Fucking helicopter parents now rule the school, and tell me how to parent.

The BBQ Pit
1

My son is in first grade at the most sought after elementary school in the city. He is almost seven. We live a block and a half away in a very nice neighborhood. He and I both decided he is ready to walk home by himself in the afternoons. The only street he has to cross has a crossing guard, and she was on board with the idea. She can see him all the way to the only corner he has to turn, and once he turns, I can see him from my front yard.

This plan is so attractive to me for a few reasons, first being he needs to earn privileges and responsibilities bit by bit as he grows. Secondly, and this is a big one, the system for picking up walkers (anyone who doesn’t take a bus) is poorly planned to say the least. All the walkers go to the auditorium at the end of the day where their parents are waiting. Each grade has one sign out sheet, which has to be signed by each parent everyday. A different teacher has the sign out sheet each day, so we don’t even know who to look for. Then we have to wait our turn to sign, which can take a long time, because there is no line, just a clusterfuck. There are about 150-200 walkers, and each has at least one parent there. It would take the boy five minutes to walk out the door and get home, but we spend thirty minutes in this hive of screaming children and shoving parents.

So today I went to the office and stated my intentions to the assistant principal and asked if there was a consent form I had to sign. Her jaw dropped, then her eyebrowed raised, I swear, all the way to the back of her head, and she let me have it. “Absolutely not! He is too young and he’s not ready! I don’t know why you think he should do that, but I cannot allow it! He is our responsibility from the time he leaves the school until he makes it home.”

I understand about her responsibility, that’s why I asked for a consent form, so I could relieve her of it. But I do not understand how she gets to make that determination for me, that he is not ready. I am his MOTHER, she has met him maybe three times, shouldn’t it be my call? He is a good boy, and he’s growing up in a hurry. I would like to help him grow up; that is, in fact, my fucking job!:smack:

So she pissed me off enough to start my very first thread. But was she right? Has anyone else run into problems like this, where someone else is telling you how to parent? What did you do about it?

2

I walked a mile and a half home, by myself, in first grade.

Offa my lawn.

3

Google maps tells me that my first grade walk (and second, and third) was 1.3 miles. I think there was a crossing guard at Little Creek.

I think the OP is out of luck. The infantilization of children has become institutionalized.

4

Does she realize that you want a release form and that this resolves the school of responsibility? If she’s intent on continuing to give you parenting advice instead of addressing the issue, I’d escalate it to her boss - you did say she is an assistant principal, so I assume there’s a principal she reports to.

I might also seek out some advice on Free Range Kids - http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

I agree that you should be the one who makes the decision here. Just realize that the school bears a significant responsibility here and you might be in such a small minority that the assistant principal doesn’t know how to address the issue because she may not have dealt with it before. But I’m just speculating.

Kudos to you. I think more parents should avoid caving in to the fear-mongering and let their kids walk to and from school.

5

You can see him all the way until he turns, when the crossing guard can see him. He’s supervised the whole time, and she freaked out like that?

Yeah, she’s wrong.

But I’m not a parent, so I don’t really know how I’d deal with this. I think it really should be your choice, but she also may just be afraid it will make her/the school look bad if they “allow” a kid to walk home alone, no matter what the circumstances. Which is also ridiculous, but another issue entirely.

6

That is crazy that you have to go to school to sign him out and then what? The parents walk home with their kid. the parent drives home and the kid walks? Seems to defeat the purpose of kids walking home. Has your school established a safe route to school program? At the very least they ought to make sure the kids get to the sidewalk safely and then they can wash their hands of 'em.

I would talk to the superintendent, the school board etc, to get to the bottom of the silly redundant rule.

7

No, she’s not right. That’s ridiculous. You are his parent; what you say goes.

I think it’s interesting and sort of funny that this is taking place in a “very nice neighborhood.” I live in a not very nice neighborhood, and I’m the only parent that takes my son to his bus stop and waits for him there in the afternoon (he’s 6). All the other kids, from kindergarten to 5th grade, walk home all alone, along a residential street that’s pretty busy. On the second day of school, my son was begging me to let him go by himself. He’s ready, but I’m not quite there yet.

If this is what works best for your family, you should push the issue. School employees sometimes forget that the kids actually do have parents who have the final say-so on what their children do.

8

Walking home from school would have taken me about 15’ in preschool 1; I went on the bus. Then we moved one block away from the school, so of course I walked (across a park - the worst problem was that, walking back home, my classmates who didn’t bus would stay in the park playing until someone came for them; this was a Very Big Temptation as I wasn’t allowed to stay).

Then the school moved, and I bused for one year and part of another; in 4th grade I realized that it took me about 45’ by bus and 15’ on foot so I was skipping the bus every time I could, therefore my parents took me off the bus.

My brothers stopped bussing when Middlebro was in 4th grade and Lilbro in 2nd, took them about 15’-20’ to get home. If they weren’t home and hadn’t called from a friend’s house half an hour after the time we left school, I was to go look for them; this only happened twice in 6 years.

Fast forward some 30 years.

The first time I went to pick up The Nephew (P1), SiL had let the school know I was coming, the Kidlet greeted me with an AUNT NAVA! that would have caused temporary deafness if we hadn’t been in the yard, but one of the teachers wanted to see ID; thankfully the other one knew me, as I wasn’t carrying any.

9

I was in boarding school when I was 7. If Ms. Assistant Principal doesn’t think a 6-year-old can handle a three hundred yard walk tell her to go to hell.

10

Oh, this crap only happens in “very nice neighborhoods”. In less nice neighborhoods, people generally have jobs they have to be at, and no nannies, so the kids are horribly neglected, left to walk a block and a half in full daylight amongst a herd of other children all released at the same time. It’s amazing any of them survive.

11

It took ma 2 years to get a policy changed. She went to the school board and brought up the subject on multiple times. They changed the policy and it was implemented. You may get action on this a short time if the principle is just doing what she wants and not what is policy.

12

How’s he doing in his SAT prep classes?

13

Wait a minute - are you saying that no kid can walk home by themself? How many grads is this school - through fifth? That is CRAZY.

So the school is eager to wast 30 minutes of your time EVERY DAY for something you feel entirely unnecessary. Yeah, I’d make however big a deal out of it I needed to to either change the policy or get my kid exempt. Hard (and sad) to imagine you would be the only parent who was not a fan of the current non-system.

My kids walked about 4 blocks to grade school. I remember when my daughter was in brownies - maybe 2d or 3d grade, they met in the school right after school. The leaders said their policy was to not let kids walk home unaccompanied. So we said, “Okay, we’ll send her brother to accompany her.” That would be her YOUNGER brother! :stuck_out_tongue:

14

The policy in Fairfax County, VA, when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 70s, was that if you lived within a mile of the school, you walked. That applied to first graders on up.

15

Google maps tells me that I walked .4 miles each way to school in 1st and 2nd grade (by myself), and .7 miles to school in 3rd through 7th grades. And this was through downtown Center City Philadelphia.

What a bunch of idiots at your child’s school.

16

I agree with you–you should be able to decide. It’s a block and a half, for cryin’ out loud, not upwards of 10 miles on a busy highway.

I, too, am sick of the overdone safety issues with schools. They can’t do half the things we used to do. There are no monkey bars on the playground and no merry-go-round, and certainly no see-saws. Only in the last few years did they even get swings. And jump-rope games? Fuggedaboutit. If they DO play, only teachers can turn the rope and they don’t allow them to enter the rope while it’s swinging. No–they tap the child on the ankle three times with the rope to let them know when it will begin turning. I can clearly remember my second grade teacher encouraging me to learn how to “jump in” and how my first attempt led to two bloody knees. She cleaned my knees and bandaged them, and I went back out to play. And I learned how to jump in. No way would that be allowed now.
The school bus has gotten so “safe” that it’s sickening. These kids can’t do anything. Remember doing homework on the way home, or even on the way to school? Not anymore–it isn’t safe. No turning around to talk to the kid behind you. No leaning over the aisle to talk to the kid in the next seat. NO LOUD TALKING. They have assigned seats and an afternoon bus monitor with a stick up her butt. My kid got into trouble the other day because he tried to pick up something he’d dropped on the school bus. Oh NO, he was out of his seat for 20 seconds! Not in the aisle, not walking around, just on his knees in front of his seat trying to pick up a miniature cootie catcher that he’d dropped.

You know, I’d love to drag these people back about 30 years to ride MY bus. Kids three to a seat and sometimes getting up to switch seats! Yelling to others in the back! Using pencils while the bus was moving! It’d probably give them hives. (And it’s not that I’m unaware that there are dangers–hell, I was IN a school bus accident once myself! Thankfully there were no serious injuries, though one vehicle was totalled and the other nearly so. These days, it’d make major headlines, but my folks didn’t even know about it till I got home and told them. The paramedics checked us out, then we waited for another bus, crowded in with them and went to school. Yeah, it scared the hell out of us, but so far as I know, no one needed counselling or therapy, or suffered PTSD.)

17

I was walking to and from school when I was in kindergarten. But then again in my day (late 1980s) we also stayed out pretty much all day during the summer without our parents worrying too much about it.

18

We had the same policy when I was a kid. I was a safety patrol when I was in elementary school. The 5th grade patrols got to act as the crossing guards before and after school. But the 4th grade patrols were in charge of walking the kindergartners home. They went to school for a half day, so when I was in 4th grade, I got to get out of class and walk a couple little kids home…up to a mile away. And I walked back. Alone. With no one else around. Frankly, it’s amazing that I’m still here to tell you about it.

19

When I was in middle school (which was the next town over from my elementary school), we had those types of rules too, but our bus driver was a real prick also (think the stereotypical old man who yells at kids to get off his lawn). He wouldn’t even let boys and girls sit together. It was like a miniature police state on that bus.
But, again that had more to do with the driver than with school policy.

20

They don’t, but rich people like it that way…culls the lower classes. They breed too quickly anyway.