When I was growing up, we walked to school. Big kids. Little kids. We ate breakfast (cereal or Pop Tarts), picked up our books (nobody had a backpack), and were handed our lunches (as we got older brown bags took the place of our batman lunch boxes) or a dollar to buy lunch. On a side note, my mother did not trust us with money. My older brother would skip lunch and spend his on candy after school and I would lose it, or somebody would take it from me.
We walked out the front door and followed the group of kids heading towards Ogden Elementary School. At least it was assumed they were headed that way. Nobody was driven. Nobody walked with their parents.
One morning it was storming. The phone rang. It was one of my brother’s friend’s mom offering to pick him up and drive him to Junior High School. My mother gladly accepted.
“Okay,” she said as she looked at my sister and me. “You two in the car. I’ll drop you off before taking your father to the station. Let’s go.”
“Waddaya mean?”, my father asked, reaching for his overcoat. “When I was their age I walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.”
“Yeah, well, this is rain and we don’t have any hills. Besides, this is 1969 and kids do not walk to school in the rain.”
“Ya know, if you baby them, they will become spoiled. And just so both of you know,” he said looking at my sister, our next-door neighbor who had just walked in, and me, “Okay, just so the three of you know, if this rain turns to snow, you walk home. It’ll make you tougher.”
My mother, tying her rain bonnet over her beehive hair (she was the only one NOT getting out of the car) looked at the three of us. “It’s May, so if it’s raining at the end of the day, look for me. I’ll be parked somewhere.”
And that was it. We piled into the back of the light blue, Oldsmobile 98 sedan. My mother drove us as close to the school as she could, without veering off track of the direction she was heading to drop my father at the Long Island Railroad. We crossed the street and sprinted in the rain towards the entrance of the school, where we would find the appropriate line to stand in the hallway with other wet kids awaiting the bell.
Nobody walked me to school. When I was five years old, I was in the afternoon session of kindergarten which meant that my brother who was in the sixth grade had to find me and walk me home. Once first grade came along, I was pretty much on my own. My sister was in fourth grade but she wanted no part of me, and my parents were fine with that.
My mother did not find it necessary to walk with me in the morning and meet me at the end of the day. I was happy when I rang the doorbell at three fifteen and she opened it. She would ask how school was, pour me a glass of milk, heat up another Pop-Tart, and send me upstairs to do my homework or watch tv until my father came home.
Today looking at the total proportion of children walking and bicycling to school, the proportion of children who live within a mile of a school, or the proportion of children living within one mile of the school who walk or bike, the decline is apparent.
Let me explain:
- Going back to when I was growing up in 1969, 48 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (The National Center for Safe Routes to School, 2011).
- In 2009, 13 percent of children 5 to 14 years of age usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
- In 1969, 41 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
- 89 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (U.S. Department of Transportation [USDOT], 1972).
- In 2009, 31 percent of children in grades K–8 lived within one mile of school;
- 35 percent of these children usually walked or bicycled to school (National Center, 2011).
The circumstances that have led to a decline in walking and bicycling to school did not happen overnight and have created a self-perpetuating cycle. As motor vehicle traffic increases, parents become more convinced that it is unsafe for their children to walk or bicycle to school. They begin driving them to school, thereby adding even more traffic to the road and sustaining the cycle.
Many factors contribute to the reduction in children walking and bicycling to school. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a nationwide survey of parents to find out the most common barriers that prevented them from allowing their children to walk to school. 1,588 adults answered questions about barriers to walking to school for their youngest child aged 5 to 18 years. Parents cited one or more of the following seven reasons:
| Barrier | Percentage of parents identifying with the barrier |
| Distance to school: | 61.5 |
| Traffic-related danger: | 30.4 |
| Weather: | 18.6 |
| Crime danger: | 11.7 |
| Opposing school policy: | 6.0 |
| Age (Too young) | 3.4 |
| Other reasons (not identified): | 15.0 |
Back to me
Unless I asked, nobody checked my homework or asked me how I did on my spelling test. It’s just how it was. I got news for you, I grew up and made it to adulthood.
I’m not saying that blueprint would work today. In fact, we know it would not. However, I do take exception to people who question and laugh about my childhood. It was a generational thing. It’s like showing your kids those Instamatic pictures of you with your afro and overalls from the 1980’s. Who knew that one day tube socks and short shorts would go out of style?
I am not certain there were any fewer criminals in the world when I was growing up. In fact, let’s say that it was the same. However, we have the technology today that allows us to see where the closest sexual offender is living. By walking our children to school, we know they are in the building. By waiting on a car line in front of the school and having a trained educator remove each child from the vehicle, your children are accounted for at the beginning of the day and the same holds true at the end of the day.
If both parents work, we have aftercare where rules include the parent signing for their child upon pick up.
My parents were second generation from their parents or grandparents who came over to this country to make a better life for their family. While my dad talked about walking up hill both ways to school, I know there was a part of him that was joking. He had to be. He lived through the Depression, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, air-conditioning, safety razors, color tv, and a man landing on the moon.
It makes me wonder what my son, now a sophomore in college, will do with his kids that will shock me. Hopefully, I can be more relatable than my dad, but some of the best times I ever had were on those walks home from school.