Two children – aged eight and five – are allowed to cycle to school unsupervised and it’s provoked a debate across national media as well as here in the office. The story made the news after the children’s school, Alleyn’s Junior School in Dulwich, south London, was considering reporting their parents to social services for letting them cycle to school on their own.
The children’s parents commented that ‘we wanted to recreate the simple freedom of our childhood. These days children live such regimented lives. They can do nothing unless it’s planned. We are trying to let them enjoy their lives and teach them a little bit about the risks of life’. Various organisations, including RoSPA and Sustrans, have come out in favour of the issue, advocating the valuable life skills children can learn from activities such as this.
However, much of the debate in the office and also amongst friends and family, has been around the age of the children – should an eight year old really be in charge of a five year old? Whilst the route to their school is on the pavement, through the backstreets of leafy Dulwich, my issue is not about letting children have a chance to learn self-confidence and responsibility but more about what might happen to them along the way. What would the eight year old do if there was an accident on the way to school? What about the issue of ‘stranger danger’?
As the mother of a three year old, the thought of letting him cycle a mile down the road in two years time, even with an older sibling, isn’t something I’d feel comfortable with. I appreciate the need for children to learn risk and understand danger but in my mind, this seems to be a slightly unusual way for children to learn this. In this day and age, it’s harder than ever to know at what age children should start to be given some freedom outside the home but five seems a bit too young for me. What are your thoughts?
Small children cycling to school – a safe ride? My blog http://tiny.cc/ml2sh
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
This has caught the imagination of the media because its hit a nerve. Previous generations had much greater freedoms, stranger-danger stories rarely hit the media, and the dreadful health and safety mentality that has imposed limitations on so many areas of our live didn’t exist. The principle of allowing children to ride to school on their own is sound. But an eight year old should not be expected to take responsibility for a child of any age.
But what is the right age for a child to cycle to school? That’s a call for the parent in judging the maturity of the child. I reckon it would have been around 9 or 10 for my children.
A safe ride? http://goo.gl/fb/n7DdB (@ceallen)
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Firstly, I wouldn’t let my kids cycle to schol alone at that age. But that’s purely because we live in a busy urban area. If we were in the country, the school was nearby and they were good at riding their bikes, it’d probably be different.
But the point I wanted to make is that parents’ first thought about an issue like this should not automatically be ‘oooh, that’s dangerous, it’s irresponsible’. Safety depends on a whole bunch of circumstances. You cannot wrap your kids up in cotton wool forever, and if you do then the more rebellious ones will be keener to embrace danger anyway.
The question of what age cycling to school is OK depends on where you live, what time of year it is, what your kids are like and – most importantly – whether they’re good at riding bikes or like some of the ‘mollycoddled-pink streamers from the handlebars-don’t go too fast darling-daddy will jog alongside you’ wimps I see in the local park most weekends. If parents put as much time into teaching their kids to ride well, to respect danger and to jump off the thing and let it smash into a tree when that’s the only way out of a nasty injury as they did worrying about what other people do and don’t allow their kids to do, cycling for youngsters would be far safer. My five-year-old daughter, having done a lap of the local park standing up last week said the only reason she didn’t do it faster was “other children who can’t ride bikes properly were getting in my way”.
Disclaimer: my parents let me ride to the end of the road when I was seven, and by eight I was riding everywhere in the local area. At nine, it was decided I wouldn’t be allowed to ride my bike to school until I was 11. But that was only because my teacher caught me pulling wheelies up the middle of the High Street as she followed in her car.
This have everything to do with parents’ inflated sense of danger. Frightening people sells newspapers and encourages parents to molly-coddle their children much more than is necessary. Of course eight year olds should be able to cycle to school on their own and yes they’re old enough to look after their five year old brother or sister.
This isn’t a hippyish or Victorian view it’s simply a case of working out how real the danger is or isn’t.