Childhood

Free Range Kids


My parents were free rangers. Their active non-involvement in much of my childhood and that of my younger siblings would earn them scorn and visits from the CPS today. Just how little my folks were aware of my activities is most evident today when I choose to freely reminisce about my escapades within their hearing. Dad just raises an eyebrow. Not because he is surprised but to let me know that although he never had proof at the time, he suspected I wasn’t any less adventuresome or reckless than the younger ones. I was just smarter. My mother professes shock and sometimes horror, but it is quickly forgotten. After all I didn’t die, wasn’t even maimed, and the police didn’t show up at the door.

Okay, the last part isn’t entirely true. The police actually showed up at my high school and requested that the girls’ dean get me from class so they could “ask a few questions”. Fortunately the dean was a woman not easily intimidated by a uniform. School policy required that she inform my parents first and my mother kept her cool enough to refuse permission. They could come to our house and question me there if they liked. That never happened however because as luck would have it I was still underage – by two whole months – and did not possess a fake ID (my two friends who did get hauled into the dean’s office both swore to that) and so I escaped being charged with underage alcohol possession and the older brother of the our friend who sold me the beer lost his job. Oh, and the little matter of transporting alcohol across state lines was dealt with by issuing a stern warning – to my two friends. I never did see a policemen over this matter nor did I receive a school punishment as was the practice of the day at my uber-conservative Catholic high school. My father told the dean that he would be handling the discipline of his daughter thank you very much and because he is a Virgo, they nodded and let the matter drop.

I was grounded for two weeks, could only go to work and school and spent the rest of my time doing what I always did – read, write and listen to music. It’s very hard to punish a Sagittarian. Even without TV (which I wasn’t banned from) I could retreat for hours into a book or my writing. How do you ground a child from her mind?

Free ranging is the new rage in parenting. A backlash against hyper-parenting and helicopter parents, free rangers let their children play unsupervised in their own yards and neighborhoods, walk to school and stay home alone once they reach a reasonable age. Free rangers are probably products of the same type of childhood that most of my peers had. The ones where we got ourselves to ball practice after school and babysat our younger siblings when our parents went out with friends on a Friday night.

I knew I was an overprotective parent but when my five year old informed me that she didn’t need me waiting for her at the bus stop after school because it was right in front of the next door neighbor’s house, I knew that it was time to let go and step away from the kid. I was only slightly older than she is when I trooped up the hill behind our house and disappeared into the next neighborhood over every morning to catch the bus to school for first and second grade. As a second grader, I was even in charge of my younger grade one sister. As a ten year old, I babysat my siblings ages 8, 7 and 5 when my folks went out for dinner. Nothing terrible ever happened and no, it wasn’t just luck.

Parents today have been indoctrinated into the hall of horrors where parenting is concerned. Death or dismemberment lurks with every unattended moment. Trailer parks and service industry jobs are all that can result from not overseeing homework diligently. All that has been really accomplished with this nonsense has been a few generations worth of kids who haven’t the coping skills or the social skills to move out and live on their own (the average age at which a child leaves home in Canada now is 32).

Children need freedom, within acceptable limits for their ages, in which to learn to think and do for themselves. Free range parenting? It’s about time we got back to it.

The Rules – A Hump Day, Hmmmm


I was visiting Julie Pippert at The Artful Flower last Friday and caught the hump day topic before the fact for a change and thought I might give it a go. I don’t do MEME type stuff generally because I am an all-about-me kind of blogger, but I loved the topic. Rules. And this is what Julie has to say about it in the form of a prompt:

Notes: Next week’s Hump Day Hmmm. Mamma Loves suggested “The Rules.” Call them rules, call them mores, or maybe even call them ethics. In general, we all understand there are certain rules and most of us try to follow them. Something to do with being good. But…are we all playing by the same rules? Do we all have to answer to the same rules? Are the rules applied equitably, and enforced equitably? Are we even all playing the same game? Are you a rule follower? You tell me.

Growing up Catholic, and a girl (the two most incompatible things ever by the way), life was an onslaught of “thou shalt not’s” and double standards. There was one set of rules for boys and another for girls, and the girls’ rules always sucked in a big way by comparison. Life if you were male was like five on five full-court, but if female it was six player. Three on three. Half-court only. You were restricted to either shooting or blocking the shot, and if that wasn’t binding in a Chinese shoe kind of way, there was that little two-dribble and pass thing. Boys could be altar-servers. Girls were lucky if they were allowed to step foot on the altar to help clean it. Boys were priests and ran the parish while girls were the nuns who took orders and did the heavy lifting. Boys were husbands and heads of household. Girls were fashioned from their ribs to be Stepford Wives their (junior) partners aka wife. When I was 8 I wanted to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, but I was told I couldn’t because I was a girl. When I was 9, I wanted to be a priest and was offered the nunnery. When I was 10, I wanted to write and was told I wasn’t any good. I equated that with being a girl and laid low for a good deal of my life thereafter.

Rules were woven into the essence of my being from before conscious memory, but I never willingly followed. I conscientiously objected. Quietly. Passively. Aggressively. I quit the basketball team in grade 10. It wasn’t really basketball anyway if you couldn’t run the court. I stopped going to confession that year too. If God could hear my prayers, couldn’t he hear my sins straight from my mouth as well?

In school, high school and university, I learned that rules were more guidelines than anything else, and the more talented you were the less they applied to you. This was reinforced by my years as a teacher. If I got the job done, it didn’t matter if I was a team player or a maverick. Results were everything. Who you knew mattered – a lot. The objector in me began to wonder who had come up with this neat little scam called “the rules” because they sure didn’t apply equally or sometimes even at all.

I am not a rules girl. I don’t get the Sex in the City approach to love. I am not Gordon Gecko enough to crave out a slice of the American Dream for myself and my family. I was too busy surviving while my first husband died slowly in plain view to coif our suburban yard or join the right play groups or volunteer at the church. There was always something more important to do than identify the feet I should have been annointing with perfumed oils and drying with the long tresses of my hair. Life would have been easier if I had colored inside the prescribed lines and known which way the wind was blowing and who was releasing all that hot air in the first place.

When I became a widow I was blithely unaware of the fact that there were more “rules” waiting for me although surely the one time in your life you need a little wiggle room wouldn’t be the time to slam the door behind you, right? I didn’t know a single widow under the age of 55 but when I went looking for my “own kind” I thought I would find comraderie and found instead a curious culture with a shitload of rules. It was like being back in Sr. Marilyn’s homeroom at Resurrection Grade School in 1976. That inner passive aggressive middle-schooler is never hard for me to locate and channel, and I did what I always do when confronted with a rigged game.

I understand the reason for law and societal norms. They are necessary because so many of us would rather be told what to do than to think for ourselves. The civilization that results is patchy at times but works, more or less. When I think of rules however, the aforementioned laws and norms is not what comes to mind. Rules are the norms within norms. The cliches and gangs that spring up in the gaps like weeds in a cracked cement driveway.

Cartoons, Commercials and Fat, Hairy Bastards


While I realize that advertisers aren’t specifically targeting my child above all other children, I wonder if somewhere in the ad world someone isn’t cackling like the Joker at parents who think they can shield their little ones from commercial TV. Unless you are rearing your offspring in RLDS compound in B.C. (because apparently U.S. officials have grown some cohones of late and are enforcing law down that way), odds are good that at some point your child will watch television the way God intended for it to be watched – and that is chuck full of enticing advertisements.

Over our last holiday in the States, my husband and I took advantage of the fact that our little girl prefers to stay with her grandparents over us and we snuck off for a few days to honeymoon our brains out. She meanwhile played and ate and watched uber-amounts of TV with abandon at my folks’. Like the last time she slipped her leash (or we dropped it – semantics here), she indulged in all the cartoons she is not allowed to watch at home. Most of them are on the Cartoon Network and they are not inherently evil. They remind me quite a bit of the old Bugs Bunny stuff I watched at her age which was back in the day before they’d been sanitized and made over to the uptight standards of the PC. So much of it was over my head that I am fairly certain I suffered no lasting damage, and I can see that same type of adult humor in some of the shows Katy likes to watch with her cousins when we are not around. Some of the stuff is even kind of clever and watchable like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. It even has old stuff I haven’t seen since I was wee like The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Magilla Gorilla. And of course it has the classics including the original Justice League and Scooby Doo. Does it seem as though I might have watched too much TV as a child? I did. But I think if fueled my imagination more than it damaged it and I can see in Katy’s imaginary play that she is right as rain herself.

So why do Rob and I object to commercial television? It’s the commercial part, of course. Whenever we have visited my folks, Katy comes home with a list of things that we need though we don’t seem to have suffered much without prior to her discovery of our new needs. Last fall it was cereal.

“Some people buy those kinds of cereals, Mama,” she said as we walked through the breakfast aisle at Safeway.

“Which cereals?”

With a sweeping gesture “All the sugar ones that are bad for you.”

“I see and how do you know this?”

“I saw it at Grandma’s house.”

“Well, some people do but we don’t buy food just because we saw it on TV.”

This elicited quite the chuckle from an older woman who was pushing her cart by us during our exchange. Obviously a mom who thought I was taking the high ground without checking for back-up. But we don’t buy food because of commercials and Katy is well-versed in this now. Her last visit at Grandma’s also stirred up an urgent need for a game that consisted of a butterflies being projected into the air and caught by large nets and a Disney princess doll whose skirt changed color with a magic wand. The first was never discussed beyond “Hmm that’s interesting” and the latter was put on the Christmas list (this was in October) for further discussions with Santa.

This last trip found us lacking a Swifer for mopping the kitchen, some sort of fake cheese food called Cheese Me’s (as nearly as I can understand her) and something that she convinced herself she needs quite desperately – a Turtle tooth-tooth. 

“Brushing is boring, Mom, but not with the Turtle tooth-tooth. It plays music that goes up through your teeth and into your brain.”

“That can’t be a good thing,” was my husband’s first, last and only comment.

After a week of listening to Katy describe the delight of owning a tooth-tooth every night when she was forced to brush her teeth the “boring” way, I decided to google the darn thing. To my horror, it exists. It is an electric toothbrush that plays a single pop tune for two minutes and was designed by some well-intentioned (childless) dentist somewhere to get kids (and adults) to brush their teeth for the recommended two minutes of time it takes to throughly clean plaque and over crusted matter from our mouth. I played the commercial for my husband and he was appalled. More so when he saw that one of the songs was by Kiss and that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons actually appeared in the web-based ad for their own tooth-tooth. 

“What fat hairy bastards they are now,” Rob was shocked. 

Whenever Katy talks about the tooth-tooth (it’s really called a Turbo Tooth Tunes), she lights up and dances about in glee. Though we have gotten her to agree that music being transported to her brain (the commercial actually shows this transfer of melody in a manner that causes me a bit of alarm) is probably not the healthiest thing for someone – she still wants a tooth-tooth. And I guess if the worst thing that results from her holidays with my folks, and their still quite liberal views of children and TV watching, is tooth brush lust – then we are pretty lucky parents.