House of Eratosthenes

You can drive through residential neighborhoods and never see a single child out playing. We should worry about what this means for the future.

There are still kids in those neighborhoods to be sure; you can see them at the schools getting dropped off by their moms. Few kids seem to walk to school anymore. My old elementary school got rid of the bike racks and turned the enclosure into a garden.

Maybe it’s the phenomena of helicopter parenting. It’s not the cool helicoptering of Wagner and “Ride of the Valkyries” but the lame kind of Barney and songs about feelings.

These kids do nothing without their parents hovering over them – in fact, you hear of college kids referring to their parents as “their best friends.” Gag me.

I went back to my hometown on the San Francisco Peninsula over the Fourth of July. When I grew up there in the Seventies, before Silicon Valley, it was solidly middle class. We weren’t poor, but we weren’t rich. It was a big deal when my parents got a second car; everyone had a station wagon, invariably American made.

Kids were everywhere. We played games on the street – baseball, tag, army. We left in the morning and came home for dinner. There was a big woods behind our house and we’d disappear into it all day, returning with cuts, scrapes and the occasional gopher snake.

But today, nothing. The neighborhood has changed – the Fords and Dodges are now BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, and minivans replaced the wagons. I know there are kids there, but you never see them. Where are they? Lurking inside the million dollar houses? Doing what?

I went walking in those woods again. There was no sign anyone else does. A wonderland is just outside these kids’ backdoors and they never visit.

My own kids come to me and talk about “playdates,” as if childhood is supposed to be a set of pre-planned enrichment experiences instead of improvised entertainment. Can’t they just go over to their friend’s house and see if Kayden or Ashleigh or whoever can come out and play?

No, I’m told, it’s too dangerous in our affluent neighborhood. And if you look at the Meghan’s Law site for any neighborhood you’ll believe it. All these little flags pop up, each some form of registered sex offender. So, instead of driving these degenerates away, we conform and constrict our lives to accommodate their presence.

I asked a cop friend I served with in the Army if this was just paranoia. He said he wouldn’t let his kids play on the front yard unless he was out there with his Remington 870. That answered that.

My son and I were talking about this kind of thing, indirectly, last week while he was still here for the summer. The context was the tragedy of the girl who died from her peanut allergies. It would be nice to hear from some brilliant scientific minds about the long-term effects of bringing up generations of kids this way…perhaps it’s a bit, er, nutty of me to envision a connection between the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter parenting, and the skyrocketing statistics of the 4A: Autism, ADD/ADHD, Asthma and Allergies. Seems to me the last two among those are verifiable as physiological ailments — it’s highly doubtful a thirteen-year-old girl could actually perish from hypochondria. Could “evolution” possibly work this quickly, in reverse? I entirely fail to see how. And yet the body has lots of ways of adapting to challenges, as well as to lack of challenges. So I can certainly envision that keeping the environment too clean, at the age where kids are supposed to be figuring out how to physically cope with natural pollutants, might cause atrophy at all sorts of levels.

To me, the surest link between our recent spate of cleaner-cleaner-cleaner safer-safer-safer helicopter parenting, and this explosion of 4A stuff, would be the ADHD — whose “father” ‘fessed up, just before shucking his mortal coil, is merely an invention. “Every child who’s not doing well in school is sent to see a pediatrician, and the pediatrician says: ‘It’s ADHD; here’s Ritalin.’ In fact, 90 percent of these 5.4 million kids don’t have an abnormal dopamine metabolism. The problem is, if a drug is available to doctors, they’ll make the corresponding diagnosis.” His words, not mine.

Well, whether my theory is likely or not, it’s certainly a possibility. And I’m much more concerned about how parents neglect the possibility that is there — not only that, but I think it’s on everybody’s minds, in some form or another — than I am about its plausibility, its content, its probability. It’s a possibility that we are harming our kids even in the moments in which we’re “sure” we’re doing what’s best for them. And, it seems to me, whenever we ignore the possibility, as a direct consequence we are confronted with yet more evidence that there’s something to be taken seriously about it. More quiet neighborhoods, more kids vegging out in front of the teevee and the smartphone and other electronic things…fewer sunburns and scraped knees, sure, but much, much more Ritalin. And peanut allergies widespread, today, whereas in generations past they were only an occasional occurrence.

Yeah, I do see a connection. I don’t pretend to be able to explain it fully. But I’ll bet in a parallel universe where the balls are bouncing on the sidewalks again, and the jump ropes are twirling, there are lot of problems encumbering us here that aren’t happening there. Less Wellbutrin during the school year, more Campho-Phenique during the summer.

I’ve noticed that, too, in my neighborhood. The multi-child family is missing, leaving a generation of people with NO experience with living with someone who isn’t dedicated, day and night, to whatever makes them happy.

Terrible preparation for marriage, or parenthood, for that matter.

As a teacher, I can tell you that onlies are, by far, the most challenging to teach. They expect EVERYTHING to bend for them; late papers – you should accept them. Poor test scores – they “need” a re-test – at their convenience. Your teaching style – it should change, right now, so THEY can best achieve all that they can. Tutoring, for free? On THEIR time, at THEIR convenience.

None of my children or grandchildren are onlies. To me, the only child represents the enshrinement of the ME lifestyle – too many children would be inconvenient, expensive, and limit a woman’s career. It’s largely NOT the men that are driving this trend.
- rau | 08/10/2013 @ 04:45
[…] research by Andrew Thomas and crew over at American Thinker; Paging Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria… the kids are nowhere to be seen; Telling a fact apart from an opinion, is the very first step; Ponderments on Medieval Pet Names; I […]
- Steynian 486rd | Free Canuckistan! | 08/18/2013 @ 09:19
I was rarely inside when growing up, and I have the skin cancers to prove it! Linked here: http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2013/08/where-are-kids.html
- bob agard | 08/18/2013 @ 12:16

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The Children Are MissingTuesday, August 6th, 2013

The Children Are Missing
Tuesday, August 6th, 2013