Do Your Kids Walk To School?

Brett Singer — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:10:00 GMT

You know the old joke about how your parents walked to school. Up hill. Both ways. In a snowstorm. (Even in summer.) While being chased by a tiger. A really hungry tiger. (I added the part about the tiger.)

Well, with child obesity rates on the rise, maybe it's time to pull that old chestnut out of mothballs.

What prompted all this? Well, April 8 is National Start! Walking Day, sponsored by the American Heart Association. (Oh, don't pretend like you didn't already know.)

Over at SuperEco, Frank Paynter says that while many of us old folks used to walk to school, our children are catching a ride. Frank points to an article on Yahoo! Green by Jeff Yeager that says only 30 percent of today's rug rats stroll their way to the hallowed halls of learning.

Frank wonders when the move from bikes to the minivan began: "Some people cite safety concerns, but the chance that a child will be injured in a car accident are astronomically higher than that he will encounter evil doers out to sell him into child slavery on a chocolate plantation or something." He's probably right, at least statistically. But parental fear is a very real thing, whether reasonable or not. There are plenty of things I did as a young'un that I have trouble letting my kid do, like go to corner store. Part of that is where we live (New York City), but part of it is simply that societal attitudes have changed.

As for walking to school, sometimes it simply isn't realistic. For example, I lived in the Bronx and went to school in Manhattan. Taking the subway (2 of them) took about an hour. Walking was not going to happen. My son is too young to walk, and we also live a little bit too far away from his school. So it’s a good idea, and I like talking about it, but he's going to have to get his exercise some other way.

Since The American Heart Association was kind enough to set the Start! Walking Day start date in the spring, I may join in. Not my son -- he takes the bus. But I'll start walking when I go to pick him up. Frankly, I need the exercise more than he does. At least he gets recess.

So let me ask you folks -- do your children walk to school? Did you?

Image/Source: SuperEco

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Remember When Kids Used to Walk to School?

Karen Murphy — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 11:34:00 GMT

When I was a kid back in, oh, that year back then, I had to walk to school. Both ways. In the ~~snow~~ sunshine (hey, it was California) and the rain (northern California). Everybody walked to school. I got a ride home once, though. It was the day I broke my arm. Even on crutches (accident-prone) in middle school I simply strapped them to my bike. It was no big deal. Nobody thought so. It was just what you did.

So a semi-new study of 7400 parents across the U.S. indicates that kids don't walk or ride their bikes much to school anymore, even when it's less than a mile away. In 1969, 90% did, but now it's less than half. What's up with that?

And when the distance is more than a mile, the numbers are even lower. Where I live, all the kids ride the bus except those who are driven to school, because it's semi-rural and nothing's close enough for safe or feasible walking. But I was amazed a few years ago when I lived in a town that was quite walkable yet still it seemed that few kids walked. I lived next door to an elementary school (and ironically drove my kids to a private school 20 miles away) and routinely saw a family who lived down the street dropping their kids off by car. What, they couldn't walk up a residential hill?

There's quite a bit of conjecture about the cause of this huge drop in walkership in schoolkids: two-working-parent families who find it handy to drop the kids at school or a lack of sidewalks or walkable conditions in newer communities. But one thing is clear, and that's that there is a concern that kids who don't even walk a few blocks to school and back are getting practically zero exercise at all. Which means we're back to worrying about the fattening of kids.

Strollerderby : walking to school