Same here. I went on a kick one summer of riding buses all around the city. By myself. My mom thought it was great. In retrospect, it got me out of her hair for a while, so I can see her enthusiasm.
Most airlines charge a fee for handling unaccompanied minors. United Airlines charges $99, for example. For this fee, the flight attendants make sure the kid is safe, and turned over to the right person at the destination.
I was riding public buses in downtown Winnipeg – not a great place to be riding the public buses, all things considered – when I was 11. I didn’t get harassed, attacked, interfered with, or otherwise folded, spindled, or mutilated.
I was riding the Metro in Montreal alone when I was 12.
This is the part of this I really do not understand. An adult in this day and time with the communications equipment we have and the knowledge basis we have access to, Google, Wikipedia, Bing, Ask Jeeves, the SDMB, schooling for all, and an adult makes this statement in all honesty because he is uninformed. How can that be? what do our schools teach, has the desire to read and to know stuff been totally lost because there is so much knowledge in the world we can access now?
Not really picking on DTC or anyone else but the hot - cold question about a thermos?? Come on…
Okay, Car repair is becoming a lost art for teen boys but what are they learning instead? Most can’t do squat with a computer except play games and do Face Book & twitter or text on their cell phones.
And so they raise kids that are afraid to do anything because the 20’s is way to late to learn the ways of the world.
When I have a problem I don’t know how to handle, I am reluctant to ask for the average guys help any more because they have no clue about anything… They can’t do anything or are too afraid to do anything.
YMMV
Adding: If I told some of the things that me & my siblings did as kids of various ages, you all would call me a liar or at least think it for sure… I am constantly amazed at how little the average person has done in their life and the things I see & hear that parents are afraid of…
I wouldn’t, but I’m sure there’s already an “online community” for that.
Please report for execution. The daily mail as a source?
Soloing? How do her feet even reach the rudder pedals at 8?
I am shamed.
Guns, that was a great post. My condolences (19 years late) on your loss.
Mine too, growing up. She lived in the countryside but came to the city to visit in the summers from the time she was 8, and each year she got a bit more independent and reliable and had more freedom to roam within appropriate limits. I’m glad for the advent of cell phones, because it made it easier to have her check in at specific times for my own peace of mind. And once she was old enough to borrow my car that was even more important, heh.
I’m glad she didn’t spend her entire childhood in the countryside, that she got the chance to become a bit more worldly-wise, including often flying unaccompanied from Calgary to Winnipeg or back. As a teen she even flew all the way from home including going across the border herself, though I have to admit I was a bit anxious about that, given that Minneapolis-StPaul airport is kind of big, and I worried about her making the connecting flight by herself and going through customs and all that. But she did just fine, and I was proud of her. I don’t worry anymore about her being a “babe in the woods” when it comes to city life, like I used to and would still do if she had spent all that time only in the countryside.
Cool, we’ve gone all the way from, “SOCIETY IS TOO DANGEROUS!!!11!!!” to “Kids these days.”
But they can have 20 of their closest friends give their opinions on what they should do in minutes!
Hey, another 'Pegger! Former in my case. My girl refused to ride the bus there because of the “weird people” on them (her words), even though it would have saved her a lot of walking in the summer heat, but hey, I guess that’s her hangup. She also did a lot of skateboarding and riding her scooter in downtown Winnipeg, going to the Forks and swimming at Sherbrook Pool.
This fee applies only if you want the airline to babysit your child.
When I sent my daughter to Sweden by herself, I did not ask for this service, or pay for it. She asked when I booked the tickets if I was going to have them escort her gate to gate, and I said no she was too old for that.
She looked at me seriously and said “Your never too old for that”
I then explained that if we did it that way, she would not get to shop at the airport, or walk around they would keep her in a small office with maybe a TV between flights. She then agreed that my way was better.
I took her to the gate at LAX I gave her maps for both Newark and Copenhagen. My travel, the lady we called the queen of Sweden arranged for her to hang out in the SAS first class lounge while waiting there.
I also gave her written instructions for what to do, and who to contact if a flight got delayed.
One of her connecting flights did get delayed and she missed her connection in Denver on the way back.
There was a short bit of panic till she got on the wait list for the next flight. BFD. It was a learning experience.
Seems that you didn’t read the rest of the post, where the fee was clearly indicated as $50, compared with the charge for a round trip adult companion fee of $500.
This most recent flight had a fee of $50.00, on Midwest Airlines- Southwest used to be free and is now $25.00 each way. Most airlines charge $75.
None of the airlines I have flown her on will allow her to be unaccompanied without the fee, although I suppose it is possible that if she just went through security and through the gate they wouldn’t stop her.
What I pay the fee for is mostly the ability to go through security with her until the plane takes off. I would hate it if her plane was seriously delayed or cancelled and I wasn’t there.
I wouldn’t have let my particular nine-year-old travel alone on the London Underground - which, from the sounds of it, is similar to the NYC subway - alone, but that’s because she’s an extremely dippy child who gets lost in our 2-bedroom flat. Some nine-year-olds would have been fine with it, but I think that there might have been some legal trouble; under-10s travelling with an adult travel for free, but they can only travel for free alone from the age of ten (under the oystercard system), indicating to me that TFL wants parents to wait till their kid’s ten to let them travel alone.
Ten seems a sensible age to me, and it’s also sensible for the transport system to have its own age limits, since they’re the ones who’d have to look after the kid if anything went wrong.
Lots of kids I know travelled on the tube and bus alone at the age of ten and were fine (except for a few arsehole drivers not believing they were ten and throwing one particular kid off the bus several times). My daughter’s now 12 and would still find it difficult, but she has taken one bus on her own. OK, so she got horribly lost, arrived home an hour late with me frantic, but she enjoyed the independence and she’ll improve in time, given opportunities to try it.
There are some tube lines at rush hour that I wouldn’t want kids to travel on, given the choice, because they’re just bloody horrible. I feel sorry for the secondary school kids I occasionally see squished in with the commuters on the busiest parts of the central line at 8am.
This perplexes me. In Japan and Taiwan, I see little kids riding public transportation all the time. I get that parents are worried about their kids, but pegging her as “America’s worst mom” takes a leap of intellectual bad faith.
My son’s 13 now, hope that’s close enough. If we had lived in NYC his whole life I can see letting him ride the subway alone at 9yo, but only if he could tell me from memory which train and which stop would get him to his destination. There’s a supervised way to let your kid ride the subway and there’s letting your kids raise themselves.
My kid is not a city kid. At 9 he’d only been on subways a few times to go to a museum or see a show. And, he wouldn’t have been comfortable riding alone. He’s flown cross-country all by himself a dozen times, though.
When I lived in LA kids that age and younger rode to school on city buses. They had the system down much more than I did. I think kids adapt to their circumstances.
One thing that makes things different for my son than they were for me is that he’s an only child. I may have been allowed to do things alone as a kid but never really had the opportunity because I have an older sister. When I was 4 I got to go toddling off to the park without a parent because my 8yo sister was going.
I’ve mentioned this in similar threads in the past. If all the planets lined up and presented circumstances where I thought my 9yo was ready, and was going somewhere worthwhile, I’d still hesitate to let him ride the subway alone. Not because I’d be afraid something would happen to him, but I’d be afraid that the “baby police” would spot him and my family would suddenly be under investigation.