In Japan there are lots of kids commuting to school at six or eight years old, often across town or in different cities. Everyone thinks I'm batshit insane when I tell them what Americans would think of it. I am mostly on board with this, although I did walk an eight year old to the station in downtown Nagoya because he was walking there at ten pm.
Same in Vienna. There are no special school buses, kids just use the same buses and trains as everyone else. In more rural areas (such as where I grew up) kids either get the bus or walk/cycle. In fact, I remember walking home from school together with friends as being quite fun (highlight of the day?), with various adventures to be had along the way. And nobody freaked when it took me twice as long to get home as it should have because we found something exciting in a ditch along the way or decided we needed to climb a tree.
I'm pretty sure any incidents would hit the media pretty quickly. That said, driving your kids to school seems to be much more common now than it was 20 years ago.
My girlfriend, who grew up in the UK, was amazed when she first witnessed the kids on public transport, but then the UK is an extreme case of overzealous protection. These days you apparently can't just pick someone else's kids up from school without special paperwork.
Which does not work? I am too lazy to look for sources right now, but wasn't there a research wich found that childern in UK are the most unhappy in the world? Not to mention problems with alcohol and teenage pregnancy.
I guess this kind of protection is like trying to protect someone by not allowing him to walk on his feet. When finally let go he'd just collapse at once.
I've been to Vienna, and the public transportation there is great.
I was 12 when I first went there to visit family, and I went everywhere by myself (not 9 as the original, but still younger than the US parents would like).
As a tourist I found the way that the destinations were announced over speakers extremely useful, and every stop had maps of the public transportation, timetables, etc.
I'd say it's very likely a 9 year old local would have no problem whatsoever, and I wouldn't find it irresponsible (even less so in today's cell phone age).
I came year wanting to say exactly the same thing.
I walk each day past a primary school and all kids arrive unassisted. There are however teachers welcoming them at the gates and one police officer at the road crossing. But other than that they are on their own.
In Japan, motorcar drivers actually seem scared of pedestrians. I have difficulty crossing the road. In my country you usually stand still beside the road and wait for the cars to pass (for an opening). Here if you even look like you want to cross the road at some point in the future, the cars stop.
Haha yeah, I can imagine that poor tourists coming to Greece from the UK are in for a surprise. We are such shit drivers, but over here (London) if you see a car coming and wait by the sidewalk for it to pass, they stop and let you through. I mean, it'd just be faster for both of us if you continued at normal speed, then I wouldn't have to wait for you to slow down!
Yeah, my country has worse drivers than Greece (trust me).
Here is how I cross the road in Japan: I wait at a place that I want to cross, but I turn my body away from the road. That way they think I am just standing there and drive past (instead of awkwardly stopping, etc...).
A lot of Japanese people that I've talked to don't have driving licenses. One person specifically said that it was because she was afraid of hurting others. That is quite different from my country's SUV style entitlement.
I had the exact same experience coming to London from Athens. I was in absolute shock that cars were stopping for me to pass when I was at a pedestrian crossing. You can't even stand near a crossing without having cars stop, just in case. Of course this only makes it worse when I go back home, and get more and more irritated at the apparent invisibility of pedestrians..
Come to think of it, I didn't think there was another Greek HNer in London, this is definitely worth a beer. Drop me an e-mail, or come to the next HN meetup this Thursday.
Ah, unfortunately I'm leaving this week :/ I'm going back home to be disappointed at our road manners :P I've been here a year, that's unfortunate... Thanks for the offer, though!
My all time favorite unaccompanied traveller is my great grandmother, who emigrated to America with the address of family living in Chicago in her pocket. Being a young lass from the Irish hinterlands, she had no clue how to get there from NYC, and asked a passing Irishman how to do it. He called her a cab, and when the cabbie arrived asked for his license.
"Now James, this is how it is going to be. Young Miss May is going to visit her family, the Henries, out in Chicago. Here is money for the trip. After she gets there, she is going to write me a letter praising your character as a gentleman. If I do not receive that letter, James, I swear by all the saints that you are a dead man."
Obviously, since I am here to tell the tale, James was completed his task with dispatch.
Me (4 back then) & my cousin (5) took off one day from the city where our moms were with us, to our home city (20km - not much) - we walked, ate some grass, kicked some signs, tooks two buses - one in right direction, one wrong - total from 9:00AM, uptill 4pm or later we were at the door of my grandmother & grandfather asking for the truck toy (that's why we started, we needed to play in the sand and we were missing an important vehicle).
That was in Bulgaria, around 1980s - Yes people were worried, but not much - it might've been the communist era that either did not produce much child related crime, or such were hiddenly took and dealt with (by still spreading that everything is okay).
Nowadays (especially was it 2004-2005) - there was whole media frenzy of kids disappearing - for about week or so. I've looked at the statistics - and nothing was different for that week compared to previous years - it's just that media picked it up.
It's exactly that - media - not news source - I'm talking about CNN, FOX, MSNBC and the crap that they do. I used to love CNN, I don't think I do anymore...
Anyway just my experience.
Oh, and later it was no problem for me taking of one part of the city (Burgas) and walking 2 or 3km through couple of streets, just to go to where my grandmother worked, and they go back, and stroll the streets.
Hell, our most favourite kid movies were about kids strolling all day streets either at their home cities, or at tourist resort places their parents were staying.
But nowadays.. It's just too much, too soft, and too tight at the same time.
As the article is saying: "Preaching independence while warning against it."
I grew up in rural Alaska. By the time I was 8, I was hunting small game unsupervised. I was allowed to operate an ATV on my own as soon as I was physically able to work all the controls (I rode it with a parent's assistance before that). It was a bit longer before I got to take out the motorboat on my own. I may have been a bit younger than average for the area when I started doing some of these things, but not by much.
None of these things caused problems. People didn't start having ATV or gun accidents until they discovered alcohol and inhalants. No children were eaten by wolves or bears. I was a much happier child because of the freedom, and I think, a much more self-reliant adult.
Since I was 9, I looked for my 6 years old brother after school and brought him back home by bus every day. Granted, occasionally it would take me 20 minutes to find him and I'd get frustrated at why he was playing in the sand pit when we were supposed to go home, but it's not like we ever got kidnapped by strangers or anything....
From the point of view of a Soviet immigrant to the US, the predominant public reaction the author describes is quite bewildering. It is hard for me to imagine how an 8 or 9 year old child riding a subway could be the basis of a sensational news story; if anything, 8 or 9 sounds like a seasoned, advanced age.
I came here when I was 6, in 1992, and did quite a bit of my growing up subsequently in a well-tended, well-watched family-oriented graduate student housing facility on the campus of a private university. Not exactly the 'hood. My parents, as all the (predominantly foreign) residents there, were busy graduate students trying to make it on a ~$10k/year stipend with student visa-based work restrictions, and, being in the humanities field, faced quite daunting demands to excel so distinctively according to the rules of their field in order to have a stab at staying in this country after their visa ran out. So, of course, they were busy working/studying until 10-11 PM.
Never in my wildest dreams as a Moscow child could I have imagined that leaving me alone in that highly enclosed, heavily security-patrolled, communal environment full of watchful neighbours and fellow parents would be considered "child neglect" under Indiana state law, nor that, in fact, it would be so until the age of 12 to leave me home alone for _any_ amount of time, strictly speaking, as a statutory matter.
In fact, I was one of the very few children of ex-USSR or Eastern European extraction who was not, at some point during this tenure, essentially kidnapped by university security with no notice given to the parents and placed in a foster family for a few days while the shocked and aggrieved parents were badgered with saber-rattling about child neglect by whatever state agency. I avoided it narrowly by a stroke of luck; on many occasions, e.g. winter nights, when I was playing outside - in the dark! - at the precarious hour (!) of 8 PM, I saw the university cops peering out of their patrol cars, eyeing me like prey. Honestly, these keystone cops were a far greater danger to my welfare than any conceivable predator. They were often unpleasant and openly contemptuous, amplifying the psychologically traumatic fear of police and other martial authorities that is already built into any child of Soviet parents by inheritance. To this day, I still have this reaction to cops that I must surely be "guilty" of something, even though I'm innocent. The way that they provided foundations for that feeling, with their hostile dispositions, abrasive lines of questioning, etc. was a lot more injurious to my development as an individual than free association with other kids until mid-evening in a protected communal yard.
It is difficult to imagine a safer environment for a child than the kind of place that this was. If there were ever a place where there were some adults around at almost times, and neighbours you knew and could count on in case of an emergency, this was definitely it.
The stream of sanctimonious busybodies from the state child/welfare agency that would occasionally come around to harass these poor, tired foreigners was just unbelievable. Now that I've lived in Georgia for 10 years, I make an analogy to what Georgia's agency - DFACS (Department of Family and Children's Services) - spends its time doing in predominantly working-class Hispanic-occupied trailor parks and poor black neighbourhoods down here.
Some of this is just an incorrigible cultural and institutional defect, as other comments have pointed out. Another important difference with the USSR specifically, though, is that we had households with two working parents for a lot longer than has been normative in the US; our entry of women into the workforce dates back almost to the revolution, in keeping with the Marxist gender equality premise. So, Soviet society developed institutional solutions and accommodations[1] for this relatively early. A necessary consequence is that children had to lead a parent-independent existence much earlier in their lives than if the premise of a full-time stay-at-home mother is granted.
The U.S. stands far and beyond any other place in this respect, though I suspect some of the same influence is starting to creep in elsehere as well.
In The Best Country in the World(*), I used to walk to first grade by myself and thereafter rode buses/subway/trains by myself or with schoolmates - just like everyone else here. Most of us even came home to an empty house and had to manage to feed ourselves before the parents got home some hours later.
This used to be the norm about a decade ago still when my younger brother was in that age range, but recently based on public discussion it seems the bubblewrap parents are gaining a foothold.
When I went to study for a semester in Rochester, I didn't have a car and tried at first to hitchhike.
What really surprised me was how scared most people were (especially when it was around 8pm at night) when I would approach them. It was as if they automatically thought that only a thief or a criminal would be coming to them in a car park.
In France, Spain and Germany (I used to walk 40 minutes to school there when I was 12), I've never seen that, people don't expect the worse to happen to them and don't seem to have their heads filled with tabloid whatifs scenarios or at least not yet.
"A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old ride New York City’s subway by himself."
a) Outside of how many acres of Manhattan?
b) Which lasted until when? The next silly-ass story for an ADHD media cycle, I suppose.
Back in the day (Kennedy administration) having your Mom walk with you to school was a fine way to be marked as a loser (though we didn't know that word yet). I usually read on my way to work, but I'm fairly sure I do see kids younger than middle school riding solo or at least without adult supervision on DC buses.
I really wonder if all these parents today were so tremendously traumatized by their freer range that they have to coop their kids up all day to avoid that kind of catastrophe? Are there really millions of child rearing adults suffering from PTSD because they go to ride the bus alone at 9? I've yet to really understand this strange phenomenon of the shrinking roaming area.
I grew up in an urban area, then moved at 10 to a very rural one. In both places my "roaming" area was several miles in any direction from my house. In fact, my parents set my roaming area in the city to a specific triangle of roads that they felt were too big to and dangerous for me to cross, but weren't too mad when my friends and I did on occasion veer outside of those lines. If I had an older friend with us (he had to be at least 13) then we could pretty much go anywhere our feet or bikes could take us in a day.
I did this until I was about 10, then we moved to a very rural area and my boundaries became very large indeed...basically as far as I was able to walk.
My parent's were aghast when they were contacted by the local rural middle school after the principle had seen me cutting across an intersection in front of the school after class one day to get to the local shopping mall to hang out at the arcade. He demanded that I either take the bus home, or get a cab to take me literally across the street, an activity I had previously performed, at a much younger age, dozens of times a day.
I wonder if the outrage over this is part of the same trend described in the 20-somethings article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614280 ). If kids are more sheltered, then it would make sense that it takes longer for them to "grow up" and start making decisions of their own. It could also explain why the partying and debauchery is so crazy at American colleges (the first real taste of independence), although I can't honestly say I know what its like anywhere else.
I would absolutely worry, but I hope I'd be able to let it happen.
This is a nice, semi-controlled experience that's probably good for everyone. Should the parent and child become separated, for example, I'd imagine that the knowledge each has--that arriving independently at a safe destination is routine--is serious peace of mind factor.
This is similar to the fire safety plans a lot of us did as kids. Didn't anyone else crawl out the window and down the fire escape and meet our parents a few blocks away, despite the building not actually burning, just to be prepared?
Times are different. I walked to school since kindergarten, but no way I let mine when it came time. (Certain years we drove just because we lived where there were no bus routes, and making a small kid walk that far with heavy backpacks just never made sense from a time POV.) Imagine that though, they actually survived my paranoia.
But now? No way unless they were a few years older. NYC needs to watch more of that news they dismiss: Attempted kidnappings happen a lot in the burbs. All paranoia is local though.
I've lived without a car for about 2 1/2 years in Suburbia, USA. The character of my neighborhood has changed. You see more kids outside playing. Teens walk to the nearby shopping center now. So this stuff can change -- and I think it needs to. I think Peak Oil will compel America to make some changes of some sort. Hopefully, we will use it as an excuse for constructive changes.
This kind of thing is very common in almost every corner of the world where there are subways and in general a decent public transportation system. That's how my brother and I grew up. We were basically on our own since 1st grade because where I grew up everything was a two station ride and a block away.
Something similar is also common in very rural places. Where walking miles through the woods, or along a dirt road are the normative ways local kids find each other.
My boss, a native californian, told me that he used to take the bike and cycle for about mile, two or more to his school, and then back (San Fernando Valley).
And that’s special? Jesus. I was walking to elementary school starting in first grade (half a mile) and biking to my next school right from the beginning (fifth grade, a bit more than a mile) and I was taking the bus when the weather was too bad for me to take the bike (which includes walking half a mile to the nearest bus station). That’s nothing special in Germany. Everyone does it.
I live in boring suburbia. The elementary, middle and high schools are a 10, 15 and 20 minute walk from house respectively. Somehow, I still have to contend with kids all over the neighborhood dutifully lining up so that the bus can come pick them up at the crack of dawn and then drive them, 2...maybe 3 minutes to their schools. It's stupid.
Actually, my understanding is that "Little Red Riding Hood" is a tale of sexual predation. "Little Red Riding Hood" is a euphemism for the clitoris and it's generally a lot more obvious in French that it's a sexual morality tale.
