Hey Kids, Get on My Lawn!

Gen-X Parenting Is a Win-Win, Part 3

This is the third of four posts on how we can make family life happier and more appealing for everyone. I believe that Gen-X parenting is not only easier for parents but also better for kids. A win-win! Here are the other posts in the series:

Fight the Fertility Crisis with One Weird Trick

Sometimes You Just Have to Be Thirsty

Hard-Won Wisdom

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We’ve all had run-ins with them—those grouchy codgers who yell “Hey kids, get off my lawn!” My childhood next-door neighbor, Gert, was one such grouch. One summer morning, my brother and I cut across a corner of her yard on our way to Vacation Bible School and noticed a bunch of pinecones under Gert’s pine trees. We could use them for art projects! We were gathering up the pinecones when Gert burst out of her house and started yelling at us to “Put those pinecones back!” Well, ok. We dumped them under the trees and ran away. I have no earthly clue why Gert objected to our taking the pinecones, unless she had an art project of her own in mind?

Anyway, curmudgeons like Gert aside, most of us would be heartened to see kids outside playing together, but such a sight is all too rare these days. We need to get kids onto our lawns! It’s precisely what they—and parents—need for happy and healthy lives.

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash.

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Turn ’Em Loose

Moms who work outside the home spend more hours per week caring for their children than stay-at-home moms spent with their kids a generation ago. Dads, too, now spend more than three times as many hours per week on direct childcare as dads did in the past. And these hours aren’t particularly relaxing either. As the linked article notes, our culture expects parents to be emotionally and energetically involved with their kids at every moment: “Parents feel intense pressure to constantly teach and interact with their children, whereas previous generations spent more time doing adult activities when their children were around.” This situation is stressful for parents, and not particularly good for kids either.

Children don’t actually need constant one-on-one mental stimulation from parents who are trying to turn every experience into an educational opportunity. The whole wide world is a classroom for children. Human beings evolved to discover the world by actively playing in large, mixed-age groups. When kids play together, they learn to cooperate, work out conflicts, and develop resilience. And, as the following memories from my Gen-X and Boomer friends reveal, free-range kids also imbibe valuable lessons that parents might not have anticipated.

Alison learned to deal with fear during bike trips to “the Lane”:

There we would pick blackberries, build forts with hay bales that a farmer had left (I think on purpose for us), paddle in the stream on a hot day. . . . One time a bunch of boys “trapped” us, blocking our way home with their bikes. It was scary but thankfully no more than that. There was a thunderstorm and, like all bullies, the boys were scared and took off.

Beth learned to handle discomfort:

As soon as it was dark, the eight kids in the neighborhood would meet up outside one of our houses IN THE SNOW, and play until about 10pm. We were frozen by the time we came in! I remember many a night of frozen feet hurting like the devil while the circulation came back in. It was glorious!

Rick learned to get lost:

By the time I was twelve, we could take a city bus to downtown, about a forty-five-minute ride, and do whatever we wanted. Once we got on the wrong bus to come home, and by the time we realized our mistake we were stuck somewhere in St. Paul. My dad had to come get us, and he was not happy.

My Swiss friend Franziska learned to depend on the kindness of strangers:

I loved going alone to the playground and spending the whole afternoon there. I met new kids and their parents, who then invited us home. Once [there was] a thunderstorm and a friendly old Italian man took me in, offered me shelter and called my Mum to say where I was.

Everyone liked to play in nature, even in winter—building snow forts, tunneling into snow banks, and throwing snowballs. Suzanne remembers

Walking to and from local skating rinks to ice skate. Packing a brown bag lunch and meeting friends for a day at the park. Going through the woods at the end of our block to the local country club to roll down the snowy, untouched hills. Going to the river to catch tadpoles in glass jars to bring home and watch them develop.

And finally, Lee discovered he could be tricky. His family, like many families back then, had a rule that kids had to go home when the street lights came on. Lee found the switch for the three lights near his house and, as soon as they came on, he turned them back off again because “I loved to try to play just a little longer.”

As for me, I learned to make up crazy games, including “Orphanage”: All the neighborhood kids—ranging from toddlers to me, an eight-year-old—had escaped from an evil orphanage and were on the lam. We harvested “crops” from a marshy area. The older kids taught “school” to the younger kids. We made shelters out of branches. When we got bored, someone would pretend to spot the authorities, yell out, “Orphanage!” and we would run away to set up camp in a new spot.

Risks and Responsibilities

Kids need to take frequent, small risks. They crave adventure, and, like adults, they find meaning in being useful. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of times my mom discovered she was short a few ingredients for dinner and deputized me to bike into town to pick up groceries, for example.

By contrast, here’s a cautionary tale: A guy I knew in college, whom I’ll call Jake, was raised by an overprotective mom. Jake loved to ride his bike, but until he was twelve, his mom would only allow him to bike in the cul-de-sac right in front of his house. On the day Jake turned twelve, he called up his best friend, and the two of them set out from their homes in western Massachusetts. By the time they turned back, they had crossed more than half the state—at which point they discovered that they had been riding downhill with the wind the whole way out, and now they were too tired to bike home. So there they were, two twelve-year-olds, stranded in the middle of nowhere, more than a hundred miles from home.¹

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My husband and I wanted our kids to have free-range childhoods, but in our suburb there were almost never any other kids outside for them to play with. Most of the neighborhood kids were busy with sports and organized activities. So when our family moved overseas more than a decade ago, we were delighted to discover that free-range kids are the norm in Europe. In every European country we have visited, we see kids outside playing together, with nary an adult in sight.² It’s normal for kids as young as six to ride public transportation on their own to school, and for kids beginning around age twelve to head into the city to hang out with friends.

Young teenagers playing chess and soaking up the sun on the terrace of the Bundeshaus (Federal Building) in Bern, Switzerland.

When our son, Noah, was fourteen, he participated in a week-long theater program in Prague. The program required the students to figure out how to get to a different meeting spot every day on their own, using public transportation. Noah didn’t speak Czech and had never lived in a big city before, but he rose to the challenge of navigating the subways, trams, and busses. A few months later, my parents visited, and Noah took charge of showing my dad around the city using public transportation.

My dad and Noah on the Prague metro.

Our daughter, Casey, also thrived on the independence European culture allowed her. Beginning when she was eleven, she would run errands for me at the local shops.³ One year, she decided to surprise me for Mother’s Day. All on her own, she visited a local florist, picked out a bouquet, and paid for it with money she had saved up. Casey was proud of her successful mission, and I was proud of her thoughtfulness and moxie.

Make a Pact

Of course, most of us can’t just up and move overseas in order to access free-range-kid culture. But we can still give our younger kids opportunities for free play with other children, and our older kids more independence and responsibility.

Get the buy-in of other parents. Peter Gray, in his terrific article Thirteen Ways to Enable Free Play and Other Independent Activities for Your Kids, offers us a script:

Get together with your neighbors who have kids. . . . Let the kids play while you talk with the parents about the value of kids’ social free play. Then say something like this: “What if we all, for certain hours every week—maybe every Saturday afternoon or one day a week after school—act like old-fashioned parents and shoo our kids out of the house. And keep the cell phones inside! If enough of us do that, they will find one another and find ways of playing.”

Enlist schools. We can talk with our kids’ schools about the importance of free play at recess and after school. As a former teacher myself, I can attest that most teachers don’t enjoy grading mountains of homework and would be amenable to requests to cut back or eliminate assignments, especially for the sake of more playtime.

Give ’em a chore. Kids like being entrusted with responsibilities. The key is to let kids perform simple chores in their own way, with no micromanaging, bossing, or kibitzing. Let them take total ownership of such household tasks as loading the dishwasher, raking, dusting, and cooking.

Let them quit.

Why not eliminate one activity (or more!) from our kids’ schedules and designate that time for outdoor free play?

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True, there will be the occasional crotchety grump yelling Get off my lawn! But I think these people are actually quite rare. Robert Frost was wrong. No fences make good neighbors. We need to work together and encourage the kids around us to Get on our lawn!

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How about you, readers? What are your favorite childhood memories of playing with other kids and taking on risks and responsibilities? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Bill Watterson’s beloved Calvin and Hobbes cartoons depict the joys, frustrations, and wisdom kids discover in imaginative play. In this cartoon, we see an additional benefit: Free play teaches kids to negotiate and to invent rules, including very silly ones!

I photographed this cartoon from our copy of Bill Watterson, The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1995).

1. Don’t worry—everything turned out ok. Jake’s dad came to get the boys, and Jake’s mom admitted that she had been too strict with him.

2. Free-range culture is easier in Europe than in the US for a couple of practical reasons. Safe, affordable public transportation means that children don’t need their parents to chauffeur them everywhere. And because European colleges don’t consider extracurriculars in admissions decisions, kids only do sports and activities if they are especially interested and talented. The result is that European kids have more time to play with friends.

3. Since this post is already running long, let me go ahead and share a cute story. Our first year in Prague, a US coworker of my husband’s, Mark, visited Prague for the first time, and we invited him to dinner. I sent Casey to the store to pick up some salad, and right after Mark arrived, Casey returned, brandishing an enormous cabbage. Wordlessly, she handed it to me and headed back to her room. “Wait, what?! Where is she going?” asked Mark. When I responded, “Um, her room?” Mark looked momentarily baffled and then laughed. “You have to understand, I don’t know anything about Prague. I thought she was a Czech girl selling cabbages door-to-door!” We all laughed at the idea of Czech girls selling the most disappointing version of Girl Scout cookies imaginable!