THE CAR
As a parent, I’m worried about cars. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and you could still kick a ball about in the road. The occassional car would drive up and we’d stop and let it pass. Now, traffic is constant and many speed up and down. It’s just not safe. Recently a car mounted the path and knocked down a traffic light just around the corner on the way to our youngest’s school. Outside the school parents drive and park like idiots so it’s not safe to let him walk there alone. My older son walks to secondary school and there are incidents where children are knocked down from time to time. There’s only so much you can teach your children about road safety when there are so many reckless drivers.
(Thinking more about it, the increase in cars has generally gone hand in hand with the increase in how shit the UK has generally become.)
My kids both walk to school but we’re lucky enough to live 5 minutes from one school and 10 minutes from another. When they were little I used to walk them to school. And I’d see other parents dropping their kids off then running to their cars so they could get to work in time.
In 1971 my dad worked but my mum didn’t. She could take me to school when I was young without worrying about time.
I guess that’s a difference. More families have two working parents, and more adults work further away from home.
Stupid fucking parents is what happened. For some reason the generation that was allowed to roam free decided to not let their own kids do it and then it got even worse the Gen after that one.
How does “stupid parents” track when meta-analyses have shown that the Flynn effect is still being observed? Each generation has continued to be (very slightly) smarter (though IQ is inherently a flawed concept and I’m still not convinced)? I was allowed to roam free for most of my childhood, it’s true. But looking at my situation, you would not have said I was well-minded. I was raised by a distracted self-employed single artist living on the largesse of substantial child support, and I was basically feral.
Gen X tend to think of themselves as the disaffected latchkey generation, but that was my upbringing too. Walked myself to school and back, sure - but also lied about having done my homework, and spent 97% of my time doing whatever I liked without supervision or even saying where I’d be. Got into scrapes, talked to strangers, managed my own affairs. Called home when I needed something or (rarely) felt like it. The fact that I’m here now is a story about (emotional) survival, not (physical) thriving.
Others also mention cars. Cars are substantially more dangerous to children than they were thirty or fifty years ago (poorer sight-lines, increased driver height and car size all playing a part), and drivers are vastly more distracted because of phones. That’s an extremely valid concern for a parent, even if your kid doesn’t have issues with attention and self-control that put them at risk. I’ve taken pains to raise a kid who sees cars as a threat to monitor and cross roads safely, and still the second I stop hammering away at those points he’ll cross the street while staring at the ground and looking in neither direction. It’s maddening, this ADHD shit. And that’s more prevalent than ever as well!
Point being, every aging cohort tends to think everything’s Worse Now, everyone younger than them is Stupid and Doing It Wrong, and Things Were Better, and I Survived So It Must Be Safe! Never trust those instincts, they are always wrong until proven true.
You sound like a helicopter parent and your data is old. The Flynn effect has now shown to have leveled off or even reversed. Not that being intelligent somehow means you’d be a good parent or spouse. Just look at Einstein and Tesla. They didn’t do relationships well.
Look, you’re the one who said the problem is “stupid fucking parents”. And if the Flynn effect has reversed (not a settled finding last I checked), that means the current generation of parents are the smartest ones we’re going to get, so which is it?
I walked to school alone starting in year 6 (10 years old, for any non-Brits visiting the community) back in the 90s. Look at the crime rates and you can see it was more dangerous back then than it is now, but walking adoption seems to have gone backwards.
So many parents drive their kids from door to door now, and for what? The sheer volume of traffic on the roads during term times vs. school holidays is crazy, and of course they’re all massive 4x4s.
Where I live there is a high school a block away in one direction, and a middle school a block away in the other direction. School starting and ending is just a massive cluster fuck of parents picking up or dropping off their kids. It’s so weird.
Same here although i cycled. Was about a mile each way. Fairly low traffic. I imagine it’s way more traffic now so that might be part of it.
I think you’re right that crime rates are lower now. But crime does still happen, so I can understand parents wanting to keep their kids safe.
As the article points out, rates of child abduction/murder are so low that it makes as much sense as not walking to school for fear of being struck by lightning.
Fear. Our governments learned that we’re all more compliant when we’re afraid, so they hyped fearful things.
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I think you’re more likely to have your phone nicked in Barcelona. Anyway, yeah, phones being nicked in London may be true, but there’s huge swathes of the UK that aren’t London - entire counties with not even a shred of London in them.
Walking to school is safer and less polluted than it was 30 or 40 years ago. When I went, being driven to or from school was reserved for a couple of posh kids and a couple of kids who lived too far “in the sticks”. The school itself ran buses to the nearby towns that had kids at the school. Pretty much everyone in the same town as the school walked or got a local bus.
