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Are we spoiling our kids?
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Are we spoiling our kids?
  It is summer - officially now, as of about 12:45 a.m. Sunday. Summer makes me think of kids, and summer vacations. There are quite a few kids on our street, all ages. I see them going to classes and coming home during the school year. But they’re not playing in the street and yards much this summer. The neighborhood is kind of ghostly without them. I imagine this is partly due to the fact that all their parents work. When both parents work and the kids are too young to be left alone (you know, under 25), summer vacation becomes a burden.  A lot of the young kids are probably spending their summer vacations in childcare or at various camps. The older ones are probably parked in front of a TV or computer, playing games and eating junk food, getting fat and pasty and surly.  How lucky I was to have a full-time mom who let me stay up late in the summer to watch “The Tonight Show,” and sleep late in the mornings, and savor the languid, unhurried ecstasy of summer vacation. But my mom was no pushover. She’d let me sleep late, but once I got up and was fed, her mantra became, “Go outside and play.” When the weather was OK (i.e., lightning wasn’t striking and there were no tornadoes in sight), I went outside and didn’t come in until I was hungry, thirsty, exhausted or forced to. That was the drill. Normally I had no problem with the drill. I would go outside and join my troops, and we’d play cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, war, baseball – virtually anything that pitted us against one another. We were all thin and brown and happy.  The only thing that marred summer vacations was the disappearances: Often our ranks would be decimated as troops were removed from the playing field on road trip vacations to Colorado, Utah, California, Florida, Washington - our forces scattered all over the country. Our family took road-trip vacations too, usually for two or three weeks, but it wasn’t a problem when I was gone – it was only a problem when everyone else was gone. At these times my mother’s “Go outside and play” command would be met by my heartfelt whine: “There’s nobody to play with.” To which she would invariably answer, “Then play with yourself.” If I’d been sophisticated enough to recognize this as a double entendre, I might have snickered. Lucky for me I wasn’t the least bit sophisticated – there’s no telling what Mama would have done to me if I’d snickered. The other common whine of summer, “I’m bored,” didn’t get you much sympathy around my house either. It elicited the stock reply, “If you’re bored, you’re boring.” Usually followed by, “Go outside and play.”  This makes me wonder if I have spoiled my children. I never made them go outside and play when it was this hot – it just seemed cruel. I heard recently from a friend whose two grown sons are living with her and her husband. She worries that she may be spoiling them. But the economy is so bad. And she enjoys their company.  Our two grown sons live with us. One is in college, the other is working and trying to save his money until his company relocates him in Arkansas. I love having them here. I wonder, am I a pushover? I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum too – the kids whose parents kick them out of the house before they’ve even graduated, if they ever do. Several of these kids have lived here, off and on, over the years. Was that spoiling them, or saving them?  Lately I have received reports from one friend of college level students complaining that their teachers’ work plans interfere with their social calendars, that papers turned in late were not accepted, and that the use of source materials not on the teachers’ list of acceptable source materials were – well, not acceptable. In one case, a student’s mother sent the teacher an angry e-mail complaining about her daughter not being able to use a source that wasn’t on the teacher’s list.  I personally have seen young adults show up for job interviews accompanied by a parent. I try and imagine my mother doing this, and can’t. I try to imagine myself doing this, and can’t. I try and imagine one of my boys asking me to do this, and can’t. So I guess I’m not a complete pushover. I do spoil children. I dote on them, love them, and miss them when they’re gone. But they’re making their way in the world – my boys, and the other boys who have nested here briefly through the years. And it’s a scary world. Tough to make a way in.  The saving grace is that they have learned not to expect this treatment from the rest of the world. Only from me. That’s the beauty of being a mom, I guess. Besides, when you start getting really unsure of yourself, and wondering whether you’re ruining your children by not getting them up at five to go milk the cows and then walk six miles to school in the snow (uphill both ways), you can soothe your worries by going back to virtually any point in history and reading what adults then thought of the children of their time. The one I picked is from Heslod, “the father of Greek didactic poetry,” who in the year 700 BC wrote: “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.” ‘nough said.  |
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