Childhood Then and Now 

Childhood Then and Now

A little hint from Glenn Reynolds--possibly something he's posted on before: in "science nerd" stories set in the 1960s and 70s, kids "seem a lot more independent and free-ranging than kids today."

I've had many conversations about this: can't we boomers all remember just wandering around with no adult supervision--especially in the summer? "Street" games were the rule, not the exception (they weren't something "lower class")? But for kids only? (I think I'm talking more about the 50s and 60s than the 60s and 70s, but still).

So I went looking for an article I read a few years ago--about how childhood has changed since the 50s. Here's some of what I remembered:

This is true, of course, for adults, too, as the line blurs between us and our children. Toys, as it turns out, are us. We display the same desires for instant gratification as our kids. We even play some of their computer games. We ferry them to their ballet lessons and sit for hours watching their exploits on the hockey rink or soccer field. When they score, we score.

For middle-class kids, this meshing of adult and child worlds is surely one of the biggest differences between today's childhoods and those of earlier times, say the 1950s.

Our parents never saw us play ball. They never knew that sometimes we hung out in the rail yards, or stole apples from neighbors' trees. They didn't know the games we played because they were ours. On summer mornings, we disappeared into neighborhood - kid enchantment, emerging only briefly for lunch before plunging back into our conspiracies. We had no play dates. It was assumed we'd return before dinner ? safely.

Now, middle-class parents feel the need to be all over their kids' lives. Rarely do you see middle-class kids playing unattended in city parks. Kids are tightly scheduled: ballet, swim team, computer camp. Postman writes about a scuffle that broke out among parents at a massive kids' soccer tournament, and then, afterward, about how parents congratulated one another for a wonderful event.

But Postman's question was this: What were 4.000 kids doing at a soccer tournament? Surely they couldn't have organized such an event themselves, for their own enjoyment. He concludes that kids' sports have less to do with children's fun than parents' gratification. Play has become serious business. As childhood disappears, so does a child's idea of play. And of innocence.