This morning there was a story on the Today show about a mother who is allowing her 10-year-old son to ride the bus and subway in New York City all by himself. I guess this is shocking news. The mother in the story was defending her decision by saying that the bus and subway are perfectly safe, and that her son is capable of navigating the system on his own. She contends that allowing independence in children helps them to become more self-sufficient adults. She mentioned, amongst the things that people believe are unsafe, but which are perfectly fine, riding a bicycle in the street.

When I was growing up, my mother was extremely over-protective. I wasn’t allowed in the front yard until I was about 10, and I wasn’t allowed to leave our block for several more years. My high school was about five blocks from our house in a residential neighborhood. Up until I began my freshman year, I was not allowed to walk to the high school by myself.

We are taught that modern society is a scary place. It is dangerous out there. If you have a child you are taught that two things loom large in the plethora of threats:
1) child abduction
2) the danger of riding a bicycle in the street
These two factors together would seem to indicate that the most irresponsible thing that you could possibly do as a parent is to allow your child to ride a bicycle to school alone.

Many years ago I took a class in ionizing radiation (it’s a long story) and that class gave me a great introduction to risk assessment. It was in that class that I first learned that smoking and flying pose far greater radiation exposure risks to the average person than do nuclear power or waste. It was also the first time that I was told that the risk of dying while riding a bicycle is extremely low, especially compared to the risk of dying in a car crash.

In Wisconsin each year, somewhere between 8 and 14 people die each year in traffic while riding a bicycle. There are fairly predictable (and preventable) factors that tend to contribute to these crashes:
1) riding a bicycle down a medium to high speed country road late at night with no lights (older adult men tend to be the people who are killed this way)
2) riding a bicycle across the path of a automobile while sidewalk riding
3) riding a bicycle out into traffic unexpectedly (little kids are typically the ones who do this)
4) being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drunk or inattentive driver comes along (this is rare)

As for abductions, according to the FBI child abductions by strangers actually have declined over the last few decades. In the 1980s the number of such child abductions averaged annually about 200 to 300. In 2000, the number of cases dropped to 93 compared with 134 in 1999 and 115 in 1998, when the FBI first began tracking these statistics ( Reference)

My training as a bicycle safety instructor has taught me that, in general, children’s brains are not ready to deal with the complexity of traffic situations until they are about 9 years old. For some kids they are ready sooner, and for some kids they aren’t ready until much later. But, developmentally, the guideline for when a kid is ready to ride their bike in the street alone is about nine.

Once a child is developmentally ready to ride in the street, they need safety training. Children are not just small adults when it comes to traffic. As adults, we have a lifetime of riding and driving in cars that informs us about “the rules of the road.” Whether or not we have formal training about those rules, we’ve picked up plenty from osmosis. Kids just have less experience in these situations

But kids are different for other reasons too, some that you may have never thought about.
1) They have 1/3 less peripheral vision than adults. They can’t see nearly as well out of the corner of their eye when a car is approaching.
2) They have trouble connecting sounds to the direction that the sound is coming from. When a siren wails or a horn honks, it may take them several moments to figure out what direction the sound is coming from.
3) Kids also have trouble judging depth and relative speed, especially for inanimate objects. They may not be able to tell if a car is coming at 5 miles an hour or 50, making it difficult to time crossing a street.
4) They are literal. If you tell a child to check “left, right, left” before crossing the road, they will do just that, and then promptly walk out into on-coming traffic. Whet they need to be told is something more like, “Look to your left (assuming they understand left from right!) and see if there is a car. Then look to your right and see if there is a car. If you didn’t see any cars in either direction, look to your left one last time to check if a car is coming. If no cars are coming, cross the street carefully.”
5) They have difficulty focusing on more than one thing at a time. If their ball rolls across the street, or if they see their friend across the street, their total focus will be on getting the ball or getting to the friend. Checking for on-coming traffic before crossing would not come into their mind at all.

Is it safe to turn your kid loose on the subway at age 10…or, heaven forbid, to put them on a bicycle and send them out into the world? I think the answer is that it CAN be, if you honestly evaluate your child’s developmental stage, and train them in basic traffic safety. One key is to regularly ride WITH your kids in their younger years, so that you can build up lessons over a period of years. As a parent you will be much better equipped to evaluate whether they are ready to go solo if you’ve been able to watch their progress over the years too.

If the proper precautions are taken, children roughly above age 9 can learn to be safe road users. And the more experience that those kids get as vehicular cyclists, the better drivers they will be when they turn 15.

Incidentally, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation offers a free class for anyone who would like to teach bicycle safety to kids. It is called “Teaching Safe Bicycling” and it will be offered at five locations in April and May. More information here

Photo by Della Haugen