KAREN I. writes, regarding the previous posts on children’s play:

I’ve been around organized sports for children due to my child being on a baseball team at a young age and I agree that it is a pointless activity for five year olds. It could also cause them to hate the game because they can’t really play it in a fun way. For example, no little kid can hit the ball into the outfield. The outfielders languish in the hot sun as the inning drags on because kids who can’t hit the ball are given about 20 tries so their self-esteem is not damaged. My son baked in the heat one day so much I was worried he’d get heatstroke. He did not return the following season and he does not miss it. 

You may take some criticism if you print this, but I think many working mothers use the organized activities to show the world how great they are doing because they are insecure. Of course, they need a stage for that, and what better place than a weekend game in a public playground. It fits perfectly into their busy lives and all the world can see how great they are doing as a family. It also shows the world they do, in fact, make time for their children. They just don’t do it by baking cookies with them or watching them as they fly paper airplanes outdoors with the neighborhood children (as my kids did yesterday). 

I wonder sometimes if the working mothers even want to be home on the weekends, the way they run around from one activity to another. When I listen to some of them comparing notes on their weekends at CCD pick up on Sunday morning, it is as though they don’t know what else to do with their own children when they finally get some time together. Frantic activity masks the loose ties caused by a work week spent mostly apart. The children look exhausted and they go to school sick a lot, but their mothers certainly have a lot to brag about.

                                             — Comments —

Anonymous writes:

Jesse Powell wrote, “There seems to be a drive to overschedule kids’ lives…” This factory-like result of industrialized institutionalism has crept into homeschooling circles as well, under the well-meaning, but, I believe, misguided guise of “managing homes,” from some translations of a verse in Titus 2. The family’s every hour (down to 15-minute increments) can be scheduled in a box on their master schedule, and though I know some families who said they enjoyed benefits (at least in the short term) of micro-scheduling, WHY would I, as a homeschooling mother desiring a more “normal” or historical childhood for her children, want to do the social engineers’ job for them? Still, how can we avoid the “institutional” aspect that some resort to in the name of “order,” because “God is a God of order”? John Taylor Gatto confirmed that many students did much better in unstructured time or with their family businesses instead of in the classroom, dropping a project midway at the end of each hour when beckoned by an ever insideous bellringing.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I spent the first eleven years of my life (born 1954) in Highland Park, California, an old suburb east of downtown Los Angeles in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. There was plenty of open space where my friends and I played Cowboys and Indians or Americans and Germans. Parents were largely unworried when the kids were out of sight because the environment was safe. Then towards the mid-1960s the demographics of the neighborhood began to change, crime appeared, and suddenly there were worries. My father moved the family to then remote Point Dume in Malibu where land was cheap, the population density low, and where, in addition to the beaches, there were also the enticing coastal canyons and mountains. Again, there was a good deal of free play outside, far away from parental supervision, in an environment where parents did not need to worry unduly about their kids. Nowadays Malibu is almost as crowded as Highland Park was in 1965, when I left it. (It’s also as snooty and unfriendly as Beverly Hills.) It strikes me that the shrinking away of open space is one of the factors in the disappearance of real play. But another one is the combination of increased predatory criminality and the unwillingness of civic authority to address it. Fear that predators will harm children – which, while it is probably exaggerated, nevertheless has a basis in reality – likely encourages the ham-handedly structured and heavily supervised “play” that is, as Laura notes, not really play at all but a pathetic simulacrum of it. Supervision seems necessary to parents, but it is inimical to actual play. 

For a decade I have lived in a small town on Lake Ontario in Upstate New York. Although Oswego’s population is less than twenty thousand, the town and its neighborhoods are compact. My son, who was six when we came to our new home, could not play freely within the city limits as I played when a boy in Highland Park or a teenager in Malibu; the accessible spaces simply weren’t and aren’t there. As he grew, and became trustworthy, however, he could ride his bike to the city parks and meet his friends for various games and high jinks. My wife and I were happy with this development. 

Having said all that, it occurs to me that these reasons are not sufficient to explain the procedural structuring (and denaturing) of play entirely. The liberal mentality, which rejoices grimly in the exercise of control, is also to blame, as it has found one of many opportunities in the situation created, in part, by the other factors that I have mentioned. 

I cannot resist recording a detail of growing up in Malibu in the mid-1960s. When I was in the seventh grade, I used to go hunting (yes, hunting) in the Santa Monica Mountains behind Zuma Beach with three brothers who were my friends. (Rabbits and game birds were our quarry.) Sometimes we went on a foray after school and we would march into the hills directly from the campus. On those days, we would bring our BB rifles to school. No one worried that we were preparing a massacre. The only stipulation was that we had to leave them in the principal’s office during the day. We retrieved them when school was out and went on our merry way.

Laura writes:

Only criminals bring guns to school today.

Having said all that, it occurs to me that these reasons are not sufficient to explain the procedural structuring (and denaturing) of play entirely. The liberal mentality, which rejoices grimly in the exercise of control …

Childhood was once relatively reckless and wasteful. The spirit of grim control and the fear of ultimate purposelessness have made it into one long organized march.

Rosey writes:

I’m a mother with two young children (aged one and two). I’ve been bombarded with well-meaning advice to have structured play dates, enroll him in preschool (he’s not even 3 yet), and even soccer.

I sense that there are some people who actually believe that my children are being deprived because they do not attend a day care!

I agree, there is a wild push to ‘socialize’ children with overly structured play opportunities. Every time a professional (Doctor, Public Health Nurse, Speech, etc) assesses my children’s development they want to know “do they get to play with other children their own age”? They are ages two and one… at these ages, they really just play side by side with other children, not with them. My point is, I feel continually pressured to enroll them in some kind of activity to allow them to socialize with other children their ages… is this really necessary at this point? They play with each other daily (to some degree), and they play with others at Sunday School~ once a week.

Although I sense that all this pressure is unfounded, I do find myself feeling insecure (as do many new mothers). I’ve often returned to your article “Excellence in Parenthood“, in which you state that children should have “Routine social interaction with the same people”. I agree with you… this is different than having routine social interaction with a room full of children of the exact same age.

I’ve been pondering this topic for some time, so I’m enjoying this discussion. Thank you!

Laura writes:

You’re welcome.

Toddlers do not need to be hurried out of their home and out of their rhythm, which is everything to them. If they are going to be with other children, it is better they be with older children not in groups their own age. Older children take an interest in them and toddlers love to watch them play. Running errands with their mother or seeing their mother’s friends who might have their own children is enough social activity for them.

Intimacy is something that has to be consciously defended, not just now but all through your children’s childhood. All genuine and normal intimacy is under assault. That includes the intimacy of marriage, the intimacy of siblings, the intimacy of extended family and of friendship. The impersonal and the crowd are destroying the personal and the individual. People look at daycare or nursery schools, the whole trend to institutionalize children, and it now seems normal to them. They see a mother with her two young children in their own home, playing, reading, doing chores, listening to music and they think there is something weird about it. They envy it too.  All those health professionals who so value socialization and who are prying into your private business might ponder the rise of childhood pathologies. Their increase parallels the demise of family and the rise of institutionalized group activity.

The simple life you are living, the intimacy you have with your children, is an example to the world. Don’t ever forget that. You have to uphold it and protect it, defend it with everything you have. It is precious. It is intimacy, the quiet realm of God, truth and love.

James N. writes:

My memories of suburban Little League were stimulated by your recent reflections on the manner in which working mothers organize their children’s play.

In Newton, MA (a wealthy Boston suburb), the opening scene of the first year of Little League (7 year olds) is always the same. Little boys (mostly), with gloves bigger than their heads, line up with the coaches. The mommies cluster under a tree. One boy throws a ball, the first ball of the season. “Remember, no competition!” comes a voice from under the tree. Another ball, and another. “Remember, we’re just here to have fun!” Another voice from the posse of mothers. On and on it goes, through training game after training game. “No keeping score!” “No competition!” “Just here to have fun!” “No keeping score, don’t forget, that’s the rule!”

Of course, the little boys with the most runs are having an absolute blast. There’s nothing that’s so much fun as kicking the opposing team’s ass, after all. THAT’S the fun they’re here to have.

And I always wondered – here come these women, with their sons, out of their $5 million Victorian homes, arriving in their Benzes – how did they get those things?

They got them by marrying men who were very, very good at competing, and at keeping score.

What are those mommies really saying?

Laura writes:

Ha! Yes, that’s a riot and a very familiar scene.

There’s a pervasive fear of hurt feelings, as if losing a game will scar children for life.

Fred Owens writes:

My kids, grown now at 31 and 33, were probably the last children in the neighborhood to “go outside and play” as I often directed them. And I did not teach them to “beware of strangers” either. I felt that they were much loved by honest parents, and if they were ever approached by unloving or dishonest grownups they would easily know the difference and run away. My kids had a sandbox, a swing set, bicycles, a few trees to climb and a neighborhood territory with boundaries.

We did not have a traditional marriage as you advocate, but we did have a combined 60-hour week rule — meaning that as parents, if one of us worked full-time, then the other could only work part-time, so we could be at home more often. We believed in spending “quantity time” with our children. We never took them to the mall or to McDonalds. But anytime they wanted to go to the library, we would gladly give them a ride.

They had snacks — peanut butter sandwiches and apples and oranges anytime they wanted. And bed-time was strictly enforced. (Not for their sakes, mind you, but for the sanity of the parents)

It seems to have gotten so much more complicated these days. I see little children at the grocery store and I want to pat them on the head and say hello, but their parents have taught them fear, so I can’t do that. The children are no longer free, as we once were. Going back to my on childhood, we were really free. There was a set of rules which were fairly easy to understand, but otherwise they left us alone. My own children still had that, although even then it was changing. Now it seems to be gone altogether.

The Friendly Grizzly writes:

My parents meant well in sending my brother and me to day-camp during the summer months. First there was a very small group that went places in a station wagon. Later there was a bigger one run by my brother’s 5th or 6th grade teacher (male). After that was a less-formal one that had use of a small piece of property with a swimming pool and a small athletic field. In all cases, the counselors were good, caring folks.

The big problem I had was that I have never been interested in sports of any kind and a lot of the activities were centered around such things as touch football, softball, and assorted running-and-jumping activities. Another issue is that I am, by nature, pretty much a loner. I had few friends, and our common interests were more along the lines of music, electronics, looking at and maybe tinkering with simple mechanical things and other stuff that would later be called geeky. In fact, my one remaining friend from childhood is a renowned physicist. To this day, I really don’t know anyone besides him and a pianist/composer in Oregon.

The only play I enjoyed was a bit of cowboys and indians, listening to music on the neighbor’s “hi fi set,” shoving toy trucks around in the back yard, or “Hey! Let’s go ride our bikes!”

I look at all these organized “play dates” the kids are forced into today and I feel so sorry for them. I never had kids (I’m – to use a polite expression – one of nature’s bachelors) but if I had done, my kids would not be forced into such a regimentation. MAYBE music lessons, as I know no-one who regrets having had musical training. Aside from that, I’d let my kids seek their own level, and seek their own interests. I believe that regimentation stunts kids every bit as much as toys that do all the imagining for the child.

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