A six-year-old receiving a public-school education instructed a four-year-old that the goal of life is to stay close to grown-ups. She explained, “If we aren’t near a grown-up and we have a problem there’s nothing we can do, so you always have to stay near grown-ups.”
Out of the mouths of babes! One can intuit this feeling of helplessness rampant in our society, a society too skittish to make decisions, to make mistakes, to make children. Leave it to the unsophistication of a six-year-old to state it bluntly.
Safety before all else?
The mothers of six-year-olds well on their way to full indoctrination are more likely to state as a supposed advantage that their children don’t do the dangerous things that heathen offspring of yesteryear—including them—used to do. “Kids today are safer!” we are told. They can’t just wander around outside for hours unattended. That would not be safe.
The skittish first-grader was, of course, proven to have a point in her uncompromising philosophy of safetyism. When the four-year-old pedaled just out of sight and took a spill on some gravel, the older girl asked with a vexed tone, “What did I tell you about getting away from grown-ups?” The howls of the ambitious child laid low spoke for themselves. So, this is the way it is now.
It’s worth considering the potentially crippling long-term consequences of such an arrangement. When, if ever, will such coddled children feel they have graduated to the realm of decision-making adulthood. Those nascent muscles of problem-solving, atrophied from disuse, will not suddenly form late in development to provide independence. How does the stunted child ever hope to mature? Have their parents, ceding ever more ground to systems, bureaucracy, and experts that enable this infantilism become just as childish as their progeny?
Let us, dear reader, leave aside these distressing queries. For now, let’s consider something more mundane. There is the unpleasantness for the mothers and fathers tasked with plodding after kids atop playground slides and circling the cul-de-sac on bikes. It’s all really quite dull.
Reaching for an alternative
While the bigger questions should compel us to action, they are theoretical and grim. The experience of daily caring for young children, however, is ever-present and quite motivating. If mothers knew there were an alternative to hovering listlessly over toddlers trained to be unadventurous, would they consider it?
Many mothers and fathers find their way to those happier, more dangerous fields of independent children, but for most people, understanding the possibility is a requirement for action. If one is surrounded by fully institutionalized children programmed by hours of public television to distrust their instincts, one may honestly not know there is an alternative.
Whether these rantings on a humble blog will convince anyone is dubious, but we can cast our words out in into the technologic realms and hope the cries of many for a return to sanity will reach someone of good will.
Where does one find the alternative?
A window into the past
While we can’t visit bygone years in person, we can find snippets of daily life in film and books from the decades before our own. There is a tremendous challenge in realizing the composition of the water in which we swim. Only by casting our eyes at the fish in another pond, another era, can we see what we take as necessary which is actually voluntary.
Paying particular attention to what was expected of children and the distance between mother and children throughout the day gives one the impression that things used to be a bit different and this difference may have its advantages.
Exploring the literature of another decade need not be highbrow. We can begin with none other than Richard Scarry’s The Adventures of Lowly Worm. By no means Scarry’s finest or most beloved work, it is still a charming children’s book. The series of tales depicts a likeable worm living daily life with a family of cats. Our hero, young Lowly, and his foster-brother the cat Huckle, have many adventures. Most are adventures precisely because of the absence of adults.
And what happened when there were problems? If you recall, our six-year-old evangelist for safetyism warned against straying from adults for fear of problems and the child’s utter inability to solve them. Lowly encounters many problems, to be sure, and these are the essence of adventure. Reading the tales, there is a sense that Lowly has been solving his own problems for some time and he is getting quite good at it.
The advantage of being unsafe
Not to spoil the whole book to much, but one example will suffice to show the ingenuity of these animal-children’s genius. In one tale, Mother Cat takes the children into the city to go to a museum. While riding the subway, Lowly Worm and Sally are caught in the crowd and unable to exit with Mother Cat and Huckle. The subway moves on with them still aboard.
Presented with this scenario, many jaded post-moderns would assure you there is absolutely nothing these young unfortunates can do to help themselves and they will definitely get kidnapped. Not so in yesteryear! Lowly has the idea to get off at the next stop, and, because there is not a cell phone in sight, wait patiently.
Sure enough, Mother Cat and Huckle trundle through on the next subway, and the gang is reunited. Letting people solve their own problems is a beautiful thing.
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