Posted on 09/14/2009 7:40:44 AM PDT by Arec Barrwin
September 13, 2009 Why Can’t She Walk to School? By JAN HOFFMAN
TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.
She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: ‘Are you sure you want to be doing this?’ Katie said friends ask.
‘She’s just so pretty. She’s just so ... blond.’ A friend said, ‘I heard that Jaycee Dugard story and I thought of your daughter.’ And they say, ‘I’d never do that with my kid: I wouldn’t trust my kid with the street,’ said Katie, a stay-at-home mother, who asked that her full identity be withheld to protect her children.
Katie, too, is tormented by the abduction monsters embedded in modern parenting. Yet she wants to encourage her daughter’s independence. Somehow, walking to school has become a political act when it’s this uncommon, she said. Somebody has to be first.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The fruit of the “Stranger Danger “ campaign.
LOL, yeah, I guess, unless the "speck" is one of yours.
BTW, according the NCIC, approximately 750,000 the disappearance of a child was serious enough that a parent called the police, the police took a report, and the police entered that report into NCIC (in 2001). Surely, most of those were probably runaways, or misunderstandings, or "family" abductions, but the author's 115 number sounds absurdly low.
Maybe she is citing resolved, prosecuted cases, but then there is the fact that many children simply disappear.
Traditionally, authorities have been slow to act in missing child cases. I, for one, am glad things are changing.
YES I HAVE CHILDREN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MY CHILD (daughter, sandy blonde)Walked to school every day. WHEN we recently moved.. she has to walk farther than the child IN THE STORY, to her School BUS STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MSM MIND CONTROL is correct.. I feel like I’m sitting in a DNC THERAPY GROUP..
DAMN PEOPLE.. you wanna raise my family for me... I THINK NOT!
“If you’re in a neighborhood where people throw bricks from a van it may not be the typical suburbia.”
It’s a very nice neighborhood; people travel into it to cause trouble.
Our attacks are fairly predictable; some problem in the ME happenens -— arabs come to the Jewish neighborhood and throw things at Jewish kids -— or it’s ramadan -— arabs watch kill-the-Jew movies, then come and throw rocks at Jewish kids.
We live in a small town that used to have the school on the main drag...but have since relocated the school in a field behind the old school. Now there are no sidewalks for the kids to walk on...(they were supposed to be part of the whole new school package)...my daughter started kindergarten when they moved into the new building and this year she will be graduating....still no sidewalks and she has had to ride a bus everyday of her school life...even the kids who live next door to the school....no sidewalks...no walking.
You had dirt? ...magritte
The reverse could also be said: that 30 years ago, society was woefully naive about the danger their children faced.
Well, that would coincide with irrational fears. When fear spikes, so do calls to the police.
When I say "irrational" I mean fears caused by the MSM 24/7 news cycle...not fears which are valid. The horror of a genuine kidnapping is hellish. But as with everything else that the MSM touches (witness global warming and the irrational fears the MSM has hoaxed us with) the fears people have over their children are likely over the top.
The only way to tell if the 115 figure is correct is to research it which I don't have the time or inclination to do. But if it is correct, the fears people have over their kids being kidnapped are wildly irrational.
Excuse me, I didn’t attack you and you are being childish. All I asked was if you had children - I don’t know you from Adam.
a block and a half?
something not right with this story
And how many were kidnapped while walking to school? We're probably talking in the neighborhood of a dozen, if that.
I've noticed this even in my small IL town. We homeschool and live across the street from the local elementary school. The drives there are crammed with parents picking up and dropping off their kids at the start and end of school, despite a good chunk of the town being within easy walking distance of the school.
I remember walking .6 miles just to get to the bus stop when I was growing up. In sub-zero (F) Michigan weather sometimes. And sometimes I'd walk/jog home 4 miles from school after track/CC practice w. books and all. We wonder why kids are getting obese?
And you call that a very nice neighborhood?
This mother is an utter freak!
Wake up. It’s 2009. If you are happy having your child be one of that insignificant “speck” that get grabbed, hey, more power to you. But you are a fool.
You must have missed the bit about us being homeschoolers. ;-)
With a baked potato to keep your hands warm! But only on the way TO school, because that was lunch.
Yes, they are. Two years ago, we were living in NJ, 4 houses away from my son's school. He was in 1st grade at the time. We received a notice before the school year started advising us of his bus stop assignment and letting us know we could opt out and let him walk. The stupidest part about it was that the bus stop was 4 houses away in the opposite direction and adjacent to the busy cross street. They didn't seem to have a problem letting him walk to and from that bus stop.
I always walked him to the corner and watched, from a distance, as he walked to the door of the school. They insisted that I accompany him all the way, but I refused. In the afternoon, however, they would not release him unless somebody was there to pick him up at the door.
Different world. In the 50s we walked to grade school and back. It was over a mile each way. None of us were ever abducted or harmed in any way. Rain, snow, or shine.
Abductions make HUGE news stories, precisely because they are RARE. Car accidents, on the other hand, are just barely news at all because they're so common.
Let your kids walk to school. If you're still afraid for them, have them walk with friends.
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