Here in Switzerland children start walking to school at around 5-years. Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly.
Young children also walk to the elementary schools near me. When I’m at the park with my kids, it’s common to see other very young kids show up alone on their bikes or on foot to play in the park. This is in the US.
I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
The US is a big country. The state this happened in has a similar population to the entire country of Switzerland. Laws and cultural norms vary across the country, but this story is unusual even for the location it happened in. That’s why it’s a news story.
As an international reader I'm missing some context here. Isn't a gated community supposed to be singularly safe? With private guards (like the guy who took the kid to his mom) patrolling and no strangers allowed in etc? Why did the guard tell the kid that "bad people" might take him? Where would those bad people come from? It really all does sound very weird.
More like the busybodies who have never experienced an adverse event in their life and are utterly ignorant of recent history and think some news coverage means the entire country is in terrifying threat of pedophiles grabbing kids off the street.
These were the same people who insisted in the 90s that we teach every kid about stranger danger while the actual causes of that kind of stuff, which has always been overwhelmingly someone known to the family, is ignored.
The same people who insisted you were going to be constantly bombarded with offers of free drugs which had of course been spiked to kill you, or that your halloween candy would definitely be poison because one time a weird uncle harmed their family that way, or that "Rainbow Parties" are a real thing that anyone should have ever cared about.
These people are insanely credulous, and live in perpetual fear of whatever Nancy Grace insists is coming to kill them tomorrow.
> I think international readers see these headlines and assume the entire US is like this, but the reason the story is a headline is because it’s a dumb sentence. This is going to get appealed.
That would still be pretty bad though. An absurd sentence like this should not end with the sentence being reverted but in changes that prevent it in the future, e.g. by updating laws or disciplining those that did not apply them correctly. This isn't just one person fucking up this is the security guard fucking up, the police fucking up, CPS fucking up and then the judge fucking up.
For sure. My youngest, who was 13 years old over the summer so a bit older, went on a few 25+mile bike rides on a nearby bike trail. He was gone for several hours, we just made sure he had plenty of water, sunscreen, and a reasonably full phone battery. This is in northern Chicago suburbs, Lake County. He absolutely loved the freedom, and we were able to periodically check is location. My MIL thought we were insane for letting him do this. She also thought we were insane for letting our oldest, a HS senior, do a 4 week summer course at USC in LA. He delighted in telling us about going off campus to play basketball, etc.
I'm also in the US, in a city in a populous state and I've never seen that, as a matter of fact it counts as child abuse in my state as well. Why don't you mention where you live and what state you see this within? Is it because what you're seeing is anecdotal in some particularly rich area? I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
It is actually telling you didn’t even check this. It’s because you are so 100% convinced it’s true. This shows how bad the situation is in some places.
> I can assure you leaving children under 16 unsupervised is illegal in most states.
This is absolutely untrue. Only 3 states have an age specific standard. Most states set no specific limits by age. The bigger problem is the vagueness of the laws we do have in place around child neglect which allows a cop or neighbor to be the biggest determining factor of whether you get a knock on your door.
I live in Colorado, we have a "free-range" law that protects parents allowing their children to play outside unattended. It's a bit sad that such a law needs to exist, but I'm glad we have it here.
In our neighborhood it's very common to see kids (including mine!) outside doing things by themselves. We bike with our oldest son to school (he's 7), but plenty of other parents let their kids bike to school on their own. I think it helps that we live in a city with good pedestrian infrastructure and lots of green spaces. The whole city is better for it and I wish more US cities would do the same. My sister's neighborhood in a different state feels like a very fancy prison, nice homes, but you can't even go to a park without getting in a car.
Why was the law added in the first place? Just not creating a stupid law that prevents such restrictions is enough by default (it's legal unless it's formally illegal)
> Just not creating a stupid law that prevents such restrictions is enough by default (it's legal unless it's formally illegal)
Not practically true at all. Everywhere has child endangerment laws, and I would bet that the vast majority of them can be readily used to prosecute the types of behaviors the free-range laws are meant to protect.
Our neighborhood in the northeast US does the same (minus the hard prohibition against parents going with them). Our 5 and 9 year old walk to school daily, usually picking up the neighbors' kids (6, 6, 10, 9, 7, 7) along the way. If we happen to be free sometimes an adult will walk with them, sometimes we start walking with them and then stop for coffee with a neighbor while the kids continue on, sometimes they go by themselves.
I can't imagine living somewhere where that was prohibited.
> If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit.
It depends of the town/location and region. In our town, police had to be involved several times due to different issues with creeps targeting 12yo or less.
Edit:And I forgot, as it's Switzerland, police moved only because parents were accompanying their kids and almost done justice by themselves.
Protecting creeps is a national sport here too.
Yes, I’m Swiss and walked to school starting around 5. I was hit by a car (due to bad judgment on my part) on the way back from school at 6, though, so it’s not all roses.
I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age, so I would not necessarily be super comfortable trusting them around those attractive nuisances, even though I’m on board with the “let them walk to school” policy. It’s a difficult balancing act.
> I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age
Norwegian here.
I rescued a girl one year older than me from a small stream/brook that had grown a bit larger due to rainwater when I was 7 years old.
Also walked to/from school alone from when I was 6 years old. I remember parents were allowed to walk us to school the first week, and then we were supposed to get there on our own. About 1km walk.
I'm very, very pro "let them walk to school on their own", and my daughter has walked to school on her own since she was 6 or 7.
That's lovely. Also all the heartwarming ways things work in Japan where kids get a lot of autonomy and live their own little lives on the way to school, among other things.
I went to Japan a few years ago - I saw a lot of beautiful things, but the image of schoolchildren in their yellow hats on the train system is one of the most memorable/replayed in my mind.
>> It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Pedibus. So civilized. People in California don't believe half the things I tell them about life in Switzerland, such as "if you try to drive your kid to school the cops will chastise you" and "if you drive 40 in a school zone you'll automatically get a year in jail" and, of course, "gas is nine bucks".
The US is extremely car focused, which they often don't really realize. Things that are normal here (like everybody has a bike) conflicts with their cyclers vs drivers culture. Such a distinction simply does not exist here. Instead we have roads that are red with signs "Cars are guests". Or indeed city centers where cars aren't allowed.
When I go to the US I'm often surprised that you can't get to things that are only a km away by foot because a road is blocking you, no way to cross it.
On holiday in the Florida we walked to the gated entrance to the community to ask whether delivery drivers got access or we needed to pick it up at the gate. The way they looked at us, you would think we had two heads for arriving on foot.
I got into an argument with a security guard at a gated community who tried to demand we give him a name, address, and "what's going on?" before he'd let us in.
Fixed that when I asked if he personally called 911 and when he said no, "So, before we make this a lot more formal, are you understanding that you are now obstructing emergency services personnel in the performance of duty?"
I once walked into a drive through in Texas (Galveston) with a group of scientists there for a conference (because main restaurant was closed), we almost got shot (no not really but people felt very very threatened and threatened us)!
My mother tells much the same from when we Australians were in Denver for five months in 1996 about walking a kilometre to school. Also mild astonishment at ideas like baking cakes not from a packet mix.
Mind you, there weren’t many who would walk to school like that in Australia, and the number has continued to dwindle. But there were some.
To be fair, there are an embarrassingly large number of places in the US where safely walking to a store a few hundred meters away would be very difficult at best.
As a naturalized American who lived in 3 other countries including two in Europe and who travels often all over the world, married to a European, etc I must say the US has its perks and it’s definitely in my top 5 countries to live. I lived mostly in the south and the east coast so I don’t have a full picture of the US as a resident. But it’s the same in Europe, living in Berlin is very different than living in Sicily, even Milan is very different than Sicily being the same country. So to be fair the US should be compared to Europe not to a particular country. The car culture in the US I think is fine because the country is built around it, the interstate system is pretty good and gas is cheap. I do like road trips very much, at my own pace not having to worry about train/flight schedules. In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans. I also like that you can talk to Americans everywhere and get to know people. In Europe you start talking to a stranger they look at you like you went crazy. Being social is part of having a good quality of life too, so the US ranks pretty high there.
So in the beginning of your paragraph you say it's "very different" depending on where you are in Europe, but towards the end, you generalise the entire continent.
I travel all over the world for work(Though mostly Europe) and my experience has been that Europe is a very diverse place.
Currently outside London where you can absolutely chat with random strangers(I'm from Sweden, so obviously I don't).
I don't know what you mean with family roadtrips being prohibited? Maybe too expensive, that's all I can think of. Cheap motels are rare and, obviously, fuel is much more expensive. All other necessities are easily available and legal.
> For most Americans it might add up to 7-10 hours a week or more.
I live in a major city. It is more like ~4 hours/wk for me. The car drives itself. It is very relaxing. It is my alone time for either thinking or listening to podcasts. I am in a nice air-conditioned, HEPA-filtered cabin and I can be on my own schedule.
>In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans.
What?? Caravan or road trip with regular car is a very common vacation in Europe. In France there are tons of free places to stop over the night. In the nordics you can camp anywhere that isn't close to someones house, even on private land. But no I wouldn't take the car instead of a 2-3 hour flight, especially as our cities have excellent public transportation.
Our school started a chaperoned bicycle bus, and it’s enabled a number of kids who live 3-5 km away to engage in active transportation once a week that would have otherwise been unable to.
> If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
What's the rationale for the parent being punished? I would understand the government employing programs to encourage parents to develop their child's autonomy, but forcing them under threat of punishment? What if there are particular circumstances, like medical conditions, or they keep seeing something sus along the way one week? How to go about things with a minor should ultimately be by the parent's judgment, since they're the most informed on their circumstances.
I'm sure they have systems to deal with the edge conditions like medical conditions.
One can instantly figure out why it's pretty smart to have the school assert a policy here based on your following ideas that it "should ultimately be the parent's judgment" and what if "they see something sus."
The current child-, parent-, and civilization-damaging child management system in the US is the direct consequence of simply "I saw something sus" and "I'm the parent so I know what's best."
It's not a school policy if the police get involved. It seems like it's law.
It's kind of funny that the post is about a parent being punished for giving their kid some autonomy and how that punishment reflects something being wrong with the US. Someone from Switzerland shares how they punish parents for not giving their kid autonomy in a certain way, and you come saying "it's pretty smart" and "civilization-damaging child management system in the US is the direct consequence of simply [...] 'I'm the parent so I know what's best.'", defending punishing parents for parenting...
I see that as the constant in both cases, and what seems backwards. The problem of the post isn't about whether or not the kid walks outside on their own; it's about people not respecting the parent's judgment in how they raise their kid. That problem also seems present in Switzerland by what's being shared and it's apparently what you'd like the US to switch to, which ultimately wouldn't be a switch.
You'd then have a post about a parent being punished for taking their kid to school under a given set of circumstances that makes the punishment unfair, the exact parallel of the current post.
> it's pretty smart to have the school assert a policy here based on your following ideas that it "should ultimately be the parent's judgment"
This is the same busybody mentality that leads to what happened to the mom of the post.
> One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together.
That's what I did when I was in first grade. Suburban US, late 70s. Lived at the end of a cul-de-sac. Met with the other kid who lived at the end of the cul-de-sac, walked to the house of a kid who lived at the other end of the street. Then the three of us got on the sidewalk of the main road and walked to the school.
> Parents aren't allowed to bring them to school. If a parent escorts their children to school they'll be told not to. If they keep doing it they'll get a letter from the school and probably a police visit. And if they continue (I never heard of it getting to this stage) they may be fined.
Can't help but think that this is just swinging things in the opposite direction.
Exactly. It’s a collective action problem — every car dropping off a kid incrementally endangers the kids walking to school, so if there is no enforcement whatsoever, we’d end up with everybody driving, and a situation worse than in US schools (because Swiss schools were largely not constructed with drop off zones in mind, and retrofitting them would be difficult with our land use patterns).
In my experience the kids form a peloton walking to school but there are adults walking with the youngest such groups. E.g. this website (never been to this town, just seems representative).
The GP dramatically exaggerated the state of affairs or perhaps it's how things are in their specific village/canton.
In French cantons you can bring your kids to school, you can drive them there and there are spots for stopping and all respective signage. But there is indeed a lot of very young kids walking to school.
I live in Zurich. I used to live in Pully, a suburb of Lausanne. It's much more car-centric in the French part. But at the same time our neighborhood had a Pedibus location where children met and walked to school from in a group.
It'd be nice if you could back up your feelings with some reasoning.
The neighborhood is safe enough and the community is cohesive enough that kids can congregate along their way to school: go to their friend's house, meet at a park, etc.
It's researched enough that you can go and learn about it and challenge your feelings.
(Not the patent) I'm very much pro letting children roam freely, but police intervention for walking or driving with your own child is clearly overreach. The good intention does not change that.
And even as a German who already spent a lot of time in Switzerland, I've never heard of anything like that.
To join in on the therapy speak: it is very good to challenge one's feelings, let go, and then, by the merit of reason, realize that police intervention for spending commute time with your children is bonkers.
It is just a very unreasonable extension of a very reasonable position.
When I was a kid, about 3 decades ago, walking to school was a blast.
I had so much fun going there and going back on foot.
So much that when I was a teenager and my mother drove by my school one day and decided to pick me up, I was super unhappy, because I wanted to walk the 20 or so minutes with my friends to the bus.
When I had 9 hour school, I would need to wait 50 Minutes for a bus... or I walked the 5 kilometers home.
I always choose to walk, even when it rained, because I was faster and I loved it!
I am curious how it will be with my daughter, once she goes to school.
Because today this is totally frowned upon. But I will not play taxi for her all the time. Occasionally, sure. But CERTAINLY not every day.
Parents and Adults in America are often afraid. Sometimes rightfully so, sometimes not.
There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely, and it could be dangerous to even try to walk in areas that barely have walkable streets.
Europe can let this happen since their city planning is much better for people who either walk or bike to different areas. Some, like in Switzerland, even have extremely low crime rates as well. Still, a sentencing seems rough for letting a kid walk, in a probably safe area.
That's not just a rough sentence though, it kinda flies in the face of trying to protect the child. Putting a parent of a 5 year old in jail? For this? To make sure the child has a better childhood?
I would not feel safe walking the street, or being at home, or even being dead or in the afterlife, while such stupid and vindictive adults walk freely. Who knows what they'll get up to next!
> There is likely too much crime in urban areas for children to walk freely
This is very much not true. If there are any urban areas that have too much crime for kids to walk freely, it's a vanishingly small percentage, and certainly does not include gated communities in Williamsburg, VA.
I would argue it depends on where. Most of the rural areas are likely too loosely populated to commit any serious crimes, especially against children. And it is a large part of the United States.
However, looking at say, Downtown Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, the amount of crime does seem to increase overall. This is partially due to density, and also poverty. Saint Louis, a good chunk of Louisiana, parts of the South (Not including Texas), the Appalachian region, a good chunk of the Eastern United States barring New England, many of these regions have had issues with crime.
There's also the issue of crime happening in schools, including but not limited to drug sales (mostly between teenagers and not generally violent), and shootings (which is rare but far more common compared to other similarly wealthy nations).
Also I said Sometimes the Adults are scared due to truths, and exaggerations.
It's a high trust homogenous society without lots of different groups with all kinds of grievances about the past, present and the future. And it's probably rural, where everyone knows each other.
When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.
It doesn't have to be homogeneous or rural, you just have to address the grievances, make sure everyone is adequately housed, has access to medical attention, and has something to do; and then you get peace.
Some groups of people have absolutely endless amounts of grievances. They have made the grievances their entire personality. They will never be sufficiently satisfied with whatever concessions you make to them
People and groups with unlimited grievances (and, unfortunately, associated revenge fantasies).
Switzerland has less of this. So you can send your 5-year old for a long walk alone, knowing that your neighbors will be looking out.
(PP: even the word "rural" is seen as a dog-whistle, e.g. by the NYTimes.)
Listen: I'm a visible minority where I'm a citizen of, myself. I'm not shilling for racial homogeneity or totalitarian philosophy at all. I'm just sharing my lived experience that when there are lots of groups with lots of grievances against each other, there's less ambient, latent trust.
Wait. Is it racial or is it cultural? There's a difference there.
Do you believe it's possible to have cultural homogeneity without having racial homogeneity?
Btw I think you're wrong: people can be extremely xenophobic with the folks from the next village over who are their cousins thrice removed. It's nothing to do with race or culture, just who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group, and what those are depends on a myriad of factors that "race" and "culture" are only convenient, but inaccurate, proxies for.
Another example: Greek football fans from Athens will literally murder their counterparts from Thessaloniki, and they're all just as Greek as each other [1]. You just have to draw a line in the sand and people on either side of it will start throwing stones at each other.
__________________
[1] Culturally of course. We're not a "race". Tiny little rant but with Nolan's Odyssey, there were the usual complains about Helen being played by a black woman etc. and people all over the internet were having fights about what real Greeks look like. Oh they have fair hair and light skin. No they have dark hair and olive skin. And so on. The truth is that most Greek families are like mine: one parent is fair-haired and light skinned (my dad: blond hair, green eyes, goes red in the sun; his mom: blond hair, blue eyes, skin like yogurt) and the other is dark-haired and dark skinned (my mom: brown hair, brown eyes, goes brown in the sun; her mom: black hair, black eyes, never sat in the sun). But stereotypes persist so me and one of my friends were asked how come we're both fair-haired with light-coloured eyes when true Greeks are brown and at the same time a friend recommended to me a concealer that was three tones darker than my actual colour even though I was standing right there in front of her eyes with my pasty-white skin. Race is not what it's made out to be. End rant.
I think cultural is probably the thing that has benefits, but they are so intertwined that they're essentially the same or impossible to extricate. Anyone who has visited Japan can understand that there is some benefit to racial/cultural homogeny. It doesn't really matter which of the two is the important part when they cannot be extricated.
Why Japan? How about the UK, or the US? Aren't those a bit more relevant? Those are certainly not racially homogeneous societies but why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences? Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?
Because Japan is the quintessential homogeneous westernish society that most are familiar with. UK and US are not homogeneous by any means. I could have said Poland or Estonia but that doesn't evoke an image of harmony like Japan does due to unfamiliarity (even though they too are largely harmonious).
> why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences?
Probably because race is equivalent to heritage which usually follows a cultural lineage unless one of the generations makes a big effort to assimilate to some other culture. Culture is inherited, and races are inherited. If a baby was born a completely random race unrelated to the parents, then this property wouldn't hold, but the way things are, race ~= culture.
> Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?
No? Isn't it self evident that Americans don't all share a culture? Aside from the first generation immigrants that are obviously their own culture e.g. Chinatown, Black Americans have an entirely separate culture from White Americans, which have a different culture from Asian Americans. The only way this could change is if all the groups completely assimilate, which is not going to happen.
Race isn't the only factor of course: if all the Japanese heritage Americans moved back to Japan, there would obviously be cultural tension there despite being the same race. But just the way history worked out, in most places and cases that could reasonably happen, racial homogeneity is approximately equal to cultural homogeneity. And when trying to achieve that, it's a lot easier to see that a person is of your race than to see that they are of your culture.
> It's a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she'd seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning
The government should not tell people either way whether the parents have to escort or not. This story is horrifying to me as a parent who may want the choice of whether to go with my child or not.
I've rarely heard of that going to the letter. Many city schools are way too lax and let some helicopter parents reinforce the anxiousness of their children until the imagined requirements become disruptive within school grounds. These highly trained parents can prolong the insecurity any child would feel on the first day until their children really start to have a problem and abnormal social bonds.
The example I know of like that is in Zermatt. The children go to school in Visp. They take the train down by themselves and live at school for the week and come back home on the weekend.
It's funny in the morning. One child walks to another child's home then they walk to another child's home and so on until you have a big group of kids walking to school together. In Austria they call it something like a children train.
Twice a year you see the children practicing crossing streets. The police are out at the intersections and show the children how to do it. It's very cute. Also how to ride bicycles properly.