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Comment by asift | Hacker News Reader

Norms are not static and based on your experiences as a child. It's labeled "free range parenting" because it is no longer the norm.

Edit: I should have been more careful in my wording. Whether it is "the norm" is obviously very location dependent. The US is a large country with all sorts of different norms at the community level.

I happen to have grown up in a suburban Midwest community (incredibly safe) with large residential areas directly across the street from many schools. However, walking to school was prohibited. Any students caught walking were subject to suspension and the school threatened to report parents to law enforcement. Obviously my particular anecdote doesn't apply to everyone, but there are some communities with insane policies in the US.

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In an affluent Maryland suburb? That should be the norm.

If you live east of the Anacostia in DC then yeah, the kids aren't as safe outside on their own, but that's more from a gang recruitment angle than a traditional "stranger danger".

Obviously people who live in crime ridden ghettos can't be quite as free as people who live in safe neighborhoods, and it's something we should fix in the long term, but it doesn't mean we should punish those people who live in safe areas with overly restrictive laws that hurt their children's development.

It's kind of sad that the kids who are already disadvantaged by being poor, having failing schools, and likely only a single parent are also the ones who don't get to be free and learn independence as children. It's yet another cog on the cycle of poverty.

Ironically, it's the other way around. In the last few years, my wife and I have lived in New Rochelle, NY; Wilmington, DE; and Baltimore, MD. These cities are poor and have a heavily minority population. But they are also full of kids running around without a parent in sight. It's the affluent Maryland suburbs where the yuppies are too paranoid to let their kids out of their sight.

I was saying what should be, not what is.

To be fair, when my kids are out playing I keep an eye on them, but mostly because they are 2 and still don't always remember to look for cars before running out in the street (but getting better).

I mentioned it in my edit above, but I grew up in an affluent Midwest suburb where parents were threatened with criminal action if they let their kids walk to school. Even high school aged students were threatened with suspensions for walking. Whether this is the "norm" will depend on where you live, but there are certainly entire communities where letting kids walk to school is not the norm.

most likely because the local school transportation company owner was related to someone high enough in the school board (not sure what they are called in US) to pass such BS rules.

This is scary. And sad.

And why didn't anyone sue for their right to walk?

Initiating a legal battle is not for the faint of heart. Few want to tangle with authority, and the kind of people that would implement + enforce such a thing (e.g. school administrators) are notorious for being petty and inflexible. Moreover, they often have lots of legal backing for their actions (due to "in loco parentis" status) that are hard to pin down.

Most parents don't have the resources for such a suit (or defense), and most students probably don't want to risk getting suspended/expelled or sent to a different school for being the one who sticks up for their rights.

No "tangling" is needed, just someone to file the suit. I would be surprised if there was not a lawyer in the whole state interested in working on it at a reduced cost due to the subject. The local ACLU chapter would be a good place to look.

As others said, no one cared enough to get into a legal battle.

And to be honest, the buses weren't bad. Particularly in the winter. You would have been crazy to want walk instead of getting picked up outside your house and dropped off at school. You could get a school permit to drive to school at 14 too (I drove to school in 8th grade), so kids in high school really didn't care about walking.

I also never heard of anyone actually getting in trouble for walking. It was probably just an empty threat, but it was meaningful enough that no one ever tested it.

The only way this could possibly make sense is if it was somehow unsafe to walk near the schools...e.g. they are on major throughways without sidewalks. Otherwise how is walking from school to a nearby home different from walking home from a bus stop? Or do they stop at every house and verify the child actually enters?

We actually had a "campus" so the buses were able to get you incredibly close to your school. Any walking you did was on a path similar to what you might find on a typical university campus outside of major urban areas. In this regard, walking was a bit different given that you had no roads to cross when walking from the bus to your school. In the end, I think it all really came down to not wanting to hire people to maintain crosswalks.

I think it's still the norm. I don't think Citylab's journalists are well-placed to know what is the norm in parenting.

> Any students caught walking were subject to suspension and the school threatened to report parents to law enforcement.

That's an insane violation of rights; was this policy never challenged?

It is still quite normal. Just because calling it "free range parenting" is becoming fashionable doesn't mean that most parents aren't "free range".

It seems that the more secure our society becomes, the more paranoid and risk averse people are.

Maybe it is the Amiga effect? All of the reasonable people are no longer complaining so the only voices you hear are the extremist ones?

We're more aware of every crazy person doing crazy things in the country now, which feeds our (mis)perceptions of risk.

I wouldn't have thought that statement controversial, but here's a reference if there's really someone out there that doesn't think that the availability bias plays into our perception of risk:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/03/fear_and_the_...

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychol...

As far as I can tell it's still the norm. It's just not actively defended.

No its very much normal still. However due to shifts in parents its not as prevalent as it used to be ( Kids spending more time indoors, fewer "neighborhood" schools, many other things ). So you don't see it as much, but every parent I know is very comfortable letting their kids wander in their neighborhoods even if the kids don't do that as much.

I walked to and from school as an elementary student without incident. While there might be areas that are too dangerous for this to be appropriate, the idea that it might be considered by some as 'child abuse' is a bit scary in its own right.

What? How are kids supposed to get to school? Ride a bike to school? Or hitchhike?

Or was bus transportation mandatory even if you lived 100ft away?

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