Colin McEnroe Show: A Wondrous Gazetteer Of Music, Parenting And Language
The free range kids movement and a new piece premiering at the HSO.
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Violinist Karina Canellakis
Photo:Chion Wolf
HSO Music Director Edward Cumming
Photo:Chion Wolf
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Colin McEnroe Show: A Wondrous Gazetteer Of Music, Parenting And Language
The post World War II wave of American parents were pretty laissez-faire. My own were hovering and hypercontrolling by the standards of the day, but even so, they assumed it was perfectly fine for me to disappear from the house at the start of every summer day, nip back for lunch, and disappear again until dinner time.
There were no cell phones; there was no way to track me. At the age of nine, I bounced from the woods to the park to side roads all day long, and my parents were only dimly interested in my whereabouts.
It's different now. I'm not sure it has to be, but it is. Kids seem to live in a matrix of supervision and monitoring.
Lenore Skenazy thinks we overdo it and, as you'll hear today, she's rebelling.
Charles Ives, another part of our show today, grew up with a father who let him be a free range music consumer in 1880.
You can join the conversation. Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.
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Listener E-mail from Phil
I agree with your guest - I'm the divorced father of a 10-year-old boy, and it seems that there are many societal factors making our kids overly dependent and incapable of independent play. Part is definitely the "helicopter parent," but there's a lot more - while I taught my son how to use a computer while still a toddler, I have to limit his electronics time since the more he's on video games (in other households), he completely loses any initiative or imagination. Also, we used to live in a condo where many kids, mostly unsupervised and some a tad too "streetwise" would nevertheless organize themselves into impromptu kickball and dodgeball or "man-hunt" teams like when I was a kid. There was never a real "problem," but eventually they would almost always be thwarted by kid-hating residents. I would watch from the periphery, a hundred yards or so away, but never once had to step in other than telling the kids not to enter a stranger's condo. But when someone would eventually stop whatever game the kids were playing, it struck me as incredibly stupid - they'll have the gall to act surprised when kids, without a productive or harmless outlet, start vandalizing the complex, or worse.
Listener E-mail from Karl
I am curious how three disparate ideas may weave into this "not playing enough outdoors" idea.
1) There's the "OMG! Child kidnapped by strangers!!11" stories on the newscasts. I can't shake the theory that TV news is designed to make suburbanites like myself ever more scared about the world around us.
2) There's over-regimentation and specialization of kids' games at ever-earlier ages.
3) There's the atomization of the suburbs, coupled with decreasing sizes of households, leading to my thought that to get a critical mass of kids together, alike enough in size, age and talent, means they can't get there by walking or cycling any longer and have to be driven by a parent.
Don't kids get to play pickup anything anymore and get there by themselves?
Karl in Bloomfield
PS I can't stand that ad for a mom letting her teenaged daughter go shopping "alone" after driving her to the indoor mall without having a GPS-capable Smartphone tracking her every step.
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