Walking to School

June 14th, 2021
kids
Last week Lily (7y) decided she wanted to start walking to school by herself. It's not very far, she knows the way, and if anything happens she has pretty good common sense. The main problem is cars: while we've been practicing crossing the street, she's not good enough at it do it completely on her own. We realized, though, that if she went a slightly longer way she would only need to cross two streets: one right by our house and another that has a crossing guard.

We went out and practiced: she walked the route with me staying well behind. When she got to the second crossing I pretended to be the crossing guard. She seemed ready to do it on her own.

The next morning, after getting herself ready, I walked her across the first street and then she set off on her own. I stayed, watching, in case she ran into issues. When she got to where the crossing guard should be, she turned around and came running back crying: "the crossing guard isn't there!" It turns out that the crossing guard was just around the corner, leaning on their car. Once Lily saw this, I turned around, and Lily took it from there.

The remaining mornings that week I continued hanging out and watching until I could see the crossing guard helping her across the street. She didn't have any more problems, and this week I'm no longer waiting.

She is quite proud of herself, and I'm glad she's able to be a bit more independent.

Referenced in:

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Exercises in benchmarking and evals, part 7: DeepSWE, Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires

This is part of a series of exercises on benchmarking, evals, and experimental design (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)1. We're going to look at three questions, which are presented before the answers to give you time to think about the questions before seeing the a…

via Posts on July 23, 2026

Donation recommendations for effective altruists (July 2026)

My recommendation for donors who are American citizens or permanent residents is that they donate directly to high-value political candidates.

via Thing of Things July 22, 2026

Let's Taboo the V-Word

Read this post on Substack.

via Home July 12, 2026

more     (via openring)