OUR NANNY STATE
THE GOVERNMENT CAME AFTER ME BECAUSE I DECIDED TO LET MY KIDS RIDE THE BUS
Iam a single father of five kids, all of whom are under 11 years of age. I live in an apartment in downtown Vancouver, I don’t own a car, and I rely on public transit to get my kids to school every day, which takes about 45 minutes.
Unfortunately, British Columbia’s Ministry of Children and Family Development recently investigated my family because I allowed four of my kids ( ages seven, eight, nine, and 11) to take the public bus to school together, without me. No safety incidents triggered this investigation. It was based entirely on a single anonymous report. Despite the caseworker insisting that I had gone “above and beyond” to ensure my children were responsible and conscientious transit riders, the ministry ultimately concluded my kids under the age of 10 are no longer allowed to ride the bus without supervision by someone who is at least 12 years old.
The ministry’s decision is a disturbing example of the government’s increasing tendency to infantilize citizens. It not merely encourages “helicopter parenting,” but actually mandates it — robbing my children of their agency, independence, and ability to develop a sense of personal responsibility. It also interferes with my freedoms as a parent, giving no weight to my choices as a father and my views of what constitutes good parenting.
I have long been an advocate for public transit and housing issues in my community. Prior to allowing my kids to ride the bus on their own, I invested countless hours riding the bus with them, to ensure they were good transit riders. I also approached the regional transit operator, TransLink, to inquire about the minimum allowable age for kids to ride the bus alone. They informed me there was no minimum age: it was up to the parent.
In the full year that my children took the bus alone, we did not experience a single significant incident. Nobody has so much as shed a tear, let alone been hurt. They’ve become friends with the bus drivers, and I’ve even received emails from fellow riders praising their behaviour and independence. Unfortunately, these community members’ opinions did not carry as much weight with the ministry as the opinion of the nameless person who reported us.
In a letter from the ministry, I was informed that none of my children under 10 can be left unsupervised in or outside of my home, for any amount of time. Even benign trips, like crossing the street to go to the corner store to buy candy and slushies — a route that I can see in its entirety from my living room window — cannot be taken by my four youngest kids without supervision. Incredibly, my children aren’t even allowed to independently walk to school anymore when their mom has custody of them, a distance of just a few blocks.
As a staunch supporter of transit, I’ve written numerous articles about the principles underlying my decision to train my kids to independently take the bus. When I came under investigation, I forwarded these articles to the ministry and spoke candidly with the caseworker about the phases of the two- year training process I undertook with my kids. The ministry interviewed all of my children individually and followed up on my character references. I suggested the ministry shadow the kids on a bus ride to assess the kids itself, but its caseworkers declined to do so.
In addition to being painfully overreaching, the assumption underlying the ministry’s ruling — that children face heightened risks on public transit — is based on fear, not fact.
The facts are that buses are by far the safest mode of travel: 24 times safer than taking cars, walking or biking. While about 10 children are killed in the U.S. each year as a result of school bus accidents, 2,300 children die annually in the home from accidents such as choking, suffocation, drowning, submersion, falls, fires, burns and poisoning.
The No. 1 killer of children between the ages of five and 14 is car accidents — a risk that most parents expose their kids to daily without a second thought. And the odds of your child being kidnapped by a stranger on the bus are staggeringly long: a 2003 Canadian study found just one case nationwide of a stranger abducting a child, anywhere, in the entire prior two years.
Regardless of the facts, it became clear that once the ministry had received the anonymous complaint, they had no choice but to fall back on whatever tangentially related case law they could find to justify their conclusion that kids under 10 cannot take public transit independently. It’s a “Cover Your Ass” culture, where the ministry cannot reject even trivial reports, lest they be held responsible for future issues. It seems the ministry has no incentive or discretionary authority to dismiss frivolous reports or allow appropriate parenting situations to continue, even where its determined that a situation is unlikely to threaten the safety or well-being of a child.
Being a divorced, single dad who has custody of his five kids 50 per cent of the time, I have little recourse to challenge the ministry’s decision. Disobeying it even in the slightest (by, say, allowing my nine- year- old to make an independent trip to the corner store), could result in the ministry stripping me of shared custody, a remarkably draconian outcome I would never risk.
Public transit is safe and costeffective ( especially for low- income families), it builds confidence, and it affords freedom to kids and parents alike. It is a vital public service that responsible individuals and families should be free to use as they see fit.
Fortunately, thousands of other Canadians agree with me. The GoFundMe campaign I launched to legally defend children’s freedom of mobility by public transit has already raised more than $20,000. It’s clear: Canadians across our country want the government to respect parents’ freedom to raise independent, confident children.
THE FACTS ARE THAT BUSES ARE BY FAR THE SAFEST MODE OF TRAVEL.