Quote:
Originally Posted by calf
The story also says the mother showed up with other children. It's quite likely that she was looking after those kids when the 6 year old got away, or putting on her jacket, or going to the bathroom, or anything else that happens in the morning. I can't believe someone would cry negligence when there's many things that could be going on at one time, and it takes a split second for a 6 year old to open a door and start walking.
It's interesting - on one hand, parents are getting a ton of criticism for being overprotective helicopter parents. On the other, if they provide perhaps a bit of freedom, or take their eyes off the kid for a second and they take off and it takes a few minutes to catch up, if something happens to go wrong, they are criticized for not keeping a super close eye on the child and letting something like this happen.
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I'm putting this out there and prepared for a flaming (and don't care about because frankly, I don't g.a.s about some wanker on a message board getting bent out of shape about it) but my kids all walked back and forth to school by themselves in grade 1 (they range in age now, from 24-27).
Granted, we lived in a smaller centre at the time (Innisfail) and there were no train crossings, but there was plenty of road traffic. For the first 2 weeks of school, I walked to and from with them, but after that, they were responsible for getting themselves to and from school. As the younger children started school, sure, they all more or less walked together, both to and from school, but there were times my youngest, in 1st grade, didn't always want to wait for her brothers so she'd meet up with them long enough to tell them she was going RIGHT NOW and she'd leave. *shrug* If we'd lived in the city, we may have done things differently, but there are a lot of variables even then, where we may have made the same choices.
I took a lot of crap even back then, for letting them walk, "at such a young age" but I blew people off for that. Maybe we just got lucky, or maybe it's that the kids knew the expectations, and we taught them, and they knew that if they weren't home by a certain time, mom would crawl up your backside if you screwed around on the way home. They also knew that I knew enough of the other/older kids/parents that lived on the route, or walked the route, that they'd be told on if they got stupid which no doubt helped. *gasp* We even let them go down the street to the park by themselves to play. We had a set of walkie talkies we used camping, that had enough range, so they'd take one of those with, but it was rarely turned on - it was to get in touch with me if something did happen, or to ask if they could go further down the street to so-and-so's house to play. They had watches and knew when to be home. Our kids had quite a lot more freedom than their peers, even back then.
My youngest was our bolter. Therefore, I watched her and we made certain provisions but even then, kids can make Houdini look like an amateur with their ability to be there at 2:09:45 and be gone at 2:09:46 and every one of our kids pulled that a few times, and they were "neurotypical" kids (ie. no special needs).
There is really nothing but sheer luck between the fact that my kids survived their walks back and forth to school at 6 and 7 years of age and this tragedy. It's every bit as possible that one of my kids could have been hit by a car or truck, of various sizes and been killed because at 6/7, the kids' size is definitely a factor up against a vehicle of any size - that's almost always a losing proposition.