Is independently getting to school really so dangerous?

It's been a while I know and what brought me back was a conversation I had this morning, with several parents, about children travelling on public transport and walking to school.

I clearly missed the memo which said it was unwise, and unsafe to let a child use a bus, train or their feet to get to school. In fact I was quite shocked about the conversation and so have done some reading. It seems (according to the 'West') parents in WA are far more uncomfortable than our European and British counterparts at letting our children independently get to school.

Why? What is it about how we perceive our city and transport system which makes us so? Is Perth really more dangerous than London or Paris? Are our trains so inefficient we risk our child being stranded? Or are we simply worried the physical world is somehow fraught with danger?

Dangerous, predatory people exist, they always have and always will, some of them will even catch buses and trains, shop at supermarkets, drive white vans and go to swimming pools, and in all of those places they have a physical presence. Fortunately in those locations they are usually outnumbered by reasonable, rational humans who are merely using the facilities. 

The benefit of being in a physical environment is we have more to work with- we can see how old the person is, we can judge body language, develop a sense of what is and is not safe and we can act accordingly. It is vitally important children learn the skills to judge situations as safe or unsafe and make sensible choices: from the enormous tree they are about to climb or the car they are about to get in with the drunk driver. 

Independently getting to school has given my children a huge range of benefits: friendships; exercise; community engagement; resilience and problem solving to name a few.

For me the online world is fraught with more danger for children than the physical. Those same predatory people exist, except now they can be 13 or 75, male or female and those interactive human cues which help keep us safe are gone. They can post photos of themselves in manner akin to taking out an advert on the main billboard in Time Square; they can write and be written about in a way no face to face communication would allow and they can inadvertently leave an online memory which may come back to haunt them. Seemingly, however, this is all ok because they get to do that from the 'physical' safety of their own homes.

It is time to rethink how we view our physical world and how we limit our children's access to it. They need to experience more, not less of it, so that's: climbing trees; falling down and off things; skipping, hopping, and jumping in mud; balancing on walls; swinging upside down; wrestling and, YES, walking, riding, scooting or bussing to school.