Kidnappers

I don't have kids.  So I generally try to keep my mouth shut about kid-related issues rather than invite picky-eater, loud-toy, poor-sleeper karma my way.  But what with all the revolutions/earthquakes/tsunamis/nuclear disaster/tornadoes hitting handgun factories (okay, the last one might have only happened on 30 Rock) this week, I'm in a mood to tempt karma.

In the United States, the chances of a child being abducted and killed by a stranger--the kind of kidnapping that people envision happening if they dared let their child walk home from school--are one in 1.5 million.

The chances of a child in the United States dying in a motor vehicle crash are one in 50 thousand.  The chances of injury in a motor vehicle crash: one in 300.  I'll admit my math is slightly imperfect since I used CDC data from 2005 divided by population data from the 2008 census so here's the raw data: in 2005 1,335 children ages 14 years and younger died as occupants in motor vehicle crashes, and approximately 184,000 were injured.  That’s an average of 4 deaths and 504 injuries each day--compared to 0.3 abductions daily.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about my niece's walk to school: two blocks--with sidewalks--in a posh neighborhood.  The one street she has to cross has a crossing guard.  By far the greatest danger she faces is avoiding all the parents on cell phones trying to maneuver their SUVs into the driveway once she reaches the school.  My husband and I quickly came to the consensus that we'd allow a theoretical child of ours to do such a walk solo sometime in the 1st-2nd grade year, depending on the maturity of the particular kid.  Before I could tell my friend this, she answered, "Oh, probably around age 13 or 14."  

We can't trust kids to walk alone until 14, but two years later it's no problem to hand them the keys to the two-ton death machine?  How did we get here?

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey.  Of kids living within a mile of their school only 1/4 are regular walkers.  Why?  Well, busing, of course, is part of it.  But even those kids that could walk to school don't.  Poor neighborhood design, lack of sidewalks and other infrastructure are surely in play (so let's fix those, too), but the big bugaboo is stranger danger.

We hear about every case of child abduction (ever think about the fact that it is, in part, more notable because it's rarer?) on the news and then repeated ad nauseam on morbid "news"-magazine shows like Dateline or Nancy Grace (*shiver*).  There's no shortage of crime dramas that will give you a case of parental agoraphobia--Without a Trace, CSI, (as much as it pains me to say it) Bones, Law and Order SVU.  Listen, I love me some Elliot Stabler as much as the next girl, but for the two years I lived alone I had to put a moratorium on SVU-watching lest I have to sleep with the light on.  I can only imagine what nightmares it must give parents.  

The decision to let your kid walk is better than any PR the car companies could ever pay for.  It tweaks a nerve with at least 7 of the 10 factors which psychologist Paul Slovic has identified alter risk perception.  Novelty and publicity--fear of the unknown combined with heightened coverage (the same thing that makes us disproportionately scared of terrorist attacks)--dread, trusting the actions of others, and, of course, the fact that it involves children.  The sense of choice and how that plays into the illusion of control means we choose the option of driving--where we control the risk, even if we control it right into a guardrail or the rear end of another car.

But it's not just that the abduction monster is not as big a monster as we fear, it's that the car monster is much bigger. If I let my kid walk to school and that kid got abducted, I'm a negligent parent.  If I drive my kid to school and they get seriously injured or killed while in the car with me, that's unfortunate, but no one's going to condemn me.  It's an "accident."  These things just happen.  Certainly no one's going to charge me with child endangerment.  Yet I'm putting that kid in much greater danger by buckling them in a safety seat than letting them take a bus by themselves.  

So how can we really protect kids?  By encouraging a diversity of options in how to get around.  By making the roads more equitable for bikers and pedestrians.  By driving less.  In order to drive our kids less, we need to embrace density, mixed-use neighborhoods, and traffic-calming measures and regulations that respect all users of our roadways (and yeah, make it more inconvenient to drive).

And speaking of that "loving" act of buckling in them in the child seat they're not nearly as good as they should be.  Turns out they're pretty much another one of those things we do "just in case" because it seems to increase safety without actually questioning if it does.  So even if you can't get behind my car-lite/car-free hippie fanaticism, hopefully you can get behind lobbying for higher standards for the thing that's supposed to save your kid's life.

Better yet, eliminate your need for one altogether.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/71068