Most parents cannot ensure 24-hour care

Re Kids walking to school not the danger it

seems, Weikle, Oct. 5 From the age of 9 or so, my daughter attended a school within walking distance of our home that wasn’t her official “home school.” Days after her 14th birthday, my daughter went to work at the CNE. She was legally employed and superb at her job, and returned for a second summer working with the company at the CNE.

During the period of my children’s childhood, there were abductions and children were murdered, yet the risk factor was so slight that I felt their selfknowledge, street-behaviour awareness and general sensibility outweighed the risks. Yet they, and I, knew at least one of these children; and they were totally aware that the child they knew had died.

They now have children of their own: One lives in a fairly remote rural area, the other downtown in a major city. Neither can allow their own children the freedoms they enjoyed as children.

The strangest thing is that my one grandchild will not be eligible for doorto-door school bus service next year. Instead, they will have to walk, alone, to a bus stop half a kilometre from their home along streets with no sidewalk to stand at a street corner; including during Northern Ontario snowstorms.

The reality for most parents is it is impossible, for social, financial and physical reasons, to watch over children 24 hours per day. Liz Powell, Thunder Bay