Contrary to common misconception, city kids do indeed have backyards. We even had a name for ours: New York.
My little grade-school gang and I enjoyed a free-range childhood we exploited with an adventurous spirit influenced in equal measure by the intrepid curiosity of Indiana Jones and the gleeful tricksterism of Axel Foley. We discovered secret subbasements hidden in the cobwebbed bowels of the Bronx’s mammoth apartment complexes. We explored the abandoned housing/condominium developments commissioned during the 1980s building boom then subsequently left to rot and ruin after the ’87 Wall Street crash. We scaled the vertiginous understructure of the Henry Hudson Bridge. We even dressed up as Boy Scouts and sold candy in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. (Karmically, we never got to spend our ill-gotten gains. Of our quartet, we selected the guy whose mother was least likely to find the cash—we made over $70 in profit, an astronomical sum for four kids in 1990 who couldn’t afford a slice of pizza between them—and stashed it at his place. She found it anyway, though, and blew it on booze.)
There’s so much I could say about those days, but I could in no way express my sentiments more truthfully or concisely than Stephen King’s plainspoken summation from The Body: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
It didn’t take age and perspective to recognize how special our fellowship was—I knew that and cherished it even then—but I can’t say I fully appreciated just how lucky we were to have the Biggest City in the World as our personal playground until I’d lived elsewhere. Take my home of the past seventeen years: L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, population 1.77 million. Every square block of it (that isn’t a strip mall) looks exactly like this:
No hidden facets. No winding streets or towering edifices, no sidewalk cellar doors or obscured alleyways promising adventure to those willing to probe parts unseen. Hell, by this vantage, the Valley doesn’t look much different from a Monopoly board, with all its identical houses tidily arranged side by side on rectangular lots. Maybe it’s shamefully condescending of me, but I feel sorry for kids who have to grow up here. What about the above inspires or invites exploration the way New York does?
Or should I perhaps say did? It’s possible, upon recent observation, that culture is irreversibly changing.
NO TRESPASSING
I grew up on what’s known as a “superblock,” a continuous city block that spans the length of multiple streets and avenues. Lining the perimeter is a series of postwar multistory residential buildings, within which hides a warren of playgrounds and parking lots, woodlands and walkways. I was back there walking my dog over Christmas vacation when I noticed this sign posted by the very playground where my kid sister and best friend and I used to playact as Batgirl, Batman, and Robin:
Before its rubber-coated renovation, this was an old-school alloy-and-asphalt deathtrap!
To be clear: This playground is not in public view. You wouldn’t happen to spot it randomly from the street, or even accidentally stumble upon it; to find it, you’d have to already know where it is. It’s actually quite inconvenient to get to, being that it’s up a steep hill and behind a copse of eight-story trees. Technically, it’s the private property of the co-op adjacent to the one in which we grew up (pictured in the right-hand background), but we played there every day till I was nine or so, and no one ever asked us to leave. On the contrary, like Cheers, they were always glad you came.
Not now, it seems. That sign isn’t merely unwelcoming, it’s borderline threatening. And it’s far from anomalous. The more I walked around the neighborhood, the more posted prohibitions I encountered, sometimes even twice on the same fence:
Rooftops are now universally secured with alarmed push-bar locks. The secret, hidden entrances to at least two of those aforementioned subbasements have since been sealed over. Streets with egresses on either side are nonetheless marked DEAD END or NO OUTLET. Outdoor dome cameras have sprouted across the face of building after building like an outbreak of blackheads.
The message is clear: Stay where you belong, and—more to the point—stay out of where you don’t. The New York City where I came of age was an open urban range: fences were there to be climbed; NO TRESPASSING signage, to the extent there was any, was to be ignored (and it was never enforced, anyhow); the only security camera I’d ever seen overlooked the quad at Manhattan College, which was always teeming with activity so what was even the point?
By Trollness – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
All of which leaves me wondering: Would my kind of boyhood adventures even be possible in 2019?
INNOCENCE LOST
My more romantic proclivities notwithstanding, I certainly acknowledge the confluence of geopolitical and technological developments that have conspired since the turn of the millennium to create our new reality, one more paranoid and, correspondingly, more restrictive. Nearly two decades after 9/11, American metropolises like New York prudently if regrettably necessarily remain in a permanent state of hypervigilance. The Internet, meanwhile, has empowered playground-stalking perverts with investigatory prowess once the exclusive province of private investigators. (Statistically, of course, incidents of abduction remain exceedingly rare, but 450 episodes of SVU in constant rotation on cable television, exploiting some of our deepest anxieties—and Law & Order is far from the only piece of popular entertainment irresponsibly peddling in pernicious worldviews—have us seeing sex fiends on every street corner.)
Such is a recurring theme of history, I suppose: Many of the freedoms we enjoyed in the past—even the very recent past—have been irretrievably lost to the march of time.
And I wonder if one of them is the freedom of childhood itself, “a freedom for kids to be kids in an active physical universe separate from their parents and other adults but still in the real world, a rich kid-world that . . . has all but disappeared in the 21st century” (Dan Simmons, introduction to Summer of Night, [New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011], vii)? Because to counter those existential hazards—be them real, perceived, or exaggerated—smartphones have conveniently supplied digital tethers to our children, shifting their free-roaming space from the streets to the sofa, and serving as tracking devices on those rare occasions they are required to stray from home base. (Such parent-tempting tech would’ve impeded, to comically understate it, my little unauthorized fundraiser at the Waldorf.) And intensive parenting—a.k.a. “helicopter parenting”—has since become the pervasive philosophical and procedural reaction to a dangerous and economically competitive world.
Yes, circumstances out of our control have changed—terrorism and technological innovation produced a twenty-first century a far cry from the one we’d envisioned—but, in response, those within our control have changed in kind, and it’s worth asking how the institution of childhood has been adversely affected by the surveillance-state practices parents have imposed on it, practices adapted from those of society at large. Because when we adopt a reactionary (and dubiously rational) position that discourages, restricts, inhibits, and even outright prohibits free-range exploration of the physical world children inhabit—often in the interest of keeping them “safe” and “constructively” busy—it begs the question: Are we depriving them of a developmental rite of passage just so we can, ya know, feel a little safer, a little less anxious, a little more in control?
“Adults override their common sense—much less the memories of their own times as free kids aged eleven and thereabouts, a time filled with freedom to roam and play with other kids—and err on the side of caution.
And they make their children prisoners.
And now those prisoners, like those in a mental asylum, are kept calm and in the house by the tranquilizing drugs of cell phones, computers, iPads, iPods, TVs, texting, and other glass teats.
But, I argue to this day . . . that if you adults steal the space and time of childhood, you steal childhood itself.”
ibid., xvi
My generation has been an historically selfish and puerile one, to be sure: We hijacked the popular culture and turned it into an immutable museum exhibit of our childhood favorites—superheroes and Star Wars, Terminator and Transformers, Halloween and He-Man—and in doing so have unapologetically enjoined this era from developing a cultural identity of its own. A stolen culture is bad enough per se, but to venerate our own childhood—to preserve and prolong both a cultural period and developmental phase incontrovertibly meant to be transitory—as we actively (if arguably not maliciously) steal the rite of childhood itself out from under the next generation is, straight up, an unforgivable sin.
The time has come for us to ask the mirror: Will a hereditary idiopathy of arrested development be the enduring legacy of Generation X?
ADVENTURES WITHOUT BABYSITTING
My late father, who grew up in the next neighborhood over from the one I did, used to regale me with wondrous stories of his own preadolescent adventures on the streets of New York, my favorite being the one in which he and his two pals, all of ten at the time, skipped school and took the train out to Queens, sneaking into the 1939 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows to see Johnny Weissmuller, famous for having played Tarzan in a dozen movies, perform in the Aquacade exhibition. They were eventually chased out by security guards, trampling the rose garden as they fled the fairgrounds.
Appreciably more than Indiana Jones or Axel Foley, my father was the primary inspiration behind my own boyhood exploits: His stories taught me to be bold, Think Big, and have fun—because that rich kid-world only gets to be experienced for one fleet season of your life. And you sure as hell don’t wanna miss it.
I sometimes think—though I never got a chance to ask him—Dad knew what he was doing when he told me those stories; that he wasn’t merely sharing an amusing anecdote and isn’t that hilarious, but that he was—subtly, cleverly, and with no small measure of plausible deniability—inculcating a childhood rite of passage in his youngest son, nearly fifty years his junior, the only one of three to be raised in the city. That, if anything, was the special father-son bond he and I shared: We were both city kids.
The tenement on Sherman Avenue in Manhattan where my father grew up (05-23-2011)
But… implicit in his suggestion was that this was a rite I’d have to seek out and experience on my own; unlike, say, my first Major League ballgame, he couldn’t take me—he could only throw a chin in the right direction and hope my receptive ten-year-old mind took his meaning. Such persuasion by illustration is, after all, what the best kind of storytellers do.
And perhaps the best kind of parents, too. Maybe the World’s Fair story, and the high bar it set for me, stands as testament that some of the wisest, most selfless acts of parenting are the ones that operate invisibly—that encourage and even incite independent action by children, and correspondingly encourage and incite trust on the part of the parent that they’ll make it back home okay. God knows my mother practiced such modes of parenting herself: She routinely—and often visibly reluctantly—vetoed her own on-point intuition to let me hang out with the boys down on Irwin Avenue (provided, of course, I acquiesced to a semantic stipulation and didn’t refer to it as “hanging out”—that, after all, was what juvenile delinquents and “shanty Irish” did).
By parenting the way they did, and consciously choosing to raise us in the city after literally every other relative (on both sides) had split for the suburbs of Jersey and the Island, they gave us the space and time required for a blessedly happy childhood—one I wouldn’t have traded with anyone, then or now. Those aren’t conditions created by putting up no-trespassing signs, but by taking them down; it isn’t something fostered by giving our children slack on their leashes—via GPS-enabled chaperones—but by severing those shackles outright. The out-of-our-hands complexities of modern existence, from global terrorism to wealth inequality, have forced us to sacrifice enough of our freedoms, but if, selfishly and wantonly, we make the freedom of childhood one of those lambs, that’s on us.
Great post, Sean, and one I can relate to. I too was a free range kid (we all were back then) and though I grew up rurally, I had the same freedom to explore, be imaginative, and take fun/scary kid-like risks. My parents would kick us out in the morning and expect us home by dinner. There was a continually morphing “gang” of us that roamed the neighborhood and woods. It was glorious.
I’m not entirely sure what happened that has made us, as a nation, so much more fear-based when it comes to our kids. Fear-based politics and the demonizing of the “other,” the influence of violence on TV and in movies, or the real statistics of sexual abuse of children and young people, or all three. My daughter recently asked me at what age did I think my grandson could walk the four blocks to school without her. My response was 16! Ha ha. Alone or with a friend (or three) made a big difference in my real answer.
There’s value, I agree, in that free ranging, an opportunity to practice choices and independence, to face challenges, incite the imagination, and rely not on our parents but on ourselves and our peers. Important stepping stones on the path to adulthood that are practiced through play. I hope that kids are finding a way to experience at least some of that freedom. A subject worth contemplation. 🙂
Oh, what a characteristically lovely and thoughtful response, Diana. Thank you. Thanks for sharing some of your own happy memories of youth.
I suspect city kids and rural kids, occupying equal yet opposite ends of the circumstantial spectrum, probably have (had?) it best. The city — particularly a metropolis like New York — afforded us an endless labyrinth of architectural penetralia to explore, to say nothing of the cultural opportunities that abound in a urban area. Rural kids — and I speak as someone who spent a fair amount of my preadolescence free-roaming the wooded expanse of the Pocono Mountains — have the freedom to ride their bikes miles upon miles, to go for a swim at the lake, to sleighride down unobstructed hills, to fish and to hike. Both are equally rich, if entirely different, formative experiences.
I imagine suburban kids are the ones who get the short end of the stick, because they have neither the open spaces of the country nor the bustling streets of the city. That’s what I think when I drive through the San Fernando Valley: What the fuck do twelve-year-olds do around here? (From what I glean from peers, most of those kids have their whole days preprogrammed for them, so I suppose that’s my answer.) There’s a reason, after all, why the Valley became the PR epicenter of the “shopping-mall culture” so abjectly exalted in 1980s movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl — it’s the only goddamn place to go in the ‘burbs!
One could probably fill a book examining all the reasons why the parenting philosophy shifted, within the span of a single generation, from one in which children were provided for to the current (unsustainable) mode of catering to them. Fear-based politics have likely played a part. (“Build the Wall!” is its own synonym for “No Trespassing,” right?) Economic anxiety is surely a factor — wanting to make sure your kids have an academic edge in a competitive world. (Hence the proliferation of charter schools.) “Parent-shaming” — that’s a thing, too, I recently learned. I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject, nor do I consider this post to be a comprehensive dissertation on it; I simply had a visceral response to that sign they posted outside my old playground and wrote a very personal compare-and-contrast contemplation. (For more on the subject, I recommend these two recent Times articles: “The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting” and “Let Children Get Bored Again.”)
Not being a parent myself, I genuinely do wonder what, if anything, today’s twelve-year-olds do in an environment so inhospitable to adult-free exploration. My father’s adventures and my own were separated by a span of half a century, but they both took place in a world of open doors and peer-to-peer interactions — a world that seems to be eroding on account of a host of restrictions imposed by overreactive adults. And I know from experience that whenever people feel powerless, they begin exercising dominion over those things in their control. In other words: They go after false targets. And that’s a recipe for disaster under any circumstances, much less the high-stakes enterprise of parenting children.
So when it comes to over-programming their kids, or keeping tabs on them via smartphone, or in anyway restricting their freedoms, perhaps adults would be wise to stop and ask if we’re doing it to ensure their safety or to abate our anxiety. If the latter, consider the price of that — and who winds up paying it.
Thanks for your engagement, Diana. (And congratulations on how wildly successful your monthly writing-prompt initiative has been over at Myths of the Mirror! You’ve unearthed a cornucopia of creativity!)
If parents today gave their children the freedoms my parents gave me and my brothers (almost a half century ago), they’d be arrested. Ha ha. And I say that honestly. We were lucky we didn’t get injured for killed with some of our escapades.
And thanks about the success of the new prompts. It’s completely changed my blog, but all in fun ways. 🙂
Oh, ditto, Diana! That my friends and I somehow entirely avoided serious trouble and/or serious injury is a miracle! And yes: Parents that permit the kind of freedom you and I took for granted do sometimes face actual legal consequences for it, though there has been a growing backlash against that, like the law Utah passed last year that stipulates it “is not a crime for parents to let their children play unsupervised in a park or walk home from school alone,” per The New York Times. I guess that’s what happens anytime a pendulum swings too far in one direction; the universe has a way of self-correcting, and there’s reassurance to be drawn from that.
Absolutely. I’ve written in the past about the difference between my own childhood of playing in construction sites and breaking into neighbours’ houses through the milk door compared to my fear of letting him walk to the corner store by himself, and why (see Playground Safety if you haven’t seen that one). I don’t know that my fear and vigilance made him any safer that I was, and it certainly didn’t make me feel any better.
“Playground Safety” is a post that predates my awareness of your blog, Suzanne, but I just read it (and slugged in a hyperlink to it in your comment above). I love your dad’s characterization of his parenting approach as “Carefully supervised neglect”! It’s a hell of a smarter philosophy — and even catchier-sounding, to boot — than “helicopter parenting”!
I could relate to so many experiences in your post, from being sent down to the Avenue to buy cigarettes for my father (and every so often he’d forget — or perhaps “forget” — to ask for the change), to breaking into our neighbors’ house when they were gone for the day. The latter story is particularly amusing: Two members of my “gang” (they were brothers) lived in a gorgeous four-family prewar home down the hill in Kingsbridge (they were dirt-poor, but the grandmother owned the place free and clear), and in the house next door was a Greek family with two boys about our age: Semos and Teddy. Anyway, Semos and Teddy would slip into our house (there were no locks on any of the doors) while we were away (or sometimes even asleep) and steal our toys, and then we’d wait till they were gone and climb through their kitchen window to take back our shit! This went on for years! That’s the sort of thing you could in no way get away with nowadays — even though it was, in the end, harmless fun — for so many reasons, not least of which is that lots of people now have GoPro cameras in their homes that they monitor remotely via smartphone! I mean, there’s home security, and then there’s surveillance-state paranoia, and it’s possible we’re veering into the latter…
With respect to your closing comment (“I don’t know that my fear and vigilance made him any safer that I was, and it certainly didn’t make me feel any better”), that goes to what I said in my reply to Diana above: If it isn’t making them safer and only serves to make us feel better — and in your instance, not even that — maybe it’s time to reconsider our strategy. We collectively implemented “helicopter parenting,” after all; we can just as easily decide to decommission it for something else. Like capitalism, it isn’t a God-given absolute even though its pervasiveness makes it seem like one; it’s a program, created by humans, and it can be reprogrammed or replaced at any time. That sort of cultural change starts with one parent — or one set of parents — deciding to do things differently. The same mindset that unfortunately gave rise to the anti-vaccine movement can be appropriated to undermine the anti–free range outlook. Legislative steps are, in fact, already being taken in that direction. We can reclaim a saner approach to parenting that makes both the adults and the kids happier and emotionally healthier, we just have to decide, big and scary though such ideological change can be, it’s an initiative worth undertaking.
You definitely would have been part of our gang–you and me going through the milk door–what a time we would have had!
You bet, my friend! That was the great thing about those preadolescent “gangs”: All were welcome. The more, the merrier! It’s why that King quote from The Body (also used as the closing line of the movie) resonates with me so profoundly: The friendships we experience at twelve (give and take) are as good as it gets. That isn’t to say adult relationships can’t be deep and meaningful and irreplaceable, but that twelve-year-old fellowship is like none other. And it does require a time and space all its own, so let’s make sure we adults still allow for that.
Freedom! That’s what we all sought as kids in our adventures to places we’re told we ought not be, right? Maybe even a little bit of “safe” danger? I grew up in a small town, but spent many hours and days nosing around places I didn’t belong–crossing the rock dam, canoeing down the river, hiding in new construction. Your backyard adventures brought me right back to my own. Whether your adventures took place in the biggest city in the country or the tiniest town, I bet the backyard feeling was similar. I loved your photos in this post, Sean.
Well said, Wendy: There’s a very particular, euphoric freedom we experience at age twelve (give or take), out on our own with our friends, that’s universally relatable regardless of where we came of age. It’s certainly the reason I connected so powerfully with Stand by Me when I first saw it at twelve years old in 1988, despite the fact that it was set in rural Oregon of the 1950s; I absolutely recognized apples-to-apples analogs of my gang with the kids in that movie: the creatively-inclined one; the kid with criminally-unrecognized potential because of his family’s lower-class pedigree; the militaristic boy with crippling daddy issues; the goofball sidekick — that was us to a T.
The adventures and camaraderie of that particular age are a developmental experience we all relate to regardless of gender, or where we were raised, or what our socioeconomic status was, and it’s a rite of passage to which we’re all entitled. I do think we’ve been depriving the children of the twenty-first century of that rite — though, as someone who works directly with kids, you would know better than I — and I’m challenging parents my age to be better than that, to be more considerate of their own children’s right to childhood.
And thanks for the nice compliment about the photos! Given how verbose some of my essays can be, a little visual variety never hurts! (That’s a trick I learned as a screenwriter: Whenever I would prepare pitch documents — a beat-for-beat outline of the plot — I would break up the text with still-frames from relevant movies that helped “tell the story.”) The photo of the playground was the inspiration for the entire piece, but during the composition I thought it also might be nice to include the one of my father’s old building in Inwood, which I snapped on a lark back in 2011. You never know when that stuff’s gonna come in handy!
As someone who was a kid basically at the same time you were, Sean, as well as someone who has been a mentor for 30 years—and thus heavily involved with and able to observe up close the changes in parenting over the decades—I’m with you.
The idea that “anyone who crosses this line intends harm” got us where we are collectively today not only as parents but as a country (in ways you expressed vividly and to which I don’t need to add).
I’m not sure how I’d characterize where I grew up. It wasn’t city, rural or suburbs, but rather something in between. But we explored, both in our imaginations in quieter ways (like creating the Muppet Show dioramas I’ve talked about a couple times on my blog, or recording our own “radio shows”) to more expansive adventures.
We played in the sandpits (where we found an entire dead horse and caught a six-foot snake).
We wandered out a mile into the woods behind my grandmother’s house to a swamp where giant snapper turtles lived (shells three feet in diameter or more).
I remember breaking into the abandoned hotel (The Shining anyone?) and going down into the pitch-black basement where by the light of m pen light I saw a poor trapped cat I tried to save… only to find out when I had it cornered and was reaching down to pick it up that it was a very large—and by that time, very agitated and snarling—opossum.
I remember the peculiar mix of fear and exhilaration that came with those escapades. And looking back, what they instilled in me was a sense that I could face fear and be OK. That the unknown wasn’t an enemy. That visceral learning is better than book knowledge. And that all has served me well for a lifetime.
So glad to have you weigh-in on this conversation, Erik, specifically because you mentor kids, and because you yourself have proactively tried to remain childlike.
Yes, I think we’ve become more isolationist — more paranoid and suspicious — a reality now reflected in every facet of our culture, from our public policy to our social media to our popular entertainments to our parenting praxes. For what, exactly? Statistically, we’re as safe — or safer — than at any point in modern history. And certainly any privacy that’s been relinquished in the Digital Age has been done willingly, so that’s a contradiction we need to come to terms with: that we can be so mistrustful of our neighbors and yet so unguarded re: the information we share publicly. It seems that if we found a more sensible balance, we wouldn’t have to sacrifice so many liberties in the name of “keeping safe.”
When I think back on the adventures of childhood, I do so through the admittedly tendentious lens of a city kid; I know how wonderful my own experiences were, and therefore can’t imagine another could be just as special or satisfying. But as I’ve expressed in different ways in my replies to Diana, Suzanne, and Wendy above, the free-roaming experiences and camaraderie of preadolescence are a developmental rite of passage to which we all relate regardless of gender, geography, socioeconomics, or era. Everyone’s story is different… but the same. All of us tasted that special freedom, the one Dan Simmons so eloquently defines as that “freedom for kids to be kids in an active physical universe separate from their parents and other adults but still in the real world, a rich kid-world.” And as a storyteller, I think we Xers need to share more of those personal anecdotes with each other, more often and openly, to remind one another — and ourselves foremost — of how emotionally and developmentally valuable that rite is, and how our own needless practices of restrictive parenting may very well be depriving our kids from their shot at undertaking it.
To that end, I have my own anecdote not at all dissimilar from your opossum episode that quite recently found its way into a short story I’m currently writing: a dark fantasy about a pair of 12-year-olds who come into possession of a magical totem — a sort of junior Tales from the Crypt yarn, if you like. Even though it’s squarely in my genre milieu — supernatural horror — it draws on some real-life experiences in order to convey an authentic sense of, as you put it, that particular mix of fear and exhilaration produced by those wonderful preadolescent escapades. Now more than ever, we need to tell those stories — to remind ourselves to allow the time and space for the next generation(s) to have those universal experiences for themselves.
Thanks for sharing some of yours, pal, and the life lessons you drew from them. Hope all is well by you, and my best for a Happy Saint Patrick’s Day up there in Boston!
P.S. I took the unsolicited initiative to slug in a hyperlink in your comment above to your wonderful review of Mary Poppins Returns, lest anyone think you were self-promoting!
Thanks for the link, Sean.
I want to add something that escaped me when I first posted. My dangers came from within, not without. Abuse happened at home or within the cult-like church and school I was part of, not from “those people out there.” In many ways, we were safer “out there,” scrambling up—and then jumping off—piles of metal at the junk yard, climbing to the precarious “tippy-top” of too-tall pines, or rummaging around in abandoned hotels. The reasons for ever wanting to keep us in were so “those people out there” had less of a chance of finding out what was going on “in here.”
We explored to remind ourselves that the world was big and wondrous and worthwhile in the face of demons close to home that would say otherwise. People ask me often how I “turned out so normal” given my upbringing; and a large part of that answer is that we sneaked off and saw the rest of the world too, learned real things, met cool people and figured out that we could survive just about anything.
Beautifully expressed, Erik — though I would expect nothing less!
Yes, institutions exist in part to condition and control behavior, be it school, church, Scouts, street gangs, government, what have you. (I should note that this isn’t inherently a bad thing — institutionalized socialization allows for the kind of tacit social contracts required to establish and sustain civilized society — but like any other tool, it can be used malignantly. That’s a much longer conversation, though, for another occasion.)
What kid-world offers, in contrast, is a time and space free of the constraints of formal institutions (those of home, school, and church) and their agendas (good, bad, or neutral) to indulge the thrill of discovery without fear of punishment, judgment, or manipulation. (I’m reminded of a lyric from the old Who song “Join Together” that kind of applies: “You don’t have to play/You can follow or lead the way/Oh won’t you join together with the band.”)
Children by and large don’t have “secret agendas,” but all that changes with the onset of puberty: Biological imperatives and psychological complexities inevitably pollute the purity of preadolescence. That’s unavoidable, but it is also the reason we never again have friends like the ones we had when we were twelve: You get that brief-as-hell window after childhood but before adolescence when you have newfound agency and mobility, but your ambitions are still innocent and communal; life is just about the next group adventure, whether it’s exploring an abandoned construction site, or playing a neighborhood-wide game of street tag, or riding bikes together in the gravel pits. That’s the special, unconditional covenant of preadolescence.
As such, it isn’t merely a developmental rite; it’s a transitional phase, too — a metamorphosis from one stage of physical and psychological evolution to another. And it’s really something best experienced with peers going through it at the same time — those who understand it intuitively and emotionally even if they haven’t yet intellectualized it. Accordingly, the most understanding thing an adult or parent can do to facilitate that process, then, is to simply give it the time and space it requires to unfold. Because as that one-time-only experience teaches us the world is big and wondrous and worthwhile, it becomes itself a rite of passage as big and wondrous and worthwhile in its own right.
This jumped out at me: “…we never again have friends like the ones we had when we were twelve: You get that brief-as-hell window after childhood but before adolescence when you have newfound agency and mobility, but your ambitions are still innocent and communal…” That pretty much sums it up. You’re awkwardly bringing up stuff all the time about “sex and adult stuff,” learning information (or misinformation) from one another while you’re exploring all that other stuff; and yet you’re at an age where it’s pure curiosity (or at least it used to be in my day) and not that “biological imperative” you speak of. And, yes, that window is certainly “brief as hell.”
That’s right: Even sex is innocent at that stage, because it’s a purely curiosity-driven interest, not yet a hormonally driven preoccupation. When Harry Met Sally… (from Stand by Me director Rob Reiner, no less) long ago made the persuasive case that sex inevitably factors into all adult relationships to one degree or another… and that complicates everything. The desire for/pursuit of romantic encounters, and the emotional complexities and sometimes even jealousies that arise from that, complicates interpersonal dynamics in a way we spend many years learning to navigate gracefully (or at least somewhat competently). That, I think, is one of the many challenges of adolescence. For a variety of reasons, I certainly spent my teenage years longing for the simplicity of the friendships I had at twelve — kind of wondering where they went, you know?
I’ll say this, though: Members of our grade-school gang rotated in and out, but I had three friends at that age (one of whom you’ve actually met, Erik) who were true blues — simply the best pals a twelve-year-old boy could’ve asked for. I lost touch with two of them for a few years in high school/college — teenage angst and family dysfunction finally took its toll on those relationships — but we found each other again right around the turn of the millennium, and have since stayed close as ever. They were and are the best friends I’ve ever had. And though our friendships don’t enjoy the same summer-breeze simplicity we experienced back in the day, complexity has endowed them with an earthy autumnal richness that’s let them mature as we’ve matured, and given us something reliable — even, in its way, pure — in a world of constant change and shifting alliances. We enjoy a level of trust with one another that’s quite unique — that I’ve never experienced with any friends I’ve made in adulthood — because we have a special shared history that goes back to a time before all the bullshit. Sure, the days of tomfoolery and boyhood adventure are long since over, but thirty years later, here we are — still goin’ strong. As far as trade-offs go, that’s about as good as they get.
I agree. This was a wonderful post.
Well, thank you, Lydia, for saying so — and for spending a bit of your day on this post! I don’t take that for granted, and I welcome your input anytime you want to drop by again. As a fellow speculative author, I’m delighted to now be aware of your blog, and eager to read some of your insights on the genre of science fiction!
Hi Sean!
I think I can relate in a way. I grew up in a very small town in South-Africa and I can still remember our little gang riding our bikes in the afternoon, playing cricket until dusk set in, doing all the kid-stuff that we could outside (those days our parents believed you should play outside). Today things are so different. People are too scared to leave their children outside alone. It’s so sad.
A few weeks ago, Lena, I met with a few writers about a decade younger than myself, and I was telling them about the time my friends and I shot a vampire movie in the cavernous foundational understructure of a luxury high-rise here in New York City, as I detailed in my essay “The Lost Boys of the Bronx.” When they asked me how I even knew about that subbasement in the first place, I just shrugged and said we’d discovered it one time when we were out exploring the streets as kids.
“But what about your parents?” one Millennial writer asked me. “Where were they while all this was going on…?”
“They were Silents raising Xers,” I explained. “They never knew — or cared — where we were or what we were doing. We were free-range kids and the entire city was our playground.”
“Oh,” my colleague said. “I could’ve never gotten away with that. I had total helicopter parents.”
(For those interested, I examine the upbringing differences between Xers and Millennials as depicted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer here.)
Many factors converged and conspired to change the landscape of childhood. Certainly the proliferation of helicopter parenting has eroded the freedom kids used to enjoy; most people under eighteen I know are wildly overprogrammed with extracurricular activities, team sports, school clubs, dance classes, etc. I never did any of that regimented crap.
Technology has also changed the game. Nowadays, even when kids are let out of the house, they are tethered to their parents by a digital leash — the phone in their pockets that makes them reachable at all times, and makes their precise physical location known to their parents on demand. Sure, the phone may provide a level of (false?) security for both parents and their children, but it offers no opportunity to build trust or cultivate personal responsibility.
And those aren’t the only spying eyes on kids these days. CCTV cameras are mounted everywhere now — on street corners, in alleyways, around buildings. Rooftops and basements are locked-off now, too, often with alarmed push-bar mechanisms that make it impossible to explore the places above and below the streets. The events of September 11 put the city into a permanent state of heightened security, and the endless mass shootings in the intervening decades have only made urban exploration all the harder; Christ, these days you’re practically required to show six forms of government-issued ID and submit to a hand-held metal detector just to get into a fucking library!
It’s not a free-range world anymore. Those liberties are gone; we lost them forevermore. That’s a shame for us all, none more so than children, who deserve their once-in-life opportunity “to be kids in an active physical universe separate from their parents and other adults but still in the real world” (Dan Simmons, introduction to Summer of Night [New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011], vii). I continue to meet more and more young people for whom my free-range childhood is a completely fantastical concept — the stuff of ’80s movies like The Goonies and Stand by Me. And to their parents, I would remind them of Simmons’ admonition: “that if you adults steal the space and time of childhood, you steal childhood itself” (ibid., xvi).
That’s very true. I have a friend who is a few years younger than me who grew up in the modeling industrie and she barely had a childhood because of this. I always feel so sad because she didn’t really experience what we did.
Yep, I know parents that do that, too, and it’s unconscionable. Children should absolutely be shielded from any and all of those vampiric industries: modeling, music, athletics, acting, reality TV. If they want to pursue those professions as adults, that’s their prerogative, but commercial commodification, even under the most favorable circumstances, is incompatible with a healthy childhood. I submit into evidence the recent two-part docuseries Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields on Hulu.
I completely agree! Thank you so much for taking the time to read through my comment. I hope you have a lovely day!
Thank you, Lena, for your time, attention, and input — none of which I take for granted!