Zebra Crossings and Planet Child

Last year, when my brain was completely broken, I couldn’t stay inside and communication of any kind was impossible. I would wrestle myself out of my sleepless bed and walk. I’d take the dog until he started to limp but I would take him home and carry on walking. I didn’t particularly go anywhere; no destination in mind except freedom from my own thoughts. This is when I came across the problem with zebra crossings in our town.

Lots of people are talking about the TV programme ‘Planet Child’ that was on ITV during the week. It was about giving children freedom so that their brains can develop properly. Anyone who has been teaching for a while can see that since children have been given less and less freedom at home they are more needy, more anxious and less able to problem solve. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that teachers are any more likely to give children freedom. In fact, the latest psychological fad - Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) - is more likely to have children sitting in rows, silently working from the same textbook in rooms with plain walls. The pressure on schools to achieve league table results has also resulted in massive cuts in children’s free time: before school booster sessions, shorter breaks, clubs at lunch and after school and revision sessions in the holidays.

It was an amazing programme and watching five year olds navigate their way across London alone, using maps and buses was jaw dropping. I’m a big fan of giving children freedom to grow their brains. When I was growing up we were out and unsupervised all day long. We did dangerous things. My sister and I were telling our parents at one family dinner about how we had built an underground den in a pile of earth that was just down the road from us (soon to become a new roundabout). They were horrified. We had dug tunnels and caves in this mound and took comics, candles, sweets and fizzy pop down there. My adult brain knows the risks and thinks, “cave ins, carbon monoxide   poisoning and just being in a small enclosed space with the boy who had the shovels who I believe is
 now in prison for murder.” As a child, though, you are fearless and so I learnt how to not annoy a psychopath and all about lintels.

 It’s hard as an adult to let your child experience the risks you can see. Death is such a big fear in our society (wow, who knew I could make every blog about death?) that we do anything to avoid the risk of it. In Swallows and Amazons when mother writes to father to get permission for the children to go out on the boat alone he writes back, “Better dead than duffers.” What parent would think that now?

One of the comparisons that was made in Planet Child was between Japanese and British school children. In Japan children go to school on their own from the age of five. It’s something we noticed when we were there: tiny children in military style uniforms with a backpack the size of the Narnia wardrobe, navigating the buses and subways of Tokyo alone.
In the programme they stressed how busy and scary Tokyo was and sort of implied that British parents should just chuck their kids in   London and they would be fine because Tokyo was bigger. This isn’t true. Tokyo might be big but it’s safe. They don’t have a problem with drugged up homeless people sleeping on the streets (they have near full employment). It’s clean and tidy (you’ve never sen so many people with a broom) and the Japanese people are more polite and helpful than you can imagine. If a child got lost in Tokyo then seven people will have helped before they had even realised they were lost. I know this because on one day of our holiday the Long Suffering Husband had left me in a pharmacy buying tubi-grip bandages (as I had broken him by making him climb mountains) while he went back to the hotel for something he’d forgotten. It took him longer than expected and while I was waiting outside the shop people kept trying to help me. They thought I was lost. Even when I explained that I was waiting for someone one man  got to the end of the road, looked round to see I was still there and came back because he didn’t believe me. Starbucks must do very well out of foreigners trying to avoid being helped. The biggest crossing in Tokyo (Shibuya Crossing) is often cited as the most mad complicated crossing in the world; known as the Shibuya  scramble but even that crossing felt safe.

Tokyo also drastically reduced their road traffic accidents in 2015. Now, if a car kills a pedestrian it makes headline news and is usually caused by an old person losing control at the wheel. They seem to have worked out that if they can see a risk to their children then the answer isn’t to keep the children from experiencing the risk but to reduce the risk.  Every crossing in Tokyo is safe. The zebra crossings also have lights on them and the big ones have traffic Jedis. Everyone follows the rules. No one crosses early or risks a late run for it. Even cyclists stop.

Here, no one follows crossing rules. Pedestrians cross whenever they like and, as I discovered,  car drivers don’t stop at zebra crossings and become furious if they have to. One day, when I was walking I already on the third white strip when a car sped up towards the crossing. As I wasn’t particularly keen on getting run over (although if I’m honest that was only because it wouldn’t have guaranteed death) I stopped. The driver saw me and slammed his brakes on, car bouncing at the edge of the stripes, so I walked across. The driver was incandescent. He wound down his window and leaned out, shouting, “well, don’t thank me then!”
I found this very distressing because I couldn’t thank him. I couldn’t talk to anyone or look at anyone, so thanking him, even if it had occurred to me wasn’t possible.  I stewed over it for a few days thinking that the rules are that drivers should stop for anyone standing by a zebra crossing but I wondered if I was wrong. I posed the question on Facebook: “Can anyone tell me when it became a thing to thank drivers for stopping for you when you are crossing at a Zebra?” The response was vitriolic. It turned out that people thought I was the worst person in the world for not thanking everyone who stopped. People commented that they taught their children to thank drivers and were always pleased that children from the local senior school always thanked them when they stopped.
I thought that I'd never be able to go out again. I was trapped by my mind and the fact that you now had to thank drivers for not running you over on a zebra crossing.

Now that my mind is better I'm still walking a lot and people still are not stopping at the zebra crossings.  I have taken to making appropriate gestures at them because I think if you have to wave 'thanks' if they stop you then there is no reason to sarcastically thank them for not stopping.

If we are teaching our children to be grateful for not being run over on crossings then we are also teaching them that there are no safe places to cross the road and that when they start driving it's okay to run over people if they don't thank you for stopping.  The emphasis on keeping the children safe has fallen to the wrong people.  It's not the pedestrian's responsibility to keep the driver happy.  If we want to give our children freedom to develop their brains then we also have to start obeying traffic laws with no agenda.