Friday Opinion: Won’t Someone Think of the Children!
***Just so you know, up front on this post, it is going to take me a while to get around to biking, but I get there. Trust me okay? Also, like all “Friday Opinion” articles, these are my thoughts alone and do not represent the entire Hub Collective***
A little over three years ago, children entered my life. It started by me becoming an uncle. Then my friend Gena had a child followed by Carolyn and Andrea over the next few years. My sister is now expecting another child. I had friends with children before, but never had I played such an active role in their lives. I was able to give my nephew his first bicycle at the age of 2 years old and was fortunate enough to watch Carolyn’s son grow as I babysat once a week. In my babysitter position I got to watch her son, Finn, grow over his first year of life and a few times got to put him in the bike trailer and take him for a ride. He feel asleep every time .
This past year I took more of a role in our Youth Earn-a-Bike program here at the Hub and right now I’m organizing my third bike Give-a-Way for kids under the age of 8. So why am I telling you all this? Am I just bragging? Good questions there. I’m not bragging. I point this out because I used to want nothing to do with children or people much younger than me. They represented things I didn’t like about society. Young children are drawn to new ideas easily and haven’t learned to think too critically yet. Their blind faith and brutal honesty leads some of them to be very critical and mean. Everything is black and white. They do not want to learn because they feel they have all the answers despite the fact that their minds are primed to learn at their age. I also think some of us pinko-commie-bike-riding types sometimes don’t like kids because we are reminded of ourselves at a younger age and all the mistakes we made. We don’t want to remember those days because now we are so smart! NOW we have it all figured out! (which is really a childish thing to think).
I think one of the final pieces is the fear of kids because they are so fragile. You think you’ll break them. Being that I’ve babysat an infant learning to crawl and walk as well as watched my nephew grow up to three – I’ve seen many faces bounce off many floors. Kids can take a beating! Not to say beating kids is okay, but they really do bounce back from casual accidents. But besides their physical bodies I often hear about how children can’t “handle” certain information. One good example is how we handle sex education in our country. Some think that if you tell children about sex they will suddenly start having sex with everything that moves. Instead, our elected officials think it is better to simply tell the children nothing at all, or incorrect and misleading information. However, when people rebel and there are examples of people respectfully giving young people accurate information the world ceases to fall apart. Our misleading information that we feed to children is only producing a future generation of adult children that still believe that information they were given as children. When these adult children are confronted with the truth they don’t think critically, but instead use denial and anger to cope.
Wow, now that you all hate me, lets move on to what this has to do with bikes and the Hub. My opinions have changed on kids. At the Hub we do have kids that use foul language with each other. Some of them steal and some of them just want to cause trouble. So not much different than our adult population really. However, many of the youth I get to worth with are incredibly smart and a joy to be around. When there is a problem and I’m able to engage in a conversation with these kids about their actions, many of them can very well think critically about the world around them. I like some of these kids more than adults I know.
We get a great mix of kids in here from many different neighborhoods. Some arrive with their guardians or hop in the van with their neighbors. Many of our kids walk or ride here themselves. At the end of the day, many of them have permission to leave the shop themselves while I work to keep others upstairs as we wait for their rides to come pick them up. It is often easy to forget about all the supposed “danger” out on the streets of the Cass Corridor that you see on the nightly news. Of course some of the danger is real, but I would argue that complete safety is an illusion. Good and bad, life just happens. I don’t think suburban neighborhoods are completely “safe” either. Every neighborhood has its issues. It is the actions we take and attitudes we have that change these situations though.
Take for example, my friend Jodie who has a pretty awesome five year old daughter, Charlotte. Jodie and her boyfriend Aaron like to ride their bikes. They like it so much that they bought a “trail-a-bike” so they can take Charlotte along with them. Jodie is fortunate to live just a few blocks from Charlotte’s school. However, Charlotte is not allowed to ride her bike to school because the principal deemed it unsafe for all children despite that Charlotte can ride on all sidewalks just three blocks to the school in a residential neighborhood. So, here in the Cass Corridor I have children as young as 8 years old riding their bikes down streets like MLK, 2nd and Cass to get to the shop on their own. However, out in the suburbs, riding three blocks on the sidewalk isn’t safe. But which neighborhood is usually considered a “safe” neighborhood by our society? That’s right, the one where you can’t move without a car for three blocks. Does that sound like safety to you? Next thing you know, parents will get child abuse charges thrown at them for having their kids check mailboxes at the end of the driveway because cars could kill the kids. One day kids won’t be allowed outside without a 2 ton metal machine as a chaperone, much like our adult children of today. Better to be inside a car than anywhere a car demands space. We will call this safety.
So lets keep going with this theme of protecting children by keeping them away from bicycles as transportation. My sister is an elementary school teacher. She is also a mother. Being an uncle to her child as well as with my experience babysitting Finn, I understand protecting children. If anyone hurt my nephew, I would murder them. This blog post may hurt me in a future court case, but as a society, we don’t like adults hurting children. I think everyone understands me here. However, my sister and I don’t let this “protection till death” instinct blind us to rational information.
At the school my sister teaches at, their playground is the parking lot because of a lack of space (I would also guess that the parking lot has grown over the years if not class sizes as well, but that is another blog post). When kids are dropped off at school, it is a safety nightmare because the one entrance into the parking lot is constantly flowing with vehicles as well as children everywhere as cars fight to get as close as they can to the building.
I discussed this with my sister after going to a presentation on Safe Routes 2 School put on by a good friend of the Hub, Rosie. One real life solution Rosie suggested is having drop off points for the kids that are about 3 or so blocks from the school and then having “walking buses” take the kids in groups the rest of the way to the school. This creates a few blocks of traffic-nightmare-free zone around the school and encourages kids to walk, even if it is only a few blocks. My sister immediately identified this idea as a possible solution. It is a nightmare she would like to see end. She also commented on the kids that do walk her school are the ones that live in the “bad” areas where they have to worry about getting jumped. The kids that live in the “good” area are the ones that get a ride to school even if they live the same distance away. This would be another post, but it would be interesting to talk about who deserves “safety” and how that relates to race, class and other factors. Also, does the “privilege” of safety (the ride to school) make it less safe for those that don’t have the privilege (the kids that have no option but to walk through the traffic jam)?
So as adults that want to protect the children of our neighborhoods, what are we to do? The Safe Routes 2 School presentation that I mentioned was attended by a bunch of physical education teachers. Leaders in their community that are trusted to teach children healthy lifestyles. What was their solution? One teacher was amazing. She was from Lake Orion and mentioned that she has a fleet of bikes at her school that she takes the kids out on rides with. Imagine gym class in junior high being a bike ride. I wish I would have had that! It wouldn’t have taken me to the age of 18 to realize I could ride my bike to school (I was in college by this time). Other teachers weren’t as helpful.
One teacher-to-be decided to forget we were talking about kids and shared a story about her fellow college students that didn’t seem to follow the rules of the road when they biked on campus. It seems as if she was forgetting that Safe Routes 2 School would teach children the correct rules of the road and then, one day some of those kids would grow up to be college students. She was pointing out a problem that the program is designed to fix. However, this “adult child” was acting out of anger. She was using her anger that bicyclists “don’t follow the rules” as a reason to not promote children riding bikes. Again, she was making this complaint at a presentation designed to teach people the correct rules of the road. The problem was enough to reject a solution.
Another teacher expressed that notion I identified with earlier: She is a mother and didn’t feel that the situation of all those cars flying in and out of the parking lot was safe enough to trust her child riding to school through. This makes some more sense, but is still a problem used to reject a rational solution. So instead she drives her children to school. Again, I understand that you want your offspring to survive. A parent of any age that outlives their children or sees them in pain are overcome with grief. However, if the number of cars are the problem, how is adding another car to the mix a solution?
The problem isn’t cars, I own one myself. The problem is the lazy mentality of car culture and the traffic jam at schools across this country every morning. There are some parents who participate in school of choice and transport their children very far every morning to get the education they deserve. However, there are kids that live three residential blocks away who are scared into accepting a ride to school instead of riding. The first example is a necessary evil to get a child to school. The latter is fear mongering car culture that demonstrates the “adult child” mentality I mentioned before. “Bikes aren’t safe” is not a fact, but an opinion. Hiding behind that opinion is lazy and stupid especially when you can’t back it up with any examples besides your own fear.
Granted you can say that “the problem is car culture” is also an opinion I have to hide behind. However, though it is anecdotal, the stories of youth playing video games indoors and being less active than ever before at least points to some sort of problem in our society. Or just look anywhere around you. Go to the mall and watch a bunch of “adult children” fight over a parking space and boil with road rage just so they can avoid walking 50 feet through a parking lot. This culture we are giving to children grows up with them.
I also do not believe that I’m hiding behind an opinion. In fact, my job is helping get kids on bikes and riding them. Besides riding, we also teach youth how to fix those bikes when they break down. We are asking kids to consider ditching their sedimentary, “ditch it if its broken” existence. This is the exact opposite of hiding, I’m living up to a belief. However, identifying a problem like, “I hate traffic jams, this isn’t safe” and then continuing to go about the same activity everyday expecting a different solution is hiding. It is not protecting children in the least bit. This mentality is having an effect on children at younger and younger ages. Have you heard the news stories about infants that are confined to car seats so much their heads are getting flat spots? We are afraid to let children move in the development stage where they are supposed to be learning that exact skill!
Wow, now that you are still with me and hate me even more, let me get to my point. I’m not afraid of kids anymore. Not anymore than adults and folks of all ages. What I’m afraid of is children never exercising their right to think critically. I’m afraid of “adult children” who hide behind things they’ve been told but never explored and accept complacency. Those are the folks that are going to hurt me. Even if our youth at the Hub grow up to be car drivers, I trust them on the road to share much more than someone who is reacting to my existence based off some sort of denial and anger.
I’m not one to trust folks easily, but I’m willing to give kids a try. Every Saturday I put wrenches in their hands and provide them support in hopes that everything goes right. The amazing part is that with the right amount of caring and support, things do turn out alright. “Protecting” children by locking them up inside and making them slaves to their own complacency doesn’t seem to work in my opinion. Put the wrench in their hands and show them another option. Trust me, it’ll change you as well.
Thumbsup,
jason x