The other day a boy of 8 ran from the Swimming Pool, Across the road, and to the bus stop ....

[QuintessentiallyAnEmptyCave]

I was on the bus going home from town when I saw a little boy of 8 who lives further down my road, run across the road from the Swimming Pool, and stood waiting at the Bus Stop when we got there.

He entered the Bus, waited inside the bus, pressed the button to get off before our stop. He left the bus, looked left and right, waited till it was clear and crossed the street. He took the key from his pocket and opened his front door.

I cannot imagine my son (nearly six) being so self reliant in 2 years time.

Casting my mind back to another recent thread where a 19 year old girl would need a companion to travel across London, I wonder, how much freedom to develop and mature into independet beings do we give our kids?

Some parents wont let their 8 year olds go to the post box on the corner, some wont let them cross the road and go through the school gates on their own, and others let their children leave the swimming pool and take the bus home on their own.

How safety conscious are we? Are we maybe stiffling our children?

OMG my ds2 is 11 and will be walking back from shcool for the first time after the easter break. I decided I didn't want him walking to school as I wouldn't know if he hadn't got there. And I have to walk there anyway, with d3.

But my ds3 went to play with a friend (age 9) and they went into town, to the shops, allowed out by the freinds father. I am a bit reluctant now to let ds3 back to their house to play.

There was a policeman in DD's kindergarten recently talking about road safety.

I suspect that the statistics are very different in Germany, as many more children walk to school. He told us how many injuries there were last year due to traffic accidents. Over 50% of the injuries were incurred when the child was a passenger in a car. Often because the children were not strapped in or strapped in wrongly.

There were about 25% pedestrian accidents and the same amount of accidents when the child was on a bike.

We are not doing our children any favours by not teaching them about road safety.

The children here in our village get regular visits from the community policeman, from the last kindergarten year and right through primary school. He also does a safe cycling course when they are about 9 or 10.

Do the schools/police do anything like that in UK?

Ks, there was a talk given by a couple of police officers for the parents at ds's kindergarten a couple of weeks ago about preventing sexual abuse. Unfortunately I couldn't go because it clashed with a parents' evening at dd's school (which in retrospect I wish I hadn't gone to!), but apparently it was really good, all about how you can teach your children to look after themselves when they are out and about on their own.

The attitude is definitely very much that you must encourage your dc to be independent from an early age. And yes, there have been some horrific cases of child abductions here but no more than the UK I would imagine and not so much played out in the press.

I was talking about this with my best friend the other day and when we were seven we walked to and from school (in Liverpool) on our own about a 15 minute walk. I didn't have any main roads to cross but she did. Her daughter is 6 now and mine is nearly 5 and neither of us can imagine letting them do this at the same age.

When I was 8 yrs old we were livin gin Singapore and my 6 yr old sister and I used to get the bus into Singapore City alone.

Don't know if my parents even knew where we were

I'm pretty sure I used to walk to school on my own at 7/8 (not every day as it was quite a long way) but my parents now deny that I did, as though they are too embarassed to admit, in today's climate, that they could have been guilty of such lax parenting.