Reply to How to make my 8 year old feel ok with walking home from school?

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Reply to "How to make my 8 year old feel ok with walking home from school?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Could you start by meeting her halfway? Are there other children who walk, or who might also walk if she walked? Could she ride her bike?

To the PP at 14:53, when I was in elementary school, before cable TV, every kid walked, starting in kindergarten. Every kid. If you had said to the parents that an 8-year-old is not old enough to walk 10 blocks [b]on her own[/b], their jaws would have dropped in astonishment.[/quote]

Really? Was it uphills both ways? In the snow?

I think you are romanticizing the past just a wee bit much. For one thing, not every kid walked -- many rode buses. For another, we didn't walk alone. We did it in groups. It's the "alone" bit that is the flaw in your rather simplistic comment.

The parents of yore were not particularly wise, anyway. I mean, there used to be smoking lounges for students at high schools. And there was forced busing. You really want to argue the imaginary virtue of doing things their way?

[/quote]

I am this PP. I did not say this to show how much I suffered. (I didn't suffer.) I said this to show that it used to be the norm. Because it was.

And yes, every kid walked. There were no kids who took the school bus to my school.

And actually, kids did walk alone. Maybe there weren't other kids on their street, maybe their friends lived in a different direction, maybe they liked to walk alone.

Are you going to argue that elementary school kids walking by themselves is like high school kids smoking?[/quote]

I'm trying to argue that the risk perspective parents had a generation ago is not virtuous. You seem to be arguing the contrary. It's implied in your statement that because our parents allowed kindergartenders to walk to school alone (I call BS on this, by the way, but I digress) and would roll their eyes at our attitudes now that their way was superior. I'm merely providing evidence to the contrary.

Or, are you not making the argument that their way was better? Because that's not clear from your assertion.

Personally, I think I'm a better parent than my parents were. I think many of us are. So, I'm always puzzled by these people who come in with arguments like, "well, when I was a kid we didn't have car seats, we crawled around in the back of the family station wagon and built forts with blankets and we didn't die." As if they think that's some kind of compelling argument.

So, which is it? You really think our parents had it right? Because I (clearly) beg to differ. Our parents were fucking idiots.[/quote]

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