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Essay
A Walk on the Safe Side
My nine year old son can navigate email and hard drives, but he has never gone into a public restroom by himself. He has eaten in a five star restaurant in Paris, but he isn’t allowed to go alone to skip rocks in the small lake at the end of our street. He can read at a high school level, but is still required to sit where I can see him when we go to a movie.
And although he still has a good seven or eight years before he is fully “cooked” and begins easing his way completely out of my protective parental clutches, I am beginning to worry. How will he learn to cross the street, avoid weird looking strangers, and count out his change after making a purchase if I am constantly hovering over his shoulder? In short, how can my child gracefully enter adulthood in a world where his freedom is so restricted?
I am not really sure when childhood became this cushioned and sanitized and proscribed. I am only 33 and I spent my childhood jumping out of dangerous haylofts, riding my pony bareback at breakneck speed, and walking alone the two miles from our small farm to the general store in order to buy a coke. But it wasn’t just my idyllic country childhood that afforded such freedom to kids. My husband, age 31, grew up in a suburban subdivision straight out of ‘The Brady Bunch.’ He remembers riding his bike all over the neighborhood with a pack of other children, building rickety wooden ramps upon which to perform Evil Knives-style stunts, and being dropped off at the mall and arcade for hours at a time with no grown-up supervision.
Already my son is chafing at his constant supervision. Even though most of his friends live in the same world he does – one of being driven to
organized playmates or lessons rather than simply meeting at the ball field to play – something deep within him seems to be aware that this isn’t how it should be. He longs to be alone sometimes, just as we all do, to put his hands in his pockets and walk a few miles and just think. But I can’t let him do that…or can I?
Lately I have begun to wonder how much of our habit today of placing our children inside a plastic bubble is really necessary and how much is hysteria. Child abduction by a stranger -- every parent’s most primal fear -- is actually a statistical anomaly. It just hardly ever happens. We hear about it a lot now – on ‘America’s Most Wanted’ and in the newspaper, but that doesn’t mean it is more likely than it was a generation ago.
Of course, to the parent of a child who disappears, statistics mean nothing. And it is this thought that drives us to hover over our offspring in the way that we do. But I believe we should be giving some thought to what type of adults this new millennial childhood is going to produce.
As a culture, we have always vilified the archetypal “mama’s boy,” the child who was never allowed any activities outside his parents’ watchful eye and who was coddled and protected from all conceivable risk. This type of childhood, we have always believed, produced individuals who were stunted in their ability to make bold moves or take leadership roles -- or even function independently. Yet, in our well-intentioned desire to make sure that our kids aren’t run over, kidnapped, or exposed to the wrong influences, we have become an entire nation of these hovering, over-involved
parents.
Today my child asked if he could walk to a friend’s house…by himself. I gritted my teeth and told him that he could. His surprise at my response made him so happy that he let loose a war whoop of joy. He smiled broadly and literally skipped out the front door, happy to be on his short –but-trailblazing journey. I wondered again to myself what sort of childhood my kid is getting when a walk up the street seemed that exciting to him. Then I pressed my face to the window and craned my neck to watch him as long as I could before he crested a small hill and passed out of my sight.
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