Walking to School

In 1969 many of the more cautious parents would have been walking their kids to school (with obvious great safety effects for all the kids).

Another unplanned effect of the two-job family, maybe; or of the two-car family.

Now, what’s funny is, how many of the poor kids (and their parents) are driving off to weightloss exercise?

I’m sure Keiran is basically right about this, though he hasn’t named all the culprits. Here’s some more.
1) decreased population densities mean that fewer children live within a mile of any give school, so that the absolute numbers eligible for walking to school are down, so even if all wlaked there would be absolutely fewer kids walking, so the tipping point is reached quicker.
2) In half the US for about half the year it is UNBELEIVABLY COLD, and we don’t want our kids dawdling to school (as they tend to).
3) Parents are less strict about bedtimes than they were in 1969, so it is harder for them to get their kids out of the door on time (saves time to drive).
4) Clew’s two car family: it is regarded as eccentric now to have an intact family with children, and only one car. IF you have two cars, and both drive to work there’s a greater chance that school is not far out of one of your ways than if you have one car and one person drvies to work.

There must be others. Neither 1 nor 2 have any bearing on the situation in England, and in most urban areas (in England) it takes almost as long to drive a mile during the school run as it does to walk, so 3 doesn’t apply either (even though English parents are equally lackadaisical about bedtimes).

Incidentally, if Keiran is right, you’d expect collective action mechanisms to be available to combat the trend — and indeed, I know of several english schools which organise parents to walk the kids to school in a kind of crocodile — pretty successful, too, since parents take it in turns to walk a whoile bunch of kids once a week, instead of having to drive their own there every day.

Being less than a mile from school doesn’t necessarily mean distance isn’t an issue. It’s all a matter of perception. I used to walk half a mile or so uphill to school every day. Then, for reasons I don’t recall, my dad started driving me in the morning. (Driving was actually longer distance-wise, because there was a shortcut up over Stony Ridge that you could take on foot, but to drive you had to go all the way around.) On the few days when he couldn’t drive me, walking seemed far more arduous than it had when I did it routinely. Once you get used to driving short distances, you get stuck in that rut. Which is one reason I still walk to the grocery store even though I have a car.

“Similarly, social movements that successfully propagate ideas or initiate collective action tend not to rely on contagion but are usually very well organized.”

True, but social movement organizational forms and tactics often spread as a result of contagion effects.

Harry,

I knew you were just adding additional possible explanations; my apologies if my post implied otherwise. Glad to know we’re on the same page here (we also are single-car-owning, strict-bedtimes types). And I wholly sympathize with your point about collective action. It’s not as though individual actors can greatly affect socioeconomic trends. “My kids could go and play in the street…but it would be with each other” sounds exactly like a mournful comment I’ve often heard from my wife when we’ve discussed these issues, and what is to be done? It’s chicken-or-the-egg: which came first, the conscious creation of a cultural attitude, with attendant material results (empty suburban streets, with both parents working and kids at day care and/or busily being shuttled from one after-school program to another), or the material demands (declining wages, affordable homes built miles from school houses) that gave rise to cultural adaptations? And either way, one’s own personal material allocations or cultural decisions probably won’t be enough to resurrect street hockey.

Anyway, you do what you can. Glad you liked the post. And I don’t think you’re being quirky at all to think that certain fundamentalist Christians have understood better than many leftists the real obstacles to child-rearing today. As you recognized in your excellent post on conservatives and gay marriage yesterday, there are situations, especially in regards to the family, where policies really should reflect “some limited assumptions about what constitutes a flourishing human life.” Traditionalists, at least in this case, have done a good job holding onto those assumptions, while many others–distracted by, perhaps, equally important issues–have often let any positive vision of child-rearing be undermined by other priorities.

“And I think (perhaps quirkily) that the fundamentalist Christians are right about a lot of things they belive in and do vis a vis childrearing, and that the left shuld pay them some respectful attention.”

You know, that really, really interests me. There was an article in the NY Times magazine a longish time ago – two years maybe, or more – about a pair of Xian fundamentalists and how they were raising their children – and I was surprised and very interested to find that some of it (by no means all, for instance not the trad sex role stuff) was highly appealing to me. Especially the total ignoring of tv and popular culture – the acting as if it did not exist. Sure, there are some drawbacks to that, but there are some pretty big drawbacks to the total immersion that’s ‘normal’ too.

I’ll respond to other stuff later (ie tomorrow) because I have to get the kids dinner and put them to bed right now, then help my mother-in-law with… well..
But I have to congratulate Ophelia on her memory. The article is called ‘Inward Christian Soldiers’by Margaret Talbot. I promise I’ll post ont his theme soon (that is, on the theme about fundamentalists, lefties, and child-rearing, not Ophelia’s memory).

Sorry — I got so into this thread that I failed to notice that I didn’t start it and so have no obligation to say anything more. Still, I will say more later anyway.

We don’t do manual labor, either. We have machines to do a lot of that. We use chainsaws instead of handsaws in the yard, powered lawn mowers instead of push mowers, weedwhackers instead of bare hands. We are richer and more capital-intensive than we used to be, so we are using capital equipment (cars) rather than labor (walking) to do a task. It doesn’t take much social change – if the folks in ’69 had been as rich as us, they would have driven, too.

A tipping point has been reached in one way, though – bicycles used to be a common approach, now disused, due originally to increased theft, but now as much due to the lack of bike racks at many schools.

Boy, mary’s a bit touchy about this, isn’t she? Everyone here is acknowledging the role of physical developments in the US in this situation. It’s actually a great example of the unintended consequences (and unclaculated externalities) of modern suburban development.

I think that the various sociological reasons – 2 car families, spoiled kid – tend to apply as well, but I suspect that what they’ve done is to reinforce the physical trends. 35 years ago, being a nice, close walk to an elementary school was a slam-dunk in housing marketability, Now, I wonder whether it even factors into sales prices? I think the allusion someone made to viewing schooling as achievement-driven got at something vital. Many (most?) middle-class and up parents in the states will give up almost everything else to put their kid in a perceived-better school, with no concern for economics, socialization, or simple things like exercise & autonomy. Why have junior walk 3 blocks to the good public school when there’s an excellent private school a mere 45 minute drive away?