Doesn’t it sometimes seem like kids today are growing up in a different world than the one we had? I’m not just talking about cell phones and the Internet and on-demand television. I’m also talking about the culture. What kids and parents got away with thirty years ago just wouldn’t fly today.
When we got on my parents’ nerves, they’d just tell us to go to Country Sunshine, and we’d get on our bikes and go. It sounds like a nice place, doesn’t it? That’s marketing, people. We lived on a dead-end street, and Country Sunshine was what my dad called the stump where the road ran out.
We also had quite a bit more unsupervised time activities such as:
- Playing on the roof;
- Falling out of trees; and
- Setting assorted things on fire.
It wasn’t that my mom was inattentive. She was, as mothers go, fairly awesome. Not only did she have five kids in five years, she also baked our bread, sewed our dresses, and schlepped us to swim team every morning and music lessons in the afternoons.
If that were my schedule, you can be darned sure my kids would run wild occasionally so that I could enjoy time in the sweet embrace of Valium. My mom, on the other hand, used it to do laundry.
These days, I do not tell my kids to get on their bikes and ride somewhere. For starters, I haven’t gotten around to teaching them to ride yet. And also, I’m way too paranoid.
Not too long ago, Lucy asked me if she and Alice could go for a walk by themselves.
“No,” I said. “You can go outside and blow bubbles on the porch, though.”
Five minutes later, when I went to check on them, they were gone. I did notice a chalk line leading away from the porch. I followed the line down the 36 steps to the street. The line turned left, toward school, and continued in a somewhat wiggly fashion all the way to the house of some friends on the next block.
At the end of the line was Lucy, crouched low so she could add on to her Hansel and Gretel trail. If I could have lifted the line of chalk off the street and tied it around her neck like a leash, I would’ve. It’s part freaking out about her getting stolen, hit by a car or eaten by a bear, and part a case of “what will the neighbors think?” We live in a world where you’re supposed to watch over your kids 24/7 and if you don’t, you’re a bad parent. 
This means that while our kids are more likely to make it to adulthood intact, they are probably losing out on some of the wildest and most memorable moments of childhood.
I relish my own memory of catching my little brother as he felt out of a maple tree by the lake, for example. I once dissected a dead squirrel with a butter knife and fork, and I brought its guts home in a bucket. I saved a sister from drowning—not once, but twice! Even my mom has a story about going on top of her roof with and umbrella and jumping off, to see if she could do what Mary Poppins did.
So what will my kids have?
For the longest time, I thought they’d grow up without these harrowing tales. After last Sunday, though, I’m not so sure.
The setting for their first real misadventure, appropriately enough, was the yard at my parents’ house. Lucy, Alice and three of their cousins were playing on the small lawn where Adam and I got married.
After my grandmother died four years ago, we built a swing set in her memory. So it’s hallowed ground in more ways than one, and the kids really like hanging out there.
Lucy is getting old enough now that you can tell her to watch over her younger cousins. This is what she was doing when her 3-year-old cousin came down to the house in tears.
“What happened?” her mother, my sister, asked. Apparently, the cousin had wet her pants.
Moments later, another cousin came down to the house in tears.
“What happened?” her mother, my other sister, asked. Apparently, this cousin had also wet her pants. But since this girl is 5, it was quite the unexpected development.
Unexpected, perhaps. But not completely random.
As it happens, Lucy had decided to teach a course called Outdoor Urination Techniques for Little Girls. Two cousins passed. Two failed, which means Lucy is probably ineligible for No Child’s Wet Behind funding.
One of my sisters—the one with a teenager in the house—thought it was hilarious that the kids had consecrated the wedding/memorial lawn in such fashion. The other was less amused. But she’s the one I saved twice from drowning, so by my reckoning, Lucy can give one more inappropriate lesson before we’re even.
Just to be safe, though, I am hiding the umbrellas, and I’m making them all use the bathroom before they go outside.
--Martha Brockenbrough
