Teaching Street Crossing

[-]Heron4y140

This sounds well thought out, useful teaching for your children. Most importantly, through observing your daughter's behaviour and attention, you could gauge how able Lily was to attend to/focus on traffic from both directions. The learner teaches you what's going on; teaching is mutual learning. This post also brings the retrospective horror of walking to school (as a primary aged child 6/7yrs) when the walk, three miles each way, involved crossing a main road. I did not know, (up until I reached twenty years old) that most people saw differently to me. Buses, cars, blackboards, TVs all were very blurry, I figured it was 'normal.' Turns out I was always extremely myopic (-10 currently) So, hopefully all children have great eye testing and great eyesight once they're able to understand the elements of street crossing!

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke4y100

At age 4, we started with the first tries for street crossing too. I remember the turning-the-head-left-and-right phase, and it required some practice to figure out when they detected moving cars reliably. One advantage that we had was that there is no pass-thru traffic on our local road and it is used by local residents only. Also, my sister, with her daughters, lives across the street so the benefit was higher. Overall, the steps described by Jeff are close to what we did. And as Jeff explains, if things don't work yet, you have to wait. All children are different, and as Jane writes, e.g., shortsightedness can make things difficult.

I completed the translation of the steps for roaming in the Google Sheet of our child development plan (see tab "Roaming."

[-]Heron4y30

The Google sheet CDP is really interesting: particularly keen to see the development of the sleep tab - sleep records/routines for the whole family could be fascinating over time.

[-]Gunnar_Zarncke4y30

Get in touch with me via direct message. The data is scanned but in German and not exactly easy to analyze, but I might be able to answer some questions, or we figure something out.

[-]Yoav Ravid4y70

Have you considered making a LW sequence out of all your parenting posts? I think that'd cool and useful.

[-]jefftk4y20

Would this have advantages over https://www.jefftk.com/news/kids ?

[-]Yoav Ravid4y20

oh, I didn't know of that page, thanks. A LW sequence won't have much extra benefit, then, except visibility through LW, and also an option to sort them in some specific order rather then just chronological.

Makes me think that it could be nice if LW had the option to automatically add a crossposted post to a sequence based on tags.

[-]Pattern4y20

Is it possible to search by a tag and filter by author? (This doesn't have the double check aspect of an author creating a sequence, but there is a tag in use on this post that's rather specific.)

[-]Yoav Ravid4y20

Not yet, but I know the admins are planing on revamping the search engine to make it possible.

[-]Pattern4y20

Hm. Are there any good export options at the moment? (Like, things you use to download stuff from websites to read (or sort) later? Like, say, all the posts by jefftk*?)

*Companion Cubes is not a tag on LW. It will probably never be a tag on LW. But, even if it's only one post, I can make it a sequence on my computer.

[-]VipulNaik1mo20

Great post! A few things I would add, having thought about crossing the street for a while:

When looking left and right, let your eyes briefly wander to the horizon on each side, or as far as possible until your view is obstructed. If there are blind spots (such as those created by parked cars), or road curvature that makes it difficult to see past some distance, it's better to consciously note that and adjust strategy accordingly, rather than just assuming that if you don't see a car coming, it isn't there. (There's also something really satisfying about looking at the horizon. I've also heard it's good for the eyes.)
Related to the above, if your view is obstructed, you want to edge into the crossing slowly and take another look once you are past the obstruction.
It's good to make use of both sound and peripheral vision as you approach a crossing. In most cases, even before you get to the curb, you should have a sense of the oncoming traffic, based on the sound, though you may not have a precise sense of its speed and direction. Starting to pay attention a few feet before you are at the crossing is a good idea.
When looking at oncoming traffic, you should be able to get a general sense both for how fast it's going and whether it's slowing down for the crossing or for you (if the crossing has a pedestrian right of way). Generally, if a car isn't showing signs of slowing down as expected, I will wait at the crossing until it slows down or passes. I generally only cross if I'm confident that the driver's speed is slow enough that I can cross even if they don't slow down (with a large margin), or it looks like their foot is already on the brake.

Many of these habits are also useful for driving, and probably more important there given the greater speeds involved, and it's good practice to start building this mental model early on.

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Teaching Street Crossing

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