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

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