Assume Cars Won't Stop
Our kids love going for walks in the neighborhood. We live in a nice, safe neighborhood with lots of streets but also lots of sidewalks. The kids will ride their trikes or we will push them in the stroller. It’s fun for the whole family. However there’s one thing that’s really starting to bug me, and it’s not what I would have expected: overly polite drivers.
I’ve been trying to teach Eli about looking both ways before crossing the street. When we get to an intersection, we stop and I ask Eli to look both ways for cars. If there are any cars coming, he knows to wait because he “doesn’t want to get squished.” But more and more we run into the situation where the oncoming driver, in some misguided attempt to be polite, stops to let us cross and refuses to go until we cross.
Just stopping, in itself, can be forgiven. But almost every time this happens, the scene quickly gets ridiculous: I motion them to drive on by waving them past, and they wave at me to cross, and I wave at them to say “No really, you go on”, and they stubbornly refuse, so on and so on. It would be comical if it wasn’t so ridiculous.
