Growing up Denatured (Or, there she goes again)

Scenes which resemble my childhood:



Children playing baseball, unsupervised.



Boys, heading for the swimming hole to go skinny dipping, unsupervised.



Boy in the backyard feeding his dog's litter, unsupervised.



Boys playing basketball, unsupervised.



Family on a Sunday drive in the country. Note that the parents are patently guilty of criminal negligence.



Children at the playground, unsupervised.



Boy and his dog on a fishing expedition, unsupervised.



Boy, girl and dog on fishing expedition, unchaperoned.



Girl, contemplating the uncertainties of life, unsupervised . . .



I guess you get the point . . . there are lots more images of Norman Rockwell's America, and they have always been popular, because they record a way of life . . . the way we were.

There was a popular parenting book in the late 1950's which was entitled: Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nuthin' . . .

A-yup.

Bookmarking for now....

I'm currently reading "The Glass Castle", the autobiography of Jeannette Walls. Her life story falls somewhere between free-range childhood and downright abuse, but I'm not sure where yet.

I had a very, very unstructured childhood and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

Soz, you have to registar to get the article.....

Could you maybe post it here instead?

Growing Up Denatured

By BRADFORD McKEE

Published: April 28, 2005

Richard Louv's new book has a message for parents: don't be afraid to let children roam in the woods.

WERE it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

"My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games," said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, "that's more the norm than the exception."

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children's indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem "nature-deficit disorder." He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children's fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

"I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing," Mr. Louv (pronounced "loov") said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. "It's society's whole attitude that nature isn't important anymore," said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

"We have mobile couch potatoes," Dr. Shifrin said. "The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?"

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. "It's absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break," said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children - 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. "It is stronger than we are."

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. "And if there weren't enough kids, you'd close right field," he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But "there's this magnet pulling them into the house." It is the Nintendo GameCube. "I have to throw them outside."

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

"As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary," Ms. Herzog said. "The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them."

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

"Who's going to pay for that research?" Mr. Louv asked. "What toy can we sell for natural play?"

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book "Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection" (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv's book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

"When you look for the hard data, it's hard to find," Dr. Kellert said. "And people talk about children's contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way."

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it's hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. "We've been conditioned to live in fear," he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family's home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. "It's more my wife than me" who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons' school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

"We're in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent" in the past, Mr. Figler said. "You're always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous."

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents' nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

"We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play," Dr. Broughton said. "The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven't gone a day where I don't see a kid who's too fat."

Mr. Louv refers to parents' abduction fears as "the bogeyman syndrome." But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who "criminalize" outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood's residents' association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

"If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal," Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. "The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days," he said. "There's a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning."

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a "lockdown," she called it. "That doesn't allow active play on the school grounds" during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. "It's not getting any easier."

We used to play baseball and basketball after school hours and during the summer in our elementary school playground, oh, and use the swings.

That was in the fifties. By now that same school has probably locked the yard tight, for liability reasons if nothing else.

Finally I feel like I'm doing something right!

Sometimes I get so discouraged when Mo's peers are loading and playing computer games and such when I know Mo has a problem operating the mouse and the paint progam is the only thing that interests him at all.

When it comes to the great outdoors Mo is amazing. He'd rather be outside than anywhere and we loiter outdoors every day good weather or bad. We go camping quite a bit and he hikes the easy trails with us. He is a real nature boy. He's a blur of motion.

Living in Oregon, outdoors is a way of life. They make it easy to take advantage of. I would have been in paradise had I grown up here. To Mo, a day spent indoors is a day wasted.

Funny, his doctor nags us saying he's overweight and is happy to hear that he is up and moving around.

<sigh>

Our neighborhood elementary school is open during off hours and they have magnificent playing fields and play grounds. As a taxpayer I'd be furious if I couldn't use the school grounds.

You're doing lots of things right, but this is one that I know you guys are especially good at. We're a bit of weather wimps. If it's sunny and warm, we're out! If it's not... Sozlet loves the backyard but is still learning how to play there on her own. She gets bored too quickly (IMO.) Jane Brody often quotes herself as having said to her twin sons, "if it's light out, you're out!" I like that a lot, but they had each other to play with. I'm not sure how fair it is to do that to sozlet if it means playing on her own. I am out there with her a lot, but I don't want to be out there all day -- I want there to be chunks of time when she's out there and I'm doing my own thing.

One thing I was incredibly happy to see when we had our warm stretch is that the free-range child seems to be alive and well in our neighborhood. The ones with freest range seem to be say 7 and up, but they're riding bikes in packs, walking to and from the playground on their own, playing at the playground on their own, etc.

We were frequently out of doors, and off the property, to avoid work. I may have known two or three contemporary children who did no work. We had chores at home, and they entailed doing real work. We didn't get paid for the work, either . . . the expression "If you think you're going to put your feet under my dinner table . . . " was known to us all. Work started at about age six, and increased in volume and complexity as one aged. When we got to be old enough to work for wages, all of us mostly did--after all we'd otherwise be working at home, and not being paid.

When all chores were done, all work projects completed and free time beckoned, we got the hell out of Dodge and were on our own. Stick around, and they'll find something for you to do.

Boomer--

Remember, the Great Out-Of-Doors dilutes aggression--and you knew that instinctively.

Down the road, sports will be available.

Life will get easier.

One of the things that makes Oregon (at least here in the Willamette valley) such a paradise is that we don't really have temperature extremes. A raincoat with a removable liner and a pair of galoshes (v. barefooting) will get you through every season.

Mo too has chores. He's only four but he has to feed the dogs and the cat. (Teaching him to care for things is a pretty big deal around here.) He doesn't get paid for those things but he does get paid for other things. Especially when there is some toy he's begging for.

I was thinking a bit about the fear thing that the article mentions.....

Mr. B built Mo a crazy tree fort. I never used to worry about Mo playing in the fort until I read a blurb in paper about a kid that fell out his tree fort and died. Since then I've been insane about monitoring Mo's tree fort behavior.

It's just that if anything happend to him I would die.....

Mothers earn every gray hair.

Hold your dominion.

This sounds so familiar except that we believed our parents had moved so far out into the sticks that there was no work away from home until we moved away.

I grew up on a saltwater bay -- most of us had our own rowboats (and lifejackets). Once chores were done, it was out on the water until mom hung a big towel on the dock handrails -- the universal signal to get home. Talk about unsupervised... there were ten or twelve kids on the water and most moms weren't home... my mom didn't even know how to swim. We thought it was hilarious when somebody fell in and got soaked. It never occurred to us that we might drown.

Jon Stewart/The Daily Show had an interview with a woman writer who discussed the new-found fear in raising children from a different angle. She mentioned that competition for kids was no longer acceptable in school. Basically no one should ever be a loser. Among other things she mentioned parents asking that Little League games not keep scores, teachers disallowing Tag, and substituting Friendship Circle where you shared your feelings during recess, and the Girl Scouts having an Anti-Stress-Badge. The author said that this was training the wrong things and American kids were not going to be able to compete in the real world. An interesting take on it.

Jeans, we always had a problem with jeans, and here's why. My older brothers were playing football in a vacant lot when the oldest was tackled, and landed on a broken pop bottle--the old fashioned heavy kind. His leg was laid open with about a six inch gash, but that didn't bother anyone, we were all concerned because his new jeans were ripped up, and he would be in big trouble when we got home. So, being the little guy, i got coerced into going home and getting a large needle and some tent patching thread. We sewed it up, and then my brother walked around in an odd manner, to make sure my grandparents (who raised us) wouldn't see where it had been torn and patched. As soon as an opportunity arose, he scraped up the enormous sum of four dollars to buy another pair so that no one would find out. The deep gash in his leg eventually healed with a scar--but none of us had that in mind.

On another occassion several years later, my cousin Judy was driving my sister and me around in her mother's Chevy. 1960's something Chevy, with a bench seat across the front, and no such thing as seat belts. Judy was playing hot rod, and went around a corner really fast, and we discovered that the passenger side door was not fully closed. We discovered this because it flew open, and i was dragged for more than a block, desparately hanging onto the interior door handle, while Judy shouted: "What do i do? What do i do?" I finally yelled: "Stop the goddamned car ! ! !" loudly enough that she reacted, and stomped on the brake. I went flying head first into the open door, but at least i had held on, and not gone under the rear wheels. Then i laid on the pavement laughing hysterically, and my sister and Judy went limp in fits of helpless giggling.

My jeans . . . the outside of the right thigh was completely gone, no sewing this up. I had a road rash about four inches wide and about a foot long. We went to the local town ballpark, and sat there with me leaning over to one side until the bleeding stopped. Then we drove home, and went into the house, with me walking sideways in a strange manner, until i could get upstairs and change. Fortunately, Judy was a real, live teenager with a job--she was a car hop at a drive-in restaurant. Jeans were up to six bucks a pair by then, but she coughed it up.

We got away with this kind of thing because we all did our own laundry, and in those days before permanent press, did the ironing, too.

"Permanent press" is neither.

Do you ever feed that doggie in your signature line? She looks awfully thin . . .

As an only in a family that moved a lot, I didn't learn to really play until I was eight and moved with family to Evanston, where there were a bunch of children in different houses on Madison Street... some onlies, a house with four bright girls, and another with, yikes, eleven kids, the oldest of whom was a key part of the Secret Pine Club (we did a "carnival" one spring..)

I was very involved with the whole thing of playing with these kids, as we called ourselves then, and - since I moved to a more lonely circumstance at thirteen - treasure those years of playing rolly polly on the sidewalks, overcrossover across front yards, blind man's bluff, catchng fireflies, making snowmen, ice skating on the iced-over vacant lot at South Boulevard and coming back to one of the houses for hot chocolate frozen stiff (I remember ice skating at -7, and that was before they ever mentioned wind chill), rollerskating the neighborhood, going to the corner store for penny candies about six blocks away, for popsicles from Mr. Sarkisian's store, making caramel apples, coloring easter eggs, playing canasta on a front porch, making houses of chairs and sheets in the yard, and a couple of years later, climbing in the foundation/basements on a stopped housing tract construction about ten blocks away. Baseball and basketball as previously mentioned. Bicycling.

Always in the summers - getting into the H's Mercury Station wagon en masse for a trip for ice cream cones at the place at Green Bay Road. Ah, don't get me started. Most of us didn't have much in the way of toys or dolls, though we did play Sorry and Monopoly and way too many games of Clue.
Always in the winters, going with the H family when they got a really really tall Christmas tree from one of the Howard Street lots...

In that world, you were subject to be held responsible for any child younger and smaller than you, and any parent known to at least two of the kids had instant authority if they showed up. We hid the things we did from our parents, not because we didn't want them to worry, but because we didn't want an ass-whippin' . . .