Many of the parents and teachers described in the New York Times article about letting your kids walk to school alone seem to be misdirecting their watchdog inclinations. Our communities have become vigilant about monitoring and admonishing “negligent” parents for letting their kids escort themselves to school. But shouldn’t that energy be going toward watching out for the kids themselves?

I walked to and from school every day from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school, usually alone. It was a mile’s walk through a nice residential neighborhood in downtown Chicago. Most kids at my school got a ride. I griped about walking when the weather was terrible, but I appreciated the time by myself and the sense of freedom I had. One spring day when I was 13, I was mugged by three older boys from a nearby high school. They held me up at knife-point, emptied out my backpack, frisked me, and ran off when they realized I had nothing but (really) dirty gym clothes to offer them. I sobbed the rest of the way home.

What’s strange about the story is not that I was mugged (I was as obvious a victim as any), but that it occurred in broad daylight on a residential street in a safe neighborhood when people were out walking their dogs, gardening, getting home from work—and not a single person looked up to notice what was happening to me. If we want to live in communities in which kids can be out by themselves, we must, as communities, be watchful of our children. There will always be wild cards—outsiders who sneak in, insiders with devious intentions, reckless drivers—but we ought to be able to depend on one another to keep an eye out, and to intervene if trouble arises.

Photograph of a mother driving her kids to school by Ryan McVay/Getty Images.

Tags: kids' safety, parenting

Yesterday the New York Times published an Op-Ed by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal on the ever-reliable themes of “Why it’s all Israel’s fault," and why Saudi Arabia isn't going to participate in making peace. Prince Turki begins with the assertion is that because Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, and it has all that oil, “[T]he kingdom holds itself to higher standards of justice and law.” And what standard would that be? Without its great good petrochemical fortune, the civilized world would view Saudi Arabia simply as a desert outpost of oppression. There is strict gender apartheid: Women are regularly beaten by government-sanctioned thugs, are not allowed to drive, are under the complete control of male relatives; there is no freedom of speech for its citizens; political parties are banned; the only religion allowed to be practiced is Wahabism, etc.

Al-Faisal goes on to distort the history of the Arab world's attempts over the decades to destroy Israel. His biggest gripe seems to be that Israel has not gone along with allowing itself to be annihilated. He says supporters of Israel cite the “outdated” charter of Hamas, which he acknowledges calls for the eradication of Israel, yet does not explain what is “outdated” about it, since that was and remains Hamas’ animating principle. Then he acknowledges more bloodshed would be unfortunate, but implies it's coming unless Israel agrees to concessions that would mean its destruction. Why would the Times run such a collections of lies and distortions?

Tags: gender apartheid, Israel, Saudi Arabia

Looking at the photo of a romper embedded in Jess's original piece on same, I was transported back—not to toddlerhood, but to junior high school in southwestern Virginia in the 1970s, where, during gym class, public school students were obliged to wear what I now understand was a romper. The girls were, anyway. I can't remember what the boys wore. Probably something that genuinely permitted athletic activity. As I recall, the romper was light blue and stiff, doubtless because it was made of polyester. It had front snaps rather than buttons, and, I always thought, felt vaguely like a prison uniform. The only structural difference between it and the checked high-fashion getup featured alongside Jess's post is that the bottom was elasticized, which added to the humiliation, giving it an additional bloomers-like quality. From their side of the playground, the boys would laugh at us. It was hard to blame them.

I associate that romper with so many other inexplicable developments that characterized the school day back then, some of which students inflicted upon ourselves, some of which were visited upon us by administrators in that transitional, considerably more directionless, era. Students calling in bomb threats from pay phones, causing the rest of us to have to shuffle outside and wait in line on a small bluff near some woods, while the premises were checked. Boys playing mumblety-peg with pocketknives flung into the dry red clay of the baseball field. Girls dealing pot in the locker room showers. Teachers paddling students with hole-riddled wooden paddles as punishment for infractions like skipping class—gym teachers being the designated paddlers, inevitably, regardless what class you had skipped, presumably because paddling was part of a gym teachers' job description in the South back then. I associate the experience of having romper gym uniforms with the experience, during a different mod, of watching impeachment proceedings on the television in current events class, and realizing the world was changing, quite possibly for the better. I associate it with "women's lib" debates in which we, the girls, annihilated the boys. I associate it with kids playing boom boxes in class and one poor English teacher so hapless that the class turned its collective back on her and just chatted amongst ourselves. I associate it with one girl who liked to crouch in the trash can. Three years of wearing rompers and learning next to nothing, except how to whistle loudly by putting two fingers in my mouth. Which, come to think of its, I learned how to do during gym class, wearing that romper.

What were education bureaucrats thinking, back then? What was anybody thinking? I wonder if my daughters' gym clothes—a far more sensible shirt and shorts, exactly like the boys', a small triumph of Title IX, which, as it happened, passed the year I started junior high school, not that anybody told us or, God forbid, taught us this—will, years from now, carry so many evocative associations. Thinking about that romper, and all the other strange and random things that life and school threw at us during that time, I actually feel sort of nostalgic. Not enough to buy one now, though.

Tags: bloomers, rompers, title IX, women's lib

Slate's TV Club is having great fun dissecting Mad Men, praising the show more than not. But my friend Matt Labash, a writer at The Weekly Standard, sent me a dissenting rant this morning. Matt is semi-horrified that I asked to publish his email, but I wonder what all you fans think? Is Matt right that Mad Men is losing its way this season? His guest post:

Gosh-damnit, what’s a brother gotta do to get Roger Sterling involved in the show again? The thing’s falling apart dramatically. And I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why, because it’s still better than most things on television. But there are two problems, the way I see it (you will probably disagree).

1) It’s getting all message-y. An inevitability as we ebb further into the '60s. But it feels broad and ham-handed: Women and blacks are people, too? Really? No shit! Even the sexism and racism are vanilla and clumsy and predictable. Rather unlike Mad Men, Season One. And if I wanted my effing consciousness raised, I wouldn’t watch Mad Men. I’d watch every other preachy, politically correct show on television. The time-capsule element is the appeal—even for people whose politics are diametrically opposed. Good drama involves ambiguity—solving riddles—and the writers are taking it in directions where we all know the proper preapproved outcome. We don’t catch up to the characters, they catch up to us. No fun.

2. But a much bigger problem is no Roger Sterling, played brilliantly by John Slattery. They walk him on for three lines per episode, and invariably, these are the best lines per episode. If I’m creator Matthew Weiner, here’s my simple two-step recipe for continued success: Hand Slattery scenery, watch him chew it. Easy. Every show is 30 percent better straight away, maybe more. Enough with little Sally and gramps and all the other extraneous BS we don’t care about. The only ray of hope as I see it is Sally’s teacher. We already know Draper is going to shtup her, and I hope he gets to it soon, quite frankly. Cause he hasn’t shtupped any women this season, including his wife. Which is why I hate baby storylines. In real life, kids = happiness. In television, babies = stillborn story arcs. Some of the best scenes in Mad Men ever were the early Greenwich Village scenes with Don’s boho paramour and all her artsy friends. There were some great culture clashes there, where the suit and pocket square, for a change, was the good guy, even as he was essentially raging against his own obsolescence. Now that was knotty and interesting and unpredictable. I’m just surprised they didn’t make January Jones (Don’s wife, Betty) have the baby in a stuck elevator, like every other dumbass show on television. That’s the way it’s going this year. Enough! More Roger. Less "evolving." And to think, we still have the Kennedy assassination ahead of us. Good God. I don’t even want to think what that looks like.

Tags: DOn Draper, january jones, john slattery, matt weiner, roger sterling

I had a whole series of reactions, in real time, to Serena Williams' outburst in the U.S. Open semifinals on Saturday night. First, I got annoyed at the footfault call that led to her blow-up because John McEnroe, in the announcement booth, said that the lineswoman was over-officiating. Then I felt cheated, as a fan, because the penalty against Williams cost her match point, which meant that the match ended without a final cathartic moment (and just as Williams was picking up her game). But I completely changed my mind as they replayed the tape of Williams, and then when I watched her completely lame press conference, in which, five minutes later, she said she'd already "moved on." One of the game's top players broke the rules in utter prima donna fashion and got punished for it, and amen to that. It's not the first time Serena has acted out like this. McEnroe's defense is neither surprising, given his bad boy past, nor, in the end, convincing. I agree with him that the refs shouldn't call foot faults on big points. Sliding a toe onto the line when you serve doesn't really give you an advantage. But that doesn't excuse a player who curses and threatens in response.

All of this is making me think again about the summer's big confrontation between a (wealthy black) star and a (not wealthy, not black) official—Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates' run-in with Cambridge cop James Crowley. The crucial difference is that this time, we have the videotape. We know what Serena and the lineswoman each did, and that means there's no opening for a see-it-your-own-way showdown about race and class. I'm not suggesting that if we had the tape of Gates and Crowley, we'd see Gates acting like Serena did. My point is that because we know the facts this time, we're not getting stuck in a feedback loop of assumptions based on who we're more prone to sympathize with. No one is talking about race and class at all. We can judge the line call and Serena's reaction, and then, yes, we can move on.

Tags: foot fault, henry louis gates, james crowley, Serena Williams, tennis

Hanna, I want to say: Let her walk to school! Because I've been convinced, by parent advice-givers like Wendy Mogel, that there is a cost in overdependence for kids, as well as a value to them from independence. If kids don't have enough chances to deal with the world on their own, in all its complications—and yes, Amanda, I agree this includes catcalls—then they grow up fragile and timid and brittle. Yes, there is also such a thing as introducing too much risk and real-life difficulty too soon. But if you live in a safe neighborhood and the chances of your child being mugged or kidnaped on the way to school are, in fact, infinitesimal, then elementary school kids should be able to walk to school on their own without anyone calling the mommy police or blaming you if, God forbid, something goes wrong. Sure, walking in a group is the perfect solution if you can organize a functional one. But I don't think we should rule out kids walking alone or with one brother or sister, either.

We've been grappling with this in our house because we recently started sending our 9-year-old by himself to the Italian grocery store on the corner. This means that he walks to the end of our block, crosses a pretty busy two-way street, and goes inside a store where we know the check-out people by name. Eli's initial reaction when I asked him to buy the sliced turkey for his own lunch, on a particularly harried morning, was utter surprise: What, me, do an errand on my own? This only served to increase my determination to send him. And now out the door he goes, serenely. But then last week, as the whole country knows by now, Yale graduate student Annie Le disappeared, horribly a few days before her wedding. The New Haven police are saying they don't believe Le's murder was a random act, and the Yale building where a body was found on Sunday is on the other side of town from our house. So I should stop myself from seeing a connection when there isn't one, all my rational cells are telling me, and keep letting Eli walk to the grocery store. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that letting him out of my sight feels harder.

Photograph of children walking by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: annie le, walking to school, wendy mogel

Amanda, I would like to be one of those parenting rebels who let their children walk to school by themselves. (In the New York Times story yesterday, one mother was reprimaded by a police officer, after passersby saw her 10-year-old son walking alone and called 911. Other mothers got scolding calls from school administrators or fellow parents.) Of course, better safe than sorry feels like the correct operating assumption. We all understand that child abductions are rare, but those stories about Jaycee Duggard and Etan Patz, the New York boy abducted in 1979, are hard to get out of your head.

Emily, you once raised the other side of the equation which Amanda mentions: overdependence, fear of the streets, lack of confidence. My husband and I recently calculated that in the 8 years of my daughter's existence, she has probably spent a total of some minutes—yes, minutes—outside the supervision of an adult. (At the pool, she walks and gets ice cream from the little concession. Maybe 10 such trips equals 40 minutes.) You also, argued, Emily, that it depends on a lot of factors: how old the kid is, what the neighborhood is like, what time of day it is.

Here is my central question: I feel like these stories always titillate by saying the singular "she" or "walks alone." What about in groups? I walked back and forth to school every day, probably starting in third grade. But I wasn't alone. I walked with my friends. Next year my daughter moves to a school about 15 minutes away, in an OK urban neighborhood. The school wants parents to let their kids walk, to cut down on the driving. I desperately want her to as well, but I'm also desperately worried. What to do?

Photograph of kids walking to school by Photodisc.

Tags: children walking to school

My first reaction to reading this piece in the New York Times about how almost no kids walk to and from school anymore was to sarcastically note that before the invention of the car, apparently there was no such thing as a good parent. As a kid who walked to and from school from the second grade on—and as someone who has no kids and no relationship to modern parenting culture—it's easy for me to mock the hypervigilance that characterizes modern parenting. But then I read a couple of male bloggers I admire mock the piece by specifically noting that the chance of abduction is low, and the feminist in me revolted. Sure, the chance of your daughter being abducted like Jaycee Dugard is low, but from my experience and that of my childhood friends who (since we lived independent-minded West Texas) all also walked to school, the chance of grown men catcalling and even following you in a threatening manner approaches 100 percent. It's easy for men to forget this, since most of them don't have a childhood memory of having a grown man follow you down the street, but believe me, for an 11-year-old girl, that's something you don't forget.

That said, the feminist me is skeptical that this sudden fear of letting kids walk more than three feet without hustling them further in the safety of a car is something born out of a genuine concern for sexual abuse and harassment. In fact, the belief that children have to be moved everywhere by heavy machinery driven by their mothers falls right in line with the explosion of newly minted parental necessities that conflict directly with a mother's ability to hold down a full-time job. I know that requiring my mother to drive us to and from school would have put my single parent household into the poor house. Attachment parenting, home schooling, even the trend toward avoiding vaccination all depend on women who are dependent upon their husbands (or a trust fund), because they sure as hell can't work. Driving a kid everywhere is yet another way we crowd out a mother's time with responsibilities that make paid work near-impossible.

And are you really teaching your daughters a good lesson if you keep them locked indoors to prevent grown men from harassing them? The fact of the matter is that catcallers don't go away when you're big enough to decide whether you can walk all on your own. And when grown women lurk inside their homes, afraid to walk around because of catcallers, we're letting the terrorists win. Letting your daughters wallk while teaching them about who catcallers are and why they bully you—they hate your freedom!—strikes me as the better lesson than teaching daughters that they should let the few cruel men out there permanently clip their wings.

Tags: children, driving, feminism, motherhood, parenting

I thought I was doing my part as a service journalist to destroy the romper, that henious, infantilizing insult to adult women everywhere. But apparently the romper will never die. According to Anamaria Wilson's fashion week coverage in the Huffington Post, "The jaunty romper, too, is back at Jason Wu and Derek Lam. Editors galore were also rocking the look Sunday at the tents."

I had hoped that rompers were going to be the next boyfriend jean: a style pushed for a season (or three) by designers, adopted by a number of super-svelte celebrities, but generally rejected by the public (look at the clearance rack at any denim purveyor and you will find those schlumpy, holey jeans in residence). Unfortunately, it looks like rompers are actually like the skinny jean. A trend originally bemoaned by many, but eventually accepted as part of mainstream women's wear. Sigh.

Tags: fashion, fashion week, rompers

This is a guest post from Caitlin Moscatello, who has written for Sports Illustrated and Salon.

Last night while Kim Clijsters celebrated her U.S. Open victory, Serena Williams walked on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards and quipped that singer Pink, suspended high above the stage, wouldn’t “have to worry about stepping over any lines” during her performance. The statement was a clear nod to Williams’ semifinal match against Clijsters, but much of the humor was lost on the crowd. The U.S.’s top female tennis player might be eager to make light of her behavior, but the real line that she crossed wasn’t the white one marking the court—it was the moral boundary she jumped over when she threatened a line judge (a decision that, in addition to an earlier warning, cost her $10,500 in fines and potentially more).

It went like this: After the first set of the match, Williams was issued a warning for slamming down her racket. Then in what proved to be the final game, she was called for a foot fault on her second serve. The double fault gave Clijsters match point, putting Williams on the brink of losing. Her tirade resulted in a point penalty that made Clijsters the winner. The call was certainly questionable, but it in no way justified what came next. Williams raised her racket at the judge and said, “I swear to God I'm [expletive] going to take this [expletive] ball and shove it down your [expletive] throat, you hear that? I swear to God."

The incident is damaging for the game in the United States—for the first time in the 41-year Open era, an American didn't compete in a singles final—but mostly it just hurts Williams. As I wrote last week, Williams, while by no means struggling, is still well behind Maria Sharapova when it comes to endorsement earnings. Looks definitely play a role in this, but so does likability. It almost goes without saying that Williams won’t be any more appealing to sponsors now.

Also hurting her bid for Miss Congeniality is that in a post-match press conference, Williams failed to apologize for throwing a temper tantrum at one of the most-watched women’s sporting events in the world. She rejected the opportunity again yesterday in a released statement that said she “handled the situation poorly” but nowhere mentioned that she was sorry—a cop-out of owning her actions without owning up to them.

Williams’s lack of acknowledgement has only helped fuel speculation over whether or not she was motivated to make her seemingly inevitable loss to Clijsters (the Belgian player would have had a sizable lead even without the penalties) appear less than definitive. (I don’t believe this is the case, but I can’t say it didn’t cross my mind.) Meanwhile, female fans have rallied around Clijsters, who returned to the sport this year after giving birth to her now 18-month-old daughter. Perhaps it’s that women are proud to see a mother kick ass on the court. But even more, it could be that fans are simply grateful to see a player respect the rules and win by them. If the rest of us have to play nice in the sandbox, shouldn’t the same be true for the athletes we admire?

Whether or not redemption for Williams is possible will become clear this afternoon when she teams up with her sister Venus for the women’s doubles final. Unfortunately for Venus, Serena might have cost them the favor of the fans. On the plus side, the crowd at Arthur Ashe is likely too polite to start booing—a lesson Serena should take to heart.

Tags: Kim Clijsters, Serena Williams