Whatever Happened to Childhood?

Whatever happened to childhood?

We live in an age of The Expert.  The Experts tell us all sorts of theories, and forgetting that a theory is just that – theoretical, perhaps neither true nor useful – we rush madly to institute each New Theory.

The results may be wonderful.  Most of the time, they’re not so wonderful. And occasionally, they’re awful.

Education is like that. When I was in first grade, my mother took me to the public library so I could take books out of the children’s section.  There were some books set apart on a shelf for the public school children.  They were learning some new fangled method of reading. All the words in the books were misspelled; they were spelled phonetically. That was how they were teaching children to read;  learn the wrong way first, then hopefully you will learn the right way to spell later just by reading ‘real’ books.  My mother slammed the book shut and hurried me over to the Billy and Blaze horse books, the Curious George books and the fairy tales with their correct spelling, sometimes big words, and traditions.  To this day, I thank the nun who taught me in first grade to read and for my Catholic school education; I may be awful at mathematics, but I had the best foundation for education anyone could want. I learned to read well.

When I was a kid in the 1970’s, we scampered around the neighborhoods on Long Island until the street lights came on at dusk. We came home when either of two things happened; we heard our mothers yelling for us from the back porch or the old air raid siren by the Long Island rail road tracks went off for its 6 pm test. Every noon and 6pm it went off.  My mother had dinner on the table at 6. You could set your watch by it. All five of us were expected to slide into our assigned places at the dinner table with clean hands and combed hair by the time that whistle stopped howling or else there’d be hell to pay (or no dessert).

We played like wild things in those days. We invented games at the playground.  I remember one afternoon camping out with my friends on the combined monkey bars and slides. We invented an intricate game, mashing together story lines from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica (the original one with Loren Greene). Garbage cans were Cylons; our finger and thumb were blasters; the monkey bars became our space ship.

I thought about childhood a lot this weekend. After Mass I ran out to the store to buy a few things, since the weekend is my last time in town before Christmas. As I walked the aisles of Rose’s and Wal Mart I saw heaps of toys.  There were stacks of forlorn baby dolls and Barbie dolls, Hot Wheels and classic toys.  The video games looked like a hurricane had gone through.  Every toy bleeped, blinked and moved, had an electronic display, and ate six batteries an hour.

Whatever happened to childhood? Do children still make up games in the playground and pretend garbage cans are aliens? Do they play flashlight tag when the stars come out, or are they being shuffled in the mini van from sports to scouts to lessons again?

I’m no expert. But I do know that my own fairly lonely, atypical childhood was the absolute best childhood I could have had to prepare me to be a writer.  We had no money when I was growing up, so my sister and I sewed Barbie clothes from scraps in my mother’s sewing basket. We made couches for Barbie from toothpaste cartons covered in fabric and scraps of wood.  I made model horse tack from felt I bought at the dime store, beads and velour trim.

I had hours to myself and I filled them with books. I had friends and we played imaginary games with Barbies for hours, creating elaborate plots.

I don’t know about other kids, but I hear more and more about The Experts at schools telling parents they must schedule and supervise, watch and instruct. Yet it is within the silent hours, the hours of solitude in childhood, that I believe imagination is formed….where we can hear the quiet direction of our hearts in solitude. Even among the screaming playground or the flashlight tag romps,  it was unstructured hours that instructed us best.

The Experts tend to forget that.

Whatever happened to childhood?

My sister Ann (left), Mr Snowman, and me (right) on a winter day long ago.