January 17, 2006--How to Take the Fun Out of Fun

At the risk of being redundant, I wish once more to turn to the subject of Parenting, contemporary style. And how some versions of it take over the lives of children and, in a burst of vicarious excess, manage to take the fun out of fun and thereby replace the fun with passivity and dependence.

I’m poaching my title from a recent column in the NY Times by Peter Applebome, “How We Took the Child Out of Childhood.” It appeared in the NY Metro Section and thus I suspect you may not have seen it. And since I somehow can’t seem to link to it below I’m afraid you will not be able to read it that way either. So let me begin by attempting to summarize his argument:

At its essence he poses the following question—“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?"

He then gets a little nostalgic, mooning about how he and Howie Kavaler and Sammy Brett used to play football in the street and ride on their bikes along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. OK, you will say, that’s when kids lived in city neighborhoods; but it’s different now with everyone living in the suburbs.

Well, not everyone lives in the suburbs where it is in truth not so easy to spill out onto the street (first of all there are no streets in the suburbs, just roads and lanes). But much more than not being able to round up a neighborhood gang of kids to hang out or play with is what he (and I) are talking about. We’re talking about a new paradigm of childhood, actually of parenting.

Caused, first, by an explosion of parental anxiety over child abductions, sexual abuse, and crime. (Thank you local TV news for this—this is your main fare even though rates for these kinds of crimes have plummeted in recent decades.) Second is the parental panic over the transmission to their children of their own class and status. Thus the obsession with getting toddlers into the right play schools and résumé building that begins shortly thereafter so as to make sure Junior gets into an Ivy leagues college. Third is parental guilt—what with both parents working and thus out of the house so much they figure they owe their kids, in Applebome’s words, “a designer childhood” every bit as cutting edge as their flat screen TVs.

For these and other reasons parents who have those concerns have moved in so close to their children that they wind up managing all of their realities. And with wireless phones with “family plans” that encourage unlimited, no-cost talk it is not unusual for parents and their children to be back and forth to other this way literally dozens of times a day.

Ironically, parenting of this sort that overtly posits the importance of autonomy, creativity, freedom, self-motivation, even entrepreneurship and leadership skills for their children, ironically winds up engendering their very opposite—children who feel the need for their parents to plan all their activities, make or be involved in all their decisions, monitor and supervise all their activities, experience life joined at the hip, and ultimately robbing them of the very capacities they say they want for their offspring.

It is therefore good to know, as Applebome reports, that there is a backlash against this kind of hyper-suffocating parenting—a movement to back off and let the kids plan and manage important aspects of their lives, especially those that enable them to be truly creative, improvisational, innocent, exploratory, and ultimately to be the kind of strong, responsible, and independent young people their parents claim they hope they will become.

So let’s join this Backing-Off Movement and let the kids have their childhoods back and even some good old-fashioned fun.