KEY POINTS:
Walking school buses are being hailed by urban planners as a way of giving city streets back to children.
Speakers at a United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) seminar in Waitakere yesterday said children who were driven to school by their parents failed to develop a sense of belonging to their neighbourhood or the independence that came from walking to school.
But those in "walking school buses", averaging about 20 children each, under the watchful eyes of parent-volunteers, said they liked it "because it's our habitat".
"They feel they belong," said Auckland University geographer Robin Kearns, who co-founded New Zealand's first walking school bus at Gladstone School in Mt Albert in 1999 and has co-written annual reports on the phenomenon for the past five years.
He told of one trip where two boys held up the procession while they stopped to look at snails in a bush. "We didn't know snails could climb trees," they said.
Another time, he and his wife walked with their two children in the rain to a movie at St Luke's mall and, afterwards, their 7-year-old said the best thing about the evening was seeing the way the drains collected the rainwater.
"The world of childhood is learning about the world first-hand through discovery," Dr Kearns said.
"Driving children everywhere lessens parental anxieties but denies children environmental experiences."
Walking school buses "get children on the streets again and they get parents thinking it's okay to have children on the streets again".
Rain seemed to make no difference to the enthusiasm of about 25 children from Wymondley Rd School in Otara who walked home from school with parent-volunteers Ita Fitialo, La Ta'ase and Lae Tausaga yesterday.
Six year 6 pupils acted as monitors for the younger ones.
"It's for the little kids. We are trying to keep them safe," said year 6 student Zemona Ainu'u.
Mrs Fitialo said a shortage of volunteers meant the walking school bus operated only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On other days, some still walked and others were driven by their parents.
"To us, it's really important for the safety of the kids," she said.
Dr Kearns' study found that schools in the poorest tenth, such as Wymondley Rd, are still far less likely to have walking school buses than schools in richer areas; 60 per cent of the walking buses are at schools in the richest 30 per cent of schools.
"It's a hugely middle-class initiative but that's okay because middle-class people are the people who need to get out of their SUVs," he said.
Just eight years after the first experiment at Gladstone, there are walking buses on more than 200 routes to 91 schools across the Auckland region, saving 2045 car trips on dry days and 1294 trips on wet days, when fewer children brave the rain.
The number of routes and the number of car trips saved rose by 67 per cent last year alone.
Dr Kearns said the children's parents reported that the walking buses were "knitting the neighbourhood together".
"A focal point in the community that gives neighbours a reason to communicate," one parent said.
They were also seen as healthy.
Earlier, a professor of urban policy at Queensland University, Dr Brendon Gleeson, told the seminar that as Western societies grew wealthier, their children were growing "fatter, sicker and sadder".
Despite Australia's strong economic growth in the past decade, trends for children were worsening in birth weights, asthma, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, behavioural problems and intellectual disability.
Growing materialism was producing "unprecedented family breakdown, ever longer working hours, social isolation and cultural alienation".
"Reinstating children to the centre of thinking is a project that will make our societies in New Zealand and Australia more secure and sustainable," he said.
An Otago University planner, Dr Claire Freeman, said adults needed to stop walling off their houses from the streets and driving their children to activities, so that their children could develop a sense of independence.
"Support your local school, support your local facilities, even if they are not the best ones," she said.
"It's about having some feeling of belonging in the place you live in."
Walk way
* Began in Australia in the 1990s.
* Started in Auckland in 1999.
* Now more than 200 routes at 91 schools in the Auckland region and almost as many beyond Auckland.
* 63 per cent of children would have been driven to school if the walking bus didn't exist.
* Major constraint is parent-volunteers, especially dads.
* 88 per cent of Auckland's 1264 parent-volunteers are women.
