When I Was a Kid…
April 13, 2008 by Pauline M. Campos | one question or comment
It’s not like I battled blizzards or wolves or had to walk barefoot, uphill both ways, or anything like that. But because my dad worked full time and my stay-at-home mother didn’t have a driver’s license, getting to school involved either a hurried 15-minute walk or a quick ride on my bike.
What about today’s kids? How many of them are hiking it to school on their own two feet? How many of them still use their bikes more often than they ride in the passenger seat of the minivan?
Not many, say
So what’s changed?
Safety First
When I read that less than 13 percent of children walked or biked to school in 2004, my first inclination was to think that their parents need to stop spoiling them. Turns out I was wrong in my assumption.
About 50 percent of children were walking or biking to school in 1969. So why not now?
The kids aren’t being driven because of coddling or even over-scheduling, say researchers. In fact, the bottom line is parental concerns for their child’s safety.
Using a combination of Geographic Information System (GIS) data combined with a survey of about 190 parents of fifth through eighth graders, University of Michigan environmental and landscape architecture researcher Byoung-Suk Kweon found that parents were concerned about the amount of traffic their kids would encounter on the way to school, the weather, and the possibility of crime.
Parental Buffers
Kweon found that kids frequently use sidewalks as opposed to bike lanes for getting to school. It could be that parents are urging their kids to do so because they think that sidewalks are safer, but Kweon believes that bike trails in school walk zones need to be reevaluated.
A series of laboratory-based simulation studies shed even more light on the issue, ultimately showing that parents feel strongly about a buffer of some sort between traffic and the sidewalk. Parents are much more likely to allow their kids to walk or ride if the buffer is at least eight feet wide. Even more, the presence of trees helped to ease parental worries.
Every Step Counts
While the physical environment remains a deciding factor in who walks and who gets driven to school, Kweon also hopes to conduct a related study in Detroit to further examine how social and physical factors influence the likelihood of whether or not a child walks to school.
Kweon hopes to identify environmental factors that parents zero in on before they will send their child to school on foot or by bike, thereby encouraging regular physical activity and perhaps reducing the growing rate of childhood obesity.
I walked home from school often, but only when my sister was with me because my mom was always worried - and we lived in a boring safe suburb. I think things were thought of as more safe years ago. Another reason I think less kids walk to school now is that there is less sense of community with everyone watching out for the neighborhood kids. In most neighborhoods, the neighbors may not even know your kids, let alone be on the watchout for them.