CSotD: Kid stuff
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Having just spent a few days in the company of a pair of kids who, if they want to go to the park, tell their folks they're going to the park, and who are occasionally left alone for a little while, today's Rudy Park got a pretty good laff.
I'm not about to start posting those memes about how we all survived without concerns about safety, in large part because it's logically foolish: We didn't all survive but those who fell prey to cars without seat belts aren't here to voice their opinion on the topic. And, as for rubber surfaces at playgrounds, there's nothing particularly "character building" about busting your knees open on concrete.
But I do remember the summer I was eight, when we spent a lot of time in the woods, where we made spears with our pocket knives and were basically unsupervised until someone yelled for us to come home. Well, as long as we stayed away from Keith Eastman's house, because, while we liked his mom, she did tend to come out and tell us to stop throwing spears at each other.
Which we weren't doing. We were throwing them at the deadly snake or tiger or bad guy who was right next to each other, because "Watch out!" was a big part of every Western or jungle movie ever made. Or, at least, ever made for us.
But watching my somewhat free-range grandkids reminded me that we did have some geographic limits to where we could go when we were out on our own, though I forget how they worked in the woods.
I'm pretty sure the rule, in the case of the trackless forest, was to apply common sense, with a heaping helping of don't ask, don't tell.
I do remember my father saying that, if you took off in a straight line, it would be 40 miles before you came to another road, which may have been a caution or perhaps just a bit of trivia. But I didn't test his grasp on geography, so it worked.
Heart of the City does remind me that there was a point in the younger years of high school when a couple of us had a notion to jump a freight train and see what that was like, but cooler heads stifled that adventure.
Even at 13 or so, there were those among us who knew that boxcars are generally locked (and don't serve iron mines anyway), that gondolas are open, dirty and uncomfortable, and that modern cabooses make it hard to jump a train unobserved and that if little boys are seen riding freight cars by drivers at crossings somebody is going to call the cops and that getting out of town is a lot easier than finding your way back, particularly when your curfew and the train schedules don't mesh.
Which is to say, even at an age where we were starting to smoke and to raid the folks' liquor cabinet, we were not utterly devoid of common sense, which I think is kind of the point of free-range parenting.
The idea that, by 13, we'd begun to learn from other people's blunders and not simply our own is some kind of endorsement for letting kids screw up here and there.
And then, once kids are 17 or 18 and know everything, you can send them off to college, as seen in this Philosophy Infomercial over at Existential Comics (go read the rest), to completely unlearn everything.
Just as it's fun to hear your 9-year-old talk about a tree fort he and his friends built in the woods, remembering your own tree forts, it's fun to talk to your college freshman right after that intro class where the teacher challenges them by holding out a piece of chalk or a book and asking what will happen when he lets it go, and demanding they offer proof.
Though it's best if said tree fort didn't extend 100 feet up in the air, and your budding metaphysician doesn't doubt reality long enough to become completely tiresome. Again, read the whole comic.
Not all parents get it, as Kevin Siers notes, and, before you give your kids the freedom to screw up a bit, you really should have outgrown the tendency yourself.
But what goes around comes around, and it's not clear that Big Don was raised any more wisely than Little Don.
As this National Review article ("National Review," fer chrissake, not "The Daily Worker") suggests, Big Don was simply handed a bunch of money and patted on the head, and the only skill he actually developed was the ability to bullshit people into thinking he was competent.
Which skill he likely developed not by being turned loose in the woods for a few hours every afternoon but by being shipped off to military school after his parents gave up on keeping the kid in check.
We had a lot of kids like that at Camp Lord O' The Flies, who were not being sent off to learn to tie knots and paddle canoes but because their parents simply didn't want them around during the summer either.
There's a difference between being free range and being feral, and thank god those kids didn't all gain access to the nuclear codes, because they're the kind who, if someone suggested hopping a freight train, would go ahead and do it.
And then, if they fell under the train and lost a leg, their parents would sue the railroad company.
Because, as Mike Luckovich suggests, instead of developing common sense, their parents teach them how to spot, and make use of, enablers.
Now here's your moment of zen
(Look quick, I don't know why they don't allow their songs on YouTube but this may disappear)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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