Call it the Back-Seat Rebellion. Helicoptered kids who spent their childhoods ferried from school to playdate to soccer are now young men and women voting with their feet . . . by using them.
They are so sick of cars, they can’t abandon them fast enough.
The proof is in the plummeting number of young people getting their licenses. According to a University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute study, in 1983, nearly half of 16-year-olds had a license. By 2014, just a quarter did. And even at age 19, the gap still yawned.
Of course, there are several reasons for the drivership decline, including the ability to summon an Uber or simply hang out electronically. Also, the advent of “graduated licenses” meant that in some states, 16- and 17-year-olds are no longer allowed to ferry a group of friends, or drive at night, so some of them threw in the towel.
But one other reason young people aren’t driving as much is that they’ve already been driven enough for a lifetime. What holds allure is not driving — experiencing the fun and freedom they missed out on as micromanaged kids who never got to walk to school or ride their bikes till the streetlights came on.
Millennials grew up staring at the back of their parents’ heads.
A Subaru ad inadvertently summed it up. “When our little girl was born,” a mom reminisces to gentle guitar music, “we got a Subaru. It’s where she said her first word, saw her first day of school, made a best friend forever. The back seat of my Subaru is where she grew up.”
Ahem. Let’s not go there. Suffice to say, it sounds like that girl spent her entire childhood, including playtime, in the car. How did this come about?
A big factor is fear. After the kidnappings of Etan Patz in 1979 and Adam Walsh in 1981, “stranger danger” catapulted to the forefront of our culture. The milk-carton kids didn’t help.
The media saw their ratings surge with child-in-danger stories, and rattled parents vowed to keep their kids safe. How? They started driving them everywhere. They still do, despite the fact that today the national crime rate is down to what it was in 1963.
Back then, the majority of kids walked to school. But today, it’s down to 13 percent. This change is so profound, you can see it in the words we use. School “arrival” and “dismissal” have morphed into “drop-off” and “pickup.”
Adult accompaniment is so de rigeur that at some PTA fundraising auctions, parents bid for the parking space closest to the front door — the handicapped spot. It’s like the old joke about the super-rich woman vacationing in Florida. She orders the bellhop to carry in all her trunks and gowns and finally, her fully grown son. “Can’t he walk?” the bellhop asks. “Of course he can!” she replies. “But thank goodness he doesn’t have to.”
This is the kind of stifling, car-centric culture that young people are rebelling against — a culture so convinced that kids can’t be safe on their own that when onlookers spot an unsupervised child, they call 911.
You’ve heard the stories of parents like Danielle and Alexander Meitiv in Maryland, who were investigated for child neglect simply because they let their kids, ages 6 and 10, walk home without them. In November, Connecticut mom Maria Hasankolli overslept and her 8-year-old decided to walk to school on his own. Hasankolli was handcuffed, arrested for negligence and faces a possible 10-year sentence.
Perhaps these nosy nanny-staters feel they’re looking after improperly supervised young citizens. But they’re only ensuring their own obsolescence when they crack down on kids who happily walk around unsupervised. The future lies not with enforced schlepping. It lies in freedom.
Fast-growing cities, after all, are the places young adults are moving to as quickly as their feet (or bikes, or public transit) can take them. And these are the cities doing the best economically: The more walkable a city, the higher its gross domestic product. That’s why towns from Tampa to Seattle are trying to be just like New York — easy to live in car-free.
Any other area that hopes to thrive must make sure it does everything possible to let everyone walk — including the kids. Otherwise, they’ll speed out of there as soon as they can.
Just not in a car.
Lenore Skenazy, author of the book and blog “Free-Range Kids,” is a contributor at Reason.com. Sam Schwartz is author of “Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars.”