A Wild Childhood

Last spring my long-time girlfriend manned the “squirt shaving cream off a balloon using a water gun” booth at her son’s 5^th grade end-of-school-year party . . .a tedious, mind-numbing endeavor.   Not content to claim the title of “most boring booth,” she put shaving cream moustaches and beards on children for others to squirt off.  It was a success that led to an all out shaving cream fight with my friend happily supplying the cans.   

Her story sounded like one from our collective past. . . until she revealed the twist.   The other mothers did not appreciate that the children were having a great time and cited one girl’s injury. .  .  shaving cream in her eye .  .  . as evidence of my friend inciting malicious mayhem.  

My friend and I grew up in the day when a seatbelt was mom’s long arm that magically stretched to the passenger-side door of the car in a sudden stop; pop bottle rockets were a 4^th of July standard; and a kid could hop a train to the coast . . . as long as he was home by the time the street lights came on.   As I remember, there was an unwritten rule that we must come home unscathed and not in a police car.  So, whatever we got into, we figured a way out before dinner was served.   

I distinctly remember applying this rule the day I was sitting on my living room couch and dropped a pair of rose clippers into my foot.  Don’t ask me why I had a pair of rose clippers . . . I’ll just blame my underdeveloped juvenile brain in retort. However, I vividly remember the moment I saw the clippers imbedded in my foot. My first thought was, “There’s NO way I can get a drop of blood on my mom’s new carpet!”  So, I grabbed my foot with clippers wedged between my bones and hopped into the kitchen where I pulled them out and bandaged my wound.    Fortunately, we camped a lot so I was always up-to-date on my tetanus shot . . . I still have a scar.

In this world, shaving cream fights were the culmination of a lingering last day of school, where we filled the hours with putting pig tails on the boys and wore red lipstick to leave lip prints on our friends cheeks and foreheads.  (Oh yea. . . the  lipstick escapade almost got us kicked out of school.)  However, by the time my actions warranted harsher consequences, I acted accordingly. 

I acknowledge the world has changed, and while I fully appreciate attempts to keep our children safe (I don’t drive until all seatbelts are latched), I can’t help but wonder if in our "helicopter" or hovering parenting we aren’t denying our children the opportunity to develop their ability to manage consequences and make split-second decisions.

In my job I interview college graduates for intern positions and I lose count the number of times they mention what their parents said or think during the interview.   They appear unprepared to make any decision affecting their lives without consulting mom and dad. 

At 44, I still talk things over with my parents.  However, I appreciate that they gave me the freedom in my youth to understand the effect of my decisions and deal with them.  I worry about young adults who have never had the opportunity to do this and wonder what will happen the day they are forced to make a decision where the consequence is more severe than staining a carpet or missing the last day of school.  

By protecting our children from negligible dangers that teach them how to deal with adversity without lasting damage, we aren’t preparing them to deal with the realities of adult life.  Historically, each generation of parents attempt to make their children’s lives better.  But with everything there’s a tipping point, and I doubt our attempts at protecting our children from adversity is an exception.

I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but I do know that shaving cream won't kill you, and in all nature a certain amount of struggle is needed for life to develop properly.  My daughter’s school curriculum packet ended with a story about a butterfly’s need to struggle out of its chrysalis in order to properly develop and survive.  Michael Josephson of Character Counts uses this story to emphasize that, “[a]dversity  is not always an enemy.  It’s often teaching that helps a young person develop wings strengthened by self-confidence and self-reliance.”  

Perhaps in this holiday season, instead of the latest Wii game, the most valuable gift I can give my children is the freedom to make decisions and the opportunity to deal with the consequences. 

In return . . . I pray they don’t involve the ubermom’s child who lives down the block!