to worry about seeing older and older children in buggies?

[mariebl]

In the last couple of years I've really started to notice many more children in buggies, some of them must be almost school age.
I also very often see them looking unhappy and bored and trying to get out and being told off for being "naughty".

I'm beginning to think it must be my age as not too many years back there didn't really seem to BE any buggies for older children, babies went in prams, when they started toddling they had reins and when they got tired people picked them up and carried them for a bit.

I appreciate that there are children with conditions where having that transport is helpful and necessary but I also believe that having older and older children in buggies is a recent trend which is in danger of becoming the norm. We are also told we have a child obesity crisis and are told that children do not get enough exercise.
Am I being judgemental to say is this kind of trend a part of it?

Something came up earlier about buggies for disabled children being made to look like buggies - why is this preferable to a wheelchair-style piece of kit?

If a child is in a wheelchair, at least people know they are disabled and not spoilt/lazy/whatever.

It's a genuine question. Please don't flame me too hard.

I was a fat child - I never ate fast food - EVERY meal I ate was healthy & home cooked and I was a vegetarian, we didn;t have a family car either.

That was a big clanger - hope you've got an extinguisher!!

www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2790020

So how do we feel about seven year olds with no SN needing one?

I have to agreee with the OP and Pagwatch re the trend for children to remain in buggies till a later age. Certianly seems to be the case in the States.

I work in a day nursery so know the back story of lots of kids, and there is a definite trend towards older kids in buggies, or even worse, ferried everywhere in cars and not expected to walk further than 200 yards. Sorry for all you folks with SN kids, the kids I am talking about have no SN, just parents who don't have time to allow for walking their DCs

Thesmallclanger.
I won't flame you.

I am not best placed to answer as I was lucky enough to be able to get ds2 walking and then walking safely.
But personally I am in the 'why the fuck should I have to label my child so that people are polite' camp

Like I said. I never judge individual kids. But I suspect more small children walking more often would be good for them.

This winds me up as well small children can walk for miles my 2 year old can walk 2 miles to the library and back parents don't give them the chance. I have 3dcs my eldest dd did not go in a buggy after 15 months, my ds was 18 months and at the moment my dd2 is 19 months and still in the buggy for the school run but walks most of the time. There is a wee boy slightly older than my ds (3.10) who goes in the buggy for a 5 minute walk to school! There is absolutely nothing wrong with him and the mum usually ends up pushing an empty buggy this is just for the parents convience imo. 4 year olds unless ill or disabled do not NEED to be in a buggy.

We didnt get a choice. In our LA all children under 8 who need a buggy because of SN (but are still able to sit and walk) get a Maclaren Major.

Thankyou Pag.
I was going to expland on this, but I can't find the appropriate language to express what I want to say. Someone mentioned "dignity" upthread, and I suppose my question is why is a buggy (associated with small children) more dignified than a wheelchair (associated with bigger children, and adults)?

Sorry if this is blunt and poorly-worded.

There are a fair few 4+ yr siblings at school who have always been put from the car parked down the road into a buggy and pushed the hundred yards to school where they wriggle and scream to get out and run round. Those kids are starting reception today, i was half waiting for them to arrive in their uniforms in their buggies.

Pagwatch - yes, I see what you are saying, but IRL I get some looks and comments like "Isn't he BIG" (translate; "wtf is he doing in a buggy?"). Which is what I mean by the not being able to tell. When I say "well he's only two" people are quite surprised. This is what happens when you give birth to a baby giant... :o

As macrosomic babies are getting more and more common, I'll wager that a lot of older kids in buggies might also possibly mabe be baby giants like mine...

There is also another thing. There is much more traffic these days. 10 times more than when I were a lass. My son being my son, and roads being as busy as they are, he's staying in a buggy until he's 28...

Mine were out as soon as they could walk literally my dd was 16 months when the twins arrived so had little choice.
They are hardy kids who will walk for miles.
Some others I know put their school age children in and also walk for miles.
I would love a buggy sometimes just to pt all the paraphanalia in but its one of htose things I dont judge others for how they do things. Why does it matter to you?

I suspect actually it might just be more visible than before as people are more mobile and tend to take their kids with them more.

E.g. We have more and more single parent families who don't have an extra parent at home for when they are doing supermarket shopping. We also don't have as much extended family round and about due to a more mobile workforce to be last-minute babysitters for when we want to pop into town, so the kids come with you rather than being left with grandma. We also are much more tolerant of children in certain places - for example you have special baby cinema screenings (I remember my first trip to the cinema really vividly because I'd certainly have been at least 6-7 before being taken for such a treat!). Due to more working mums, we also have more kids being ferried to childminders/nursery etc every day.

So just in general, there are more kids spending time out and about with their parents which makes them more visible than they were say 30 years ago.

But I do tend to agree that the kids get dragged along with whatever the parent is doing a lot more and that shoving them in a buggy (even when they are really too old for it) is the easiest way of getting them there.

Plus I've noticed that since buggies have inflated to ridiculous prices, people seem to want to get more use out of them - after all if it cost you £600 you're going to want to get the most use out of it!!

I think that the number of children with SNs and thus difficulty walking may be fairly constant, but they could also be more visible now, compared with yesteryear.

A lady I know has an adult son with AS (and other medical details that aren't importatn to the thread). When he was young, he wouldn't walk. She didn't feel she could take him to school in a pushchair, even though he would not walk. So, she sat him on her bicycle, and wheeled the bicycle along.

It would have just looked like a normal parent-child game to any passer-by. These days, she might come to a different decision about whether a pushchair was acceptable for him.

I know of only two children in my area (and by that I mean a fair number of streets) that have had to use a buggy past the age of 5. One is my Ds2, who has severe autism, and he doesn't use it all the time and the other was a lad who had leukemia (he is older now). Other than that the only children I ever see in buggies are toddlers, three or four years old at the most.

Some posters seem determined to take the OP as a personal affront against their own situation and the perfectly valid reasons why their own DC still need to use a pushchair, despite the proviso that the OP included!

Anyway, I agree with Pag about not judging any individuals, but noting the general trend.

A twenty minute walk for me will turn into at least an hours walk if walking with DD (2.3y). So that's when I mainly use our buggy.

However, I suspect we were judged massively when we visited Gullivers recently - my seven year old DS was in the buggy between rides. He was absolutely exhausted, while DD was happy to run around and we had the time to let her do so.

I hope to get rid of the buggy soon, as I don't think they are necessary for children over the age of about 3 (except maybe on really long walks). SN excluded obviously.

I forced my (quite small and petite) DD out of her buggy at the ripe old age of 3 and told her it had broken. She'd stopped dawdling so much at that age and I basically gave her no choice in the matter. A few months on and she walks for a few miles and quite fast. She's simply gotten used to it as there are no other options for her and she knows this. Fortunately we live in London where public transport is excellent so if she tires we get on a bus or the Tube (or even on a few occasions a black cab).

But I never judge other parents who have their older DC in buggies. Who knows what those DC are like - they may still be dawdlers or tire easily. If ever DD tantrums in the middle of the street because she's decided she doesn't want to walk another step (even if she's only been walking a few minutes) then I always wish I still had the buggy .

Oh gosh yes I mean we do try. I'd far rather he walked sometimes...so I get all brave and take him along, dallying behind while me and ds1 stand around waiting for the intransigent toddler to move.

it's crap. We might only be going round the block but if it's the wrong time of day or he is tired, we'll get about 10 paces before he's climbing up me demanding a carry. It always happens on the way back, whatever.

I mean why put yourself through it? That's what buggies are FOR! And life's too short to struggle. It doesn't mean he'll never walk...in fact I was always made to walk as a young child, our parents insisted on long walks every weekend, often in the middle of nowhere and that awful feeling of absolute exhaustion, aching little legs and needing to be carried because you're crying and can'#t manage another step - only to be met with 'well daddy's tired too,' and a further half hour trek ahead in the growing darkness before a station appears, well it was torturous.

I won't do that to my kids. Sorry. They are tired when they say they're tired and I believe them

Ds2 can - and has done - walked for over 5 miles throughout countryside and hard going ground (over rocks, through heather etc). But I'll put him in the buggy to the supermarket less than five minutes walk away if I know I won't be able to keep hold of his hand and carry the shopping.
Of course, when I don't have much shopping and he walks with me, he usually then likes to try and run off as soon as I let go of it. Or when I am packing. He'll then either race towards the doors, or spread eagle himself onto the floor, just at the right level for people to trip over him.
The thing is, is that from a selfish viewpoint, it's a damn sight easier to not put Ds2 into the buggy. We can go to more places. I don't have to manouevre it through narrow places or awkward turnings. I can rest assured that no one will be judging me for putting my son who LOOKS perfectly typical into a buggy to take him to the supermarket, before rushing back to comment about it on a parenting site.

I don't agree at all that the percentage of kids with sn using a pushchair will have remained the same. Sn is much more wisely recognised/diagnosed these days. It's entirely possible that in the past parents of kids with sn who were not aware encouraged their kids to walk when maybe it wasn't the best idea if they lacked road sense etc. I'm sure some parents would have continued to use buggies against the norm but I think a dianosis and the availability of adapted pushchairs makes their use more likely.
Also I disagree with the view that more people are necessarily lazy these days. There always has/always will be people who are lazy and I think it's more likely that the percentage of lazy people using pushchairs for older kids will remain pretty much constant.
Like others have said kids are out more with their parents these days and there are more cars on the road. Me and my sister were out of our pushchairs at a young age but the furthest we went was the local shops. All day trips such as to the zoo were a treat a couple of times a year and not done until we were older. More parents do all-day trips like this more regularly now and with younger kids.
People ARE busier these days. Most families in the past would have a working father and a sahm. These days a lot of women work and have to get kids to childminders before work etc.
I think the vast majority of parents would prefer their kids to walk when practical. And whether you are judging individuals or not OP a thread like this is always going to get peoples backs up.

Gloria you have just reminded me of an incident the other day when I decided to take my 18 mo to the local shop without taking the pushcahair. It's 15 mins each way (my pace) and he has always walked it fine before when I have had the pushchair with me. Half way back he decided he could walk no more and needed carrying. I can't carry him with one hand so had to abandon my 4 pint of milk by the side of the road! I won't be leaving the pushchair behind again in a hurry that's for sure!

I had comments from a few people when dd2 was in a double buggy (bought when she was 3.4 - horrors!). She does not have SN, but life was very stressful at the time, I had just had ds, who was ill, dd1 had just started school, I don't drive, we have a long walk to school, which dd2 had to do 4 times a day (up to school, back from preschool at 12, back up to school for dd1, back home from school). We also used the buggy into town when she would have enormous meltdowns about going in the wrong direction, going in the wrong shops. Believe me I would have preferred her to walk, but having to carry a screaming, nearly 4 year old having a panic attack, because we have walked the wrong way down the road, whilst pushing ds in a buggy, carrying shopping and having dd1 crying because people are staring, is frankly beyond me. So in a way it was for my convenience, and sanity.

I know that this is an individual case, but the point is that if you are going to judge an older child in a buggy, you wouldn't necessarily know the individual circumstances of why.

I would have thought that the increase in short car journeys, availability of cheap junk food, and cutbacks in school sports/closure of sports fields has had a greater impact on childhood obesity than 4 year olds having a ride in the buggy.

I think childhood obesity is mainly due to overprotective parents keeping their kids in watching tv/playing their ds rather than running around outside.
Me and my friends were all skinny as rakes. We ate sweets and drunk fizzy pop. But we also ran around outside from after breakfast until the streetlights came on.