And Now for Something Completely Different

(Because I should probably get off sports for a little while...) As summer is now in full swing, I've thinking about my kids, as parents of course often do. And I was reflecting back on my own childhood summers, how I remember--accurately or otherwise--spending them, and contrasting them with my children's summers.

I should start by saying that our neighborhood in Cleveland Heights is a pretty safe (despite the string of burglaries on our street last week), reasonably quiet, and very beautiful place to live. No place is completely safe, of course, but I don't worry living here. That said, it's a LOT more urban than where I grew up. It's admittedly difficult not to be more urban than Nickerson, Kansas--population 1200. It sounds impressive to say that when I was 9 I was riding my bicycle all the way across town, except that that can be accomplished in about 15 minutes. Less if you're racing your friends.

My brother and I, when we were Abra and Thalia's age, were unquestionably fending for ourselves quite a bit more than Abra and Thalia do. That's no doubt a function of a lot of different factors. One is the different settings. When we were their age, Mom would often give Rob and me some cash and a grocery list and have us walk to the store. We didn't live any closer to the IGA than our family does now to our nearest grocery store. But if we'd grown up here in Cleveland Heights instead of Nickerson, I don't know that Mom would have sent us on that errand that young, simply because the streets bordering Zagara's are way busier than anything to be found in Nickerson. There's no way I'd send A and T right now, unsupervised, to Z's to do the grocery shopping. If I did, somebody would probably call the police.

Besides the differences between inner-ring suburban Cleveland and Nickerson, Kansas, there was also the fact that I grew up in a single parent household--a function of my mother's widowhood at a very young age. Particularly during the school year, Mom had to work a lot of long hours, so it made sense under the circumstances to get the kids to where they could take as much care of themselves as reasonably possible, as quickly as reasonably possible. Frankly, had I not married Chris a few years ago, I'm sure I'd have been working harder in that direction than I find myself doing.

But even those factors aside, it just seems to me that the minimum socially acceptable level of adult supervision of children has shot up considerably since the time that I was a kid. Parents are convinced that the world is an impossibly dangerous and complex place, and that their children will never be able to navigate it on their own. So it is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children's complete safety, at all times, and give constant praise and encouragement for everything they do, to provide them with never-ending intellectual stimulation. It's kind of exhausting.

This summer in particular, Chris and I have been doing a bit of wrestling with how much to be having them do. On the responsibility side of the ledger, it seems clear to me that the girls could manage a few more regular chores around the house. In fact, this weekend, one of their weekly duties became cleaning the bathroom sinks and toilets. The inspiration for this is that recently we seem to be having a rather consistent backslide in remembering to, um, flush. They actually were kind of excited about it yesterday during the training session, arguing about who got to do what. But it wasn't really intended as a punishment, more a reminder that remembering to flush makes that job a lot easier and less gross. And I've also been letting them help me out a bit more in the kitchen, because I figure it's not too early for Abra in particular to start learning how to do some simple food preparation. But it also seems fair and rational that, along with the increased responsibility of becoming older and better able to contribute to your own care and upkeep, comes increased freedom to do fun things on your own without your parents hovering over you. So we've been working to teach them bicycle safety, how to ride safely in the streets versus when you really need to be up on the sidewalks, that type of thing. This is with an eye toward letting them ride their bikes unaccompanied around the neighborhood, down to the library or the playground. But other than up and down our street, they haven't gone anywhere alone yet.

All of this brings me around to the sometimes conflicting nature of our two main jobs as parents. The first is to try to keep our kids safe and out of danger as much as possible. The second is to train them to be self-reliant adults who are responsible members of society and, hopefully, good people in the bargain. On the whole I think we as a society do a great job of carrying out the first responsibility. We're so afraid of something awful happening to our kids that we make everything safe for them and constantly watch over them, far more than when I was growing up. Mind you, I don't advocate a return to the safety standards of 1972. Car seats? Pfft, most of the time we didn't even wear seat belts as we hurtled down the highway. And neither I nor any of my friends even owned a bike helmet, while Abra and Thalia basically aren't allowed to get on their bikes if they're not wearing a brain bucket.

But on some level, the more you protect and shield your children from dangers and potentially disastrous consequences of what they do, the harder time they have learning how to navigate those dangers and learn that their actions have consequences as they get older. Eventually, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, bad crappy stuff is going to happen to your kids, because bad crappy stuff happens to people in life. Part of getting along in life is learning for yourself how to avoid the avoidable bad stuff, and how to cope when bad stuff happens despite your best efforts.

So, we sort of plug along, wrestling a bit every now and then with what new levels of freedom we think they can handle and what new responsibilities we think they should shoulder. We, or at least I, worry along the way that we're not always making the right call. But we do our best and hope for the best, which is kind of what parenting is anyway.