In response to Air Traffic Controller II, one parent wrote:
During holiday breaks such as Christmas or summer, many children will be home for a month or longer. Some parents will insist they stay i doors—not wander to parks or through the neighborhood—without adults. This can lead to a lot of computer time or time with babysitters—even for the thirteen and up crowd while parents work, as most don’t get the whole month off. Some parents will pile on structured activities—such as day sports camps for a week or other “structured” activities to keep them busy as no parent that I know of feels it’s acceptable for kids to wander at all anymore.
Yes, the world has changed. It does seem that there has been a serious reduction in safe wandering space, although it may be that this restriction has always been the challenge of raising children in a city. So many adults I speak with, even those born in the 1980s, all look back nostalgically on their childhoods as times of freedom. It seems the closing of the frontier (if that indeed is what it is) occurred very recently. One thirty-year-old parent said yesterday: “Whatever happened to sitting in the basement, playing cards, and drinking Kool-Aid?” It makes me wonder if the literal loss of wandering space is the real issue.
In the thirty-four years I have been a principal, I have seen the continuous increase in the amount of organized, supervised activities imprinted with ADULT. Most disturbingly, this occurs in school as well as out. Teachers think it is more important for the class to stay in their seats and practice sums than to play together on the playground.
To be sure, training children to multiply two numbers and to dribble a soccer ball is equally important. To grow up successfully in this culture (in any culture for the last 40,000 years), children need the adults to show them how to do things. They need to be taught the disciplines of everything from grammar, to dancing, to brushing their teeth, to washing dishes. Freedom from adults is not a value.
At the same time, freedom to play, to imagine, to roam through their minds as well as the world, to make decisions and mistakes on their own, this is of enormous value. It is essential, not only for success in most pursuits, but also for a sense of well-being, wholeness, and confidence. Children’s minds need to wander at least as much as their bodies. Emily Dickenson’s body may not have wandered much, but her mind sure did.
Kids need it all: alone time, involvement with adults, and involvement with other children. The important thing is the quality of that involvement. We need to choose vacation camps carefully with a balance of supervised and free play in a rich environment. We should discuss boundaries and values with parents with whom we plan playdates—the same with friendly neighbors. We need to instruct baby sitters in the importance of letting kids self-direct their way through the day within clear and strongly defended boundaries. For instance, if you have a no TV rule until homework is finished, or if you have a computer time limit, of course your sitter needs to uphold these rules. Those who care for our children need to be instructed not to abdicate the role of adult authority.
So safety aside, one mom asked: “What if your child goes over to a friend’s house or you leave them with a baby sitter and they spend all their time playing computer games or watching TV? How bad is that?” The answer is, not too bad. Many of us have watched plenty of TV and gone on to be successful, happy people. Electronic games have been around long enough for them to be studied, and there is some evidence that they might even be better for brain development in some ways than reading.
