s to encourage free range parenting.
Is there evidence of that? And would you define 'concern trolls' (beyond 'people who have concerns different than mine')?
"Trying to abduct my child either directly or by proxy" is not merely a question of polite differing concerns.
We know the concern is insincere because the OP’s example (children playing in their yard) cannot be considered concerning by a reasonable person.
How? Those idiot Karens are the ones writing the laws. They get on your state legislature and local town ordinances, and prevent more housing from being built too.
They have no competence and they do everything in the name of "safety", so you can't challenge them with logic or reason.
They are usually very privileged people with plenty of time on their hands so you can't play asymmetric warfare with them and expect to win.
Karen delenda est.
As a mandatory reporter if I don't report such a thing I can be put in prison. Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters (only mandatory reporters are allowed to go camping with scouts). I'm specifically told not to think, if there is any possibility I must report it and let the experts figure out if there is a problem or not.
This of course means the experts have to spend a lot of time/effort investigating where it is obvious there is nothing but they have to get enough evidence of that to close the case. This time is taken away from all the kids that really need help. Note that I have no idea how many kids who need help are discovered this way.
There are some issues here with what you're saying.
Mandatory reporter classifications are a legal construct. Activities can't make people into mandatory reporters. Only some mandated reporters are subject to reporting requirements when off-duty (for example, in many jurisdictions, your scout camp 'chaperones' may well not be obliged to mandatory report. Teachers and HCPs may, however, be. And it may vary for WHAT they are reporting.)
What is all that based on? Are you a mandatory reporter?
It might be dangerous to give advice. Even if you know your jurisdiction, others will vary.
> Many activities now make all adults mandatory reporters
I was specifically commenting that an activity doesn't make someone a mandatory reporter. That is you are a mandatory reporter based on your occupation, status, and what is happening. The OPs comment makes it sound like "if you're camping overnight with children, you become a mandatory reporter"
versus, for example, "The BSA's policy is to only allow people who are already designated mandatory reporters to chaperone camping overnight with scouts". The BSA cannot ... mandate ... that you are a mandatory reporter (in the legal sense, with protections and responsibilities accompanying) just by virtue of you saying "I'll chaperone this event" (though they can certainly say "it is our policy that you act as-if").
Come to think of it, they say it is mandatory to report, but are careful to avoid talking about the law. However it is recorded I have training. I would honestly expect the courts decide that I'm legally a mandatory reporter if it was discovered I should have seen something, even if I don't technically meet the law. (at least if they can find any way to read the law to get me)
All of this is of course on top of any moral or ethical imperatives about reporting suspected abuse, mandated or otherwise.
Change requires someone that doesn’t accept the status quo
(I don’t have kids, but hope to have some in the future, so this is me talking out of turn)
It's the reverse. CPS could be found liable if they ignored a report where there were indeed problems.
Also, I have family that work in CPS and it's really not the bad guy everyone that's "anti-CPS" seems to think. They have a HIGH bar to go over before they'll remove kids from a home. Things have to be particularly bad. And even then, the organization is slanted to get the kids back into the home ASAP. The state doesn't want to have to take care of kids.
Most of the time, it's work with the parents to make the environment safe.
It's quite literally the same thing as a cop checking up on someone for a reported domestic disturbance.
It's not as instant jail sentence or separation of parents from their kids.
Like I said, those are literally tools of last resort. Things have to be really bad. Like, for example, a kid that shows up with bruises and stories of violence from the parents won't instantly be removed. That's how far CPS bends over to avoid family separation. The research is pretty clear that family separation is about the worst thing you can do to a kid. That's why instead CPS generally will deploy things like mandatory therapy (if that). Or life skills lessons. And that's assuming they see major problems at the initial interview. If it's a false claim the actual most likely thing that will happen is they'll show up and say "looks like a false claim" and leave, probably ignoring future reports.
It's actually wild to me how anti-cps people are.
I'm not really anti-CPS as much as I'm anti unnecessary involvement with unaccountable people who can wreck other people's lives.
Or on how caring, responsible, and capable they are. You're making a lot of assumptions about a lot of people.
People say these things casually but let me point out that it's not at all trivial: Demonization is the first step used by the right-wing to oppress and harm people: Democrats, liberals, LGBTQ (esp trans people), immigrants, FBI, CDC, any regulators, high-ranking government officials in national defense, government workers, city residents in blue states (when will the National Guard be sent in?), ...
The casual spread of such ideas, which makes them more insidious because few people notice their significance, is a big part of demonization.
The worst part is that someone would thing this is the appropriate thing to do rather than observe the kids and in any case approach them and ask if they’re OK. The US has grown a culture of “don’t get involved” cowards hidden behind the legal system.
They also literally had a camera and crew on standby while also blocking off streets (off screen).
Like any reality TV, you're only seeing the story they want you to see.
Nobody should be gauging reality based on what you see on reality TV shows.
Edit: Occasional parts of the show are the camera people trying to avoid the kid who has turned and is walking right toward them.
1. Neighbors and friends are notified in advance. "If you see my daughter and she looks lost, please help her, she is doing an errand."
2. The destination is usually notified. "My daughter is coming to buy rice, let me know if she isnt there in two hours."
3. This practice is somewhat old-fashioned and rural. Many parents wouldnt consider it today.
Remember, the show was aired to a Japanese audience. If it were universal, it would not be worth televising.
I have observed many kids walking and biking to and from schools when these conditions seem to exist. Crossing guards help out for crossing busier roads near the school. However, there is also a car queue, perhaps for students who live farther away.
The reason it's more dangerous now is because of them. They privatized profit (in this case, the warm fuzzies of addicts shooting up on playgrounds) and socialized risk.
That is pollution. We should clean up that pollution, and ban those who created it from causing more.
I grew up in the 70’s where after maybe eight we had pretty much free rein. I rode my bike several blocks away and crossed two busy four lane roads to get candy at 7-11.
The world is no more dangerous now than it was then, and yet here we are, with parents being treated like criminals for letting their kids play in their own front yard.
It's a lot safer than the 1970s in most places.
We live about a mile from his current school, so he rides his bike whenever the weather permits. He's always in a good mood when he gets home.
I think it's funny that when he gets older, he'll be able to say that it was uphill both ways since we have a sizeable hill between home and school.
I only got dropped off if it was raining (that can be quite severe and thunderstorms are common) or if I was so late that I couldn't make it. In the latter case, I walked home.
Four years later, my school was miles away. No choice but dropoff lines (private school, no bus service). Had I been in the public school system, I would have needed to bus or be dropped off for junior high (that year and two after it, ~4 mi/6.5 km away traveling on and crossing multiple arterial roads without bike lanes or sidewalks for most of the way), but could have walked/ridden/driven myself to high school.
A lot of it will look something like this [1].
In England, it's actually somewhat unusual to have any space between two homes. Semi and fully detached homes command a fairly high price.
Roads were also not built for cars, so they tend to be much narrower than what you'd find in the US. All that means you'll find a much higher population density. You can even find a bunch of cobblestone roads without much effort.
I'd also say that cities are FAR more walkable than they are in the US. It's almost the reverse of what it is here, it can be easier to walk to the store than drive simply because there's a billion little pathways that lead everywhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_houses_in_the_United_...
https://whitearkitekter.com/news/kvarter-7-the-starting-poin...
However, what is the average size of a graduating class from secondary education? My high school class was quite small, just under 100, but it was an oddity and classes before and since were more like 120-150. Even in elementary school we had around 75 in each year. It is not unusual in larger metro areas in the US to have over 1000 students in each graduating class.
It's close enough for a 5-year-old to cycle, which is my point.
While it's a lot of parental idiocy, please do consider that lack of enforcement action around bullying is also part of the answer.
The impact this has on the quality of life of everyone, but particularly those that can't/won't drive, is enormous.
Our family suffers this insanity, too. This is one of the few things my spouse absolutely refuses to budge on: she won't let our child walk, bicycle, or even take the school bus to school because of vague "danger" that the news media is pumping into her. School is only 3 miles away and we live in a peaceful rural-to-suburban area. The kid could walk that distance at midnight and not be even remotely at risk. No facts, statistics or reasoning works.
Have you two ever tried walking along the road at around the same time? A calm walk along the same path your kids would be taking would put me at ease about the situation if I was in the same spot.
The most rambunctious, violent, harrowing and underpoliced part of the day
Not offering a solution, just an observation
The bus service is completely unreasonable. They shopped it out to the lowest bidder and the stops are all in terrible spots on busy streets. It also takes longer to sit and wait in the cold with a 6 year old than it would be to just drive there and back.
I don't know how your bus driver would handle it but even back in the 80s, some parents would drive their kids to the bus stop and let them wait in the car until the bus came. As they got older, like 5th or 6th grade, they would be taught to dress warm for the wait.
1st grade is probably too young to wait alone. But by 3rd grade I'd expect a child to be able to bundle themselves up.
One time the bus arrived a full hour late and the people we could call to ask where it was had already went home. I was considering calling the police. Turns out the bus was late because they didn't have enough busses and it had to complete a different route first.
School has been enshittified.
Edit: no one told these parents to drive up for pick up like a drive-through. In most cases, it is a choice. You can opt to park like a normal person and walk up. This article is absurd. Most of these parents are too lazy to walk 5 minutes. I’ve seen parents show up 40 minutes to be first in queue…just so they don’t have to get out of their cars. Makes zero sense.
You keep accusing other people of living in a bubble, but you're indexing your entire experience on to anecdotes of where you grew up as an individual experience.
It's like the man who has happened on "several" three-alarm fires in his life. How many times does a person happen on even one three-alarm fire in a lifetime? Let alone "several". The likelihood you're either speaking to an arsonist or a liar is very high.
Same is true for people who are robbed at gunpoint "several" times. The statistical likelihood that you're either speaking to a criminal or a liar is extremely high.
Walking home from school in many areas is perfectly safe. In other areas it's not. Making blanket statements or restrictions without context doesn't make sense.
The article is literally about how location effects are driving the changes.
> Pick one. If you knew the statistics on kidnapping in the US, you would not think of this as a “life-style” choice.
Child abduction is extremely rare in the United States.
You might be confusing sensational headlines with statistics. It's common to report missing children or parental disputes as kidnapping, which people conflate with children being abducted off the street
Here's an article about it with some real statistics from the FBI: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
For some perspective: The number of children abducted by strangers in the United States every year is similar to the number of children who die from head injuries from riding a bike: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8909479/
More people in the United States die from lightning strikes every year.
Discussing the practicality aspect is literally the point of the article.
Above I was addressing your arguments about danger and kidnappers.
Building primarily low-density car-dependent suburbs is a choice. Building horribly oversized car infrastructure is a choice. Not building bike or pedestrian infrastructure is a choice. Building one megaschool instead of a handful of smaller local schools is a choice.
People voted to have slightly lower taxes and spend a few hours a week waiting in the pickup line. That's a lifestyle choice, even if they weren't aware they were making it.
Child abduction by strangers is extremely rare: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-dat...
Where was this? Most places in the US are not this susceptible to random violence. In the suburban city I grew up in, I'd walk home from school and I never saw a firearm in public when I was a kid, aside from those carried by police.
Even though my family has the flexible schedule to handle dropping kids via car, by using the bus system I help support the community and others who might not have that flexibility.
Plus, the school bus is one of the first places a kid might be without (much) adult supervision. A tremendous growth opportunity, where you learn how to deal with discomfort, difference and drama.
I was never enrolled in any as a kid and never really expected for my kid to be, because I thought parents were the motivating factor for kids to get into a bunch of activities, but IME they aren't. My kid loves her activities and picking her up to shuttle her directly to it is a lot quicker than using a bus or walking.
Further, schools near me won't allow many children to walk home even within a safe walking distance with parental consent for (and I quote) "liability reasons". Absurd.
Where I am the school line is mainly to prevent kids from running between the cars; anyone who has been authorized can just be let free and walk home - some of whom just walk a block to where their parent is waiting.
I went to school in a semi-rural school district, one of the largest in the state by area. I just checked Google Maps and the high school is 13 miles away, 16 minutes by car (much of it highway), and maybe a half hour by school bus if I remember correctly. It could be a bit tedious, but it wasn't a terrible commute by any means.
> Parents are not simply choosing to drive their children to school because it’s fun to sit in a long line. It is becoming more of a necessity because schools are more spread out than before, or at least families are living further from their schools.
Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas. They work for all ages, in any weather where the school is open at all.
The buckets were chosen because 3 miles is farther than you'd reasonably expect kids to be able to walk to and from school every day. They say this right under the chart.
It's not helpful to do chest-thumping to compare whose farthest away from school when the entire point of the section is that 80% of people fall into that bucket.
> Necessity? I don't see what's wrong with school buses. They're just about the only practical form of mass transit in rural areas.
Again, you've missed the point of the article. In cities, students are spread out in all directions. It's not feasible for a bus to loop around an entire city to pick everyone up when they're spread all over.
Why is it expected that kids should be able to walk to school? Seems like that’s a pretty blinkered view by someone who never leaves the city? In a rural district, very few kids can do that, and that’s why there are buses for everyone else.
Also, why wouldn’t school buses work in a denser area? That’s why they have multiple school buses doing multiple routes.
All the usual arguments for mass transit should apply for school buses, too. Density should make providing bus service easier, not harder.
Because we typically don't let kids drive. If they're able to walk to school then they can walk themselves to and from school without the help of an adult (even one driving the bus), once they are responsible enough to.
[0] Our current bike route from home to school isn't optimal -- too many busy streets where drivers routinely run reds. That's a rant for another day...
As population and (perceived) facilities increased, the schools built new buildings in farmland or other wide open areas on the outskirts of town to have more room for stuff like stadiums, huge auditoriums, bigger playgrounds. The land may be cheaper but the new high schools are almost more like college campuses vs. stately buildings in the middle of town.
There's an appetite for more and we've relocated schools to make more room not save money.
I'm not a parent, so I don't know what I don't know; but, I've observed so many kids being shuffled between school, events, "play dates" where it is harder to build deep relationships outside of the parent's sight. Everything is being curated to "ensure" the kids are safe or on the "right" path.
I understand that we live in a different world, but I really do feel that its to the detriment of the kids.
In 1969 only about 30% of kids lived too far away from school for walking to be a realistic option.
In 2009 (and today) that numbers is around 80%.
Walking to and from school is great if you can do it.
Most people cannot do it.
Because the article is comparing the past with the present, I am curious what parents were doing in the 90s in your area? And, what are parents doing nowadays?
I'm assuming, either car or bus. And I can't imagine that would have changed since the 90s unless there used to be a school much closer.
I wonder if this also takes into account families choosing to send their kids to schools farther away. In particular, sending them to private or charter schools that are farther away.
With less people putting housing pressure in cities, of course you get unbuilding of houses in the cities
The article does have a chart that shows distance from their school. I'm curious if there are closer schools that parents chose not to let their child attend. I have known a couple people that drive miles away to drop their kid off to private schools when they have a public school a mile away.
Where I grew up, you had multiple smaller elementary and middle schools eventually feeding into a larger high school.
I would argue the primary cause is an attempt at "school optimization"; the choice to attend the "better" school over the closer school. Also, standardization of schools has decreased with the great variety of charter, private and magnet schools now, increasing the reasons to skip the local school. Personally, I think standardization is best. You could make the same argument about how people choose colleges.
It's also fashionable for parents to choose a school across town for arbitrary reasons in order to signal that they care more about their children (in my opinion). We have tried advocating for the local options and the positives it has had for getting to know others in the community but most don't even consider.
I'm lucky to live in an older neighborhood with an elementary school, middle school, grocery store, and a few other shops. There are also safe ways for kids to cross from adjacent neighborhoods so there is still a lot of autonomy for the kids getting to and from school.
This. I would have let my kids walk to school, but one of the intersections would have been totally unsafe.
Do we, though?
Kidnappings have been dropping steadily for decades, though maybe it's because kids are indoors more often now. Though FWIW, most kidnappings are from an insane relative, not the random guy promising candy in his van.
I was allowed to play outside unsupervised when I was only 9 years old in 1991, though maybe being on the Keflavik, Iceland US Navy base played a role in that.
Yes we do, and it's covered in the article.
It's not kidnappers. It's distance to school.
80% of kids live too far to walk. It's not that their parents are afraid of kidnappers, it's that they literally cannot feasibly walk to and from school every day.
And yet, even for students who live within 0.25 mile of school, a minority walk.
People are fucking nuts and are driving around in these oversized vehicles with their phones in their faces. You can very casually, very trivially observe this any time you want by simply walking down a semi-busy street and looking at the drivers as they go by.
What we did have was the sixth grade kids acting as the school safety patrol. Those kids would be dismissed 5-10 minutes early, walk in pairs to pick up these bright orange flags, and then fan out around the school to a number of intersections where they were trained in how to be a crossing guard.
It made it safer for even the littlest kids (I walked to school by myself for half day kindergarten in the 80s) both at the crossing and along the roads because you had kids watching kids.
Today my kids’ school has one adult they hire to work about 90 minutes in the morning and afternoon to watch one intersection at the middle school and one at the elementary school. Would be much easier to have kids do it.