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Is it responsible for a parent to let a 12-year-old child ride the NYC subway alone?
Is it responsible for a parent to let a 12-year-old child ride the NYC subway alone?
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| Yes | 34% | 144 votes | Total: 427 votes | |
| No | 66% | 283 votes |
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Add to FavoritesAs a mother of four, ages 15 to 5, I've debated "The Safety Dance" with many a mom on this issue, So much that it helped me land a gig on a California radio show. My neighbor, a PhD in psychology was hosting “Psych Talk” on local university’s public access channel and she then brought me into the station for a guest spot on parenting trends in the 90’s. A few months later, I was hosting “The Parent Rap” on the same station.
In those months behind the microphone I interviewed several authors, MDs and other noted experts in the field of parenting and family life. My children at the time were 5 and 3, and my basic observation of American motherhood was that we were running 24/7 to obtain the illusion of the perfect life for our children. This included our obsession with safety. We read food labels with a line item veto ready for any chemical deemed potentially hazardous for our children’s brain developments. We warned our children of “Stranger Danger”, assuming anyone and everyone was a potential abductor. And then came the laws.
California is the bastion of safety laws for family life. There are helmet laws for bicylists and morotists, laws against leaving your child alone in a car, and recently legislation was introduced to make spanking also illegal. It’s a great state for lawyers, but citizens, beware.
Once while sitting in a parked car at a Southern California airport, I received a ticket for not having my toddler in a car seat. Grandma’s plane was delayed, the kids were fussing, and I had pulled over to clear my head. Since that wasn’t possible with my three year old screaming, I made the decision to let him stretch his legs. The fine? $350.
California’s culture of safety trickled into other aspects of our family life. I was scolded by neighbors for letting my children play in our private cul-de-sac. I guess they feared some terrible boogie man jumping out from behind their parked car. Then I approached a parent about a school carpool to school. She didn’t like the looks of my car - which was a modest, but well made Toyota Corolla. My friend recounted when the police came to her apartment after it was reported her leaving her kids alone to go to the next door laundry room.
Back in the studio “The Parent Rap” played bumper music from the 80’s hit “The Safety Dance”. We interviewed a representative from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who clarified that random child abductions were rare. Still, my fellow California parents continued to ring their hands, and legislators were all too happy to respond.
When we moved to Iowa, I was so relieved to see the relaxation of these anxieties. Kids riding without helmets. My sons visited a local construction site and no one kicked them out because it “wasn’t safe”. Here you can breathe and put life in perspective.
And yet now Iowa is considering helmet laws for motorcyclists, and there’s worry about intoxication of children from hand sanitation products. The truth is - we can legislate our selves into oblivion, but as parents, we have a bigger and even more scarier adversary to embrace, which is the reality that we don’t control the universe, bad things happen, and then yes, one day, our children are going to get hurt.
If I were still on the air today, I’d invite the British authors Conn and Hal Iggulden to discuss their run away best seller “The Dangerous Book for Boys”. They point out how our “safety first” approach to child-rearing has all but crippled creativity in the good old fashioned boyhood enjoyed by previous generations - go kart making, bows and arrows, skinning a rabbit.
My children have gotten lost in malls, wandered home alone, broken a few bones, and lived to tell about it. We say a prayer every night at bedtime. “Guardian Angel, bless my children, protect them and keep them safe.” So far, everybody’s still breathing…..
Learn more about this author, Jennifer Bioche.
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No
New York City is one of the greatest cities in the United States. It has Central Park, Time Square and the Statue of Liberty. Its a city full of exciting activities and things for one to see and do. However it's also full of child predators, murderers, thiefs and rapists alike. The sidewalks are crowded with people walking to and from places they need to be. The dangers of NYC are enormous for an adult, let alone a twelve year old child.
Letting a twelve year old child roam the streets of NYC alone is quite simply put: Parental Irresponsibility. Anything can happen to a child in between point A and point B. Child abductions usually do not end up like the little boy who was recently abducted from his home and found wondering the streets of Mexico. An abducted child, if not found within the first 48 hours, does not have a very high chance of being found alive. Children are extremely vulnerable and that is why they have parents to protect them.
Unless your twelve year old has grown up on the streets, chances are good that he does not know how to react when faced with a dangerous situation. When needing to travel on the subway a child should be accompanied by a parent or another responsible adult. Traveling in a group is better, still than two kids traveling alone. One child is easier to grab than two and two children are easier to grab than a group of them. There is no real reason that a child needs to be on a subway alone. If you are working and the child wants to go to a friends house that requires use of the subway, then the parents should arrange for someone to take them over there.
Another serious concern that parents in this day and age need to worry about is on-line predators. Why am I including this in an article about whether or not a twelve year old should be allowed to take the subway alone? Simple. A child tells their parents that he wants to go meet a friend of his, but he needs to take the subway to get there and what he's really planning to do is meet a twelve year old girl he has been talking to on-line. The twelve year old girl is really a thirty-six year old child molester that has been pretending to be a twelve year old girl and now this man has your child. It's that simple. Children are sneaky when they want to be and what they do not realize is that being sneaky can also put them in a life or death situation.
So the next you think its OK for a twelve year old to take the subway alone, ask yourself if the risk of something happening to your child is worth it. The one thing there is no replacing is your child.
Learn more about this author, Lisa Shaver.
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