10 years old - walking places alone, & how to prepare them?

[akjay]

Topic: Walking to park/school/friends houses alone. Dealing with "letting go" for the first time and the accompanying guilt/worry!

Appreciate there is never a one-size-fits-all approach with this as you have to consider the maturity of the child/area you live etc.

My son is 10.5 years old, an only child, but very mature and sensible - not just my opinion, but many friends and family agree.

We live in a village/civil parish outside a city that in my opinion is very safe and pretty middle-class. The worst thing that happens here is burglaries from people who target the area. The school and park are both a 17-minute walk away from home. The park is mostly walking in a straight line along a main road, only crossing once to get to the park over a road just off the main one.

The school requires crossing a main road which gets busy during rush hour, but then it is purely a foresty footpath and walking through houses.

The past few months as it's gotten lighter his friends have all been meeting up at the park after school - some live right by the park, but a few also live a good few minutes walk away (8mins I think). I've felt sad that we live what feels like further away from all the action, as I spent loads of time out and about at parks as a kid and felt this was a core part of my childhood. I hear his friends say to each other "see you at the park" etc after school, so I know there will definitely be other kids there.

How we've built up to him walking on his one so far:

• He's been dropped and left at the local youth club and gone to this for over a year. Same location as the park - 6:15 - 8 pm once a week.

• We've dropped him off at the park and picked him up from the park a handful of times so far after school - leaving him there for about 2 hours.

• He's allowed to be left at home for small periods i.e. popping to shops - under instruction to not use kettle, cooker or shower.

• We currently do road safety every morning on the school run i.e. he makes all decisions about when we cross.

• He knows the area very well. We've lived here since he was 2.5 so walked around the village/done the school run thousands of times...

The next obvious step is letting him walk by himself. He has a phone but the sim isn't working - once that is sorted I will feel much more relaxed.

We are happy to keep driving him when my partner is home (I don't drive) so this will be relevant on days partner working late.

I guess what I'm looking for is advice/solidarity/opinions. What safety provisions and resources do you recommend? Am I doing the right thing? What about in the summer holidays - do people ever leave their 10.5 year old alone at home when going to work? I don't mean every day - I can work from home most days and have a lot of flexibility, but I do need to go into the office ideally 1-2 times a week.

I can do solidarity and perhaps some advice, but no opinions - you know your child and your local area.

We had slightly different circumstances: our childcare arrangements changed unexpectedly and my child had to adjust to walking to school independently (under a mile) around a year or so younger than your child is now. They're pretty responsible, so we decided to give them their independence. There's one difficult road to cross (lots of very poor driving, no pedestrian crossing) and then some minor roads with/without crossings, all urban.

We had been doing progressive road safety / increasing independence for years, on our many walks around town to/from activities, then over the weekend before letting them walk alone we picked a busy time for traffic and had them walk to school and home again with me tailing behind/observing. We gave them a cheap GPS phone watch so we could see when they had arrived at school. It looks pretty cheap and nasty, so is unlikely to make them a target for anyone.

My child loved it from the outset, really blossoming from the sense of responsibility and becoming a bit of a celebrity for being the only child in their year who arrived at school without an adult / older sibling, and also being able to hang out at the park nearest their school with their friends whose parents came to collect them and then took them to the park for a bit after school.

I was nervous and a bit anxious the first time they walked alone, but being able to see roughly where they were from the GPS tracker was reassuring. By the end of the first week, we were all pretty relaxed about it, and wished we'd done it a bit sooner.

Having confidence in their independence has been a real benefit to all of us - my child has been running errands in town (under a mile from home) like buying milk when we'd run out, or things we needed for dinner but which I forgot to buy at the weekend, since summer of year 4. They really enjoy doing this, too. They take themselves to/from their activities which are within walking distance, although we have rules for when it's dark in winter - stick to the bigger, street-lit roads, no cut throughs, come straight home. Not having to take them to/from clubs has been wonderful and has given me some very welcome time back in the evenings.

We don't leave our child alone at home whilst we are out at work for the day. We work normal office hours and with commuting this is outside of our comfort/tolerance and will be until at least secondary school. We do leave them for shorter periods which we assess to be reasonable on the basis that the risks are negligible and they have good practical knowledge - e.g. where the stopcock is and how to turn the water off, using the phone, emergency numbers, which neighbours are around if they need some help (and neighbours are aware they might pop round). We have some rules for when they're home without us - they can make themselves hot drinks and snacks, use the microwave, but not use the gas.

Our experience is that it has been overwhelmingly positive to give our child more independence. Some people think this made us terrible parents, but since this invariably happens whatever one does, we paid no heed. We have only seen benefits from our child having more independence.

I started off with letting her walk to school. With your longer walk, start by going as far as the road and watching him cross.

After school... do his friends go straight to the park? Can you pick him up an hour or so after school?

Mine is 10 and a half. I just let her go to the near little shop by herself so far. Which she can go there and back in 15 minutes.

Haven't done anything else yet.

But no I would never leave a child a 10 year old alone while you're at work

Teach him things like no grown man or woman would ask a child to help find their dog, help put things into a car, ask for directions etc. Teach him to walk tall and with confidence and get him to look in a mirror and look scared and then brave. Tell him he can be wrong and scream the place down rather than not make a noise and something happen. Teach him to draw attention to any situation he feels unsafe in, how kicking, punching, biting are all completely acceptable reactions to being bodily lifted by someone he doesn't know.

The more situations you can talk through with him the better as he has the knowledge of what to do if it ever does happen. I know this sounds extreme but we actually live in an area where historically a child was taken and it makes us over cautious. Better to be safe than sorry.