To get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.
She is seven, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks.
“Are you sure you want to be doing this?” Katie said friends ask.
A stay-at-home mother, she asked that her identity be shielded to protect her children.
“‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so ... blond.’ A friend said, ‘I heard that Jaycee Dugard story, and I thought of your daughter.’ And they say, ‘I’d never do that with my kid: I wouldn’t trust my kid with the street.’”
Katie, too, is tormented by the abduction monsters embedded in modern parenting. Yet she wants to encourage her daughter’s independence.
“Somehow, walking to school has become a political act when it’s this uncommon,” she said. “Somebody has to be first.”
It has been 30 years since the May morning when Julie Patz, a Manhattan mother, finally allowed her six-year-old son, Etan, to walk by himself to the school bus stop, two blocks away. She watched till he crossed the street — and never saw him again.
Since that haunting case, a generation of parents and administrators has created dense rituals of supervision around what used to be a mere afterthought of childhood: taking yourself to and from school.
Certain realities also shape these procedures, like the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.
But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque.
Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.
When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.
Parents’ worst nightmares were inflamed recently by the re-emergence of Jaycee Dugard, the 11-year-old girl who was kidnapped on her way to the school bus 18 years ago in northern California.
The fear of abduction by strangers “has become a norm within middle-class parental circles,” said Paula Fass, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. “We try to control our fears to the nth degree, so we drop our children off right at school. It’s a confirmation that ‘I’m a good parent.’”
In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.
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