I’ve seen this 2015 documentary of some sort from the perspective of Japanese vs Australian kids being able to commute to and from school on their own without parental supervision. The thing is that parents in Japan encourage kids to be independent from a young age without being “babied” too much while apparently in Australia it’s common for parents to drop kids at school.
Now: why is it common for American parents to either drop kids off themselves or kids using the stereotypical yellow school buses on commuting to school rather than letting the kid use public transport themselves or walk to school on foot on their own? I’ve heard that a father got arrested in the US just for letting his son walk to and from school due to accusations of “child endangerment”.
Public transport? What’s that?
- Most of the us doesn’t have functional public transport
- as a single datapoint, kids in Boston public schools get t passes. I don’t know if it’s some or all but a coworker had her kids get to school on their own using transit, with passes provided by the school system
- I live in an older suburb of Boston, and my kids walked to school. However it was falling to the same disease as so many suburbs: neighborhood schools closing into fewer and much larger ones across town.
Most of this continent was built by racists who owned car companies. Turns out racists that own car companies really wanna make sure that everyone has to drive and black kids stay away from white kids, and then they build cities to make those things happen.
I walked back and forth from home to school all throughout fifth grade to about middle school, unsupervised. This was also in the 70s and 80s, before parents were paranoid about such things.
