News/Commentary

We live in an old-fashioned, school-centric city neighborhood—-one in which many kids walk to school or are walked to school if they are six or seven.

It is a wonderful way to start the day, to see them coming down the sidewalk, lugging their book bags.

However, after the recent story about the kidnapped child held for years, I flinched when I saw a very little girl, walking a dog far bigger than she, all alone. She was about five.

Why flinch? A young male jogger was passing by me. He looked over at her and then he looked over at her again.

She really was too little to be out by herself.  Although I was rushing to get to Pilates, the newly paranoid me decided to slow down and see the jogger go far enough to be sure she was safe.

Then I saw a silver-haired woman, walking a dog which had to be a sibling of the very little girl’s dog. It was clear that she was out with her grand-mother, who clearly believed in giving children and dogs their freedom. The child never had been out of her sight but she was not in the line of sight of me or the jogger.

The article below, “Why Can’t She Walk to School?” makes the point that, as horrific as the disappearance of any child is, it is exceedingly rare. Far more common are injuries due to cars. Why are we not paranoid about cars?

Because nothing about a car wreck, however tragic, becomes material for endless replaying, commentary and speculation on television about these cases, that’s why. These are sensational, heart-breaking stories and a ratings dream.

If your only source of news was television (or a milk carton), you would think children are disappearing by full busloads every day and everywhere.

Schools are fearful of being held accountable. Their leadership puts into place pick-up and drop-off policies which are stringent. These have their roots in child custody disputes, when schools have to be clear the authorized person is, in fact, the one who is picking up the child.

Parents themselves are haunted by the specter of the story of one child who disappeared. Obviously, I was ready to act like the police just because a jogger glanced twice at a small girl. Maybe he was only as surprised as I that one so young could successfully handle such a big dog—-which she did do.

At some point, we have to decide if we are going to let our daily lives be driven by remote fears or real concerns.

When I was in about the third or fourth grade, I was walking home from school as we all did. A man stopped and offered me a ride. “No, thank you,” I said. I was not scared but I knew I did not know him. He drove off. When I got home, I told my mother. I knew very well you did not talk to people you did not know. I knew very well it was odd that he didn’t identify himself. “I am ______, your grand-father’s friend from ____.” That told me that this was not right.

Now, my mother could have made Martha Stewart do a double-take at her spring cleaning standards. She could get really worked up about dust.

She would not, however, allow me to see any fear she may have had about this.

“You know if you ever had any reason to be uneasy, you can go to anybody’s house and ask for help.”

So true.  All the kids who walked any route to school in my home town were known to the neighbors. We had a safety net. It was dense, tightly-woven and would always catch us if we needed it.

There are no simple answers to this problem because so many roles adults play in a child’s life must be discharged responsibly. There are no simple answers because of the peer pressure from other parents. A friend used to send her children across Washington on the Metro and their friends’ mothers were shocked in the 1980s. Nonsense, said my friend. These are city kids. They have to be able to live here, she told them. She did not yield in her conviction that city children had to know their home towns just as well as I knew mine.

That was then.

Before there was a steady drum-beat of messages that made adults wary of letting kids walk to school when they live within reasonable walking distance.

It is not right to dismiss these parents as neurotic or over-protective.

It also is not right that kids have to grow up this way, unable to trust the world, as they know it, around them.

A new safety net needs to be woven.

Any ideas?

The New York Times

…“Certain realities also shape these procedures (walking to school versus being driven), such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.

“But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.

“Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.

“When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.”

Source: New York Times, September 12, 2009