Just made the mistake of trying to get home during "school bus drop off hour".
Our community is like a comb with one main road and lots of short dead end streets coming off of it and a few on the other side as well. There is very little traffic. Even the main road is so narrow that vehicles need to take turns to pass each other. The bus stopped at EVERY FRIGGIN BLOCK. Not only does it seem that modern children are deemed incapable of making it the few hundred feet from the bus to their houses without being kidnapped (or eaten by a wolf which is statistically comparable) but their parents are waiting for them at the corner, many IN THEIR CARS! It is above 50 degrees out and beautiful! What are you teaching your children when you can't trust them to walk less than the length of a football field down their own block surrounded by their neighbors in broad daylight? If M were going to school and getting dropped off with the other kids I would absolutely expect her to walk home by herself (and these kids are older than her) and I KNOW I would suffer the judgement and ire of my neighbors as though I am a "neglectful" parent when really I equate what they are doing with abuse.
I remember waiting for the bus in the morning. Their were two stops for an 8 block or so radius and even that was considered codling. It moved from year to year depending on where the bulk of the students lived. No one AND I MEAN NO ONE's parents waited with them past kindergarten. That would have been the ultimate in embarrassment. Walking to the bus stop was how I learned about my immediate neighborhood and met a lot of my neighbors. I got to hang out with kids in different grades. No one panicked if I hung out there for twenty minutes to chat, have a snowball fight, or do cartwheels in the street, and dawdled home. Another simple thing that is GONE. replaced with the ILLUSION of safety. But in this one example effecting millions of children every day what has been lost?
Robbing your children of any sense of independence and self sufficiency and then wondering why they can't get their shit together when they emerge from college: the new American parenting standard.
Way to go America.
