Louisville Mojo: Are children safe outside?

Fall is always a nice time to walk and perhaps never more than this perfectly turned-out year. So probably you've been noticing the groups of neighborhood children enjoying leisurely walks home from school in the afternoon, playing kick the can or dragging a stick along the fence.

Ha!

Of course, you're not seeing that.

Hardly anyone walks to school anymore. In some neighborhoods, students barely even walk home from the bus stop! Instead, two times a day, clusters of cars sit idling at bus stops, where children eventually emerge from buses to get immediately into cars, breathing only the idle exhaust in the few seconds that they're outside.

(Read more about the yuck factor of idling cars here.)

There's a combination of reasons for this. The list includes laziness, a student assignment plans that mean fewer students live close enough to walk, public policy decisions that have left many neighbors without sidewalks along busy roads, increasingly complicated family patterns and schedules, and, of course, fears of abduction.

And it's not just about getting to and from school, the nicely done blog called Free Range Kids writes about people who are scared to let their children get the mail at the end of the driveway, or walk to a neighbors house. Even playing in the backyard, alone, can be frightening for modern parents.

Earlier this year, The New York Times wrote about the trend away from walking to school, focusing mostly on the abduction issue. (It was tied to the then-recent news about Jacycee Dugard's release from captivity, which reminded parents of why, exactly, they were so fearful.)

As you would expect, the newspaper dutifully reported that parental fears were way overblown, that the risks of stranger abduction was actually quite small.

Although they did so partly with bogus statistics. At one point, for example, they reported that only 115 children are kidnapped each year, while 250,000 are injured in car accidents. This is, on its face, a laughable comparison. Among other things, while no one wants their child to be injured in a car accident, whiplash is better than being kidnapped.

Nevertheless, the larger point is quite right. The long-term health risks of the lifestyle we're teaching our children, where they take cars everywhere and rarely go around the block without supervision, are surely more likely to occur than the very small chance of abduction.

Most thoughtful parents don't like the way our current style of supervision undermines the growing sense of independence and autonomy that children of previous generations had, when they rode their bikes around the neighborhood looking for new kids to invite to a pickup ball game. (Or whatever.)

Still,there's an aspect of the equation that doesn't get looked at enough.

When children of my generation roamed the neighborhood, hardly anyone had central air and few women worked outside the home. The neighborhood was full of kids, yes. And it was also full of women, who could hear a cry for help through the screen window, or who might spot a problem brewing while she was hanging clothes on the line.

In many neighborhoods now, a kid roaming the neighborhood would be, really and truly, alone. That is the state of things now and if we want to address this issue sensitively, we need to start with that recognition.

Public Domain Pictures.net

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Rick Redding mon nov 16 2009 at 12:00 pm ·


	in my neighborhood, I saw a Mom actually drive a middle school kid literally four houses down to the corner to catch the bus and then drive home. In nice weather. This was not more than 100 yards. Kids can, and should, walk more to get places.

PhoenixFellow mon nov 16 2009 at 3:17 pm ·


	Kids will never feel obligated to walk as long as adults depend on cars as their means of transportation without even considering walking. What are teens looking to get the first chance they get their license? A car for themselves. I'm the oldest one left in my neighborhood's generation of kids, at least I remember and cherish those times we got the whole crew together to play kickball or toss the frisbee around. I know exactly where you're coming from as recently as the 90's.

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blogs: Let's talk about family life