I’m only 34 years old; when I was a kid no other child was driven to school. EVERY kid came by bus or foot.
Now schools have to have kiss-and-ride areas because of the volume of cars.
It’s not worse, I guess. Just different.
My bus stop was about 2.5 miles (Google Earth is good for measuring) from my house, but then we lived way the hell out in the jungle. So me and my sister got driven to it and they waited with us in the morning and for us in the afternoon. Not too long after my parents started going to college and then we got driven to school. This would have started in 1978.
Boy, my parents would let me disappear into the forest for hours on end. I assume mostly because we were hell raisers, I do recall getting kicked out of the house quite often. We also were left to wait/play in the parking lots of supermarkets so they didn’t have to take us inside. Ok, that sounds bad but parking lots in Hilo had large grassy areas for us to play in when we weren’t pretending to drive the car.
Actually here in Hawaii a lot of kids take TheBus by themselves, young kids too. Naturally the older they get the more of them there are but man is it a pain to get off work when they get out.
I’m really bad about following that rule. No one’s complained recently.
I grew up either just less or just more than 1/2 mile from the local elementary school. That was the dividing line, so I walked in Kindergarten and was bused in 1st grade (after that I went to Catholic School). A tenth of a mile was easy to measure, as the frie hydrants were place at that interval, and there was one in our yard. In one direction, there were eight houses within a tenth of a mile. In the other direction, there were three. The bus would stop no more than once in a tenth of a mile. This was in a small town. I’m not sure what the kids who lived out in the cornfields did. I was under the impression that this was standard.
We went to private school in elementary, so we got picked up and dropped off by someone. Then we lived out of the school zone, but in high school I started riding the bus. Our stop was down on Highway 441 in the middle of nowhere. I would sit as close as possible to the stripe on the road because there was nothing but woods around and I was terrified.
Fast Forward to today (FFTT) There is an elementary school approximately 5 blocks from my house. All the kids in this neighborhood go there. There are two entrances to our neighborhood. The number of parents sitting by the bus stops in the morning isn’t too bad, and darn near none most afternoons. However, the school up the road blocks the road so bad from all the parents picking up the kids, that the road is fundamentally undrivable. There are quite a few parents that walk up to get their kids, but I believe they do that because it’s faster. Seriously, that road is blocked for more than an hour in the mornings and afternoons. The sad part? They have the traffic weaving around the parking lot and at least 100 cars can be in the line at a time and the line goes down the road both directions all the way. This is for a neighborhood school. It’s surrounded by houses. Hundreds of children have to be within 1/4 mile of that place. There are 831 students at this school.
There is a 4 lane busy street between me and thee. So I can see walking Katie at least across that road, even though there is a crossing guard there. After that, I think she’d be ok.
We get alot of abducted kids stories here too. However, I don’t really see how this overprotectiveness extends beyond the bus stop. The local Ross has to constantly make the announcement that the toy department isn’t a babysitter, the mall is overrun with little britney wannabe’s, and god knows, I work at a DOG TRACK and the number of children I see running around unattended at 11pm is pretty shocking. I’m not talking about teenagers at the track, I’m talking about 5 year olds. Like the powers that be screens the folks that come there, we know there are convicted child molesters that come there, we also know that it is an old building with alot of hidey holes.
Here’s a clue parents, let the kids stand at a bus stop alone, but keep them away from the drunk gambling child molesters, eh?
I suppose I should have mentioned the time we spent the evening at Lum’s because Mom thought Jeff picked us up and Jeff thought Mom picked us up and we sat around drinking shirley temples while the waitstaff doted on us.
We just walked in and said “our mom forgot us again, can we borrow your phone?”
Did I mention we had tried waving my Mom down to pick us up, but she didn’t see us. Yeah, we were right on the side of the road, yeah she was coming towards us. Yeah, we hollered. All things being equal, we often suspected we foiled her best plans to get us lost in the proverbial woods.
I think it’s more the insecure middle class that is desperately afraid that their kids might appear like those low-class people who let their kids run wild all over the place, and think that true upper classness means lots of ballet classes, etc.
The true upper class kids are running wild all over their boarding schools and summer homes.
I don’t think so. I stated my own experience as a child, and stated my observation that it seems like more parents are waiting with their kids these days. I don’t see where I stated that no one ever waited with their kids until “these days.”
As a general observation, most people seem to be in agreement that there has been a fundamental shift in American society about how much supervision most children need these days – though we’re getting plenty of counterexamples both of how people deal with their kids today and what their own experiences were as kids.
Prezactly. Most of the people posting here have extenuating circumstances – shitty neighborhoods, crazy kids, major highway bus stop, etc. The stuff we’re talking about is the standard suburban or city situation where the neighbors are normal, the school is within walking distance, the bus stop is within a block of the house, and the parents are paranoid. It’s weird.
Well, another consideration is how much more supervision is required by law these days. For instance, the bus drops mudgirl off at the top of my street; it’s two blocks to our house. You can literally see the bus from our front porch. But unless an adult is waiting at the bus stop for her, the bus driver is not allowed to let her off. The driver has to take the child back to school, and the school calls the house. I know this is true for Pre-K kids and Kindergarten kids. Might be true for first grade as well.
I probably didn’t communicate too well in my original point. I correct other people’s kids, too. It’s not that anyone’s complained lately, but the worst kids (like RJ) just ignore you. I tell him to get out of the middle of the road (he stands in the middle of the busiest road in the neighborhood just for the hell of it), and he just looks at me with a clear expression of “Yeah? Make me”. And that’s the thing. I can’t make him. He knows it, and he knows I know it.
What slays me about the parents today is that they have their kids ride the bus, but they wait at the end of the drive way ( or alotted bus stop location) in the car with the engine running until the bus comes.
By the time they get there and wait, they could have made it to the school and punted the little buggers in via the drop off line. Parents are so fucking lazy it isn’t even funny.
AND, because out where we live people have really long driveways ( 100 yards seems to be the minimum as the houses are all set back off the dirt roads.) but the parents will sit at the end the driveway in their SUV’s and wait for JR. to be dropped off by the bus and drive them back to the house.
OMFG. JR might have to walk 100+ yards to the house…
And we wonder why kids are obese nowadays.
I drive my kids in because the bus ride is too long ( on at 8am. School starts at 915. They are released from the bus at 910a. And school is out at 415 and they wouldn’t get off the bus until after 5pm. That makes for a looooooong day.) Though with the gas prices rising, I am seriously considering the bus for school at least one direction next fall.
Sides, I want to teach my children how to burp properly, not some other kid.
You’re a good mom.
I was thinking about this on my way to work this morning, and was wondering how much of this is a reaction to the whole SAHM/WOHM debate. That so many SAHMs feel that they need to justify their choice externally, so doing things like waiting at the bus long after they aren’t REALLY required justifies their choice (although I don’t think it needs to be justified) and casts working moms who don’t in a poor light - especially those working moms who have latchkey kids. Its really difficult for single parents to do this sort of thing as well, this sort of coddling is a luxury that is really only available to “traditional” families.
We take our first grader to the bus stop and wait with him because everyone else does it. It’s right across the street from our house. When it’s raining really hard we all get in the minivan and drive it across the street because it’s easier to see the bus coming from there. It’s about 10, 15 feet from our driveway. When I was in first grade my mother was too busy drinking coffee and smoking so we had to walk 3/4 of a mile in the freezing Bangor, ME winter, past the bullies and the mean dogs, to school. We’ll see who gets the nicer nursing home, me or mom.
Incidentally, I don’t think our town’s K-3 schools let kids walk home by themselves and I don’t think the bus is allowed to leave a stop if all of the kids aren’t picked up by an adult.
SFD@%#SDFE$# I hate that. I lived out of town from K-12, so any extracurricular activities I did were during lunch hour because my parents couldn’t transport me. I only did a few, but I kept my marks up, and I’m pretty sure I could get into any university in Canada that had my program of choice. Activities aren’t the be-all and end-all. If your kid has a 90 average and 1 activity, I have a feeling they’ll be picked over the one with a 70 average and activities 5 days a week.
As for the OP, I was bussed in every day. I was lucky to be the last one on and the first one off though. 
But I still got on the bus at 8am and got off at 4pm. I was picked up at my driveway, because all the farms where I lived were far apart, but my brother graduated when I was in Grade 2 so I had nobody to walk with after that and became a latchkey kid.
We went to a small school, we didn’t have busses, there were school Suburbans (I kid you not) that were used to drive to field trips and basketball games. We lived maybe 1/2 mile back to back with the school, but you’d have had to cross cotton or rice fields to get there. Following paved roads you’d make a big U shaped loop which was about three miles or so. We’d bike in by ourselves sometimes, walk occasionally, most of the time my parents would drop us off since they were going in that direction at the same time anyway.
FWIW we were in a very, very small town, and would take off for hours biking into town for an ice cream or to the levee and river to play. The only thing we weren’t supposed to do without letting my parents know first is go to the woods side of the river to play. It was fine to do, we just had to let them know we were going there first.
I wait for a commuter bus across the street from the elementary bus stop.
Where I live, the parents do make the child get out of the car long before the bus comes.
That’s thoughtful – nobody has to wait while the kiddies struggle out of the vehicle and run to the bus.
But often, these same parents are too nervous to leave the group of children (theirs and any others at the stop) unsupervised. So they pull back to a reasonable lurking distance and idle the car…lying in wait…staring at the children.
It’s creepy. I keep thinking “What if THAT ONE isn’t a parent at all? Did I SEE him drop off a child in the last ten minutes? What if THAT ONE is the BAD MAN?”
Yeesh. The parents are probably wondering the same thing about me. “Why is that man at the bus stop near my kids every morning? DOES HE EVEN HAVE A JOB?”
Sigh.
Sailboat
I’m pretty sure my Mom walked me to school when I was in kindergarten. After that I was on my own, and my brother started going to the same school as me after a couple of years so we had each other.
We always walked but there was a shortcut we could take through the crazy lady’s property across the street and down the woody steep hill to school. Mom told us not to but she also told us not to eat our lunch Little Debbie cakes as soon as we left the house and we disobeyed that too. :eek:
I was going to jump in and attribute this phenomenon to mothers working – except for the opposite reason. My hypothesis is that the overstructured and paranoid child-rearing is the result of workimg Moms overcompensating for their absence.
Parental Paranoia drives me crazy. I’m on a message board where a mother is planning on taking her son into the women’s room all the way up to 12-years-old. At Disney World, which has to be one of the safest places on the planet. Insane.