Sometimes I think we all would be better off if parents would stick to parenting and other adult activities and leave childhood to the children.
People of my generation are constantly wondering why youngsters of 8 or 10 are acting the way we did when we were 18 or 20. They have a precocious interest in their appearance. Little girls, especially, worry about whether they are too fat or too short or have the wrong hair color. Pre-adolescents want to attend hard-rock concerts meant for much older kids; their choices of reading material aren't exactly "Anne of Green Gables."I think I found a clue to this phenomenon in a conversation with a friend of mine about tents.
We both remember having some of the best times of our childhoods in homemade tents or "huts" that we built ourselves out of the living room furniture and blankets, or, in my case, out in the yard using bales of straw and discarded pieces of lumber.
I thought of this last Sunday when I read a strip on the comics page that showed a couple "fixing up" a big cardboard box for their kids to play in. It's a cliche, of course, that kids have more fun with the boxes that things come in than with the toys their parents buy for them. This comic-strip couple were updating the cliche with today's parental attitude that children need their parents' help being entertained.
They don't.
This couple had a great time decorating and making the box into a playhouse; then they were surprised when the kids didn't appreciate it.
Kids don't want their parents' constant interference in their play time. Or maybe now, since they've never really been left alone to make their own fun, today's kids do expect constant parental involvement. But I think it's a mistake.
The sand-lot games of my youth, when groups of kids would gather for unplanned afternoon softball games, have been replaced with community sports leagues in which parents are the supervisors, planners, coaches and constant overseers. If a kid exhibits a mean streak, the parents call a meeting to decide what to do. In my day, if a kid got out of control, some other kids would put him back in line. It was a good way to learn how to deal with difficult people. How are kids learning those skills now?
My parents would never have thought of getting involved in kids' activities. It may have been because they were way too busy worrying about how to pay the bills, but we entertained ourselves. We didn't need much in the way of toys or organized activities.
Society today is different from the way things were when I was young. In many areas, it simply wouldn't be safe to allow children to play by themselves, even in neighborhood parks and playing fields. Parents are afraid -- and rightly so -- of kidnappers, child molesters and worse. But I do believe there's also too much of a feeling that kids should be kept busy in activities where adults are in charge.
And I wonder whether this constant exposure to adults isn't one factor in children maturing too fast. I remember as a kid resisting growing up. I was having too much fun being a kid to have any interest in what the teenagers or adults were doing. My peers were other kids, not adults. I had no more interest in what older people were doing than they did in my activities.
Now we have overzealous adults who interject adult concerns into childhood fun -- they worry that a Teletubby might be gay or that the characters in Harry Potter books have satanic inclinations. They worry that a kids' tree house doesn't meet safety codes meant for adult structures. They worry that some books and stories might scare their kids. They seem to want to provide near-sterile environments that will insulate kids from what childhood has been all about for generations -- learning through play to be creative, to sort out good from bad and to get along with other kids.
When I see catalogs with Christmas gifts for kids, I'm amazed. Parents can buy their kids cars with real engines, fancy tepees, painted blocks in various shapes. In my youth, kids spent months building their own go-carts, tents and huts and using all kinds of discarded materials as building blocks for kid-created "toys."
I think we should give childhood back to the kids.
Deseret News features editor Marilyn Karras may be reached by e-mail at karras@desnews.com