RECENT NEWS: CHILDREN AS EXPLORERS

Many years ago, parents smoked and drank in front of their children. People were sympathetic when mothers and fathers spanked unruly children. No one wore seat belts in moving automobiles or safety helmets when riding bikes. Elements of risk, danger and abuse were permitted in child-rearing that are unacceptable today. It’s good that society is showing more concern with its most important mandate: to protect our young.

But we’ve lost something. In an article in The New York Review of Books that previewed his latest work, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon puts it this way: “The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.”

My parents were not only used to their children being out of the house in undisclosed locations, they sometimes ordered us to get there as quickly as possible. Of course, there were boundaries within which we were to stay (boundaries we might ignore), but there were parts of every day where children determined the activities and established the rules.

We knew our surroundings in an intimate and concrete way—all the hiding places, dark and scary places, comforting and familiar places, who was mean, who was nice, who was neat, who was messy. Well before school lessons about history and geography, we had our own internal schema for those subjects, and our own set of regulations for behavior and social interaction.

Today, it’s harder for kids to learn those things on their own. Chabon mentions the example of a nine-year-old girl in his neighborhood who lives three doors down from a nine-year-old boy. Both of them have lived in the neighborhood their entire lives. Yet they had never met.

This summer, I struck up a conversation with a mother sitting next to me at a presentation on assistive technology. She talked about her son in middle school and a “free night” parents had organized at a community center. She had been surprised at the kids' confusion about what to do, and once that was decided, how to organize things. She complained they were too used to structured activities supervised by adults.

I have been surprised by children who can show me where California is on a map of the United States, but are baffled when I ask them where the bay is. The San Francisco Bay is immediately in front of my office building. Kids who might know the name of their city and street seem unaware they live on a peninsula with a ridge of small mountains running down its center, next to an ocean.

I wish I had a solution, a way for children to escape what Chabon calls the “door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived,” that left adults feeling that they have been responsible, that children are safe. It’s a touchy area, as seen by all the controversy surrounding New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy’s decision last year to let her nine-year-old ride the subway on his own. Children seen walking alone have prompted adults to call the police.

“If children are not permitted,” says Chabon, “to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?”