What Is Car Culture Doing to Our Children?

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA, New York Times
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“Children,” Dr. Jackson told Jane E. Brody for The Times’s Well blog, “who grow up in suburbia can’t meet their life needs without getting a ride somewhere.”
For me, and I’m sure for many of you, those are slightly chilling words. The amount of time my children spend in a car being driven somewhere isn’t about being overscheduled or my hovering tendencies (although we could certainly discuss those things). It’s about the fact that unless I drive them, they’re limited: to one friend, whose mother has often already driven him somewhere else, and to the entertainment that’s to be found in one another and in the woods and fields around us. There are no sports, no movies, no after-school activities without my help.
We didn’t precisely choose this …
On the Well blog, Ms. Brody writes in her article “Communities Learn the Good Life Can Be a Killer,” … individual families like mine need to look at how we’ve structured our own lives around the expectation that we’re going to be constantly hopping in the car.
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https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/what-is-car-culture-doing-to-our-children/oldId.20120207181959551