The Kindergarchy and Laissez-Faire Aren't the Only Options

There seems to be a backlash recently (or maybe I’m just paying more attention) to the phenomenon of overparenting and overscheduling kids: people are just saying no to too many activities. An article that came out last week written by Joseph Epstein about how the United States has turned into a Kindergarchy (a term I really like) where Epstein rails against our overly child-centered lives here in the 21st Century. Add this to the “Free-Range Kids” champion, Lenore Skenazy, the mom who let her nine-year old ride the New York City subway unaccompanied (something I support, by the way) and got all kinds of guff for it (luckily the article includes a handy picture for all the pedophiles out there that are looking to nab an unaccompanied minor on the subway … I keed!). And a few years ago, Caitlin Flanagan emphasized in some of her articles in the Atlantic that her mom tended to not pay too much attention to her. There are other examples…

A few things about this. Of course kids should play outside and shouldn’t have scheduled activities taking over all of their after-school time and weekends all of the time. The fact that you shouldn’t overschedule your kids and let their schedule dominate your life is so incredibly basic and such a cliché that it’s hard to work up the energy to even build up this paper tiger enough to knock it down. You shouldn’t be dropping your kid off at the airport at age 9 to spend a month at Bela Karoli’s gymnastics camp. You shouldn’t taking your 9 year old to 5-day a week soccer camp, even if you think he’s the next Landon Donovan. If you don’t get that, you probably aren’t reading this anyway. So on some level Epstein and Skenazy are of course correct in their basic assertions: don’t schedule the hell out of your kids. But 97% of people don’t actually do this (at least for more than one season).

But there are really two over-scheduling issues here, based upon the age of the kids. At ages 5 through 11 or so, the parents are generally in control with respect to the activities their kids participate in. They can pretend that the kids want to swim an extra hour but, at this age, kids will express their preferences. And most kids at this age are hedonists at heart. They make a quick and simple decision when choosing between an second hour of violin lessons each week or using that hour to go outside and play freeze tag with the neighbors. But, at the end of the day, you’re in charge.

But older kids, 12 and up, tend to, well, do what they want. And kids these days, for a variety of reasons, tend to schedule themselves into all kinds of activities. Part of the problem here is cultural. If a kid wants to be a swimmer, the high school invariably instills in him or her the idea that they have to try to be state champs and devote themselves to the sport and come in for 60 minutes before school in addition to the 2 hour practices after school, not to mention the offseason programs and weight training. Many high schools athletic programs resemble the programs that Olympic athletes went through less than 100 years ago.

But if your 15 year old wants to go out for the team, and wants to be good, are Skenazy and Epstein saying that the parent is supposed to forbid it?

I get the sense that the demographic that Epstein and Skenazy really are focusing on is the younger 5-11 bracket; and the younger children of rich people. So really how many kids are they actually worried about?

And they do what everyone tends to do: lionize the past. I grew up in a nice middle-class town of 15,000 people where lots of people had kids and the kids roamed the neighborhood. As the oldest of four kids, my mom often had her hands full and the only enrichment activity I was given was to “go outside and play.”

I vividly remember those days. Kicking around in the driveway for 15 minutes. Deciding to actually try to find a friend. Getting 3 guys together and then finding another … we’ve got 5! … neighborhood kids together and spending another hour trying to get one more so we had 6 guys so we could get a real backyard football game going (anything less than 3-on-3 kind of sucked). And then, when the last guy finally finished his chores, and the game was ready to go … we’d get one series in, and one of the guys invariably would get called in for lunch. And the game would be off, or we’d end up with a less-than ideal lineup.

So there’s 4 hours outside and the end result is a game that lasted all of twenty minutes. Great.

And that was if we were able to avoid the older kids who would steal our ball and teach us the meaning of all kinds of new vocabulary words with never an adult in sight. I guess if this was a good thing, a good educational tool, then I think we should suggest that all adults be mugged, just to know what it feels like, right?

Back then, I just thought getting the ball stolen by Randall just sucked. All it did for me was imprint the notion that life wasn’t fair and treating someone like crap actually had no real consequences most of the time. Isn’t that the opposite of what we try to teach kids?

I don’t doubt that all this no-rules-laissez-faire kicking around the neighborhood kept me busy, and kept a lot of kids busy (and I’m sure that if you are only given 10 books to read in your childhood, you’ll get to know those books very well, and might even appreciate books in general more than someone who has had anything they ever wanted to read). But wishing this mundane existence on the youth of America; nay, demanding that it be imposed upon the youth of America; I’m not sure why anyone would want that.

If such a thing could even be imposed today. I was born after the baby boom ended, but even then, the world of the 1970’s is different demographically from today (and I don’t mean that today there is more crime and some huge wave of sex predators out there; I don’t buy most of that, since while crime rates did spike for a while, they are generally back down these days). Overall, there were a whole lot more kids running around back then, for a lot of reasons. People were having kids earlier, so there were less DINKs out there. People were living shorter lives, so there were less old people with no kids filling out the neighborhood. Families were larger back then; now a family has 2 kids instead of 4. Back then people had less money to spend on outside activities, so they couldn’t afford to be out of the house paying to do things: they were hanging out near the house.

All of these factors combined mean that there were generally more kids running around back then than you see today. If Epstein’s boyhood self hopped into a time machine, I doubt he would be able to scare up much of a stickball game here in 2008.

And so I don’t see a lot of value in giving your child a completely unscheduled childhood these days. It looks particularly valueless when compared to kids’ activities. Indeed, young kids actually really like to have a couple of things to do a week. My daughter has a weekly 30 minute lesson from a piano teacher and, while she’s really just getting started, so far she absolutely loves it. My kids play baseball or softball in the spring, have swimming lessons in the summer and soccer in the fall. They go to art classes and nature camps from time to time. They like this stuff a heck of a lot more than I ever thought they would.

But there’s an entirely different area that Epstein and Flanagan delve into that Skenazy doesn’t seem to touch, and that is the idea that it is somehow debasing for parents to involve themselves in matters that are thought to be childish. Epstein and Flanagan seem to want us to feel shame if we play Go Fish with our kids.

I’m sorry guys, but life isn’t neatly divided into adult activities that exist over here and kid activities that exist over there. I personally have tastes that run the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow to everything in-between. Many of those tastes – complicated literature; European porn (again, I keed) – can’t be properly enjoyed by a child. But other things I enjoy – watching baseball, eating at a greasy diner, hiking, playing chess – are completely accessible to my kids. If I like these things, why shouldn’t I enjoy these things with my family, the people that I love? Why is that debasing?

Writers in many ways devote their lives to the pursuit of influencing people’s opinions on things: Leaving aside the obvious examples of editorial pages and opinion columns, journalism is often the pursuit of giving people more facts so they are more informed. Biography and memoir are often dependent upon the empathy of the read. And I would hope that most people would admit that there is literature out there that changed their outlook on the world.

Yet Flanagan and Epstein, who have devoted their own lives as writers to influencing people’s thinking, seem to be saying that parents should actively try to avoid influencing the thinking of the people that they care about the most: their kids. They want to convince everyone else of the way to live their lives, but they don't want to influence their kids. Does this make any sense at all?

In fact, the unbalanced nature of the parent-child relationship opens all kinds of great areas of conversation. I enjoy baseball games with my friends, but my friends don’t want to hear me talk about the way 2nd baseman is positioned for half an inning. My daughter, however, hearing for the first time how the middle infielders often position themselves based upon the batter, or lean one way or another based upon the pitch that’s called … when I explain that to my daughter, and then she SEES IT …

… she gets a smile of recognition on her face that is beauty and magic and just every wonderful that exists in this world. Watching the light bulb of a great idea go off in your kid’s head: I’m not sure there’s anything better.

I realize that, at the end of the day, it’s a balancing act. There’s no reason why kids can’t sometime be kicked outside, away from the supervision of their parents, and sometimes have a friend over and pretend they’re animals. But there’s no reason that the next day they shouldn’t be sat down and be taught how to play that marvelous game called Euchre, and why they can’t be taken to a Little Gym karate class every now and again.

I don’t want to live in the Kindergarchy. I also don’t want to live in a wholly parent-centered society.

But at the end of the day, no one is asking you to make that choice, and there’s plenty of room in between: and there is the space where most of us raise our kids.

So I hope Epstein and others have a good time beating down that paper tiger. Because now that I've spent 2 hours writing this, I'm going to go play with water balloons with my kids.