Fraters Libertas

Carefree Days of Youth?

Beth Hawkins has a timely article in last week's City Pages on the overprotective nature of many of today's parents. She believes that part of the explanation is that it's not really all about the children:

But we also fear their independence. We're up there in the climber because we can't afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children's emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way--because it's central to our well-being. We're scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or--the biggest golem on the list--they just plain won't like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don't like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.

She also talks about what has become a cult of worrying:

Worrying is a secular form of prayer, according to David Anderegg, a psychology professor at Bennington College in Vermont, and the author of Worried All the Time: Rediscovering the Joy in Parenthood in an Age of Anxiety. Earlier generations coped with the thought that they couldn't control what happened to their offspring all the time by reasoning that once the kid walked out the door, God took over. But accidents are no longer seen as divine intervention, and the parents Anderegg now sees in his private practice often equate worrying with being devoted.

And God forbid if you let the kids out of your sight for even a moment:

My generation, meanwhile, won't drop Jr. off at the neighbor's for an afternoon. No, much like the squad of grownups policing Adventure Peak, parents these days stay for the duration of the kids' "play dates." If they permit them to occur at all, that is. This business of treating kids like hothouse flowers seems to go hand in glove with the idea that we should endeavor to keep them away from the rest of the community.

I've written before of my distaste for the oxymoronic concept of "structured fun." Kids need to be given the chance to play on their own. It encourages creativity, imagination, cooperation, and teaches valuable lessons about the need for compromise, the power of persuasion, and the value of shared understanding.

When kids get together with other kids to play games, they need to agree to a set off rules, assign roles, and resolve disputes. I think that half the fun of the games that we played as kids was coming up with the rules and then arguing about them. When adults hover around making rules and adjudicating the conflicts, the kids lose out.

When I was growing up in a suburb of Minneapolis in the '70s and '80s, stories from my Dad's childhood on a farm outside of Ladysmith, Wisconsin in the '30s and '40s seemed straight out of a different universe. But despite the many differences, I wonder if my childhood experience has more in common with my Dad's than with a kid growing up in the same Minneapolis suburb today. It really is a different world.

I don't agree with everything in Beth Hawkins' piece, but she raises some excellent points that merit further discussion and I encourage you to read the whole thing. And for the parents out there, I encourage you to let your kids be kids. Let them play.