Back to the "Big Question"

I came across this today while reading the online version of the Wall Street Journal's opinion page. While reading this I couldn't help but think of the conversations I have had with by Dad about his childhood and how it differs from my own and my children's. For my dad, a depression era child, it was not unusual to leave the house alone or with his friends. He would leave in the morning and not come home till dark. His mom, my grandmother, would go to do the shopping, by foot, and leave him home in the yard, alone and locked out of the house and he just got on with it. He always walked to and from school twice a day, for he always went home for lunch, alone or with his siblings. There were always bullies along the way, he most of the time managed to stay out of their path. He spent hours on his own in the woods around his house figuring out how to entertain himself, and I suppose, though he won't ever tell me, must have gotten into some kind of trouble along the way. As my dad always says, my how times have changed. To raise a child like that today, would be shocking - it would be child neglect. Yet, somehow my dad and his siblings, in all 5, did okay. In fact, they are all successful and still alive and kicking, all in their eighties. My grandparents must have done something right.

As you read this op ed, here is some food for thought... Today in our quest for perfect children with perfect childhoods taking something very important away from our children. Privacy. Independence. By trying to be modern parents who are "in tune" with our kids, in other words, trying to be our child's best friend, entering a zone we should never be in? Our child's world. Do we really belong there?

Read on and tell me what you think. I think you know what I think.....

Letting Go
Hey, parents, leave those kids alone!

BY SAM SCHULMAN

In the midst of my 1950s childhood, the playwright Robert Paul Smith published a quirky little book that became a best seller called "Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing." It was a laconic evocation of the independent lives that Depression children contrived for themselves in the era before postwar affluence. And its subtitle--"How it was when you were a kid, and how things have deteriorated since"--condemned, by contrast, the coddled, structured, supervised and superabundant childhoods of my own generation.

Though "Where Did You Go?" was written for our parents, every child I knew made sure to get hold of a copy. A year after its publication, we children were the target of a sequel: "How to Do Nothing With Nobody All Alone by Yourself." It featured seductively grim drawings of spare little toys and games you could make out of wooden matchsticks, empty spools of thread, tin cans and rubber bands. I, for one, went right to work. Trying to carve a boat out of a wine cork, I cut my thumb to the bone with my Cub Scout pocketknife. My quest for the simple life of an earlier time ended, sitting with my disgusted father, in a Chicago hospital emergency room.

But any envy that we children of the '50s felt toward the sparse childhood of our grandparents faded quickly. Now we have children of our own, and we're determined that they should never be alone, should never go out and must never do nothing. Despite all the opportunities for independence that our way of life should give them--with both parents working and huge increases in disposable income--the fact is that our children are part of the most closely watched generation in history.

The watching begins in primary school. The days are no more when knots of children wandered erratically to their schoolhouse or back home. They step out of sliding minivan doors in the morning and are quickly whisked away the moment the bell rings, driven in quick succession to gymnastics, soccer, karate or violin lessons.

And the lazy days of summer are over, too. Not only will few kids be playing out on the street when the weather warms up, but the ones who go away to summer camp will be in constant contact with their parents, sending daily emails with pictures and reporting on each of their activities.

As kids grow older and begin to take an interest in something more than kickball, it turns out that even romance isn't off-limits. Today's parents don't want to be the strict, distant types of yesteryear, handing down judgments that may cause moments of unpleasantness. They want to be "friends" who hear about--and show sympathy for--the travails of dating and "relationships." As social commentator Leonard Steinhorn boasts in a recent book on the baby boomers: "Candor and openness--not rigidity and distance--have become the norms in American families today."

The parental connection does not wither away after high-school graduation. Cell phones keep college students tethered to their parents--parents who might have been sent off to college, like my freshman roommate in 1967, with 12 stamped, preaddressed envelopes in which to insert a weekly letter home. Email and text-messages now allow for minute-by-minute updates. One recent study by a college revealed that its freshmen were in touch with their parents by cell phone as many as 15 times a day.

Parental hovering has not simply produced a large number of inane conversations--"I'm on my way to class, I'm walking into the building"--it has destroyed the private lives of children. Kids no longer have the privilege of making their own worlds and participating in a separate culture. This kind of childhood was celebrated not only by Robert Paul Smith but by Peter and Iona Opie in "Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" (1959). The Opies discovered that teasing games, hide-and-seek and tag, have been around at least since the time of Chaucer.

Another version of childhood as a separate realm is visible in Booth Tarkington's Penrod books, which were published in 1914 and 1916 and remained best sellers until midcentury. The American childhood that Tarkington's children experienced was beset by grown-ups, but they wanted to impose adult responsibilities on the young ones, not supervise their childhood adventures. Penrod's traumas came from haircuts, dancing lessons, school arithmetic and mixed-sex parties where he was expected to act like "a little gentleman." His parents--a stern father and a sentimental mother--knew that there were certain things he needed to be taught but generally let Penrod look after his own childhood.

So why can't parents today leave their children alone for five minutes? There are probably a number of reasons. Some no doubt worry that the coarse surrounding culture is a constant threat--and indeed it is. But it is much more likely to intrude on the computer or on television--two aspects of life often unmonitored by parents--than at a playground or summer camp. Another reason may be an exaggerated sense of our own importance in producing the persons our children are destined to become.
A recent Wall Street Journal story about the growing reluctance of affluent families to send their children to boarding schools illustrates the point. One couple, who chose not to send their daughter to a famous New England prep school, rationalized their decision like this: "We just want to spend a couple of more years imparting our values to our daughter."

Yes, parents impart values. But values come from other useful sources, too. Hovering parents undermine the influence not only of other institutions like schools and churches but of peers. Being picked for a sports team, facing the first day at school or at a job, learning to handle the ups and downs of courtship, enduring the apprenticeship of almost any career--these are not only signs that our children are becoming independent adults, but acts of initiation that take them out of the family embrace and into the wider world.

The seemingly obvious notion that kids need to be left alone sometimes if they are to grow up has been so lost that more than one American university has been forced to station security guards outside freshmen orientation sessions to keep anxious parents out. There are no reports, encouragingly, of freshmen on the other side trying to pull their parents in.