Lately, I've been mourning the loss of childhood. Kids no longer seem to have a sense of independence, are micromanaged by their parents, are overly protected, and aren't allowed to go out and play the way kids used to. Play is controlled. Outside activities are padded and bubble-wrapped. There's that dumb controversy over cupcakes. (my mom brought cupcakes for my birthday and no one got fat on ONE CUPCAKE) Helicopter Parents stalking their young with Costco jugs of hand santizer and stacks of college applications. Childhood these days just looks like a shitty day at college, only with parents up your butt. Why the shift?
The first thing that comes to mind is Adam Walsh's grizzly 1981 kidnapping and murder splashed all over TV, scaring the bejeezus out of parents springs to mind. The media really got all over that. Saturday morning TV showed creepy dramatizations of little kids getting kidnapped from shopping malls. Diff'rent Strokes even had an Adam-themed episode where that little redheaded boy is forced to live as the pretend son of a bereaved, crazy-assed couple (I guess the producers wanted to skip the sodomy and the decapitation?).
All of this coverage had to have an effect on our parents, who grew up in an era of no seatbelts, no bike helmets and "just be home by dinner." What happened between their childhoods and ours? No one can answer for sure. Did the streets of America really get more dangerous? Was there really more crime? Was it desegregating the schools, Governor Reagan cleaning out California prisons? Or was it fear every night on the daily news?
Also, can't believe it's taken me thirteen years to come up with this:
Northclamton
Come for the clam, stay for Art 100!
It was probably a little bit of all of those things, plus a cultural change shifting from focusing on parent's lives to kids lives.
And liability issues.
Losing your child in a mall for an hour used to be an accident with a huge sigh of relief at the end. Now, you are as likely as not to have CPS look into every nook and cranny of your life.
Not that I'm promoting losing kids at malls.
Me, I always went and sat at Waldenbooks until my mom was done shopping.
Parents are afraid of losing their kids to strangers AND being judged bad parents and losing their kids/reps to the community.
Teachers can't touch children or hug them, and kids as young as 6 have been expelled for so called sexual harrassment.
1) most kids can't even fathom sexual harrassment and 2) if they were acting out sexually/violently it might very well mean they themselves were being abused and shouldn't be expelled, but counseled.
Things are indeed different now and I am deeply worried that we'd never really get it back.
Of course, there are things now that are better too, I suppose.
okay, but also when my parents were kids, they were both regularly whipped with belts until they were black and blue. this was widely considered a perfectly normal form of discipline in the middle class. teachers were allowed to use corporal punishment in school and my father had his knuckles beaten bloody by nuns with rulers, and other kids got their heads slammed into the blackboard. there was no fear about child molestation because there was no cultural awareness of the problem, and kids who got molested mostly had to live with it in silence. there are some things that have gotten better, too.
Posted by: cm at September 25, 2007 05:02 PMTrue dat, CM. I wasn't pining, I was just trying to parse out reasons why my mother is still extra-controlling of my 16-yr-old brother and is convinced that he is going to get hurt somehow.
Posted by: Mo at September 25, 2007 06:09 PMdang, I thought that cell phones were supposed to make teenagers more indepedent than ever. maybe your mom didn't get the memo that having a cell phone is like having an invisible force field! :P
Posted by: cm at September 26, 2007 08:57 PM