Childhood...what childhood?

It was never easy to be a kid, but it must be much more difficult to be a kid in today's world. But kids, for the most part, don't know that because they've never experienced any other kind of childhood. It wasn't always like this--this being the obsessive, over-parented, angst-ridden, schedule driven method of child rearing I see so much of today. And I'm not sure how I might have turned out if I had grown up in a world where my parents scheduled my life in such a manner that I wasn't allowed to waste (in their opinions) time, to pick my own friends, to just go off on my own for several hours and just explore or laze about, to play games without adult supervision, and to get into minor scrapes--which inevitably meant banged up knees and elbows--that taught us how tenuous friendships were and how important it was to consider how our words or actions affected our friends and friendships.

I grew up in the country near Florin and Elk Grove, California, in the 50's and 60's, and we literally roamed the countryside and sought ways to entertain ourselves as often as we could get away with it. There was one television in the house, and Mom had first dibs on it for her soaps... with Dad being next in line for the evening news...and my brothers and me being last. If we were home, we could watch the Mickey Mouse Club or Crusader Rabbit or Woody Woodpecker because that was generally when Mom was busy starting to get dinner ready so we could eat together when Dad came home from work. Adults went to work and came home, we went to school and came home, and after school we wandered as far as our bicycles could carry us and still get back to the house by dinner time and dark. We made forts in the many hay stacks in the barns and the fields; climbed trees to fetch bird nests, hide from our friends, and build dangerously frail platforms to just perch and idly talk about whatever came to mind; waded barefoot in the creeks and irrigation ditches to catch pollywogs, frogs, fish, bugs, muskrats, turtles, and snakes; swam wherever there was enough water of any sort to allow us to more-or-less submerge ourselves; and dug holes--we called them forts or tunnels--wherever we could get away with it. School was important, but learning for us also included the importance of experiencing the natural world and being able to figure things out for yourself...without the aid of a parent, teacher, tutor, computer, or the Internet.

Oh, we made a lot of mistakes...for which we received motherly treatments that generally included chastisement for doing something so irresponsible, copious applications of--ouch--iodine, and frequent trips to the doctor's office for yet another tetanus shot--one of the hazards of being barefoot most of the time in an area where rusty nails and broken glass were to be found everywhere we went.

But we learned a lot, too, and discovered that:

• we could do just about anything we put our collective minds to doing
• planning did not always guarantee success and plans worked well...until we tried them
• risk had two categories--unnecessary and calculated
• many things you would never suspect as being dangerous were
• fessing up generally proved a far better option than lying
• we couldn't do everything we wanted to do--but that isn't necessarily a bad thing
• there were consequences for not doing the things we needed to do
• some consequences were permanent and couldn't be undone
• you shouldn't spend more than you have
• going to jail was something that should not to be emulated or praised
• if you broke it, you were expected to fix it or replace it
• taking something without the owner's permission was not borrowing
• farming--especially dairy farming--was hard work
• work was something to be praised

I tend to look back on my childhood rather nostagically these days...the result of watching too many parents over-supervise and over-schedule their children's childhoods. I am glad I grew up when and where I did, and in the way my parents allowed me to experience childhood. I'm not sure how I would have turned out today...and am glad I don't have to worry too much about it.