Now that I have relaxed a bit from the end-of-the-school-year crush, I am spending more time with my own children and it is a very good thing. They are all teenagers now.
Yes, I am crazy.
I am also squeezing in some time to ride my bike as much as I can in the mornings, which has been pretty difficult since the weather has been so very rainy for the past two months. This morning, as I dodged numerous places on the bike path that were flooded by the recent rainfalls, and marveled over all of the downed tree limbs from the three tornadoes that swept through the area last week, I was listening, as I often do, to a Mary Chapin Carpenter song from one of her best albums, Stones in the Road.
The first verse goes like this:
When we were young, we pledged allegiance
every morning of our lives
The classroom rang with children's voices
under teacher's watchful eye
We learned about the world around us
at our desks and at dinnertime
Reminded of the starving children,
we cleaned our plates with guilty minds
And the stones in the road shone like diamonds in the dust
And then a voice called to us to make our way back home....
And here I was, riding my bike and watching out for stones in the road, since unlike my younger self, if I was to get thrown from my bike today, there would probably be several broken bones. I am only a few years younger than Mary Chapin Carpenter, but I imagine a lot of you remember being outside to play all the summer long and even into the autumn, if you grew up in a relatively warm place like I did.
We would be gone for hours in the morning, playing with the neighborhood kids. We'd come home at lunch, and then back out we would go until suppertime. Those times together with our friends from the neighborhood taught us lots of things. We learned how to organize games by ourselves-- football, baseball, war, HORSE, whatever-- and we called the rules and their infractions ourselves, kind of like in that movie The Sandlot. If anyone disputed a call, we worked it out, or they stopped playing until they could cool off. We sang goofy, disgusting songs about bodily functions. But we were in the ultimate kid-centered world. If someone really got mad at someone, the LAST THING in the WORLD we would have done would be to go to our parents, for a variety of reasons:
1) If you woke my dad up from a nap, or my mother from her housework, for any reason than an approaching wildfire, you would regret it.
2) Adults had other things to do than to listen to our foolishness. And we didn't want to look like babies.
3) We probably wouldn't like the decision that an adult would hand down.
4) If we didn't act independent, we would lose our right to play independently.
There were limits, and we mostly respected them. We couldn't cross 21st Street on our bikes-- it was too dangerous. If we left hearing distance, we would tell our parents the direction we were going. But once we were there, there was no recourse to adults as supervisors. We played outside until we heard that voice calling us home-- and usually at about dark, there would be a chorus of mothers' voices calling various kids home. We went. or that was the end of our freedom.
Yes, we were relatively free. And don't think that there weren't bad things that happened back then. I was almost kidnapped when I was five. There was a group of older boys in the neighborhood who bullied or behaved inappropriately toward us younger kids. There was an old couple at the end of the street who were grumpy and had a grandson who was a peeping tom. But still we had long hours to fill on our own, and we did it. Besides, if we had stayed inside and watched TV, we would have been put to work cleaning or cooking or doing some other task.
None of my students have had experiences like this. When I first showed the Sandlot to a class one time to help them understand the childhood experiences of the later baby boomers, they couldn't understand kids being left alone for untold hours like that. Instead, for most of our kids today, every single minute is filled with some activity supervised by adults. Or, they spend untold hours glued in their rooms which come equipped with cell phones, computers, game consoles, and satellite TV. Ironically, this is the one place where they SHOULD probably be supervised, but they aren't. Earlier this year, a mom in Texas was arrested for letting her kids play in the cul-de-sac on their scooters as she watched them from a lawn chair in her yard. (Now personally, I would not let my kids on a motorized scooter at that age, but-- arrested? in TEXAS? I mean, that's just crazy.)
The gift of this childhood independence was teaching us to be self-reliant. We also understood that our parents had other things to do than to entertain us, and respected the fact that they worked hard throughout the day, month, and year to provide for us. Our parents did not derive their identities from us, but instead we derived our identities from them.
I was once screamed at by a woman who drove by my house for allowing two of my kids to climb a tree in out front yard. She told me what a horrible mother I was for allowing them to do something so dangerous. My kids had worked out their climbing patterns all morning long and then asked me to come watch them-- and they were so proud of their achievement, which, by the way, no adult had to micromanage. Ironically no more than five minutes later the gym teacher down the street stopped and PRAISED me for encouraging my kids to climb trees.
I myself climbed trees for a large part of my life (later on for necessity rather than for fun, per se, and also to show that I could still do it). We built tree forts. We went to the skating rink and stayed for five hours. My grades were MY GRADES-- although I might get punished if they were low, my parents would never EVER have gone to school to argue that I should not be held accountable for missing work, or some such other gambit.
I wish more parents would allow their kids to develop their personal senses of competency and self-reliance and not rush to the rescue any time something doesn't go their kids' way (and as a teacher, I second myself wholeheartedly for other reasons which are not just entirely selfish). We learned to be responsible. We learned to take care of ourselves. We thought twice before doing something that would undercut our ability to claim that freedom we enjoyed.
It was a great blessing. And I bet I and many of my friends my age would agree that we are grateful for the trust our parents placed in us.
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