Parenting After Toddlers

Another AMA question came in after my last post:

when can kids start to get to school by themselves? Or stay alone?

This question came from a reader who is a friend from high school, and when I got it, my brain’s hand shot up in the air and my brain said, “Oh oh! I know this!” This is a question that I’ve tackled successfully. I know I was successful because my kids survived learning these independent steps.

When kids can get themselves to and from school depends a lot on your circumstances and your child. Distance to school and the roads they must travel make a difference, and whether there are trustworthy people along the way who your child could stop and ask for help if they needed to. The same goes for when your child can be left alone.

Someone once told me that DCFS will take your kids away if you leave them alone before they are 10. I did some research on this, and it’s not true. The maturity of your children and their capacity to assess safety and access help matters more than their calendar age. The length of time they get left matters. A family that leaves a 9-year-old and a 7-year-old for 2 hours is fine, if the kids know how to use the phone and not to turn on the stove. In a different case, a severely disabled 16-year-old who lacked the ability to use the phone was left for a week with a 4-year-old and 2-year-old. That didn’t fly.

My kids didn’t get themselves to school until high school when they could walk. Their elementary/middle school was too far to reach by bike or walking, and if they’d had to rely on the bus each morning, they would have bailed and snuck home to play video games. For a while, I had a good carpool, but when my sons were in 7th and 5th grades, our carpool partner was gone. I couldn’t pick them up after school and (I was led to believe) the afterschool program would be TORTURE. We decided to try the city bus as the means for getting home.

The steps for doing this were pretty straightforward. I got them youth transit cards and we rode the bus a couple of times. We did some troubleshooting around problems that might arise and then after each ride, we would debrief. My older son was sanguine about it but here are two issues I recall my younger son raising:

“A homeless man asked Liam for money and Liam gave him his bus money so he didn’t have money for the bus.” This was reported in a slightly breathless tattling voice that conveyed worry and admiration at the same time. Liam had already lost the transit card. The bus driver let him ride home anyway, and Liam agreed not to give away money he needed in the future.

“A weird man wearing a leather vest with no shirt sat near me.” Said man did not speak to my son; he was just weirdly shirtless. Quinn agreed that if he felt uncomfortable in the future he would sit closer to the driver or next to any old woman near the front of the bus.

The next year, I was able to set up another carpool but the boys had the option to take the bus and they did so pretty regularly. At 17 and 19, they are both pretty comfortable with traveling alone by bus, train, and plane. I guess I should have mentioned that we put the kids on a plane alone to visit their Nana on the East Coast when they were 6 and 9, so they were ready for the bus when we needed it.

The takeaway: Let your kids try it earlier than you are ready for them to do it. If your kid has anxiety about anything, having them try new things that they are interested in, like walking to their friend’s house, can help them overcome it. Check out this NYT article on the topic.

Now I want to talk more generally about parenting advice. There is a lot of it available when our kids are young but then it gets really sparse as they get older. Meanwhile, the problems get larger and larger, to the point where the issues our kids face rival anything we’ve dealt with. I’ve found a couple of helpful books, including The Grown-Up’s Guide to Teenage Humans, and books by Madeline Levine like The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, but overall, I often feel like I am either flailing or failing when it comes to parenting teenagers. There’s a lot of heavy shit involved with this job; it’s really hard work at a time in my life when I want the work to be easier.

Getting this question from my high school friend really helped though. She was one of my best friends in high school but I wasn’t always the best friend to her. We had a long stretch of not being in touch with each other, which I am responsible for and which I regret. But if 30 years later, she supports my writing and is willing to reach out with a hard question, that means being a teenager doesn’t last forever. With teenagers (ourselves included), the long view is needed. It’s very uncomfortable to live with the day-to-day questions of “Am I doing this right?” and “Did I say the wrong thing?” but with love and patience, we find our way through it. Good luck, fellow former teenagers! We’ll get through this together.