Free Range Childlhood and the Business of Life

Several Months ago, my sister Julie, in a facebook posting, suggested some titles for a personal essay about her childhood that she was thinking of writing. She suggested to some of us in the family that we come up with titles ourselves, and this is one I came up. I have been thinking for quite some time about the relative freedom that I grew up with, compared to how I was able to raise my daughter, and how my friends and sisters raised their children and I definitely think, that the era that I grew up in granted children more autonomy than we allow children today. I think that the main difference is that when I was a child, the percentage of working mothers, was very low, not that the world is a much more dangerous place. While this may not have been the case for all economic levels it was true for the majority of the children I grew up with. Daycare has become an imperative today, and consequently children are more time and observation oriented. If you have thirty minutes to get a child to X or Y, you can't be hunting all over the neighborhood looking for them ! I also think that the relative freedom that I was allowed as a child is part and parcel of why Baby Boomer's are not aging in the same ways as previous generations. This so called refusal to grow up, is really a refusal to stop doing things we have been doing since childhood. Loud Rock and Roll, to our shattered eardrums, sounds just as radical as it did forty to fifty years ago.

The three main rules in my family's house were, you had to be dressed, except for shoes, to come downstairs, no running by the pool and you had to be home by 5:30 PM. We generally had dinner between then and 6:00 PM. Other than that, you were on you own! Given the fact that we had a swimming pool, we of course spent a great deal of time there, but we also explored with friends and by ourselves, all over the avenues. Generally from the old Primary Children's Hospital on 11th. Avenue to the mountains above and east of the old Shrine r's Hospital. There were times when neither of my parents had any idea where, in the neighborhood I was, and as I grew up there were even a few times, when my parents didn't know if I was or was not even in the state. Several times in my teenage years I drove with others to Wendover, had a piece of pie and a cup of coffee and drove back. I don't think we even thought about trying to gamble. This sense of relative freedom was true of my sisters as well. When I was almost three my sister Kathy carried me on her back up almost to the base of Black Mountain. She did of course tell my mother , when we returned, where we had been. She also drove an old Jeep all over the mountains above the avenues way before she had a driver's license and drove the pink Jeep to East High School without a top.

I can remember exploring the area above the Old Veteran's hospital, that had once been a garden, for hours and days on end, with other kids in the neighborhood and we built huts and forts all over the place. My memory of the difference of a hut and fort is size, but there may have been more! I had a mother, that if you told her you wanted to run away, which I told her a couple of times, instead of packing you off for tests and counseling, she packed me a lunch, told me she would miss me, and I was off. The first time I did this, I took off on my three speed bike, with a lunch, including homemade turkey soup in a mason jar. I ended up riding over to City Creek Canyon, and probably going up the canyon a mile or so. I pulled off the paved road to a shady spot and ate my lunch and then after riding up the canyon a little way, headed back down and back home. I was probably about ten years old. Could I imagine allowing my daughter when she was the same age doing something like that, no way! While I don't think our society is producing more perverts and deviants than it did when I was young, just the mere increase in population means that there are greater chances for ill will today, than fifty years ago. Another time, I think my little sisters had been reading the Box Car Children, the three of us, ran away , complete with another lunch lovingly packed by my Mother and we went up above the power station above G street and found a round hole to sit and eat our lunch and think about how we were going to survive on our own. We were probably all told, gone for less that two hours and of course Louise was happy to have us back.

I read an essay several years ago that said something to the effect, that the reason some of
our children are marking their bodies with piercings and tattoos, is that their parents are still generally wearing in their casual attire, the same clothes they wore as teenagers. So if you can't differentiate yourself with clothing, what is left? It will be interesting to see how our grandchildren turn out.

While this is not the serious essay the subject warrants, it is what I am able to write this hot weekend in July.


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