I'm sure I've told this story before, but I always walked to grammar school by myself, after the first day or so in K and 1st, since we moved in between. In both cases it was basically a straight shot. I found out years later that my father followed me for a while after I was going "by myself"! Hilarious. Can you imagine this big man following a little girl down the street? Now that seems like a scary situation!

Casper doesn't walk to school by herself yet, even though it is only 2 blocks away, because she is only 4. There is a street to cross without a crossing guard, and I half worry that she would stop to look at something or think about something and forget to go all the way to school. mr. flea does drop her off on the corner and let her cross with the guard and go into school by herself, though.

I walked 3/4 of a mile to school at age 10, and took the suburban shuttle bus home from the center of town to near my house after choir practice when I was that age too. I am pro-independence, for those developmentally ready to have it. Four is a little young, still, to me.

Luckily flea 4 is also young enough they usually don't yet feel the need to go off and assert their independence in that way. My daughter's idea of independence is riding her bike in front of our house. My son's is going to the potty by himself.

Can you imagine this big man following a little girl down the street? Now that seems like a scary situation!

My father followed me on my paper delivery route when I was about fifteen. Incredibly irritating--as noted I'd been taking public transport in the third world five years earlier. I think I quit after a week because he wouldn't stop.

Emmett walked to aftercare from his school unaccompanied by an adult (but with his friends) starting in 3rd grade. But it was only a few blocks through housing for UC Berkeley graduate students. Very safe environment. Towards the end of 4th grade he stopped doing aftercare, was given a cell phone and we just picked him up where he told us to find him. He had keys to his Mom's house so he could let himself in, but mostly he was free to roam and I generally picked him up at one his friends' houses.

It was a conscious choice to let him have some of that freedom before he got into middle school where the aftercare options dry up. It helped that his Mom and I had freer schedules so that we could collect him right after school as well.

I still wouldn't turn him loose on BART or Muni by himself, but he's probably old enough to do that now. Some of his school friends are a couple stops away on BART and take it every day to school. The BART station is only a 5 minute walk from his school.

My mom, who was very young when she had me, used to leave me by myself in the front yard of their apartment building in Birmingham, AL when I was 2 to 3. This apartment building abutted one of Birmingham's busiest streets. She said she'd tell me not to go into the street, and I'd say okay. Somehow I survived.

Anyway, I didn't have that kind of freedom again until I was in 3rd grade in Montgomery, AL, when my mom had me walk once a week through a pedestrian tunnel under a major highway, down a sidewalk-less street, and across a park to get to piano lessons. That tunnel was terrifying, filled with disturbing (to a 3rd grader country mouse like me) obscene graffiti and an overwhelming smell of piss. I remember that fear clearly, how I had to screw up my courage as I approached the tunnel, how scary I found all the images of penises (and seriously, someone had a Superbad-like obsession with spray-painting dicks on that tunnel wall because they were everywhere) and stick figures in coitus and forbidden words on the walls, and especially how my heart would almost stop at the nadir of the tunnel, when the curve brought the entrances to the least-visible point and I felt like I was drowning in my own fear.

My son's is going to the potty by himself.

::weeps::

HOW. HOW DID YOU GET HIM TO USE THE THING???????????????

That sounds terrifying. Ugh!

The flip side to all of this is my friend who started drinking after school at like 13, because once the school bus dropped her off at home, there was nothing to do.

Yep. In my hometown, you drank and blew shit up until you were old enough to drive. Then you drove out to a different field to drink and blow shit up, and maybe take a baseball bat to some mailboxes on the way home for a little something different.

{{{wee Corwood}}} That's terrible.