Strollerderby
Do Your Kids Walk To School?
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
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3 Comments
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amYes, here the school is not too far away but there are absolutely no sidewalks between here and there. I think when people cite safety concerns, they might be more worried about their kids being hit by a car while walking than stranger danger. That is a legitimate concern and one that needs to be addressed if any of us are to walk more.
brettsinger commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amThat’s interesting – sidewalks. Living in cities my whole life it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t be present somewhere, but of course they’re not a given. No sidewalks = no walking.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amYes, they walk. One reason we bought the house we did was so the kids could walk to school – the elementary school is about a quarter mile away and the middle school is just over one mile away. One of the main reasons we bought a house in the city proper was for the sidewalks. I feel for people who live in communities without sidewalks… I think that’s a huge deterrent to walking (to school, for recreation, any reason at all.)
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