Home Alone

I ran into an article today on the topic of letting children ride public transit alone.  It talks about a man in Vancouver who let his four children of ages 7, 8, 9, 11 ride the bus to school without adult supervision.  A seven year old on the bus alone seems possible depending on the seven year old, but in the company of an 11 year old I feel it is perfectly reasonable considering he spent considerable time training them to do this.

The government did not like this however and forbade it.  Once his eldest child reaches 12 they can then supervise the younger ones, and while that seems older than the limit I would choose it doesn't seem absurd.

But the article also talked about the rules here in Ontario and those made me choke a little.  Apparently here children cannot legally be left alone until age 16.

16!  The same age at which they can legally hop behind the wheel of a car and start driving.  Apparently sitting at home alone for a short period is equivalent in terms of responsibility to being the operator of a powerful and potentially dangerous piece of machinery.  It boggles my mind.

It is especially galling because nobody obeys that law.  Children are expected to arrive at Pinkie Pie's school by themselves - while parents are certainly welcome to drop them off, it is obvious to anyone at the school that nearly all of them arrive on their own.  So even though by law the great majority of the parents of the children in the school are in violation, and even though the people in the school are undoubtedly aware of it, nothing happens.

I *hate* laws like that.

Having laws on the books that are stupid and which are not enforced just leaves people in a terrible state where they risk something horrible happening to their family if they do what basically everyone does, and when everyone is doing the right thing it is especially crappy.  Obey the law, do a disservice to your children.  Disobey the law, be worried that they will take your children away.

Even if nobody actually obeys the law and it never gets enforced its mere existence is a problem.  I think people will generally have a lot more respect for laws and those who enforce them if laws themselves are consistently enforced.  When people know that the rules are fair, reasonable, and consistently enforced they have more reason to think that they themselves should play by the rules.

When it is clear that laws are arbitrary, destructive, and ignored, then it fosters the idea that the legal system should be ignored.

And if that law should happen to be enforced, as in my case, or the case of nearly all parents, it would be a disaster.  Should this happen, it won't occur to people with money, and influence, and access to lawyers.  It will happen to someone who is poor and powerless.

That is what gets me.  Not that anyone is going to take my kid away, that won't happen.  But that somebody might decide to do this to someone who doesn't know how to fight back or cannot do so.