This is very affirming of what I sometimes feel like is lazy parenting on my part. My kid is 17 and I am not on her devices at all, nor do I check her grades other than at grading periods. She knows what we expect of her and keeps us informed when she's struggling. We do track each other--all 3 of us--, but mostly in a "are they at home or at work?" when deciding whether to call or to text. I do sometimes notice she's not where I expect and text her to ask about it rather than accusing her of anything nefarious. I am sure that sometimes she abuses our trust, but she's nearly an adult and needs to start learning how to make decisions for herself and handle the consequences. She definitely tells me about stuff I would have kept secret from my parents, which feels like a win, even when said "stuff" stresses me out a little!
I was a middle school teacher when these online grading information systems first came into use and were required of us. It was a problem to work around.
I had a son in middle school and told him up front I would never check his grades. He should just keep me informed. I didn't want him to feel micromanaged, and I trusted him. There was no reason not to.
But I remember the ordeal it was for many students whose parents were watching, checking every day. I remember once giving a particularly difficult exam on which the grades were relatively low. I asked the kids, who had their papers back and knew there own grades, whether it would be easier for them if I delayed posting until a few more grades had come in (which would have raised their averages). The poll was overwhelming yes, as they expected their parents would over-react.
I have an 8yo and was anti-device until I realized younger kids don't have easy access to phones anymore. If they're in a jam and need to call mom or dad, there are no payphones, no landline at their friend's house, and all the adults' phones are locked with a passcode. While we're more connected than ever before, kids are actually more isolated than we were in the 80s! To top it off, I'm divorced from a man who makes some very poor choices. So, a smartwatch it is!
When I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I studied abroad in England. Between the end of the semester and my flight home, I had nine days to just bum around England and Scotland. Cell phones existed (and were quite common in the U.K. then) but were not yet anything but for rich people in the U.S. yet (many areas did not yet even have cell service) and I certainly couldn't have afforded international calling on one.
I had no specific plans, just got on a train to wherever, would stop by the Thomas Cook booth in the station and see what hostel availability there was for that night, and stay there. Every couple of days, I would either pay a couple of pounds in a train station pay phone to leave a message with my mom about what city I was in or I'd use the email on the shared computer in the hostel living room to shoot her a quick message. Other than that, she had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and I didn't know what was going on at home.
I figured if anything really bad happened to me, the embassy would figure it out and contact her soon enough, if anything really bad happened at home it would realistically take me a few days to get there anyway, and exactly what was anybody going to be able to do about any of this? I was thousands of miles away in another country.
Anyway, those were some of the greatest days of my life, and I think about that when I hear about students whose parents have Life 360 on them from afar. What, exactly, are you going to be able to do about where your adult child is?
My kids are in their 20s and I am observing that once you start tracking your kids, it becomes really hard to stop! One friend reports checking on her 25 year old daughter every night because otherwise she cannot sleep. Another friend described panicking when she tracked her kids phone to some random field where it sat for hours, and while she was sure his body had been dumped or something terrible, it turned out her kid was at a friend's barn watching football, having a great day. I say this with such empathy because I really struggled with anxiety when my kids started driving but feel very strongly that most typical teens* are being robbed of privacy and feeling safe in the world, as well as not being taught the habits of common courtesy like sending the, "I'm on my way home, can I pick anything up?" text or the opportunity to respond to a kid's "hey, here safe, all good" with a "have a blast" text from mom and dad. The hard truth is that tracking makes us feel like we have some kind of control but that is an illusion. The work of parenting teens and older kids is in disentangling from one another and setting up healthy boundaries, and that means doing the work to learn to manage your worries/anxieties.
* I absolutely understand there are individual instances where tracking feels more necessary, so I am adding that caveat.
I have younger kids and my oldest is in 1st grade. I was amazed at how many of his peers got smartwatches for Christmas. Where I struggle most is how to navigate the pressure from other parents in our community who do track their kids. My son asked for a watch but couldn’t communicate why he needed one when I asked other than his friends have one. We also had an incident with a neighbor who saw my sons out riding their scooters alone and felt it wasn’t appropriate. They were less than 2 blocks away and we live in an extremely safe place. It’s hard for me to verbalize why I don’t want to track my kids without feeling judged or as if I’m a bad parent.
This interview was so reassuring, thank you so much!! I’ll have to get a copy of the book.
Our family has always been Team Screen Time- as in, we don’t limit it.
Perhaps our boys are anomalies when it comes to using technology, but we figured that the chances of them having careers that use screens most of the time were high, so why not get used to that? They will independently switch from screens to an analog activity without our input.
We also don’t track location or messages with our middle schooler, but App Store purchases need to be approved. He isn’t allowed to have social media accounts yet (and I’m not sure when is best for that to happen).
I was surprised to discover his friends have much different setups- lots of screen time limitations, trackers, surveillance.
There was only one time I asked my kid to hand over his phone because he was acting different (his texts were totally fine), and we’ve told him that we trust him to make good decisions and to trust his gut. We’ll trust him until he gives us a reason not to trust him--that’s how trust works, right?
I've never tracked my kids (17 and 20) locations even though almost every parent I know does track in some way. I do ask them to keep me generally apprised of their location - mostly for the younger one at this point. When the older one is home I'll still ask her to "text me when you get there" if its bad weather or she's going out of the area, but I try not to get too up in her business. Sometimes I feel silly about even that remembering that my parents never knew where I was as a teen, but then again my mom is the biggest "text me when you get there" person so I know she would have been a location tracker if she'd had the technology! Only one time did I wonder if not tracking was a serious mistake. When my oldest was in high school she was the victim of a crime which led to a - very brief, but it felt like eternity - period of time where we did not have any idea where she was but knew for sure she was in danger. Would tracking her have resolved the situation quicker and with less trauma? For me and her dad, yes. for sure. For her? I don't know. We were very lucky that things didn't turn out worse - she was shaken up pretty bad and also deeply embarrassed for getting into a bad situation in the first place, but she's recovered emotionally and was physically unharmed. It also was a real inflection point in her life and she ended up on a much stronger path after that situation.
I recently read that NYT ethics question about the parents who installed a camera in their daughters room to know what’s going on with her boyfriend--and still have it years later! Absolutely insane.
Two kids, two different experiences with such tracking technology.
My 17-year-old son is an underperforming student. If it weren't for PowerSchool, he would lie about his grades and make excuses for missing assignments, etc. (He's in therapy for anxiety and depression, and we hope things will turn around by his senior year.) I wish I could trust him more to be more open about his grades—we tried this tactic in his freshman and sophomore year, but there was an obvious disconnect between his effort and results. So we're forced to use PowerSchool as an accountability tool--it's much harder for him to lie about his efforts and grades when it's all right there. Trust me, I HATE being "that parent" who has to go to her kid and say 'PowerSchool is showing a 69 in history and 58 in Lit, how can we help you get caught up?"
There are a lot of extremely driven, high performing students in his high school and I get the anxiety that they must feel from their own parents. I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son.
My younger son is in 5th grade and definitely relies on technology for entertainment and as a way to ease his insecurity in the world. He has a lot of separation anxiety; to my great shame, he still makes his way to our bed in the middle of the night and has difficulty getting to sleep on his own. Frankly I'm surprised by how many of his classmates have smartwatches. We've debated getting him a smartwatch when he starts middle school, but we want him to mature a bit more -- he needs to make a few more social-emotional developmental leaps. I'm afraid that having a smartwatch might exacerbate his insecurity even more. He doesn't need a piece of tracking technology on his person--he needs to build up confidence!
This is right up my alley! When my kids were little (one is 20, the other is 22) we were encouraged to join the social media apps our kids were on and friend them (and because they were middle school aged, they agreed). It's why I'm now a Twitter addict, because I joined when my son wanted to follow some gamers. I'm still friends with some of my kid's childhood friends on Instagram who may not realize I am still there (I don't comment or like). For my own kids I am friends with them on Instagram, which they barely use, and Facebook, which they don't at all. I don't have the time in my day to add yet another social app for Snapchat.
But what I'd like to really get into is Life 360 for this college/young adult age. I'm in a HUGE parenting group for this age range (278,000 members, just checked), and the number of parents who track, who 'say' their kids are ok with it, who use it as almost a social app, like "let's see where Susie is right now" is... a lot.
There's lots of "the entire family is on it, including my elderly parents", "my daughter drives alone a lot", and articles on how people who got in car accidents are able to be helped because of it. Of course, what the parents (mostly moms) are ACTUALLY doing is seeing if the kids are in class, at a bar or their boyfriend's/girlfriend's place. There was a thread not long ago about a daughter whose roommate constantly had her boyfriend over because she is tracked, so can't spend time ay the boyfriend's place, so they just hang out in her room all the time.
Tracking for a limited time, I can see, like a long car trip (although we just text when my son drives 12 hours back to school). Or if it helps the CHILD feel more secure. And to be frank, the only time I felt the need to track my daughter (driving to an unfamiliar area to meet friends) I simply asked my son to use Find My Friends on his phone to see her location, then asked him to send her a meme to get her reaction. Done! And I went on with my night.
So I have a 7th grader and a 4th grader, and due to bus delays and general school-crisis-related anxiety, I dropped an airtag in each one's backpack a couple years ago and was very clear that they were there-- I couldn't contact them that way but I could see where they were.
When my oldest went into 6th grade, we got him an old iPhone 8 with a cheap plan, because his robotics team would meet unexpectedly after school and a text to the family group chat was more likely to get seen/noticed than a call (husband and I both work and can't take calls during meetings). We have always been very clear that, as long as we don't see any risky or inappropriate language or behavior, we won't be up his butt about his phone. At the beginning of 7th grade, there was a 36-person group chat of 7th graders (not including him) that included someone making a school shooting threat that was caught by a parent who looked at their kid's phone. So we talked to him and installed Bark on his phone-- it looks at his chats, his internet use, and his spotify use for language and references to self-harm, sexual content, bullying, drugs, etc. He's aware that we have an eye on his use, but I have never seen anything that causes me concern-- he and his friends are mostly self-described queer, their group chat is old Twitter memes, dumb jokes, pictures of drawings, and other stuff I would have had in a group chat at 12/13 years old. I don't repeat what I've seen to the other kids' parents (if I saw something truly harmful/dangerous, I would, but I'm not gonna out someone to their parents), but at 12, he's very much a "IDK" kid when I ask him about his friends and what they like/talk about/do. He's a sweet, happy kid, and I am fine with some cussing and "omg lol it's a joke about marijuana" memes.
We do check grades every few weeks, not for low grades, but for missing assignments-- he has ADHD, I have ADHD, and missing assignments were the bane of my existence-- I'd get to the end of the quarter and my parents would get a list of 15 assignments that were missing and then I'd be bulldozed into doing them all over a weekend and it was always a huge fight and hassle.
This convo seems a bit more centered on teens, but something a coworker in the Boston area recently mentioned was the rising popularity of smart watches (like Apple Watches) for their middle schoolers in lieu of phones. I guess the idea is the kids can easily message one another and their parents, and parents can do location tracking if desired. Obviously not a cheap solution, but I liked the idea of popularizing lower tech communication solutions among adolescents to accommodate socializing without social media.
Oh, also.... the year when I was in kindergarten (in 1985, in a much less supervised time), they were doing renovations on two of the three local public K-4 schools, so regardless of what district you were in, you went to kindergarten at Rosenmund.
The elementary school divide was Rosenmund was K-4, Washington and Billings were grades 1-4, and Jerman was 5-6. All of the school buses stopped at Jerman after going to their respective lower elementary schools, and some kids had to switch buses (and of course some kids lived right across the street, and that was their ordinary stop).
I normally would not have to switch buses, because I lived in Rosenmund district anyway. One day, I accidentally got on the wrong bus at Rosenmund, inwardly panicked NOT because I thought anything bad would happen but because my mom would kill me if she had to come pick me up from the bus garage at the end of the day, and then when we got to Jerman I saw my correct bus across the parking lot. So I hightailed it onto the right bus across the parking lot full of 5th and 6th graders.
And then other days after that I'd deliberately take the wrong bus and switch to the correct one at Jerman. I went all over town for shits and giggles and no one paid me any mind!
Sometimes I'd also deliberately ride the correct bus past my stop and then walk home the long way.
I was five years old at the time, and I didn't tell my mother about my adventures until I was about 25. She just laughed and said that wasn't surprising.
Now, do I think EVERY kid would be able to do this at five years old without freaking out? No. Do I recommend setting kindergarteners loose on the city? Also no. But I also see college students who are living off campus without cars and bankrupting themselves/missing class because they are taking Uber every day and even when I pull up the RTA website and I show them EXACTLY which bus/streetcar routes they should take and that a monthly pass is only $45, even when I explain that I did this every day for 13 years without incident and it's perfectly safe, even when I show them that there's a real-time app on it that will let them know when the bus is coming, they will not do it because they are too scared of getting lost. (NB: most of my students are Black, so this is not a race-based fear about public transit).
This conversation covers so many things I've been thinking about with my own children for so long. The information is invaluable. Appreciate you both for sharing this convo with us anxious parents.
Helpful!!! We're not there yet for our kids, but my oldest does keeps mentioning wanting a phone/watch *specifically* so we can track her and (by her reasoning) allow her to move around the city more freely. At nearly 10, she's already allowed more solo mobility than most of her friends (walking to and from the park/ballet class/etc) and I have no plans to start digitally tracking her (or buying her a device of any kind), but it is fascinating to me that it's something she's *requesting* we might do. Brave new world, etc.
This is very affirming of what I sometimes feel like is lazy parenting on my part. My kid is 17 and I am not on her devices at all, nor do I check her grades other than at grading periods. She knows what we expect of her and keeps us informed when she's struggling. We do track each other--all 3 of us--, but mostly in a "are they at home or at work?" when deciding whether to call or to text. I do sometimes notice she's not where I expect and text her to ask about it rather than accusing her of anything nefarious. I am sure that sometimes she abuses our trust, but she's nearly an adult and needs to start learning how to make decisions for herself and handle the consequences. She definitely tells me about stuff I would have kept secret from my parents, which feels like a win, even when said "stuff" stresses me out a little!
I was a middle school teacher when these online grading information systems first came into use and were required of us. It was a problem to work around.
I had a son in middle school and told him up front I would never check his grades. He should just keep me informed. I didn't want him to feel micromanaged, and I trusted him. There was no reason not to.
But I remember the ordeal it was for many students whose parents were watching, checking every day. I remember once giving a particularly difficult exam on which the grades were relatively low. I asked the kids, who had their papers back and knew there own grades, whether it would be easier for them if I delayed posting until a few more grades had come in (which would have raised their averages). The poll was overwhelming yes, as they expected their parents would over-react.
I have an 8yo and was anti-device until I realized younger kids don't have easy access to phones anymore. If they're in a jam and need to call mom or dad, there are no payphones, no landline at their friend's house, and all the adults' phones are locked with a passcode. While we're more connected than ever before, kids are actually more isolated than we were in the 80s! To top it off, I'm divorced from a man who makes some very poor choices. So, a smartwatch it is!
When I was 19 and a sophomore in college, I studied abroad in England. Between the end of the semester and my flight home, I had nine days to just bum around England and Scotland. Cell phones existed (and were quite common in the U.K. then) but were not yet anything but for rich people in the U.S. yet (many areas did not yet even have cell service) and I certainly couldn't have afforded international calling on one.
I had no specific plans, just got on a train to wherever, would stop by the Thomas Cook booth in the station and see what hostel availability there was for that night, and stay there. Every couple of days, I would either pay a couple of pounds in a train station pay phone to leave a message with my mom about what city I was in or I'd use the email on the shared computer in the hostel living room to shoot her a quick message. Other than that, she had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and I didn't know what was going on at home.
I figured if anything really bad happened to me, the embassy would figure it out and contact her soon enough, if anything really bad happened at home it would realistically take me a few days to get there anyway, and exactly what was anybody going to be able to do about any of this? I was thousands of miles away in another country.
Anyway, those were some of the greatest days of my life, and I think about that when I hear about students whose parents have Life 360 on them from afar. What, exactly, are you going to be able to do about where your adult child is?
My kids are in their 20s and I am observing that once you start tracking your kids, it becomes really hard to stop! One friend reports checking on her 25 year old daughter every night because otherwise she cannot sleep. Another friend described panicking when she tracked her kids phone to some random field where it sat for hours, and while she was sure his body had been dumped or something terrible, it turned out her kid was at a friend's barn watching football, having a great day. I say this with such empathy because I really struggled with anxiety when my kids started driving but feel very strongly that most typical teens* are being robbed of privacy and feeling safe in the world, as well as not being taught the habits of common courtesy like sending the, "I'm on my way home, can I pick anything up?" text or the opportunity to respond to a kid's "hey, here safe, all good" with a "have a blast" text from mom and dad. The hard truth is that tracking makes us feel like we have some kind of control but that is an illusion. The work of parenting teens and older kids is in disentangling from one another and setting up healthy boundaries, and that means doing the work to learn to manage your worries/anxieties.
* I absolutely understand there are individual instances where tracking feels more necessary, so I am adding that caveat.
I have younger kids and my oldest is in 1st grade. I was amazed at how many of his peers got smartwatches for Christmas. Where I struggle most is how to navigate the pressure from other parents in our community who do track their kids. My son asked for a watch but couldn’t communicate why he needed one when I asked other than his friends have one. We also had an incident with a neighbor who saw my sons out riding their scooters alone and felt it wasn’t appropriate. They were less than 2 blocks away and we live in an extremely safe place. It’s hard for me to verbalize why I don’t want to track my kids without feeling judged or as if I’m a bad parent.
This interview was so reassuring, thank you so much!! I’ll have to get a copy of the book.
Our family has always been Team Screen Time- as in, we don’t limit it.
Perhaps our boys are anomalies when it comes to using technology, but we figured that the chances of them having careers that use screens most of the time were high, so why not get used to that? They will independently switch from screens to an analog activity without our input.
We also don’t track location or messages with our middle schooler, but App Store purchases need to be approved. He isn’t allowed to have social media accounts yet (and I’m not sure when is best for that to happen).
I was surprised to discover his friends have much different setups- lots of screen time limitations, trackers, surveillance.
There was only one time I asked my kid to hand over his phone because he was acting different (his texts were totally fine), and we’ve told him that we trust him to make good decisions and to trust his gut. We’ll trust him until he gives us a reason not to trust him--that’s how trust works, right?
I've never tracked my kids (17 and 20) locations even though almost every parent I know does track in some way. I do ask them to keep me generally apprised of their location - mostly for the younger one at this point. When the older one is home I'll still ask her to "text me when you get there" if its bad weather or she's going out of the area, but I try not to get too up in her business. Sometimes I feel silly about even that remembering that my parents never knew where I was as a teen, but then again my mom is the biggest "text me when you get there" person so I know she would have been a location tracker if she'd had the technology! Only one time did I wonder if not tracking was a serious mistake. When my oldest was in high school she was the victim of a crime which led to a - very brief, but it felt like eternity - period of time where we did not have any idea where she was but knew for sure she was in danger. Would tracking her have resolved the situation quicker and with less trauma? For me and her dad, yes. for sure. For her? I don't know. We were very lucky that things didn't turn out worse - she was shaken up pretty bad and also deeply embarrassed for getting into a bad situation in the first place, but she's recovered emotionally and was physically unharmed. It also was a real inflection point in her life and she ended up on a much stronger path after that situation.
I recently read that NYT ethics question about the parents who installed a camera in their daughters room to know what’s going on with her boyfriend--and still have it years later! Absolutely insane.
Two kids, two different experiences with such tracking technology.
My 17-year-old son is an underperforming student. If it weren't for PowerSchool, he would lie about his grades and make excuses for missing assignments, etc. (He's in therapy for anxiety and depression, and we hope things will turn around by his senior year.) I wish I could trust him more to be more open about his grades—we tried this tactic in his freshman and sophomore year, but there was an obvious disconnect between his effort and results. So we're forced to use PowerSchool as an accountability tool--it's much harder for him to lie about his efforts and grades when it's all right there. Trust me, I HATE being "that parent" who has to go to her kid and say 'PowerSchool is showing a 69 in history and 58 in Lit, how can we help you get caught up?"
There are a lot of extremely driven, high performing students in his high school and I get the anxiety that they must feel from their own parents. I feel like these online grading systems fuel anxiety in high achieving kids, and demotivate smart but not driven students like my own son.
My younger son is in 5th grade and definitely relies on technology for entertainment and as a way to ease his insecurity in the world. He has a lot of separation anxiety; to my great shame, he still makes his way to our bed in the middle of the night and has difficulty getting to sleep on his own. Frankly I'm surprised by how many of his classmates have smartwatches. We've debated getting him a smartwatch when he starts middle school, but we want him to mature a bit more -- he needs to make a few more social-emotional developmental leaps. I'm afraid that having a smartwatch might exacerbate his insecurity even more. He doesn't need a piece of tracking technology on his person--he needs to build up confidence!
This is right up my alley! When my kids were little (one is 20, the other is 22) we were encouraged to join the social media apps our kids were on and friend them (and because they were middle school aged, they agreed). It's why I'm now a Twitter addict, because I joined when my son wanted to follow some gamers. I'm still friends with some of my kid's childhood friends on Instagram who may not realize I am still there (I don't comment or like). For my own kids I am friends with them on Instagram, which they barely use, and Facebook, which they don't at all. I don't have the time in my day to add yet another social app for Snapchat.
But what I'd like to really get into is Life 360 for this college/young adult age. I'm in a HUGE parenting group for this age range (278,000 members, just checked), and the number of parents who track, who 'say' their kids are ok with it, who use it as almost a social app, like "let's see where Susie is right now" is... a lot.
There's lots of "the entire family is on it, including my elderly parents", "my daughter drives alone a lot", and articles on how people who got in car accidents are able to be helped because of it. Of course, what the parents (mostly moms) are ACTUALLY doing is seeing if the kids are in class, at a bar or their boyfriend's/girlfriend's place. There was a thread not long ago about a daughter whose roommate constantly had her boyfriend over because she is tracked, so can't spend time ay the boyfriend's place, so they just hang out in her room all the time.
Tracking for a limited time, I can see, like a long car trip (although we just text when my son drives 12 hours back to school). Or if it helps the CHILD feel more secure. And to be frank, the only time I felt the need to track my daughter (driving to an unfamiliar area to meet friends) I simply asked my son to use Find My Friends on his phone to see her location, then asked him to send her a meme to get her reaction. Done! And I went on with my night.
So I have a 7th grader and a 4th grader, and due to bus delays and general school-crisis-related anxiety, I dropped an airtag in each one's backpack a couple years ago and was very clear that they were there-- I couldn't contact them that way but I could see where they were.
When my oldest went into 6th grade, we got him an old iPhone 8 with a cheap plan, because his robotics team would meet unexpectedly after school and a text to the family group chat was more likely to get seen/noticed than a call (husband and I both work and can't take calls during meetings). We have always been very clear that, as long as we don't see any risky or inappropriate language or behavior, we won't be up his butt about his phone. At the beginning of 7th grade, there was a 36-person group chat of 7th graders (not including him) that included someone making a school shooting threat that was caught by a parent who looked at their kid's phone. So we talked to him and installed Bark on his phone-- it looks at his chats, his internet use, and his spotify use for language and references to self-harm, sexual content, bullying, drugs, etc. He's aware that we have an eye on his use, but I have never seen anything that causes me concern-- he and his friends are mostly self-described queer, their group chat is old Twitter memes, dumb jokes, pictures of drawings, and other stuff I would have had in a group chat at 12/13 years old. I don't repeat what I've seen to the other kids' parents (if I saw something truly harmful/dangerous, I would, but I'm not gonna out someone to their parents), but at 12, he's very much a "IDK" kid when I ask him about his friends and what they like/talk about/do. He's a sweet, happy kid, and I am fine with some cussing and "omg lol it's a joke about marijuana" memes.
We do check grades every few weeks, not for low grades, but for missing assignments-- he has ADHD, I have ADHD, and missing assignments were the bane of my existence-- I'd get to the end of the quarter and my parents would get a list of 15 assignments that were missing and then I'd be bulldozed into doing them all over a weekend and it was always a huge fight and hassle.
This convo seems a bit more centered on teens, but something a coworker in the Boston area recently mentioned was the rising popularity of smart watches (like Apple Watches) for their middle schoolers in lieu of phones. I guess the idea is the kids can easily message one another and their parents, and parents can do location tracking if desired. Obviously not a cheap solution, but I liked the idea of popularizing lower tech communication solutions among adolescents to accommodate socializing without social media.
Oh, also.... the year when I was in kindergarten (in 1985, in a much less supervised time), they were doing renovations on two of the three local public K-4 schools, so regardless of what district you were in, you went to kindergarten at Rosenmund.
The elementary school divide was Rosenmund was K-4, Washington and Billings were grades 1-4, and Jerman was 5-6. All of the school buses stopped at Jerman after going to their respective lower elementary schools, and some kids had to switch buses (and of course some kids lived right across the street, and that was their ordinary stop).
I normally would not have to switch buses, because I lived in Rosenmund district anyway. One day, I accidentally got on the wrong bus at Rosenmund, inwardly panicked NOT because I thought anything bad would happen but because my mom would kill me if she had to come pick me up from the bus garage at the end of the day, and then when we got to Jerman I saw my correct bus across the parking lot. So I hightailed it onto the right bus across the parking lot full of 5th and 6th graders.
And then other days after that I'd deliberately take the wrong bus and switch to the correct one at Jerman. I went all over town for shits and giggles and no one paid me any mind!
Sometimes I'd also deliberately ride the correct bus past my stop and then walk home the long way.
I was five years old at the time, and I didn't tell my mother about my adventures until I was about 25. She just laughed and said that wasn't surprising.
Now, do I think EVERY kid would be able to do this at five years old without freaking out? No. Do I recommend setting kindergarteners loose on the city? Also no. But I also see college students who are living off campus without cars and bankrupting themselves/missing class because they are taking Uber every day and even when I pull up the RTA website and I show them EXACTLY which bus/streetcar routes they should take and that a monthly pass is only $45, even when I explain that I did this every day for 13 years without incident and it's perfectly safe, even when I show them that there's a real-time app on it that will let them know when the bus is coming, they will not do it because they are too scared of getting lost. (NB: most of my students are Black, so this is not a race-based fear about public transit).
This conversation covers so many things I've been thinking about with my own children for so long. The information is invaluable. Appreciate you both for sharing this convo with us anxious parents.
Helpful!!! We're not there yet for our kids, but my oldest does keeps mentioning wanting a phone/watch *specifically* so we can track her and (by her reasoning) allow her to move around the city more freely. At nearly 10, she's already allowed more solo mobility than most of her friends (walking to and from the park/ballet class/etc) and I have no plans to start digitally tracking her (or buying her a device of any kind), but it is fascinating to me that it's something she's *requesting* we might do. Brave new world, etc.