Kids (and their Parents) These Days

I got some real satisfaction out of Michael Chabon's essay on "The Wilderness of Childhood" in the New York Review of Books. Tim Burke brought the essay to my attention, and as he says, Chabon's basic claims are spot-on. Growing up for Chabon was a constant encounter with mystery and adventure, both of which took place in spaces that were unsupervised, unregulated, unscheduled: the woods beyond his house in Maryland, vacant lots and playgrounds, a whole cartography derived from "the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children": that's where the mean dogs are, that's where the kid with the air rifle lives, that's where the grandma who always has Popsicles in her garage freezer is to be found. In the context of all that, you explore. Being a writer, Chabon connects this to our literary imagination, but he fears the connection has been lost, replaced in the experience of our children with a safety-obsessed, "all-encompassing escort service." "We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between." He wonders, rightly, what will happen to the kind of stories today's kids will learn to tell themselves and others, when their parents--and Chabon implicates himself here--won't let them go out to play.

Tim's reflections on Chabon's piece strike a chord with me, a chord that I've written about a few times in the past. All by myself, I walked and rode my bike and rode the bus to school, to the bowling alley, to the grocery store, to the video game arcade, to the park, to the swimming pool, downtown to the comic book shop, or just out into the open country (the home I mostly grew up in was right on the edge of the suburban development of Spokane Valley; south of us were homes and construction sites, places for bike riding in the summer and sledding in the winter, while north of us were just open fields and country roads surrounded by drainage ponds and stands of pine trees, all there for the climbing and getting lost in). Like Tim--another member of "Generation X" like myself, a man whose childhood was shaped by the 1970s--I would be gone for hours some days, and my parents trusted that I could find my way to where I was going and back again. (And if I couldn't, there was the quarter I carried for calling from a pay phone.) Tim agrees that Chabon's diagnoses--a fixation on consumer safety, paranoia about lawsuits and child-snatching--but he also thinks Chabon is a little too mournful for the past. He writes, "[Chabon’s] missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences." He goes from there to make a defense of parents and children not having their own separate worlds, but sharing adventures together, and of the particular kind of media and story-telling that allows for a cross-over between adults and children.

I want to be more persuaded by Tim's response to Chabon than I am. My wife and I are very different sort of parents than our folks were (or, at least, than my folks were; Melissa's parents, interestingly, were much more into their children's lives and activities than mine). We interact with them, watch movies with them, involve ourselves with their learning and playtime a great deal; and our habits in the way we treat each other around our children and the way we treat our children themselves, don't seem to be terribly unique amongst our generation cohort of parents, but rather kind of typical. (I'm thinking in particular here of this fine old essay by Damon Linker, "Fatherhood, 2002".) Granted, there is a great deal of self-selection involved here--for reasons having to do with everything from political tastes to the amount of available free time to where we chose to buy our home, most of the parents we end up associating with have a socio-economic background at least vaguely similar to ours; we simply aren't close friends with any either dual-career couples with their kids in daycare and both of them working 80 hours a week as investment managers for high-powered banks. Still, I don't think I'm wrong to believe that our habits are not uncommon, especially amongst middle-class members of the American bourgeosie like ourselves. So I should feel comforted with Tim's suggestion that such behavior on our part is opening up new vistas for our children, rather than seeing it all as just an act of compensation, right?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. There are too many other factors which Tim either ignores or chooses not to address in concluding that Chabon, in his mourning for his own unpatrolled childhood experiences, may have been missing the point. Probably the primary one is contained in the passage of Chabon's essay which Melissa focused on as the real killer: after teaching his younger daughter how to ride a bike, and taking her on an evening ride around their neighborhood, during which they don't see a single other child, he plaintively asks, even if he does send his children out to play, "will there be anyone to play with?"

Imagination--even the imagination of a child on his or her own, navigating their fragmentary, mental map of secure locations and danger zones and unmarked paths in their own heads--is a collective effort; that "lore" Chabon mentions came from and through someone, many someones. Brothers and sisters, cousins and schoolmates, friends and enemies. In the midst of the wealth and changing mores of post-WWII America, with its suburbs and mobility and slowly but surely (especially by the late 1970s and through the 80s) strangled efforts to contain and preserve patterns of assocition and stability in the midst of an economy that spread out wealth ever more arbitrarily (think white flight and globalization here), moving around and actualizing yourself and seeking better meritocratic opportunities and taking care of number one all contributed to the shrinking of family size, the concentration of resources and attention, a thousand little changes (the relative disappearance of front porches and sidewalks, the growth industry in micromanaged and carefully constructed--and therefore expensive--play areas like Chuck E. Cheese and more) that made it hard and seemingly unwise to let kids go at it alone.

At some moment--or at a hundred distinct moments--along this continuum, you hit a tipping point: so many families consist of dual earners with no one at home during the day, and so many kids live far away from grandparents or other trusted figures, that you just have to hire someone to watch them (if you're rich) or put them in daycare (which is another growth industry all its own). And if you do that, you might as well get them into the best situations possible: not just any kind of substitute authority to keep an eye on them during the day, but organizations and teachers that will give them sports and preparatory school work and musical lessons and youth leagues and awards for participation and more. All of which is, of course, depending your situation, eminently defensible. And I'm not even touching on the real, often difficult, issues and requirements posed by children with special needs, or with idiosyncratic talents, or just whose home life is anything other the classic two-parents-in-the-home model. But generally, by and large, all of these "helps," all of these ways we assist in our childrens' navigation of their worlds, whether natural or suburban or urban, just build. And then, once you see all the other kids getting ready for school in the middle of summer, you need to do it for your kids; once you see that there's no one at the park except the homeless and the meth addicts, you refuse to let them head out on their own. In which case, they get bored, and you have to find more projects of them inside the walls of the home, or you need to chauffeur them to even more places. Etc., etc., etc., wash, rinse, repeat.

The possibilities of parents and children together--learning together, exploring together, telling stories together--are admirable to be sure; Tim is right to highlight them, and I completely defend them. But I still strong suspect that Chabon has the better argument, if only implicitly: the sort of learning and exploration that we experience together is wonderful, but it tries to do more than it should, and the reason why it tries is because I am taught--by the hysterical warnings of predators on the talk shows, by the competitive mindset of the super-prepared kids in my daughters' classrooms, by the patterns laid down by choices that shape so much of our living environment--that it just isn't worth the risk to allow kids these days to make their own adventuresome way on their own.

To an extent, then, this is a call loosen up, to slack off, and to praise those forms of work and play--and, therefore, also praise the somewhat limited sorts of lifestyles and economies which such forms can allow, as well as sorts of polities and infrastructures which enable more people to purposefully choose such forms, with all their limits--which better leave kids alone: not entirely alone, of course, but alone more often than they are today. I don't mean such a call to be all a mournful "kids these days!" complaint. There are good things which have come along with the responses of parents to the changes of the past thirty years, and I don't want to dismiss or downplay those good things: we aren't 1970s parents, we're 21st-century ones, and happy for it. But if our way of patrolling our children's lives and environments were slightly more slanted towards the more open-ended, more adventuresome options that were already disappearing for us suburbanites when we were kids way back when, our kids, I think, would be even more happy for it as well.

[Update: Laura McKenna has a fine contribution to this discussion on her blog here. In talking about her own children, she adds an excellent and important distinction: "time freedom" along with "space freedom." We often don't give our children unstructured time, because we are bothered by what destructive thing they may come up with, and because they are bothered at the prospect of being bored. But as Laura rightly says, "being bored is essential to the creative process." Freedom in terms of the space to explore and map out on their own--which is really the heart of Chabon's original complaint--is harder for her, and I sympathize, as I say in a comment. Anyway, check out what she has to say.]