By today’s standards my parents were notoriously of the free-range mentality, albeit within some limitations. Once we were out of school for the summer and had gone through the paper grocery bag full of debris from our desks, we had time to explore and experience life around us. There were some basic rules: don’t go climbing the walls in the stone quarry, don’t go beyond the barb wire fence that surrounded our acreage, don’t bring home any wild animals – especially snakes and field mice. Beyond that, my sister and I were often on our own. There was a price to pay for all of this when Mother handed us each a notebook and pencil to write down all that we saw and did.
We explored the woodlot on the east and west sides of our property, and with the help of some pocketbooks, learned to identify trees, flowers, and birds. We became amateur naturalists. We weren’t allowed to climb the stone quarry walls, but one time we found a loose piece of limestone, slammed it against another rock and looked inside. It was filled with small trilobite fossils. We quit being naturalists, and became rockhounds in search of fossils. We stalked the wild asparagus and brought home a side dish for dinner. And at night, we found the constellations in the sky, and thought about launching our career as astronomers. We filled out several notebooks by the end of the summer, all of them reviewed each evening over dinner.
If it rained, we read. If the weather was too hot to be outside, we went to the library or a museum or used the World Book Encyclopedia to learn about weather. Most of these activities were of our own choosing because our parents warned us they were not going to come to our rescue if we were bored. We worked it out for ourselves with minimal supervision from The Olds. My sister practiced the piano for hours on end. I practiced the accordion until my sister and mother conspired that another interesting (and quieter) hobby might be in order, such as stamp collecting. To escape I signed up for a summer school typing class and one on creative writing.
There was nothing unique about our free-range summers. A classmate started experimenting with paints and eventually became a professional artist. A fellow in my class took an interest in taxidermy until his parents said ‘not in my house’ and I invited him to use our garage where Father promptly said, “not in my garage.” He later moved to Montana and became a skilled blacksmith. Another classmate spent the better part of one summer staring at Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm. We had long thought David was weird, and he was, but a few years later he graduated from a mining school in Montana. He began applying what he learned from the ants to designing mines that were far safer and less likely to collapse. Not only did he have a long and successful career, but he worked around being a high functioning autistic and learned to enjoy life, sort of, at least.
That is why I feel sad for so many young people today. Free-range parenting and free-range children, except in rural areas and smaller cities, is becoming a thing of the past. Children, walking two blocks, all by themselves, to a library – unthinkable? Too dangerous! Children, playing without being under the watchful eye of responsible adults, even in their own backyard – call the child protective services.
Get together with some friends to play some sandlot baseball? Without adult supervision? Without protective gear? No industrial sized first aid kit? Someone might get hurt, better not do it. Besides, some modern day ‘Karen’ will call the police that there is a mob of youngsters with clubs in a vacant lot.
Even back then, most of us never got out the back door without some adult admonishing us to be careful. When a good friend’s mum said that a few times too often, she asked, “Do you think I would be any less careful if you didn’t tell me to be careful?” That made perfect sense to me, but her mother said something about being old enough to know better than to “sass”.
We took part time jobs such as mowing lawns or doing unskilled lawn work. We were after the money, of course, but we learned skills. And we learned about work ethics and saving the money we earned.
It has been said that play is the work of children, but The Olds kept secret to themselves that everything we did was educational, hence the notebooks. We had fun and without realizing it, we learned all during those summer vacations from classrooms.
That’s why I almost feel sorry for the youngest generation. Everything seems to highly structured and organized for them. Worse, they seem to be rushed into adulthood far too fast. They don’t have time to be youngsters. No more chemistry sets with the right ingredients to lift a garage off its foundation. No rock collections with small chunks of radium. The worst of all is that the rotary phone has been replaced by modern versions that reveal the caller’s number. That puts an end to the fun of calling someone and asking if their refrigerator is running. They answer yes, and the caller says, “You’d better go catch it.” Or call the drug store and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Yes? You should let him out!” Today, if someone put an exhaust whistle of a police car they’d probably be sent up the river for ten years, instead of being scolded for disturbing the chief’s nap.
We learned a lot about science on the playground, such as physics when playing on the teeter-totter became a competitive sport and one youngster landed hard on the ground. Or, on the merry-go-round where we discovered physics laws of centrifugal force when someone went flying off and took a header onto hard ground. We learned about global warming when we went down a metal slide on a hot sunny day, and the two globes where the person meets the seat got toasty. We learned aerodynamics when we mistakenly believed we could fly by jumping off a swing. All those fun things are gone now.
It’s a pity children don’t have more free time, more time to play in the dirt, do dumb things, and come home with dirty clothes. It is just plain wrong that too often they are being pushed into adult problems (party politics, religious politics, sexual politics, racial politics) at an early age. They need to be playing and enjoying their childhood.