What’s Really Dangerous for Kids? Hint: It Has Four Wheels and a Tailpipe.

Photo by pawpaw67 via Flickr.

When she wrote a column for the New York Sun last year about letting her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own, Lenore Skenazy was pilloried by many as an irresponsible mom. She stuck to her guns, though, and started a blog
dedicated to “sane parenting”, advocating the idea that we are
over-sheltering our children from infinitesimal threats such as
stranger abduction. According to Skenazy, the kind of independence
represented by that subway trip is necessary and healthy for children
— and their parents as well.

Now she’s making the publicity rounds promoting her book, Free-Range Kids. In a recent interview with Salon,
she pointed out that  while many American parents are terrified to let
their children walk a few blocks or ride public transit, they think
nothing of driving them everywhere — even though car crashes are the leading cause of death for children in the US:

Skenazy:
If you don’t want to have your child in any kind of danger, you really
can’t do anything. You certainly couldn’t drive them in a car, because
that’s the No. 1 way kids die, as passengers in car accidents.

Salon: Rationally, why aren’t cars the bogeyman instead of stranger abduction?

Skenazy:
It would change our entire lifestyle if we couldn’t drive our kids in a
car, and it’s a danger that we just willingly accept without examining
it too much, because we know that the chances are very slim that we’re
going to have a fatal car accident. But the chances are 40 times
slimmer that your kid walking to school, whether or not she’s the only
one, is going to be hurt by a stranger.

Skenazy’s
answer gets to the heart of why it is so hard for people to accept the
many ways in which automobiles hurt everyone in society, perhaps
especially children — through crashes, through polluting the air, through promoting obesity.
We can imagine a life in which our children are not allowed to play
outdoors, walk to a friend’s house or spend any time unsupervised. But
we just can’t imagine life without cars.

Or can we?