Year of Writing 41 Let the kids play.

2/10/12

One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately (besides how badly I want to dismember my cat when she pees on items I own), is the amount of freedom kids have now as compared to when I grew up.  I grew up in a city, Seattle, and can remember being in first grade - walking about half a mile or more to the bus stop to go to school. 
      This is an aside, hence the italics, but I had an incredibly hard time using public restrooms as a       kid, especially the restrooms at school.  Because of this, I would urinate in my pants almost every day walking home.  It totally sucked.  I would make it almost all the way to our back fence, could see it in fact, but then knew I would never be able to jump it without my bladder exploding anyway, so just let loose the torrent.  After a couple of days of this happening at the same spot - an old tall lodgepole pine, it became Pavlovian, and I would piss myself upon viewing the tree.  It took one of my friends riding the bus home with me once to explain "hey, you're a guy, just pee behind the tree."  That boy saved many a pair of pants.  Thanks Eric Abrahamsen.  
      What I have noticed lately, both from teaching, and from my friends with kids, is that something like what I did is completely out of the question.  There is no way a 6 or 7 year-old kid should be walking that far by themselves.  I'm not sure I'm with that.  There was a ton of adventure during those walks, and in the other neighborhood explorations I would go on in my elementary school days.  Chestnut fights, salamander hunts, paper boat chasing... a lot of which I made up on my own as I went.  I hope that in this new culture of fear and mistrust, kids don't completely lose out on adventure and individuality.  That they aren't protected to the point of harm.  I know it's a different world that we live in, but human beings are not fundamentally different than they were then, and my babies deserve to be free too.