Fear is the Heart of All Bad Things
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Stranger danger
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Directly relevant to the article's discussion of irrational parental fear of child abduction - this Wikipedia article covers the history, effectiveness, and criticism of stranger danger campaigns and how they've shaped American parenting culture
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Risk compensation
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The article describes how parents feel safer driving because they feel in control despite statistical evidence to the contrary - this psychological phenomenon explains why perceived control leads to riskier behavior and false sense of safety
I live right up the street from a public elementary school. This was part of the reason we bought this house, if a minor one; I mean, who knows if we’ll even still be living here in five years when Junho is ready for kindergarten. But it’s a lovely little school by the woods that’s a ten-minute walk from our home, and thinking about walking him to school in the mornings fills me with what the kids use to call “the feels.” Crunching through leaves on a New England fall morning, delivering my little guy to school as he bops along beside me…. I drive by and see the sweet little multiracial student body doing silly kid stuff on the playground and I try to imagine him that age. Can’t do it! But I look forward all the same.
But - I try not to drive by at all during dropoff and pickup times. Because like so many other American elementary schools, the one up the street has developed a problem, a geometry problem, one driven by irrationality and fear. Cars choke the street, stressed crossing guards do what they can, cops are assigned every single day, and what was once a generally simple and stress-free process has become a constant nightmare for parents, students, staff, and local residents. Yes, twice a day, my immediate neighborhood is consumed by the school car pickup line problem, which has become more and more common in this country, and for the dumbest reasons you can think of.
You see, elementary schools have been plotted and designed with the assumption that a significant portion of the kids are going to arrive by bus or walk. They have infrastructure to accommodate parents arriving in cars, but the space for such infrastructure is limited, and the entire school bus system exists because bringing kids by bus is more rational than doing so with a fleet of individual family cars - and for decades, schools were able to rely on parents to help them be rational in this way. The preference for bus transportation is simply an expression of the same basic issues of geometry and movement that urbanists have been stressing for decades: when you need to bring a lot of people to or from one place, having
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