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posted by martyb on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-not-walk-with-friends? dept.

The state's Department of Transportation issued a poster telling parents to use their own judgment. How refreshing.

While the rest of America is going crazy over keeping kids safe and protected, to the point of near-suffocation, the state of Oregon is a refreshing haven of sanity. The [Oregon] Department of Transportation (ODOT) recently issued a poster addressing the question, “When can my child safely walk or ride to school alone?” Oregon has no legal minimum age requirement for children travelling to school on their own.

Rather than enumerating a list of frightening hypothetical scenarios and urging parents to hover, the ODOT poster encourages parents to use their brains in assessing a child’s readiness for independence.

Oregon has given its residents permission to make their own parenting decisions.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:23PM (#420105)

    Son, you;re going to have to walk to school this morning; your Mother and I are high as fuck.

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:49PM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:49PM (#420106) Homepage Journal

      Pussy. I walked to school in half the schools I went to and never came to any harm. As did millions of other kids.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 29 2016, @03:45PM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday October 29 2016, @03:45PM (#420131) Homepage

        Seconded. There's that old joke about having to walk to school miles through the snow, I was literally doing that at age 6 when I lived in Flagstaff, Arizona.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday October 30 2016, @03:13AM

        by driverless (4770) on Sunday October 30 2016, @03:13AM (#420424)

        I walked to school in half the schools I went to and never came to any harm. As did millions of other kids.

        In the rain and snow. Uphill both ways.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 29 2016, @04:24PM

      by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday October 29 2016, @04:24PM (#420152)

      I'd say these days there is more harm that goes on IN schools or before leaving the house than just walking to school.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday October 29 2016, @09:39PM

        by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday October 29 2016, @09:39PM (#420266) Journal

        I'd say these days there is more harm that goes on IN schools or before leaving the house than just walking to school.

        There's no "these days" about it. Child abuse -- whether sexual, physical, or merely verbal -- is most frequently something that occurs between kids and people they know. We've been trained in recent years of media stories to think of random predators, along with Catholic priests and scout leaders, but really the rate of abuse for any adults in kids' lives (ministers and priests of other denominations, camp counselors, teachers, coaches, other family members, adult family friends) is roughly the same... at least in percentage of the population who offend. And the most common source of abuse is often the immediate family -- parents, siblings, uncles, etc.

        The reality is that these folks have the opportunity to develop a relationship with kids and then exploit or abuse them. The number of random stranger abductions is and has always been much smaller, because it's simply more difficult to do.

        Bottom line: Parents should spend a lot less time worrying about pedophiles with Timmy walking somewhere by himself and more time checking to be sure that the time Timmy spends with some known adult in his life is actually OK.

        (Also, parents' fears tend to be focused mostly on little kids. Again, major statistics flaw -- the number of actual PEDOphiles who target pre-pubescent children is quite small compared to those who are attracted to teenagers, even though all of these tend to be lumped together as "pedophiles" in media reports when a kid is under 18 or so. It's much less likely that 8-year-old Timmy is going to get targeted by a predator walking to school than it is that 15-year-old Johnnie is going to be felt up in the locker room by his coach or whatever. Yet we don't tend to focus on the threats to 15-year-olds as much.)

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:46PM

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Saturday October 29 2016, @02:46PM (#420117)

    There was a story on the TV news recently about a blind Georgia mother who could not walk with her kids to school. She lived too close for the bus to pick up the children, but yet the children were not allowed to walk to school by themselves. Which literally meant they were not allowed to attend school.

    Which, of course, is completely and totally insane. The entire point of buses not picking up children that close is that they can walk. If they aren't permitted to walk by themselves, then the damn buses need to pick them up. Even if they live right next door to the school.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @04:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @04:53PM (#420155)

    Remind me not to hire either of you guys as a press spokesman.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday October 30 2016, @06:58AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday October 30 2016, @06:58AM (#420449) Journal

      I see, you prefer the parents to be locked up in cages. ;-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @09:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @09:52PM (#420270)

    That's all it will take - one scraped knee by a kid walking to school, videoed and replayed 24/7 for a few weeks on all the "news" channels for this to be rolled back.