chilling effect

[psocoptera]

Maryland parents get investigated for letting 10 and 6 year old kids walk home alone.

This hits really close to home - I have sort of assumed that if Q seems ready for it, we would let the kids walk to/from school themselves sometimes when he's in the 1st grade and Junie in 4th and they were 6/9. Half a mile, no busy streets except right by the school itself where there's a crossing guard, and it'll be their fifth year of doing it so I imagine they'll know the route pretty well by then. It's weird to think that concern about getting in trouble for it might actually be the limiting factor in that decision rather than actual concern for their safety. (Shouldn't CPS be busy full-time interviewing non-vaccinators?)

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

I was expected to walk home alone when I was 6 (although it was just a quarter mile--I lived around the corner on the same block, and the only street crossings were two cul-de-sacs or culs-de-sac or whatever). I remember my dad weening me off of being picked up from school a month or two into first grade by meeting me farther and farther from my classroom until eventually he was just standing in the driveway of our house, watching me come down the block; the scariest part was the day he switched from meeting me at the corner to meeting me just past the corner so I couldn't actually see him from my school. Actually, the scariest part was the anticipation of it--being told that we would move on to that step the next day--actually doing it wasn't that bad. But there were always hordes of kids walking home from school; I always had classmates and/or neighbors to walk with if I wanted.

(Maybe the hordes of kids is the difference between walking home from school and walking home in that linked story, where the kids are walking home from a park on a weekend?)

Once, when I was 17 (home on winter break from college, which, I guess the fact that I'd moved out already is important to the feel of this story), my 10-year-old brother was acting up in a restaurant after everyone had finished eating and all the adults were sitting and having boring adult conversations. Usually when this happened, one of my parents would volunteer to take whichever kid out for a walk in the parking lot of the restaurant--often with most of the other kids joining--but for some reason they were trying to ignore him instead. So I offered to take him for a walk, and my parents said fine, and my two sisters--15 and 12--said they'd come along, and I said in that case we'd just walk home. (It was almost exactly 4 miles, mostly along the very busy, 6-lane main street of our town, but only a few of the cross streets were busy.) And my mom said, ok sure, and we said ok, we're going home now. My 12-year-old sister started to sort of freak out, and my 15-year-old sister tried to shepherd her out of the restaurant before she could start crying, saying it was ok because I was an adult now. And we all left and started walking home. At which point my dad realized we might possibly be serious and ran out of the restaurant after us. But we said we were doing this, and kept walking, and he decided he didn't believe us and went back inside. Apparently once it was time to leave my dad tried to wait for us to come back, and it took a lot of convincing from my mom to get him out of the restaurant, and even then only with the promise that they would look for us on the way home and stop and pick us up. By the time they caught up to us, we were more than halfway home. My mom pulled up next to us, and my dad started screaming at us to get in the car. By then, even my youngest two siblings were confident that we were ok, and that I would get us all home safely, so we said no, and we just kept walking. My mom understood, and drove away, with my dad still yelling. Several minutes later, she came back without my dad, asked if we were all ok or if any of us were tired and wanted a ride, and promised to tell my dad we'd all walked the whole way even if one of us did need a ride now, but we all declined (although my youngest sister might have needed a bit of peer pressure/encouragement that we were almost home and that she was strong enough to make it the rest of the way). My mom then drove slowly along side us for the last 3/4 mile or so home. It was a really great bonding experience for me and my siblings, though--we all felt much closer to each other for quite a while afterwards for our joint rebellion and slight foray into perceived almost-danger, and some of the hour and a half of in-jokes that got built up on that walk lasted for years. (My dad has the audacity to criticize my various cousins for being helicopter parents, though.)

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

I'm not even a parent and I find this trend pretty awful and discouraging. My own childhood -- which was considered overly sheltered at the time -- would be impossible today. It's so sad. And so exhausting for parents, to have to monitor their perfectly capable children so closely! :(