Childhood In America Used To Be Fun
At The Cut, Danielle Henderson published an excerpt of her memoir, The Ugly Cry. An excerpt of her excerpt, showing what kids today have lost -- both from the pandemic mandates to isolate indoors and from how childhood increasingly has become a form of protective jail:
The hardest thing to convey to the children in my life about my childhood is the concept of unadulterated freedom. As people who have been scheduled and monitored down to the second for most of their lives, they truly cannot conceive of life outside of the panopticon of their own experience. When I was a child, a successful day was one where I saw my mother for two hours total, split evenly before and after she went to work.Helicopter parents were born in the 1980s, a direct response to their personal experience of being roundly ignored by their own parents. Children were not to be seen nor heard, and we were definitely not supposed to complain about any injuries sustained during the 15 hours a day we roamed the streets. We saved popsicle sticks from the Fat Frogs, Rocket Pops, and assorted ice cream purchased at the Good Humor truck to fix our sprained and broken digits, taping them to our misshapen fingers and toes with contraband masking tape snuck out of a kitchen drawer while someone's mom watched Days of Our Lives in the living room. Mosquito bites were relieved by using our fingernail to press a cross shape into the swelling skin, bee stings were only an emergency if they caused our throats to swell so much we could no longer call out "Marco!" or "Polo!," and the only antiseptic liquid used on cuts and scrapes was our own spit.
The 1980s were a decade of neglect, and I haven't felt freedom or terror like it since.
...Without arranging to meet, all the kids in a two-mile radius managed to wander out to the yards and streets of our neighborhoods around the same time each morning like Raisin Bran-fueled zombies. Sometimes you would hear a kid outside playing before anyone else, and that would be the clarion call to the rest of us to hustle. A cacophony of banging screen doors signaled our mass exodus. We were wild. We were free.
Mostly, we were heathens who urinated outside for months.
...In the past year, as we received the indoor-kid dream directive to stay inside, I've never felt lonelier, less focused, or more anxious. I daydreamed about feeling soft grass on my bare feet, walking down the street with another person, or, if I really let myself go, cracking open one more bottle of wine on someone's porch while the moon clocked in for its regular shift. I've started to look back on those childhood summers with more fondness, making promises to my future self that I would recapture those fleeting moments of freedom whenever possible. I haven't examined it closely, but this is surely part of the reason I recently purchased my first home, a farm, and immediately set up an archery range on the back acre of my property. I want enough space to roam with my friends. I want the night sky. I want to get poison ivy, I want to get sprayed by a skunk, I want a thin film of dirt winding toward the shower drain at the end of a long day of nothing.
I've watched enough true-crime documentaries to want to keep my goddaughter heavily chaperoned until she turns 50, but after the year we've all had, I hope there's some room for kids to take a cue from the 1980s and explore this summer. To break free of their chalk circles and find a place in the yard to squat, just out of view, and mark their return to the world.
In the 60's I would leave in the morning in summer, come home for lunch and then at dinnertime. We climbed trees, played baseball, had rubber-band gun fights, rode bikes all day. Parents barely asked where we had gone. At 12 I would take the bus to the YMCA to shoot pool by myself or swim or to the mall to bowl with my buddy. Went with friends to the beach. That kind of freedom teaches self-reliance. Many places are still safe enough to do that.
When people become better off, they tend to become more risk-averse. We also are exposed to daily reports of crime which engenders fear even in places that are very safe.
cc at July 16, 2021 7:43 AM
I was a kid in the late-80s/early-90s in a rural area. We all roamed around between each other's houses. My parents did have strict boundaries of "go no farther than." My sister and a friend once roamed "farther than" and got lost and didn't come home with the rest of us around dinnertime.
I remember my mom being mostly annoyed that all the adults who had "better things to do than go on a wild goose chase" had to go find them. Sister and friend got grounded, a HUGE punishment in the days before electronic entertainment in the summer.
sofar at July 16, 2021 8:23 AM
Trouble is, nowadays, even in very safe neighborhoods, if you throw them outdoors, chances are most of the neighbors' kids will either be indoors, playing on their phones, or playing on their phones OUTdoors! So the kids without phones will just sneak off and find kids WITH phones. Which means no creative play or real exercise.
So what do parents do? They force kids into organized sports, for exercise (which is often not so fun for the kids, since they didn't choose it); they push them into clubs and music lessons, to keep them away from screens, they neglect to teach them how to do house chores, since the parents got too used to plonking kids in front of the TV in their toddler years while THEY did the chores, and they arrange playdates because too many other kids are similarly scheduled and cannot be counted on to be available at any given time.
But, one undeniable benefit of over-scheduling kids is that when their unsupervised peers get in trouble with the law, the supervised kids will have sound alibis and thus be less likely to hurt their chances of getting into good schools. (Hard to blame parents for worrying about that. Also, business owners are no doubt grateful for any parental supervision that exists - as well as SUV drivers, who can't see short kids crossing the street.)
And, from JoJo in 2015:
"I'm not defending helicopter parents, but I grew up in the days of 'go out and play,' and 'solve your own problems,' and it wasn't the paradise the author remembers. Telling kids to go out and play is fine if you lived in a neighborhood full of kids, not so much when you live in a brand new subdivision surrounded by cornfields with literally no one within three years of your age. I would have loved to have had playdates.
"As for conflict resolution, in real terms it was the smaller, younger kids being bullied unmercifully by the meaner, older, bigger kids with no help at all from any adults.
"What's wrong with wanting to have some control over who your kids socialize with? Kids don't have good judgment. I've seen decent kids sucked into drugs and delinquency because they fell into a bad crowd. I suspect a lot of the helicopter parents saw the same thing and the push to keep the kids occupied and control who they associate with is a reaction to that.
"That being said, we as a society have gone way to far in the other direction."
(end)
Lenona at July 16, 2021 10:01 AM
When I was a kid I used to sleep inside an abandoned factory during the afternoons. I got a spectacular, unobstructed view of the ocean.
Sixclaws at July 16, 2021 10:02 AM
My kids, born in the 80's, were stunned to hear about my and my siblings' freedom in the mid-60's. For instance, at age 10 my 8 year-old sister and I would put a bridle and exercise pad on a couple of our horses and take off into the surrounding hills full of rattlesnakes and needle-sharp yucca spines. I am sure that our Mom felt that the horses had sense, even if we didn't.
Jay R at July 16, 2021 5:57 PM
I dunno, my kids spent their day yesterday being knocked over by waves. Yes I was there because the little one can't swim well, but it was pretty fun.
I certainly know paranoid people who won't let their kid walk around the block but for the most part kids are still allowed out and about.
I agree with the phones being a problem.
NicoleK at July 17, 2021 6:59 AM
There is a movement pushing back on the trend in "helicopter" parenting.
It's called "free range kids." Lenore Skenazy is one of its principle
proponents; see her site at www.freerangekids.com.
Anon Y. Mouse at July 21, 2021 10:31 PM
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