Last week’s column and reactions to it got me thinking about childhood. You should know first, however, that someone threatened to send Child Protective Services to my house because of things I mentioned last Monday: mainly, that my boys play outside, and they ride their bikes on the sidewalk.
Have we really changed so much in the span of one generation that it is considered child neglect if you don’t keep your children (in my case, 7 and 9 years old) locked in the house? When I was growing up, a mother who let her child stay inside and play Dungeons and Dragons all day would have been suspect. Today that might be considered excellent parenting, if only the child also wears bubble wrap around his head so that he doesn’t get hurt and cleans his hands with antibacterial liquid every 20 minutes.
Before we left Florida, my oldest son, Ford, was a few pounds away from being labeled medically “obese.” I was shocked to learn this. Ford didn’t look heavy. Sure, he had a doughy belly and his face had grown fuller, but still, he looked average to me. It wasn’t Ford’s weight on the scale that was the problem. It was his body mass index, the ratio of fat to muscle. He wasn’t getting enough physical activity.
Several things kept me from letting Ford play outside in Florida. As I noted last week, there were no sidewalks and therefore no safe place for the boys to ride bikes and Big Wheels. The grass was coarse and prickly and full of fire ants. The backyard was cramped and enclosed by 6-foot privacy fences. Even I felt claustrophobic there. A quick scan of an online registry also revealed that we had an extraordinary number of sex offenders in a 1-mile radius of our house. And then there was that incident when Ford pulled the legs off our neighbor’s (also Dustin’s boss) plastic flamingo and buried the pieces. But I digress …
Our boys spent a great deal of time in Florida upstairs in the air-conditioned playroom.
Then we moved to Bangor. The boys had a sidewalk and wide-open spaces in our backyard. In fact, because we had gone from a 3,000-square-foot home in Florida to a 1,500-square-foot home in Maine, the boys had no place to play inside. (Future column: How much house is necessary?) We were outside the majority of the day. We walked together to and from school. We played baseball as a family at the park. By October, after we had been here two months, Ford had lost nearly 5 pounds.
There are real risks to letting our children have a childhood spent outdoors. One need only turn on the nightly news to be scared into pulling out the bubble wrap and anti-bacterial liquid. But it’s just as frightening to keep our children inside, where they may never know the smell of freshly cut grass or the way a squirrel scurries up a tree.
Luckily, one of the nice things about Bangor is the fact that most homes don’t have air conditioning and windows stay open six months out of the year. I can wash dishes in the kitchen and still see and hear my boys playing basketball on the driveway. When they move to the front yard, I follow them and take my book or housework to the front porch, where I watch and listen. If they go to the backyard, I move myself again. The boys may be outside, but they are never alone. I call it “controlled independence.” Also, because our neighborhood is such that I’ve developed close friendships with nearly all of the neighbors, I know that if my children run into trouble, there are at least six other nearby adults who will overhear through their screens or from their driveways and come to help.
I think most of us agree that the ideal childhood is spent running and playing outdoors. In the span of one generation, however, we have become afraid of dangers real, imagined and-or overly hyped. The pendulum has swung so far that we are putting our children at risk in a different way by sheltering them too much.
Through feedback from readers and chats with city councilors and officials last week, I have come to realize that the answer to our greatest fears for our children is more community. We need more neighbors knowing and looking out for other neighbors. We need more police patrolling the streets. We need more laws to protect our children.
Bangor is closer than any other city I’ve lived in to reaching this goal. But there is still work to be done. Together we can safeguard our children and their right to a happy, carefree childhood.
Maine author and columnist Sarah Smiley’s writing is syndicated weekly to publications across the country. She and her husband, Dustin, live with their three sons in Bangor. Her book “I’m Just Saying …” is available wherever books are sold. She may be reached at sarah@sarahsmiley.com.