11 Comments

That’s the UK branch of the EFTA, Easier For Them Association. If TPTB are so concerned let them change the bus route so the 7 year old does not have to cross the road, but of course its easier for them to draft the parents in to involuntary crossing guards.

Here’s a comment on the original article that supports this action:

I agree that the risk that anything could happen to a child alone is small but the thing you are ‘playing with’ – a child’s life – is so precious that all risks should be minimised as far as possible.
Walk the little girl to the bus. At 7 years old, it is enough independence that she is going on the bus on her own.

I guess that sums it up!

I think this is silly, too. A 7 year old can cross one street, especially a very familiar one in the daylight hours.

What’s interesting here is at least they’re trying to protect a plausible risk–a child getting run over–and not some imagined unlikely risk, like a child abduction. I’m sure a fair amount of kids get run over each year in the UK (especially since they’re driving on the wrong side of the road! 🙂 )

One good example government paying attention to the wrong risks:

In Florida each year about 100 children down in backyard swimming pools. ( http://apha.confex.com/apha/135am/techprogram/paper_145908.htm ). In the same year there will be about 2 cases of a stranger abducting a child.

And which risk do you think Florida has more legislation to try to prevent, and spends more money on with all sorts of electronic tracking, sex offender registries, etc? The number of drownings keeps going up each year, and the number of non-family-member abductions has been constant since the 1950s, the earliest I can find statistics.

Parents who have no pool alarm and an improper fence are typically not even charged when their child drowns in their pool, under the “well, they’ve suffered enough already” school of justice. A drowning death is probably a horrible way to go…..

Horrible politically-correct busybodies. Left-wing Arlington County, Virginia, where I live, frowns on people letting elementary school children play unattended in their OWN front yards.

When I was a 7-year-old child, I and my twin brother would spend hours walking up and down our street, and in the woods, without any parent present.

It gave us lots of exercise, and kept us physically fit, unlike today’s children, who stay inside with helicopter parents and get obese as a result, and then diabetes (at expense to taxpayers via Medicaid and SCHIP).

But today, my parents, who were pillars of their community (my dad’s obituary was the lead story in the local paper) would be considered neglectful parents.

The 60’s liberals who whined about defying authority in their youth have now taken over local governments and become authoritarians who seek to control families’ private lives and interfere with both children’s freedom and parents’ right to raise their own children as they see fit.

The solution is simple – a bus stop outside every house. The bus system will end up in chaos but at least the children will be safe.

It seems school buses in the UK don’t have the stop signs and swing out barriers that school buses in the US do. If the bus were legally able to stop traffic in both directions while the child crosses the road there wouldn’t be this issue, would there?

Actually, the nannies have made a very good case for homeschooling.

Disregard previous post. I forgot that most accidents occur in the home. There’s noplace that’s safe anymore.

Yes, a 7-year old child can cross the street by themselves. Here in Japan, children that age take the train to school or to visit relatives by themselves.

I agree with Hans on our parents now being considered neglectful parents, can’t agree with him on the liberal take though. My in-law (born again, right wing conservatives) are more protective of their children then I ever was of mine.

If a chicken can cross the road, I would think a child can.

Bob

kimsch above, declares that “school buses in the UK don’t have the stop signs and swing out barriers that school buses in the US do”. How do death rates compare?

If there is a school bus waiting for the little girl, then drivers would not be caught by her darting in front of them.

When I was 7, I went to the park by myself. We were supposed to come home by dinnertime, and we did. Day after day, year after year, made it back alive, and had to cross a street to do it. Wow, huh?

My friend Lenore Skenazy, of the excellent book and blog, Free Range Kids, was called “the worst mother in the world” for letting her son Izzy, 9, take the subway home by himself after he begged to do it. He did, and of course he was fine. The hilarious note, though, was Lenore’s comment about why she gave him quarters instead of a cell phone: something like, “I knew Izzy would make it home, but I wasn’t so sure the cell phone would.”