(…guardian, nanny, whatever…)
Why was there a toddler standing by himself, completely unattended, on the center line of a highly trafficked bike path? This strikes me as not a smart idea. Do you also let him play in traffic on Michigan Avenue?
Yours,
Kaio
Yeah, that’s probably not a good place for a child to play imho.
I wonder if it’s the same parents of the two little girls I was swimming “with” at the state park I was at earlier this summer.
The lodge had 2 pools, one indoor and one outdoor. Both of the pools are heavily marked with signs about there being NO LIFEGUARDS. There weren’t even any lifeguard stands.
My folks and I were leisurely paddling around the indoor pool when two girls, about 4 and 6, came in to swim. They were there for about an hour and their parents never came. Nobody poked their head into the pool area to see if they were still breathing and hadn’t been kidnapped. The girls left before we did, with a couple of little boys (maybe 8 and 10) that hopefully were their relations.
I mean, it’s bad enough to let your kids wander around alone in public amongst adults, in a huuuge state park that is full of Pretty Little Girl Body Hiding Places (the girls were NOT shy about chatting up my dad). But in a POOL? With no lifeguards?! I don’t care how many swimming lessons Suzie has taken in her 4 short years - accidents happen. Don’t leave it up to the kindness of strangers - provided they happen to not be alone - to save your damn kids from drowning.
Sorry to hijack your thread. This happened like 2 months ago and it still skeeves me out.
Jackass parents, indeed!
But it’s too much trouble, and takes too much time out of my life, to watch them.
:rolleyes:
It’s none of your business how I raise my kids, I believe in letting them explore their world by themselves, and it’s not YOUR job to yell at them, so stay out of it, got it?
Did you call the police?
No, I was out to ride and clear my head a bit, I left my phone at home, which by that point was a 35-40 minute ride away. Not much I could do beyond try to anticipate which way the bugger was gonna run so I could swerve the other way. (Failed, of course, in part because when I started moving left I realized I couldn’t get around him before the oncoming bike got there, and in part because when I subsequently swerved right, he took off in the same direction, naturally. There was much hard braking and mental swearing, thankfully he stopped in the middle of my lane otherwise I would have had to choose between running over a toddler or running over about three joggers.)
ZipperJJ, totally with you. If the kid hadn’t stopped, someone would have gotten hurt, probably several someones. I mean, come on, on a weekend there are literally hundreds of bikes on that path. What kind of mental defect would allow you to think that’s safe?
Piffle. A coworker and I were heading out to lunch the other day, and as she turned a corner onto a heavily trafficked side street, she barely missed a toddler (perhaps in the neighborhood of 1-2 years old) laying face-down in the middle of the lane. Indeed, had she turned the corner as she was supposed to, and not taken it wide (cutting into the oncoming traffic lane), she would have run over the child before even registering it was there. Dad/uncle/older brother/mama’s flavor of the month was most of the way down the street with another child trailing behind him and probably had no idea how close we’d come to hitting the kid.
When she was finished cursing, I did call the police, just as I call every. single. time I get to/leave work and have to weave through the large group of children playing in the middle of the road who seem to delight in watching me approach, then at the last second run in front of my car. Never seems to make a difference. Of course, the police also do an excellent job of utterly ignoring the drug dealers up and down the street, so I suppose I shouldn’t expect much.
errr… Whoosh? I hope?
Not necessarily. My Mom decided I was old enough to explore my town when I was 8 years old - until then I always had to remain in sight of the front porch, but I could visit my friends down the block or play at the playground at the school across the street from about 4 on. When I was 8, I was all over the place, going to the library which was about a mile away, or to the arcade that was about 3/4 a mile up the main drag of our smallish town (pop. 15,000). This was in 1979. Sometimes I’d leave in the morning and not come home except for lunch and supper.
I don’t think my Mom was neglectful towards me, and a lot of kids my age had the same freedoms. People are more aware of (and paranoid of) abduction these days, but it’s no more dangerous for children now than it was back then, and my Mom made sure I was raised to be very wary of strangers. I think these kinds of experiences are why people of my generation were so much more independent and self-reliant than the kids who are hitting adulthood now.
It’s a point of conflict with my wife. She had the same kind of freedom when she was a kid, but she doesn’t want to give it to our own kids. We live the short-side of a city block away from our oldest daughter’s elementary school, and I think she should be able to walk to school herself but my wife insists on either driving or walking her there. She freaked out recently when the 8 year old daughter was walking our dog and went around our block, instead of just up and down the side we are on. When we were her age, we were roaming much further away (my wife actually wandered further as she lived in an area that you had to walk most of a mile to get anywhere that wasn’t residential).
The way you put it makes sense, and is a rational point of view… Mr. Bus Guy’s comments… not so much.
I too struggle with decisions about keeping my son close versus letting him explore the way I used to.
8 year old is not a “toddler” (as stated in the OP) though. 8 years old is a great age to get more freedom, as you have enough sense at that point to not stand in the middle of a busy bike path and get run over.
Yeah, the sprout in question couldn’t have been more than 2 or 3… walking reasonably competently but he still had that choppy “toddle” gait, not the smoother gait you get by the time you’re 8.
And I think Mr Bus Guy was being sarcastic. 
I am also fairly sure Mr Bus Guy was being sarcastic.
What we’re raising now is kids like my niece, who at 13 years old, is barely left alone by her parents at all. 13 is the new 3, apparently. Self-sufficiency? Who needs that?
Um, I don’t think that actually speaks to the OP - yes, indeed, a bike path is no place for toddlers to toddle. Or for kids to play. Neither is a street in a city where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a “green space” for kids to play in (which they don’t seem to do - they’re always abandoned like the day after the Apocalypse). It looks like we’re getting two extremes - the helicopter parents who just won’t go away, and the absentee parents who think the rest of the world is going to do their parenting for them.
At least this parent had absenteeism as an excuse. The one that sticks in my head was the mom I encountered who was encouraging her toddler to walk across a crowded bike/jogging path. The kid was on one side, and she was crouched on the other, about 5-6 meters away, doing the “come to mommy” bit, completely oblivious to all the traffic going by right in front of her.
Based on your comment about Michigan Avenue, I’m assuming this happened in Chicago? Was this part of the bike path that runs along the beach, where there are people on beach blankets literally 2 feet off to the side of the path? If so, than it’s possibly more understandable that a situation could come about where a parent gets distracted or looks the other way for less than 5 seconds and during that time the toddler bolts and ends up on the path. I’ll agree that it’s still not the best parenting, but it’s possible that the kid wasn’t just left to his own devices to wander the wilderness.
That path from Oak Street to Fullerton is constantly being crossed by kids, dogs, errant volleyballs, adults, all with no regard to the faster moving joggers, bikers and rollerbladers intersecting their path at right angles. Any speed over a brisk walk on that path is taking your life into your own hands…
It was the part of the Lakefront path between Oak Street Beach and Ohio Beach that looks like a giant airline runway. No sand there, just a sheer concrete drop-off into the lake. I think there was a small collection of people on the concrete steps on the Lake Shore Drive side that the kid belonged to, but the distance between the center line of the marked bike path and the steps is a good 20ish feet. Plus the aforementioned traffic which is perfectly predictable on a warm weekend afternoon. In any case, I didn’t get a good look at anything that wasn’t on the path right in front of me because my attention was focused on the kid and how to avoid hitting him, the other bikes, and the joggers using the marked path.
Here’s the satellite view of approx. where it happened.