I walked to school until high school; because only the high school was too far away to walk to. I walked or rode my bike to school in elementary school, alone or with a friend from the neighborhood. I’m guessing it was about half-a-mile; not as the crow flies, but as the roads ran.If your kid's school is close enough to walk, you're probably within a short radius of the school where a lot of other kids (plus some parents) are all walking to the same place. How "alone" could your kid be?
— SK (@sonik0909) September 15, 2022
The only cars on the street were men (!) going to work in the morning, or coming home in the evening. Seeing a car in the afternoon was a rare event. I remember being with friends, and I remember being alone. Being alone was not extraordinary.
On the other hand, today, in a city of four million people where cars are out and about 24 hours a day, it still happens that a student reports a car that followed them on the street or stopped too near them, or even tried to take them. The kids are aware of the risks of kidnapping for the same reason they are aware of school shootings. But they can do more to protect themselves from the former.
Risk? Or danger? Nobody in my childhood so much as feared a car slowing down near them in the street. Today we have road rage incidents where children die from gunshot wounds because a driver starts shooting on the freeway.
Risk? Or danger?
The risk is painfully real. If I didn’t raise my daughter to be aware of that, I’d be a very negligent parent indeed.
It shouldn’t be that way; but it is. Even the town I grew up in isn’t one where I would have let my daughter walk to school from the home I grew up in. Things have changed. Denying that is just shouting at clouds.
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