New York Times, 1/8/05
DANNY
BERNSTEIN and Robin Winter don't know
each other. They both live in pricey
Westchester suburbs (he's in
Scarsdale, she's in Chappaqua), but
their concerns aren't necessarily
similar.
He is passionate about youth sports
and has just started a company,
Backyard Sports, that's dedicated to
making the games kids play just fun
for kids, rather than an achievement
arms race for parents. She would just
like to make it easier for her seventh
grader to ride his bicycle to school,
something almost no suburban child
gets to do anymore. But she can't seem
to get anyone in a position of
influence in her town interested in
even trying to tap a new government
program that provides money to make it
safer for children to go to school on
their own.
We'll pass over the slightly
incongruous premise in both cases.
Kids need parents to organize sports
events in a way that will let kids be
kids? And it takes a government
program for kids to be able to safely
ride bicycles or walk to school on
their own? (The answers are maybe and
probably.)
But both Mr. Bernstein and Ms.
Winter, in their own ways, are on to
one of the great mysteries of suburban
life in America. How did we get to the
point where few kids ever get to play
with friends outside of a play date,
to walk to a neighbor's house without
parental escort or to have free,
unsupervised time in which they're not
tethered to a television set, computer
or Xbox? How is it that Mr.
Bernstein's friends in their 40's go
out to play soccer every Saturday but
their children wouldn't know how to
organize a game on their own without
parents around?
How come long, long ago I got to
play football in the street every day
after school with Sammy Brett and
Howie Kavaler and the rest of the
neighborhood kids on Long Island, or
to ride my bike as far out along the
service road of the Long Island
Expressway as I cared to, but children
now live in permanent lockdown, their
every moment planned, organized,
monitored and measured? How did this
happen?
One person who thinks he knows is
Steven Mintz, a history professor at
the University of Houston and the
author of "Huck's Raft: A History of
American Childhood," who has watched
as a new model of childhood - one of a
long succession of new models, it must
be added - has taken hold over the
past three decades or so.
He starts with three big changes.
First is an explosion in parental
anxiety over child abductions, sexual
abuse and crime, a panic almost
entirely due to saturation news media
coverage and not, he says, to any
glaring increase in whatever dangers
lurk beyond your crabgrass. Once, the
child abduction in California was a
local story in California. Now, it's
constant fodder for national cable
news stations.
Second is the parental panic over
the transmission of class status, in
which grades, achievement and, of
course, getting into the right college
(never too early to start worrying!)
are seen as part of a Darwinian
struggle for economic success and
social esteem. So Kumon math, si;
foraging for frogs, no.
Third is guilt. Parents, often two
parents, are working so hard and such
long hours that they figure they owe
their kids a designer childhood every
bit as up-to-date as that plasma TV in
the living room. And since their model
of life is being busy all the time, no
sense having the kids just hanging out
doing nothing.
Worry, competition, guilt - what a
combination. "We're all Jewish mothers
now, but my mother was never as
invested in the way I am with my
kids," Dr. Mintz said.
You can go on from there. There's
technology, which has made being alone
in your room the most interesting
place in the universe, just as long as
the computer is on. There's the living
large syndrome, in which ever bigger
houses mean less proximity to
neighbors. And with smaller families,
chances are there aren't many kids
down the road anyway. Throw in, for
good measure, fear of being sued over
almost anything.
As Dr. Mintz notes in his book, our
notion of childhood changes all the
time, and often it's been a pretty
grim one - in the Puritan era,
children as imperfect adults in need
of moral uplift; or for much of the
19th century, children as fodder for
sweatshops and mines.
That said, who could have imagined
that today's suburbs, with children
their prime reason for being, would
end up excising the one thing kids
always had before: a sense of freedom,
room to explore, time to wander around
to see what you could find? Who could
have imagined today's fortresslike
homes and grand green lawns as quiet
as an empty church?
This can't really be what we had in
mind. Which brings us back to Mr.
Bernstein and Ms. Winter, who in their
small ways seem to be looking for ways
to tip things back a bit, in getting
parents to back off from their kids'
games, in finding a way to give
children the freedom to be children.
Maybe good ideas, maybe bad ones. But
surely there's a way out of this. If
you have thoughts, please pass them
along.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
