Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the late 1970s and ’80s? To children helping themselves to three slices of cake, or ingesting secondhand smoke, or carrying cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words. To those evenings when they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves.1
—Katie Roiphe, In Praise of Messy Lives
Until rather recently an American childhood was filled with a wonderful set of freedoms. Kids not only survived, but grew up and thrived, and led our nation to become the greatest economic power the world has known. School mattered a great deal, and kids worked hard, even very, very hard, but school wasn’t the only thing. Kids were free to roam their world and explore what became of interest to them. Sport was for sport. Play was play. These pursuits all contributed to kids’ cognitive, psychological, and social development, and most of it happened out of the earshot of adults. If you’re a Gen Xer like Katie Roiphe (quoted above), you know this. If you’re a Millennial, this may sound like history or fiction.
Like Roiphe, at times I, too, long for childhood to be exactly as I remember it, and I feel quite a measure of sadness that our kids are raised within the structures of our fears and expectations rather than with those remembered freedoms. I long for my kids to experience the childhood of the past, sensing that they—we, all of us—might be all the better for such freedoms, even though my daily choices often contravene that desire. I wonder if that other childhood might still exist in pockets of this country—in places where life is less like a treadmill and more like a free run, less like a destination and more like a journey—and whether for the rest of us it is retrievable, recoverable, like retro fashion or furniture. When we let our hair down and let loose our most authentic selves, what is it that we really value? I think often that our kids’ childhoods are as much about us as they are about them.
One day in 2008 as I made my way through the Stanford campus, I came upon a mother and daughter looking lost so I asked if I could help. “Yes,” the mother replied. “We’re looking for the Electrical Engineering building.” “Ah. It’s down this way and over there,” I explained, pointing. Always eager to engage with a potential new student, I then tried to engage the daughter in dialogue without much success, while the mother continued to chat with me about her daughter’s academic plans. When we were through, the daughter offered a small nervous wave of thanks or departure, and we parted.
In the course of our exchange, I learned the younger woman was not a teenage visitor but a college graduate in her mid-twenties interested in doing a PhD. And her mother was doing all the talking.
In a 2014 opinion piece, New York Times contributor Jon Grinspan compared parenting today to parenting of yesteryear and asked whether today’s manner of overparenting articulates values we can be proud of as Americans. “There is a side of contemporary American culture—fearful, litigious, controlling—that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation.”2 What we do brag about is our kids’ perfectness even as simultaneously we evince so little actual faith in their ability to do the work of living life on their own, the way every prior generation of humans somehow has. Instead of a belief in them, we have great faith that our skills, plans, and dreams are the right tools for constructing their lives.
“There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings,” said German writer, poet, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It’s time to start examining what it means to give our kid wings. It’s time to imagine what we hope they’ll be able to be and do when they’ve grown, left the nest, and gone wherever the wind takes them. It’s time to ask whether parents and children can love one another forever but lead separate lives, and what can be gained when that happens.
It’s rather wonderful that a mother had the time and inclination to accompany her grown daughter to visit grad programs. It’s even more wonderful that the daughter welcomes the mother’s participation. Avery was about seven when I observed this mother-daughter pair, and as I continued on toward my meeting, I found myself wondering what role I would be playing in Avery’s life when she was in her mid-twenties. I can imagine wanting to be there for her exciting adventures—maybe to help, but more just to admire my lovely girl as she makes her way through the world.
Still, another part of me took a pause. I would want Avery to be able to trek to a grad program all by herself—to call me about it with great breathless enthusiasm in her voice, sure, but to experience the trip, its details, its challenges, and its joys on her own. As the mother and daughter turned the corner toward the Engineering Quad, I wondered whether that kind of separation is even realistic anymore, after childhoods that feature the omnipresence of parents well into the years of adulthood.
Thinking back on the thousands of young people I’ve known from Stanford and my community, and keeping those two I’m trying to raise very much in mind, I see that we want everything to be good and comfortable for our children. But that isn’t the reality of the world we’re preparing them for. They don’t learn to make choices or to construct possibility from the vacuum of boredom. They don’t learn responsibility or accountability for their own behaviors. They don’t get the chance to stumble or build resilience. They feel supremely accomplished for things they really haven’t achieved on their own or, in the alternative, believe they are incapable of accomplishing things without us. And there’s no buffer from the stress. There’s no freedom. No play. Hell-bent on removing all risks of life and on catapulting them into the college with the right brand name, we’ve robbed our kids of the chance to construct and know their own selves. You might say we’ve mortgaged their childhood in exchange for the future we imagine for them—a debt that can never be repaid.