Bad Parents
By Tom McGrath
Page 5 of 9
It says an enormous amount about how much child-rearing has changed in only a generation that last year the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report — written by Ken Ginsburg — about what it categorized as one of the biggest current threats to children’s health, a linear descendent of TB, child labor, polio, and all the hazards faced by our forefathers: Today’s kids don’t, um, play enough. The paper notes that play is essential to the cognitive, physical, social and emotional well-being of children. “It’s the way kids master their environment,” says Ginsburg. “It’s the way they overcome difficulty, figure things out, work out new solutions. Unfortunately, we’ve taken that away, because we’ve redefined parenting.”
I must say that the report really resonated with me, at least in part because of my Summer of ’75 baseball experience. Now, I’m not going to claim that my friends and I had a Lord of the Flies thing going on, but in a lot of ways our little baseball league was a world unto itself, one filled with problems that we needed to find solutions to: what to do when you didn’t have enough kids to cover all the positions (solution: hitting the ball to right field is an automatic out!); how to handle it when there’s an argument about whether someone was safe (solution: you guys got the benefit of the doubt last time, we get it this time); what to do when somebody hits the ball in the tall weeds at the back of the field and we can’t find it and it’s the only ball we have and jeez, it’s really getting hot out here (solution: screw this, let’s go drink Dr. Pepper at the little store down the street!). Again, it wasn’t solving nuclear fission, but you saw the beginnings of leadership and conflict resolution and a lot of other things that tend to help you get by in the real world.
And by the way, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I won the RBI title.
WHAT’S FASCINATING IS THAT WHILE many of us over-parent when it comes to promoting achievement, we under-parent when it comes to things parents prior to us were fanatical about for centuries: manners, courtesy, respect, responsibility. It’s not that we’re pro-brat, but that we’re so uncomfortable being figures of authority that we can’t demand those things of our kids. To go back to Al Gore, it’s like we want to be a young person’s ideal of an older person: the cool parent, the one who doesn’t mind if you blow milk out your nose at the dinner table.
You see this not only in parents refusing to tell their kids “no” (as I write this, I’m sitting in a Center City Starbucks where an acquaintance’s three-year-old is playing “Let’s See How Loud I Can Be In a Public Place”), but generally in the way we talk to our children. Where our parents told us that yanking the cat’s tail was wrong, we opt for the less judgmental “That’s not a good choice, sweetie.” Where our parents were content with “Because I said so,” we feel compelled to explain our reasoning, lest we seem dictatorial. The popular book What to Expect the First Year (seven million copies in print) even advises that when speaking to your offspring, it’s best to refer to yourself in the third person — their small brains are confused by “I” and “me” — and that if possible, you should crouch down so you’re both on the same level.
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