For the past ten years my husband and I have walked our three children to and from playschool, infant school and junior school in Hove.
But later this year we will be facing a real dilemma.
When our second child joins his sister at secondary school in the autumn, making their own way there and back, should we continue to walk our youngest to school or let him walk the half-mile on his own?
This will be the first time we have been in this situation as our youngest will be the only one of our children to have been at school run age on his own.
In September he will be nine-and-a-half and we will have to decide whether he is mature enough, sensible enough, careful enough to get to school and back safely every day.
There are two fears that particularly prey on parents’ minds. The first is stranger danger, when somebody plucks a child off the street and they are never seen again.
Logically you know that the chances of a stranger snatching your child are very low... but it does happen.
Road danger
The second is road danger. In 1971, there were about 15 million cars on Britain’s roads and about 80% of children aged seven and eight walked to school without parents.
In the mid-seventies my mother let me and my sister, a year older than me, walk to school together in our big village when we were about six and seven, crossing one main road. But in those days drivers drove more carefully and slowly.
Today the number of cars has more than doubled – and that’s not counting other vehicles – and only about half of 11-year-olds walk to school alone.
My son’s route to school takes him across two main roads, one with a pelican crossing and one with a middle-of-the-road traffic island, and the problem is that today in this small, crowded country, the car is king.
Roads rule and the pedestrians are ‘peasants’, forced into submission.
Even when I walk my children to school, drivers steer their cars onto the pavement we are walking on because it’s a single lane road and they are simply unwilling to wait a few seconds to let another car through.
And at busy traffic lights drivers are so anxious to get through they speed up even as green changes to amber and often chance it on red.
Pedestrians, forced to wait for the green man at three or four-way lights for longer and longer, risk running reds too.
How long before a nine-year-old learns the sequence at traffic lights and, free from parental scrutiny, grows cocky enough to think they can beat the system? It only takes one mistake.
In Brighton city centre pedestrians behave badly all the time, dodging across roads in front of buses when the lights are against them.
They are risking their lives and young children who see them are simply going to copy.
Agressive drivers
It doesn’t help that Brighton and Hove are afflicted by the fast and aggressive driving of Londoners, who ignore many of the rules of the Highway Code. Accustomed to fighting their way through the clogged capital they bring to Brighton an entirely different way of driving.
This is dangerous for other road users but even more so for child pedestrians.
Parents teach children the rules of the road, and children expect the rules to be followed. But when drivers deviate it’s often children who pay the price.
In a commendable move Brighton and Hove Council is introducing 20mph zones in residential roads around schools. All we need now is for all drivers to observe it consistently. And I will include cyclists in that, too.
Helmeted heads down and Lycra legs pumping, they power-pedal their way through red traffic lights and pelican crossings. In a way they are more dangerous than cars because cyclists sneak up on you in silence. I’ve been met with filthy looks and abuse when cyclists have flashed past my regular pelican crossing just as my children and I begin to step out into the road.
Actually, I think I’ve just persuaded myself to never let any of my children cross the road alone again!
But independence and confidence are essential parts of children’s development and they have to learn how to assess a risk. This also depends on each individual child’s maturity and that is something for parents to decide on, as the law does not specify age and distance of walking to school.
The charity Kidscape found in a survey that most parents allowed their children to cross local roads by the age of nine.
So in September our nine-year-old child should be ready to walk to school alone or at least with a friend. After all, by then it will only be two years until he starts secondary school. But it’s too early to make a decision yet. I’ll decide in September...
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