Along with most kids of the 80s, summers for me were all about the outdoors.
I spent a fair amount of time indoors, too, drawing and writing, playing with my Play-Doh Fun Factory and the Lite-Brite, and building tents in our basement.
But, generally speaking, summer days were spent outside. I was more of a loner than most, not to mention I was one of the few girls in our neighborhood, but neighborhood kids moved in packs and I was often among them. I would leave out early in the morning on my blue butterfly bike with the banana seat, (sans any helmet or knee pads, mind you,) and be gone all day, popping back in at home only long enough to drink from the water hose and grab a quick lunch so I could leave out again.
Granted, a lot of our outdoor time was spent doing things we really shouldn’t have been doing, like playing at new building sites in our growing subdivision, exploring an empty lot that had turned into a dump, and wandering the woods and wading the creek on property that wasn’t ours.
But we were outside getting sun and exercise, using our imaginations, and enjoying hours of unstructured play.
Ah, the good ol’ days.
So what has happened in the years since? Why is it I can drive through a neighborhood I know is full of children, even see the evidence of children living there, and yet never see a single kid outdoors?
Lots of people will no doubt blame it all on screens. Screens are the reason people can’t communicate anymore, why relationships struggle, why people are depressed, why kids can’t learn, why kids can’t be kids.
Screens are the source of all that is evil, right? And if we could just remove them from society, then kids would spend their summer days outdoors drinking from water hoses, going without sunscreen, and not wearing bicycle helmets, and all would be right with the world again.
Except that it’s not that easy.
We like blaming technology for the ills of our society. We all like a scapegoat and blaming an inanimate object – a screen — for what we don’t like about modern culture is especially convenient.
And there’s plenty there to criticize, when you consider the wealth of garbage available to our kids via phones, tablets, notebooks, and TVs. And yet I love the way we blast kids for their attachment to the same things we refuse to do without ourselves.
Sometimes we are pathetic hypocrites.
Blaming screens for keeping our kids indoors is just a copout – an avoidance of greater problems that are much harder to acknowledge and repair.
Honestly, parents aren’t even home a huge portion of the time. According to 2016 U.S. Census reports, nearly ¼ of all kids live in a single parent home. More than 60% of those living in two parent homes have both parents working.
When parents aren’t home, don’t expect kids to be outside.
Even if parents are home, houses are bigger, plusher, and not only filled with more entertainment choices than ever before, but also with more food choices! It’s hard to push adults from such luxury, and yet those same adults will criticize kids who want to enjoy the luxuries themselves.
More families now live in urban settings, too. Traffic can be a major concern, and proper play places are hard to come by.
Watch the old black-and-white TV shows and you’ll see the children having adventures all over town all hours of the day. Now kids are rarely allowed out of their own backyard, if they even have a yard, and they aren’t permitted to ride their bike to the soda shop in town, or even to the park just down the street.
So we tell our kids they need to go play outside, but they can’t go beyond their own small, boring, often treeless backyard. What kid in their right mind isn’t bored to death at the prospect of that?
And before you start ripping parents for their over-protectiveness, a mom who allows her children more freedom runs the risk of a visit from CPS. I’m not sure what drives people to be so critical, but nosy, judgy people abound today and parents literally cannot allow the things their parents allowed without the possibility of some scary consequences.
It’s not fair, but it’s reality.
Even if CPS is never involved, one parenting mistake can subject a mom or dad to horrible public ridicule. Lord forbid a parent lose their child in a crowd, or a Houdini of a little boy manages to push open a door and escape the house. (Yes, that happened to me!) People line up to take pictures and blast the poor mom and dad all over social media as evil, negligent, and inept.
No wonder parents are petrified to let a child out of their sight!
Let’s talk about neighbors, too, since nobody really knows theirs anymore. You can blame that on a lot of things, but modern work schedules certainly don’t help matters. When I was a kid nearly all my neighborhood friends had stay-at-home moms and their dads worked day shift. The arrangement naturally made it easier to come to know your neighbors. Now it’s not uncommon to have neighbors you never, ever see because of their strange work schedules.
And let’s not forget the Sex Offender Registry Lists! This is one of the mixed blessings that both informs and terrifies. While it’s important to be aware of people who could be a threat to your children, spending too much time reviewing those lists may cause you to never let your child out of the house again!
Social media and news organizations both add to the terror with stories of suspicious vehicles and scary reports of human trafficking. Accurate or no, they add to the uncertainty parents feel, and they no doubt push wary parents to just keep the kids indoors where they know they’re safe.
And what about the other fears we pump into parents? There is the threat of skin cancer if you forget sunscreen, and the risk of mosquito-borne disease. There are the weird, but highly publicized stories of dry drowning from pool swimming and brain-eating amoeba from lake swimming. We hear about the dangers of playground equipment and we talk about air pollution and environmental contaminants.
My point is this: I wish kids spent more time outside, too, but I understand sometimes why they don’t. And it breaks my heart when I hear kids bashed for it, and their parents criticized for not forcing it.
It’s not 1981 anymore, and that world of rural living and carefree parenting is far behind us. If we want to return to it, then society has to do more than take screens away from kids. It needs to change its view of childhood and alter its approach to parents and parenting.
I wish we could go back to a time when most kids grew up surrounded by trees and grass and dirt, when our world wasn’t so scary and parents weren’t judged so harshly.
If we could do that, I guarantee we would see more kids playing outside in summertime.
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I remember 1981 well. I did have way more freedom than my kids do. Fear is definitely one of the reasons they do not get to go out of our yard. I think your post hit it well on how to fix the problem, but we as parents need to set up safer situations and also don’t forget a lot of our moms talked more in the neighborhood. Moms need to set up a neighborhood network again. Great post!
I truly believe we’re all a little more suspicious than we were years ago, too, which has its good points and its bad. If we could all overcome that enough to do as you said — get to know our neighbors better and then set up a neighborhood watch — it could definitely help us all with the fear we experience! Thanks so much for reading, Michelle, and for taking the time to comment!