Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)
PART V
Dads Out and Proud
Be a Dad. Don’t be “Mom’s Assistant.” …
Spend time with your kids.
It won’t take away your manhood, it will give it to you.
—Louis C.K.
21
Raising a Responsible Rebel
In South Carolina, a working single mom is arrested because her nine-year-old daughter was playing unsupervised in a nearby park. A couple in Florida faced felony charges because their eleven-year-old had to wait outside the house for ninety minutes one afternoon after school (the kid had food, access to water, and shelter for that traumatic hour and a half). A mom and dad in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, faced multiple investigations from Child Protective Services and the police for allowing their children to walk to nearby parks and explore their neighborhood without adult supervision. A mom in Chicago was found guilty of child neglect after allowing her three children to play in a park adjacent to their apartment while she checked on them through the window every few minutes. These are just a few of the modern-day horror stories found at Lenore Skenazy’s website Free Range Kids, and she’s never running low on new material, unfortunately. We’ve made it downright dangerous to let your kid have any degree of independence.
It didn’t used to be this way. Back in the 1970s, psychologist Roger Hart delved into the lives of kids in a small Vermont town. Over the course of two years Hart interviewed virtually every child between the ages of four and twelve, and turned his research into his dissertation, which in turn inspired quite a bit of attention in the scientific press, as well as a BBC documentary on children and play. Three decades later, Hart returned to the rural town to talk to the original subjects and, when possible, their own kids as well.
What he found is deeply depressing. Back in the seventies, kids in the town roamed for blocks. They ventured off the sidewalk and played in the woods or down by the river, and always without parental supervision. In fact, parents often had no real idea where their kids were at any given time. The older kids were supposed to look out for the younger ones (with an almost unwritten rule that some bossiness was to be expected). All of that had changed when he returned in the mid-2000s, even though the town itself still had the same low crime rate and relatively tight-knit community. Now there was little free time for kids, and it certainly wasn’t unsupervised. Play dates were scheduled, instead of kids just hanging out after school. What it meant to be a kid had changed, and not for the better. The parents that Hart had studied thirty years ago looked back nostalgically on their youth, but that didn’t change the fact that they were raising their kids much differently.
Hart spoke to the Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin for her feature “The Over-Protected Kid,” and wasn’t quite sure why the change had been so quick and so prevalent. “There’s a fear,” Hart said, “an exaggeration of the dangers, a loss of trust that isn’t totally explainable.”
I actually think the explanation can be found in the growth of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and our brains’ inability to process the never-ending litany of horrors shown to us on our cable news channels, tablets, and smartphones. Things have gotten exponentially worse with the rise of social media. I see this all the time in the gun control debate. Anti-gun advocates are constantly talking about the “epidemic” rates of gun-related violence in the United States, and how “something” (which really means something anti-gun) needs to be done. These advocates and the reporters who cover them seldom mention the fact that gun-related violent crime has declined dramatically over the past two decades (and of course, when homicides spiked in cities like Baltimore, New York, and Hartford in 2015, those same anti-gun critics failed to mention that the increases happened after sweeping gun control laws were passed in Maryland, New York, and Connecticut in 2013). We are, in fact, doing “something” about violent crime, because we’re seeing a lot less of it. Yet, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center poll, only 12 percent of those surveyed said that crime had gone down over the past two decades. By comparison, the 2014 Chapman University Survey on American Fears found that more than 20 percent of survey respondents believe Bigfoot is real. That’s right, more Americans believe there’s a population of ape-like creatures wandering around the forests of Oregon than know that the country they live in has become much less violent over their lifetime.
The Survey on American Fears also found that people who watch TV news and true crime shows tend to be more afraid, which makes sense. If the vast majority of what you watch is crime-related, it’s probably natural to think that we live in a hellish landscape of mayhem and horror, even if it’s not evident in your daily life (aside from what you see on television). Which is not to say that threats don’t exist. Crime, even if crime rates are down, is a fact of life. But the fact that we live in a world where criminal behavior exists is no reason to deny kids a proper childhood by always insisting they remain under constant adult supervision. I want my kids to have a childhood close to mine; with independence, freedom, curiosity, and responsibility. My goal as a parent isn’t to make sure that every day is “the best day ever” for my kids. It’s to make sure that when they’re adults, they’re ready to take on the real world.
Sometimes it feels like I’m raising my kids to be rebels against the prevailing culture. Responsible rebels, but rebels nonetheless. The “Free Range Kids” movement, popularized by Lenore Skenazy, is full of parents and kids who are going against the grain, so it’s not as if I’m the only one. And frankly, for a lot of parents, raising a “free range” kid is more of a necessity than a choice.
When my wife was a single mom, she had to raise self-reliant, responsible kids. At the age of nine my oldest daughter could run to the corner store in Camden, New Jersey, and buy basic groceries, like a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs. That’s the way it is for many families. Helicopter parenting is a luxury they can’t afford, but that doesn’t mean their kids are worse off than a child who was shuttled and smothered with constant supervision and a never-ending stream of piano lessons, karate classes, and scheduled play dates.
I’ve never believed my kids should have a more sheltered childhood than I had. Luckily, when I moved my family to northern Virginia, our neighborhood had a number of military families whose kids were trained in responsible childhood freedom. It wasn’t unusual for packs of kids to roam the woods at night with flashlights playing a game called “Manhunt,” or for my then-ten-year-old son and his friends to walk a mile and a half to 7-Eleven in the afternoons.
Even in that bucolic setting, though, my wife would still get random calls from the neighbors when they saw our youngest daughter riding her bike alone on the sidewalk less than a hundred feet from our house. At least they called my wife and not Child Protective Services, for which I am eternally grateful.
I grew up in the suburbs, mostly south of Oklahoma City, along with a two-year spell in a small town in New Jersey about twenty miles west of New York City. My childhood sounds very much like the one Roger Hart witnessed. At seven, I was riding my bike to my elementary school to take advantage of the playground on the weekend. A year later I was walking alone several blocks to the Friendly’s restaurant in the small downtown of Ridgewood, New Jersey,* for a lunch of clam chowder and a grilled cheese sandwich. Every now and then my mom and dad would join me on one of my adventures, but for the most part I was on my own. I knew my phone number, I knew my address, and I knew where I was going and how to get back home, whether it was a trip to the library, the town’s swimming pool, or my friend Pete’s house. I was a latchkey kid, and I had a great time growing up.
I’ve got a lot of great memories of my time in Ridgewood, but there’s one thing that still gets to me. I could walk to the movie theater, take myself to lunch, visit the library by myself, and so on, but I wasn’t allowed to play arcade games. The town has an ordinance (still on the books last time I checked) that requires video games for profit to be licensed by the town, and “No license shall permit any of the devices regulated under this article to be used by any person under the age of sixteen years.” For two years the only opportunities I had to play arcade games were the evenings we’d drive to neighboring Hoboken to eat at a diner. This particular diner had a Pac-Man game in the lobby, but the game, for some reason, was in German. I still remember my first trip to the arcade in Crossroads Mall after we moved back to Oklahoma. I was awestruck as I soaked in the rows of displays, joysticks, and buttons … all finally available for me to play. I might have even wept a little as I put a quarter into a Spy Hunter game, overjoyed at doing something other than eating dots and running from ghosts.
My parents did a great job of preparing me for the real world, because they allowed me to explore it as a kid. Sure, there were some issues. Older kids in the neighborhood tended to give us younger ones a hard time, at least until they got to the age where they discovered girls. Generally speaking, though, boredom was our biggest issue, and that was always only a temporary problem. Even with all of that freedom I never felt neglected. We were an affectionate family, and as the youngest I received more than my share. I knew my parents loved me, and my mom and I were really close, especially after my parents divorced. I never went through a period where I rebelled against my mom’s authority, though as I got older I did have my periods of typical teenage idiocy.
Beyond giving me the liberty to explore the world I lived in, my parents also encouraged me in my love of reading. That allowed me to explore the world beyond my neighborhood, and the more I read, the more curious about the world I became, which made me want to read and learn even more. I became fascinated with American history through the Childhood of Famous Americans series.* For a while after reading Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer I was as big a fan of the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers as I was the 1986 Boston Red Sox.* I learned more about science from the adventures of Danny Dunn, Boy Scientist than I did from Bill Nye, Science Guy. I always had a paperback with me, and would even read at concerts in between the opening act and the main event. I distinctly remember killing time waiting for Bon Jovi by thumbing through a copy of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.
Crispus Attucks was a particular favorite of mine, and I remember developing this weird prepubescent crush on Clara Barton after reading her biography. I wouldn’t feel the same way about a woman until I saw Lea Thompson in Howard the Duck.This ultimately led to my trading a 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan card for a 1956 Topps Jackie Robinson card. The Jordan card is now worth a couple thousand bucks, depending on condition, while a Jackie Robinson card in similar condition to mine can be found for a couple hundred bucks. But I still have that card, and it still means more to me than the Jordan card ever could. Looking back, I’m proud that a twelve-year-old me understood the difference between a great player and a history maker.
I don’t know that any of my kids caught the reading bug quite as bad as I did, but every one of my children reads for pleasure, just as my wife and I do. My youngest daughter shocked me by reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy when she was eleven. My youngest son loved books on Egyptian and Greek mythology, and I read aloud the tales of Perseus, Heracles, and Theseus. After a few Minotaur-related nightmares, we switched to Aesop’s Fables, which, I explained, were kind of like myths, only with fewer monsters and vengeful gods. I’m not a perfect parent, and I don’t have perfect kids. I’m okay with that. I’m not aiming for perfection. I want my kids to grow up to be happy, healthy, responsible, and productive adults. I want them to think for themselves, not just about themselves. They don’t have to vote like me, though we do talk politics. They don’t have to own a gun, though I’ve taught all my children how to shoot safely and responsibly. They don’t even have to eat meat, even though we’re raising our own hogs, goats, and sheep now. It’s my job as a parent to equip my kids with the tools they need to live a purposeful life of their own, not to turn them into little mini-me’s.
I want my children to be able to stand up to what Charlton Heston called the “pervasive social subjugation” of our modern-day thought police. To do that, he told a crowd at Harvard Law School in 1999, one had to learn to disobey. “Peaceably, yes,” Moses told his flock, “Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey the social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom.”
I don’t expect my kids to turn out just like me or their mom, but if they turn out a little like Charlton Heston I’d be thrilled.
What Would Ward Cleaver Do?
Self-reliance, independence—these were some of the things we used to take for granted in the American character. Ward had it—and he would have wanted it in his sons.