Sometimes I feel like I live in a time warp. According to this New York Times article, kids have lost touch with nature. They zone out on their X-Boxes and never leave the house except under close parental supervision. They don't know what a caterpillar looks like, and they don't even break their arms falling out of trees anymore.
Is Red State Capital City Suburb the only remaining bastion of childhood freedom? From April to November, you can't walk down the street without seeing packs of kids on bicycles racing through the neighborhood. Middle-school girls saunter down the sidewalks, giggling and gossiping in their newly-achieved big girl freedom. The backyards are full of kids poking at dirt, picking dandelions, throwing balls. As soon as it's warm enough, M and E are outside every minute they can be--scootering, chalking, hula hooping, skipping. OK, those aren't very nature-centered activities, but they take place out there in nature. And they do the dirt-poking and dandelion-picking too (especially when S agrees to pay them a penny a dandelion).
Am I imagining it all? Are we that unique? Or is this yet another example of the Times grandiosely generalizing from a bunch of upper-middle-class coastal-big-city suburbanites?
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3 comments:
Becca,
We live in Austin, so it gets pretty hot mid-summer. I prefer to stay indoors then, but my children don't seem to notice.
We just moved about 6 miles, from an in-town, urban neighborhood, to a quiet country road, and the children are always outdoors - looking for snakes, swinging, workin with sidewalk chalk, riding bikes - you name it. In fact, the parents here keep telling me not to let their children in my house!
Those NYT folks don't know of what they speak!
Sinda
Everyone's outdoors here, in granola southeastern college town, and everyone was outdoors in working-class southern New England suburb, too. There was and is tons of walking, biking, digging in the dirt, and unsupervised outdoor play.
Beware the trend piece--it's almost always full of crap.
Although, that having been said, urban kids for 120 years have had significantly different lives than rural and suburban kids. And the Times is right in the middle of its Fresh Air Fund campaign, right? And there are suburbs were more two-parent families don't feature a parent at home.
Eh. The NYT isn't such the universal paper it likes to pretend it is.
Conversation at this house, just this evening:
DD14: Mom? "A" called and wants us to meet them "in the woods" to play.
Me: Be home before dark!
Now, to reassure you, the "woods" are a no-more-than 25' wide grove of (mainy) poplar and maple trees that divide the back yards of the cross-street and cul-de-sac in our neighborhood. Bugs and mug galore: not much in the way of wildlife, with families we know in yelling distance at any given time. The plie of bikes at the curb identifies the adventurers on any given afternoon; and to retrieve a child you just send a message with the next kid that rides by the house!
My girls know more about identifying six-legged creatures than about pop culture...and they're 14.5 and 10!
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