GO OUT AND PLAY

My mother was a firm believer that in the summer, children were meant to neither be seen nor heard.  That meant sending the kids out to play, ordering them to stay out of trouble, and then telling them to come home as soon as it began to get dark. At three years old, my brother was too little to be out on his own, so she tied a long rope to his toddler harness, attached it to the clothesline and let him run around the back yard. Our neighbors did the same thing with their German- Shepherd, so the two of them used to run about having a wonderful time.

However, Mother did get her exercise when the neighborhood fire engine would come directly toward the house. Before it made a turn at the road, Mother would start running when she heard the siren. But, of course, my brother started wailing and the dog started howling way before she could arrive.

I was twelve-years old, and entertaining myself all day posed no problem at all. I was free to roam. Nowadays, my mother would have been reported to Child Protective Services. “The neighbors reported your daughter up in their tree eating green apples and staring at the clouds,”  “Was that your daughter riding her bike to the park on her own?” “Are you aware that your daughter jumped into the swimming hole with her clothes on?” Maybe, it was a lame-brained idea when my friends and I used the railroad tracks as a shortcut to the swimming hole, but I survived since Mother never found out about it.

Of course, Mother warned me not to talk to strangers, but that was difficult while selling lemonade on the corner. The park was only three blocks away, and they offered Kiddy-Camp with arts and crafts, and dramatic arts and metal slides (where you could burn your butt if you wore a skirt) and jungle gyms, and swings that when you pumped your legs hard enough you could fly high and touch the sky. I don’t know what the surface of the playground was made of, but when you fell down, skinned knees were a badge of honor.

When it started to get dark, if I wasn’t home, Mother would whistle for me, and I knew it was time for dinner. If I drank my milk, I was allowed to go back outside in order to catch fireflies in a jar---and then let them go.

In the April 2015 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family a study is cited that shows that the amount of time mothers spend with their children, between the ages of 3 and 11, has no impact on how the kids turn out—emotionally, academically or behaviorally.  Don’t know if that is true, but if so---Lucky for me!

In this day and age, parents can be punished for letting their children play alone in a park, or letting them climb on play equipment without supervision. I have a neighbor, whose son spends 6 hours a day staring at a computer screen. I don’t know what he does with the other hours, but I’m sure it involves thumbs and a complicated phone. Oh, Yes, he is very safe, and his Mother drives him everywhere. We didn’t have a car, so that wasn’t an option.

Granted, the world can be a scary place. It never was risk free.  And, that is difficult for parents to accept. However, if a child doesn’t have the freedom to roam, and stays home, and figuratively pulls the covers over her head---she just may smother to death without having lived at all.

Esther Blumenfeld (“Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.”) Steven Wright