As I recently mentioned, today is Blog Action Day. Ironically, because it’s Blog Action Day and I’m involved in the TckTckTck campaign, I don’t have a lot of free time to write a long, heart-rending blog post about the dangers of climate change.
Instead, I want to share this great video that the local video-meisters at Giant Ant Media created for TckTckTck. It speaks for itself:
I usually wouldn’t be a big fan of a video full of cute kids, but this one jibes with our philosophy and theory of change for TckTckTck. It’s reportedly brought the occasional person to tears, which is a pretty good result for 80 seconds.
This generation of children is the most pampered and protected of its kind in all of history. Of course, that’s probably been true of every subsequent generation of the past 150 years, if not longer. Still, some instances of helicopter parenting are particularly exasperating. One is the radical change in children being restricted from walking to and from school on their own.
In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.
The article, as it happens, describes an incident from “a Vancouver suburb”:
Lisa Reid, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, had signed a permission form, but when her first-grader proudly told his teacher he was walking home himself last spring, a distance of six houses, the teacher was incredulous. She took him to the office and called Mrs. Reid, who didn’t hear the phone. That was because Mrs. Reid was pacing at the end of the driveway, waiting for her son, her worries climbing exponentially as the moments ticked by.
The article goes on to explain that–the math here is mine–a child is more than 2000 times likelier to be injured in a car accident than be abducted by a stranger. There are the 62 million American children under the age of 14, and only about 115 of them are abducted by strangers every year. In Canada, there are about40 to 50 stranger abductions a year.
I wonder why it’s so much higher, per capita in Canada? Maybe there are differences in how the crime is defined? In Canada, a stranger is apparently anybody other than a parent or guardian–”a close friend, neighbour, uncle, grandparent or another family member”. I wasn’t able to find a definition for ’stranger abduction’ in the US.
In short, the odds of a particular child being abducted are extremely small. Not to be all “when I was a young’un”, but the truth is that the abduction risk hasn’t changed since I walked about 500 meters home from elementary school in the eighties.
I should recognize that there are still many levelheaded parents out there. Derek, for example, lets his kids walk to school (and take other risks). It’s a little sad, if not surprising, that our the majority’s perceptions have so overruled the very safe reality.
While writing this post, I remembered the excellent map that accompanies this Daily Mail article.
Caterina wrote a nice little essay about her failed soccer career, and ended with this charming anecdote:
They don’t let little kids compete these days, because it might ruin their self esteem. I see it all the time. A friend of mine at work said her 8 year old son played soccer, and one day he came home from playing and she asked him how many goals he’d scored. “There are no goals,” he said.
I don’t have much exposure to children’s sports. Parents, is this anti-competition streak common these days?
