I worked in schools for almost 10 years before having my children. Unfortunately schools are no longer considered safe spaces for many children in America. My children prefer for me to drop them off at school because they feel safer than being on the bus. Dropping my children off at school also means they aren’t being exposed to inappropriate things by older students with cell phones. We could all sit here and say “when I was a kid” but this is 2025, we didn’t grow up in this current reality. Once we get some gun control, and harsher punishment for pedophiles then maybe us parents would have the mental space to handle the car line problem.
Thanks for sharing your perspective as a parent. While I disagree, I think it's important to hear from your side about why you want to drive your children. It's all about doing what is best for the kids, after all. We just have a different perspective on how to get there. Stay safe out there!
As I outlined in the article, stranger danger conceptions of safety. Bigger threat is cars themselves. Like I said, I like hearing from people so I can think more on the topic. I’ll consider for future articles. Not really looking for long debates in the comment section of my article though.
The only mental space needed is to stop thinking that death is lurking around every corner. When you live in fear of things that are 99.9% not gonna happen, there is no mental space that exists. The fact is, if you let your kids walk to school, or bike, the overwhelmingly odds is they will be just fine. Unfounded fears are the reason helicopter parents exist. It drove me crazy raising my 2 kids..even the playground was overrun with parents butting in not letting kids just play. It is bad for your kids, stunts their development, and makes them unable to cope with conflict.
It's 9 miles from our elementary school to our house. Through hilly, windy, country roads with no sidewalks, all posted 45-55mph.
So we did the bus. And then the bus driver had "tickle Tuesdays" where he'd grab little kids and shake them upside down joking around. Our girls came home crying every day because he'd grab their bags and joke around with them in inappropriate ways. We reported the driver, the school fired the guy, and back to business as usual. So now we do the car line.
I feel like most folks complaining about cars in this country don't understand how far apart most things are in the U.S., and while "stranger danger" may be overblown, my kids have had nothing but really messed up interactions with older kids on the bus, let alone tickle Tuesday bus driver guy.
Sorry to hear about that terrible experience with the bus driver. I do understand the spread we are dealing with, as I grew up in similar environment. In fact, the photo later on in the post is the street I took to school as a kid. Hard to blame individual parents. I blame broader societal issues that can only be grappled with collectively.
The bus driver problem is a subset of a broader cultural and economic problem. Driving as an occupation is paid and valued socially as a low-responsibility job when it is objectively a high-responsibility job. Add to this that kids are the "cargo" on a school bus, which rachets up the responsibility requirement. We need to train and pay people as such. But I think this about all driving jobs. Even more so for school bus drivers.
It is understandable that you would opt for a car line. There will always be anecdotes for any situation. Nothing is 100%. But where I live these conditions don’t exist and parents don’t only drive there kids to school for no good reason, they drive them and pick them up from the bus stop also. An I’m talking high school and middle school age kids.
I see this too and it’s ridiculous. When I was in HS sports, I looked up what public bus line I had to take and took a bus home without parental involvement. Was I harassed by weirdos? Yes but I learned how to deal with strangers. That’s life and at some point you have to figure it out.
I appreciate your input, but these aren’t anecdotal in the article. I use data and numbers. Things have changed in the US and the issues I cover show why. I will have a follow up soon to discuss further.
If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
The school pick up and drop off lines like this are real. If you’re going to send your kid to public school then put them on a bus. If you won’t put them on the bus, stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
I drove my child because if not, she would be on the bus almost an hour each way. The bus had this weird winding route. And, the bus stop couldn’t be anywhere near my house. They wanted a middle schooler to walk down our street, turn the corner, walk just as far down that street, cross the road & stand on a corner that had a hill & no way to access the side walk other than to walk up the homeowner’s driveway. the bus would pick child up, & then turn down our road driving passed our house. I thought it might get better in high school. Nope. Again the bus stop was a ways away & crossing a street. And, it was another long ride but not quite an hour. Sometimes the bus wouldn’t even show up. After waiting with child at the bus stop in the rain for no bus to show up. I again gave up & drove the 3 miles to school. Driving child to school was an inconvenience but totally worth it!
Yes, I have heard versions of this. I think with cuts to buses, routes have gotten longer and more winding. Hard to blame parents in this case, too. Sitting on the bus over an hour isn’t ideal.
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Oh my goodness, just had this conversation with the husband yesterday, driving in a school zone and gobsmacked over the number of parents with their perfectly capable and old enough children. And down the road, we learned never to drive by the high school either before or after school because of the pickup and drop off traffic trailing out and blocking the road. Absolutely crazy.
The number of walkers has been a steep decline since the 1960s. Very few American kids walk anymore. But this was true even in the 1990s. Even crazier is that even school bus riders have been dropping! Hence the huge traffic lines we see at modern schools.
Wow, I have always been a walker, I walk everywhere. I choose places to live based on walkability to get to what I need. I am not trying to sound like my grandparents but heck we walked to school rain or shine. I grew up just under one mile away from school, in a small town granted so all the schools were in a cluster, but we walked to and from daily. If it was really, really, ugly out -- like bordering on a 'snow day' we might, MIGHT get a ride. Sounds like the car pollution problem is actually a lazy humans problem.
Hmmmm. Like just about everything else that has tumbled downhill since 1950, ‘If It Ain’t Broken, Break It, And Make It Worse’. On my way home from my morning run the other morning I was behind a school bus at 5:20 am picking up kids.
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
Another change I don’t believe was mentioned was school start times. Our school growing up started at 8. If I had lived close enough to walk or bike (we lived in the country and our elementary school was 6 miles crossing a busy highway with no light) then we might have biked occasionally, but as it was, the bus came at 7:30. The school my son is slated to that he attended for one year before we switched to private school began at 7:35am. It’s 4 miles away across a busy highway with no sidewalk, also rural. His morning bus came at 6:37 and we had to walk/drive him to the front of our neighborhood which is 3/4 a mile from the house. You can see why the bus wasn’t desirable when I could drive him in less than 8 minutes almost an hour later than the bus came. These early elementary starts are not for the faint-hearted. In Japan , my sisters’ kids get on their bus that they walk about 1/2 mile (5 months a year of snow) on a country rode and board at 7:40 and get to school for an 8am start. And no phones allowed on the bus for messing around. Different rules make a huge difference.
Interesting. I had not heard anything about starting times yet. Definitely worth a closer look. Thank you for comment. I will look into this for a future post.
I worked in schools for almost 10 years before having my children. Unfortunately schools are no longer considered safe spaces for many children in America. My children prefer for me to drop them off at school because they feel safer than being on the bus. Dropping my children off at school also means they aren’t being exposed to inappropriate things by older students with cell phones. We could all sit here and say “when I was a kid” but this is 2025, we didn’t grow up in this current reality. Once we get some gun control, and harsher punishment for pedophiles then maybe us parents would have the mental space to handle the car line problem.
Thanks for sharing your perspective as a parent. While I disagree, I think it's important to hear from your side about why you want to drive your children. It's all about doing what is best for the kids, after all. We just have a different perspective on how to get there. Stay safe out there!
What exactly do you disagree with? Shit response.
As I outlined in the article, stranger danger conceptions of safety. Bigger threat is cars themselves. Like I said, I like hearing from people so I can think more on the topic. I’ll consider for future articles. Not really looking for long debates in the comment section of my article though.
I admire your courage and patience.
The only mental space needed is to stop thinking that death is lurking around every corner. When you live in fear of things that are 99.9% not gonna happen, there is no mental space that exists. The fact is, if you let your kids walk to school, or bike, the overwhelmingly odds is they will be just fine. Unfounded fears are the reason helicopter parents exist. It drove me crazy raising my 2 kids..even the playground was overrun with parents butting in not letting kids just play. It is bad for your kids, stunts their development, and makes them unable to cope with conflict.
It's 9 miles from our elementary school to our house. Through hilly, windy, country roads with no sidewalks, all posted 45-55mph.
So we did the bus. And then the bus driver had "tickle Tuesdays" where he'd grab little kids and shake them upside down joking around. Our girls came home crying every day because he'd grab their bags and joke around with them in inappropriate ways. We reported the driver, the school fired the guy, and back to business as usual. So now we do the car line.
I feel like most folks complaining about cars in this country don't understand how far apart most things are in the U.S., and while "stranger danger" may be overblown, my kids have had nothing but really messed up interactions with older kids on the bus, let alone tickle Tuesday bus driver guy.
Sorry to hear about that terrible experience with the bus driver. I do understand the spread we are dealing with, as I grew up in similar environment. In fact, the photo later on in the post is the street I took to school as a kid. Hard to blame individual parents. I blame broader societal issues that can only be grappled with collectively.
The bus driver problem is a subset of a broader cultural and economic problem. Driving as an occupation is paid and valued socially as a low-responsibility job when it is objectively a high-responsibility job. Add to this that kids are the "cargo" on a school bus, which rachets up the responsibility requirement. We need to train and pay people as such. But I think this about all driving jobs. Even more so for school bus drivers.
It is understandable that you would opt for a car line. There will always be anecdotes for any situation. Nothing is 100%. But where I live these conditions don’t exist and parents don’t only drive there kids to school for no good reason, they drive them and pick them up from the bus stop also. An I’m talking high school and middle school age kids.
I see this too and it’s ridiculous. When I was in HS sports, I looked up what public bus line I had to take and took a bus home without parental involvement. Was I harassed by weirdos? Yes but I learned how to deal with strangers. That’s life and at some point you have to figure it out.
I appreciate your input, but these aren’t anecdotal in the article. I use data and numbers. Things have changed in the US and the issues I cover show why. I will have a follow up soon to discuss further.
If you want kids to be independent btw, maybe change the laws. I used to take the train to school by myself when I was ten. Pretty sure a parent could be charged with neglect in many places in America for letting their ten year old go off on a 30 minute trek by themselves.
Stop helicopter parenting.
Definitely a big part of it. That mom who was arrested for letting her 10 year old boy walk into town recently just illustrates our different culture and legal expectations than when we were growing up.
Yep, I watched this trend grow while I was working in the school market. It's ridiculous. I walked and biked to my elementary (our bike racks were FULL of bikes), middle and high school, as well as bussed (winter).
It was fun, and we enjoyed it.
Some of this is because of the simultaneous -national fear campaign about people abducting children, and also - this police state BS whereby it's considered criminal to let you kids outside unattended.
But it's also, helicopter parenting, lazy children (and their lazy children, now adult parents), and the same mobile culture that has people ordering DoorDash for garbage fast food, or Amazon, or whatever... anything for "convenience".
hell, when I was a kid, it was humiliating for your parents to walk you to your bus stop, and/or stay there until you were picked up.
Although, as an aside, a few years ago, I found a toddler, wandering around near a 50 mph road, next to some townhomes. It took me 5 minutes of knocking on doors to find his home and shitbag parents.
There's just too many parts of our culture and society, disintegrating at once, to keep track, or to fix them all in isolation.
Yes, I have seen it in my own communities. Was somewhat rare to be driven to school by a parent back in my parts of Oklahoma, but now has become more normal. Even if we didn't walk or bike, pretty much everyone rode the school bus.
That's pretty crazy about the toddler! I guess it shows you all this stuff is more generalizations. We can spot counter examples all over.
Either way, it's a shame. Riding our bikes home after school, or chatting it up on the school bus, was a lotta fun when you're just a kid, and it was also a place where you could cut loose a little, since we were under pretty tight controls at the actual schoolhouse. Today's kids, like so many things, have no idea what they are missing!
These lines are also DANGEROUS.
Fully half of all kids hit by cars and killed and killed by cars driven by other parents driving their kids to school.
Driving our kids to school in giant SUVs and pickup trucks which ALL have poor visibility is insane.
The most dangerous thing is right in the driveway not some imaged stranger. Yep.
The school pick up and drop off lines like this are real. If you’re going to send your kid to public school then put them on a bus. If you won’t put them on the bus, stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car.
"stop proclaiming you’re desire to save the environment while you sit in your idling car." Ha, I am imaging a lot of people here in California.
When my kids were in K-12, we lived in suburban San Francisco. No sidewalks in our town, particularly in the hills, no school bus service, and no public transit. So we had to drive them to school in the morning before I went to work and arrange for sitters in the afternoons to pick them up at 3:00 p.m. I used to joke (but not really) that our school district was keeping women at home, especially when you also considered the vast amount of volunteerism the school district required. There were no teachers’ aides, no secretaries except for the one assigned to the Principal, and no drivers for class field trips.
Our schools run on the unpaid labor of women. If you totaled up the volunteer man-hours our schools receive and actually assigned a wage to them, the ACTUAL cost of an education would be far higher than what we believe it to be now. I would love to see all the moms who drive and volunteer their time to literally go on strike for a month. The whole system would grind to a halt and maybe, just maybe, we could get the funding we need to run public education effectively. But who am I kidding? Women’s time is not valuable in this society.
This is actually an interesting angle. It forces a parent to basically work part-time, and that often falls on women. It's ironic because we have higher rates of women in the work force than in the 1960s, yet there is now this added burden of getting kids to school (not just on the bus or out the door). Tough for moms.
I drove my child because if not, she would be on the bus almost an hour each way. The bus had this weird winding route. And, the bus stop couldn’t be anywhere near my house. They wanted a middle schooler to walk down our street, turn the corner, walk just as far down that street, cross the road & stand on a corner that had a hill & no way to access the side walk other than to walk up the homeowner’s driveway. the bus would pick child up, & then turn down our road driving passed our house. I thought it might get better in high school. Nope. Again the bus stop was a ways away & crossing a street. And, it was another long ride but not quite an hour. Sometimes the bus wouldn’t even show up. After waiting with child at the bus stop in the rain for no bus to show up. I again gave up & drove the 3 miles to school. Driving child to school was an inconvenience but totally worth it!
Yes, I have heard versions of this. I think with cuts to buses, routes have gotten longer and more winding. Hard to blame parents in this case, too. Sitting on the bus over an hour isn’t ideal.
It’s the cars! We’re far enough from the school that the kids get to ride the bus. I’ve walked home with my older one a few times, but I wouldn’t let them walk alone. There’s a major highway they have to cross, with a stoplight and crosswalk, but even the school bus drivers aren’t attentive enough to see people in that crosswalk. Their school was built in the 60’s and just last summer the city put a sidewalk along the only road to the school (in a suburban neighborhood, not remote in any way). The way my neighbors drive is too selfishly aggressive to trust them to see my minions. And the trucks these days that have a hood higher than a kid’s head are so dangerous! I hate this car centric approach.
Crazy it took that long for sidewalks! My home town school STILL doesn't have any, so no one walks or bikes at all. It's a shame.
1) I got kicked off the bus for graffiti in 5th grade. Got to ride my bike 2 miles to school.
2) I live in a rural suburb now. No sidewalks. The school is 25 lots away and completely un-walkable or bikable. Dear doge: please return funds to municipalities
That's tough! It sounds like your school was similar to mine in distance and space. No way would I have been allowed to bike. Not sure what my parents would have done if I got kicked off!
Oh my goodness, just had this conversation with the husband yesterday, driving in a school zone and gobsmacked over the number of parents with their perfectly capable and old enough children. And down the road, we learned never to drive by the high school either before or after school because of the pickup and drop off traffic trailing out and blocking the road. Absolutely crazy.
Yep! More and more people are noticing this in our communities. Simply annoying!
Do children not walk home from school anymore? I realize that society is continuing to devolve but really?
The number of walkers has been a steep decline since the 1960s. Very few American kids walk anymore. But this was true even in the 1990s. Even crazier is that even school bus riders have been dropping! Hence the huge traffic lines we see at modern schools.
Wow, I have always been a walker, I walk everywhere. I choose places to live based on walkability to get to what I need. I am not trying to sound like my grandparents but heck we walked to school rain or shine. I grew up just under one mile away from school, in a small town granted so all the schools were in a cluster, but we walked to and from daily. If it was really, really, ugly out -- like bordering on a 'snow day' we might, MIGHT get a ride. Sounds like the car pollution problem is actually a lazy humans problem.
Hmmmm. Like just about everything else that has tumbled downhill since 1950, ‘If It Ain’t Broken, Break It, And Make It Worse’. On my way home from my morning run the other morning I was behind a school bus at 5:20 am picking up kids.
That can't be great for kids who likely don't get the needed amount of sleep!
I am glad you mentioned the hysteria over abductions as a driving factor for the phenomenon of school pickup lines. The data is clear that it is nowhere near the problem that the news and social media make it out to be. For a lack of a better term, abduction is romanticized in American society. The image of an innocent child being snatched up in an instance by an evildoer for insidious purposes is implanted in our minds, yet in actual crime statistics, this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. There's an entire corner of the internet dedicated to uncovering new "methods" people use to kidnap children and women, perpetuating this culture of fear.
Part of the solution to this problem will have to be convincing parents it's safe to let their kids get to school without being driven there, whether by bus, bike, or on foot. I'm worried that this fear will outweigh any attempts to reorganize cities to make the journey to school more feasible on foot, by bike, or with public transit unless it is directly addressed.
Yes, it goes into the idea of "if it bleeds, it leads" in media, that has only been exacerbated by social media and the internet. I don't actually have a good answer, other than trying to bring more attention to the issue. It does make support for public transit, walking, etc more difficult. So it's an up hill battle.
I would argue it’s a localized embarrassment, but embarrassing nonetheless
Well yes I am definitely embarrassed at Southern California locally.
Another change I don’t believe was mentioned was school start times. Our school growing up started at 8. If I had lived close enough to walk or bike (we lived in the country and our elementary school was 6 miles crossing a busy highway with no light) then we might have biked occasionally, but as it was, the bus came at 7:30. The school my son is slated to that he attended for one year before we switched to private school began at 7:35am. It’s 4 miles away across a busy highway with no sidewalk, also rural. His morning bus came at 6:37 and we had to walk/drive him to the front of our neighborhood which is 3/4 a mile from the house. You can see why the bus wasn’t desirable when I could drive him in less than 8 minutes almost an hour later than the bus came. These early elementary starts are not for the faint-hearted. In Japan , my sisters’ kids get on their bus that they walk about 1/2 mile (5 months a year of snow) on a country rode and board at 7:40 and get to school for an 8am start. And no phones allowed on the bus for messing around. Different rules make a huge difference.
Interesting. I had not heard anything about starting times yet. Definitely worth a closer look. Thank you for comment. I will look into this for a future post.
How children lost the right to roam in four generations
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
And even worse since this was written