Road hockey, lemonade stands, and the art of being a kid

Have we lost it? In the age of video games, organized children's sports, and gated communities, I'd argue that if we haven't yet reached that point, we're well on our way. I'm convinced that it's been a pretty drawn out process; looking back to my early days, although I had my fair share of mischevious fun as a tyke, I still feel like I was pretty cooped up based on what I've heard first hand from my parents (my dad riding his bike a kilometre to the beach - barefoot and shirtless - as an 8 year old), read in books (think Tom Sawyer), and seen in movies (not only did those midgets in the Sandlot spend their day hanging out in a creepy abandoned lot, they had a sweet treehouse to boot!) I recall a recent conversation on this topic with my mom, in which she expressed a certain amount of regret for being what she called "overprotective". The 80's, she explained, were a decade where it was the vogue thing in parenting to tighten the noose, and in this regard she admittedly rode the wave. Despite growing up in what was the relatively rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Downtown Kitchener, however, I feel like they gave me chances to scrape my knees, and certainly didn't bar me from countless games of urban hide-and-seek. This considered, I feel like I experienced more freedom than your average city-bred 6 year old in 2008.

Occasionally, I see kids out-and-about doing things sufficiently independent (or mischievous) enough to constitute an "art of childhood", at least in my mind. Case in point: I was inspired to blab on about this when I came across a couple kids selling lemonade on the side of Scottsdale Dr. a couple of hours ago. Now, you've gotta understand how awesome I thought this was - it's something I always wanted to do as an older kid in Haliburton, but was somehow convinced by my parents that revenues may not cover costs on a side street in a town of 1400. I remember at the time thinking this was bollocks - cmon, even a stupid 10 year old on an allowance of 2 bucks a week isn't intimidated by the overhead of running a juice stand! Heck, considering how cool I thought these kids were, I don't know why I didn't buy a cup, if only to encourage them to keep on living life on the wild side. I guess a few fleeting thoughts went through my mind, i.e. I had cheaper juice at home, and there's always a possibility that two innocent 9 year olds dissolved cyanide into the stuff they're trying to sell. Both indicative, ostensibly, that I'm somewhat enslaved to societal notions that I outwardly claim to oppose.

The occasional encouragement aside, however, I really believe kids are being deprived of the freedom to become the independent-minded, ambitious, creative risk-takers that our society needs if it's not to fall into perennial mass paranoia. I'm not exactly sure what's to blame: over-protectiveness, for one thing, surely must count for something. Although I'm usually a big supporter of the media's role in the world, I think they've played a negative part in convincing parents that there's a modern-day Jack the Ripper on the loose, only this time he's a pedophile and instead of living in England, he resides right around the corner. Civil authorities certainly haven't helped either; although it might be insensitive to question the need for "Amber Alerts", I'm sure they've influenced parent's reluctance to put that little velcro wrist-leash into storage (anyone else remember those?). On an even broader level, I think the way that we view family as an institution also increases the likelihood of over-protective tendencies. Although children have obviously been the most important part of their parent's lives since time immemorial, I feel like we're increasingly falling into the trap of viewing them as possessions, and subsequently focusing on the pleasure that we, as adults, can derive from loving them, instead of caring for their needs simply for their own sake. This perhaps causes the 21st century parent to worry about the short term dangers of letting their kids experience adventure and independence, without taking the long term consequences of over-protectiveness into account. That's a pretty bold statement, I know, especially coming from a guy who's never even come close to having a kid (yes, I really am that much of a square). But I feel there's a certain degree of truth in it.

Of course, as a good liberal arts student, I also have to place a certain amount of blame on suburbia. Before you skip this paragraph out of prediction of it's anti-establishment, socialist rant, however, hear me out - I think that a good deal of the 20th century notion of what it means to be a kid has been developed in the 'burbs. After all, in what other type of setting can you find such a large concentration of young families, and thus huge amounts of kids? Suburbia was largely developed in the 50's as a result of demand from war-tired couples for a quiet, convenient, safe place that they could raise families, and it's largely from this type of community that we conjure images of kids playing road hockey in cul-de-sacs, and balloons hanging off of letterboxes indicating an open-invitation birthday party. I think there's an important distinction that needs to be made, though, between the suburbs that my parents' generation grew up in, and the ones that are sprawling over old farmland today. Most important in this regard has been the rise to popularity of the dreaded gated community. Imagine the amazing impact driving in and out of a cast-iron gate, attached to ten foot tall, two-foot thick brick walls, every day must have on a kid's outlook on the world! If that's not an impediment to the development of broad-minded, globalist mentalities, I don't know what is. I remember visiting one of these places in Dallas a couple of years ago, and feeling like I'd just entered a world made entirely of stale bread. Just recalling the experience causes a little bit of bile to emerge from my esophagus.

Alright, so I've thoroughly expressed my view that gated communities are evil fortresses of paranoia, sectarianism and isolationism. However, I think that even the less defined, more integrated subdivision setups (i.e. the ones without spiked walls and security guards) are straying down a similar path, albeit in a less extreme sense. I'm not sure how widespread this is, but I've noticed that many communities have started appointing governing bodies of sorts, kind of like the resident's councils that you see in condo complexes. From what I understand, these committees agree on regulations that are legislated to apply to all of the members of the particular community, such as maintenance standards, noise rules, etc. Anyways, I remember reading in the Guelph Tribune last summer about such a community that had just passed a regulation that prohibited kids from playing games out on the streets, whether it was tag or road hockey. In reaction, I remember thinking "what the crap?!?" Although the perpetrators of this absurdity claimed that it was for the safety of the kids, the details of the circumstance - as well as the comments of some of the parents that opposed the rule - made it clear that they did it because they saw the kids as a collective nuisance; disturbers of their quiet, mature, adult lives, if you will. I think this is a great example of how the ideas of convenience, order, and safety that originally motivated the development of subdivisions has mutated into an ugly embodiment of selfishness, monotony and paranoia.

As usual, I started writing this blog with no idea whether I'd end up making any sort of cohesive set of points. I do write these things as much to get my own thoughts in order as to share them, however, and I think I can identify a few key themes that have become apparent, if not leapt off of the screen, regarding the "lost art of being a kid". Firstly, geography is a factor, as is isolationism, including the disparity between different parts of towns and cities (i.e. inner core and suburbs). More important, however, is the stupidity of us adults in general, and some parents in particular, for thinking that kids are to be protected from all forms of potential evil, and fawned over for our own pleasure. I'm definitely not saying that this is a universal phenomenon, but I think that if we examined our own view of family, and the identity that we derive from our loved ones on an individual, emotional level, we'd at least see flickers of it in our psyche.

Alright, I'm done. Maybe I'll head back to that lemonade stand, and see if the tykes are still peddling their goods. They are, after all, doing their part to stop the madness.