Busy weekend, this one, despite not really doing anything. It's all the kids' activities. They are always doing something, and this is after we made a conscious effort to cutback on signing them up for things. It's funny because I feel like I did way less formal activities when I was a kid, and yet I feel like I was exposed to more things. I've been trying to reconcile those two seemingly contradictory things. One obvious answer is that I'm misremembering in some way, and that is definitely a possibility. But I have a different theory, and that is that the way children interact these days limits their exposure to different types of things. Parents are so much more helicoptery today than they were when I was a kid (myself included), and so play time is more formal and focused. There isn't as much unstructured play where kids just do shit on their own.
Let's take sports, for instance, because that's what I was into as a kid. Just about every memory I have about playing as a child involves sports in some way, and yet I played very few sports formally pre-high school. It was pretty much just soccer and baseball, and then I took swim lessons during the summer. I played so much football and basketball and did a ton of bike-riding and wrestling, but I just did this stuff with the kids in my neighborhood -- my parents didn't sign me up for it. They didn't need to sign me up for it because I was already doing enough of it on my own.
It seems like that pick-up game culture just doesn't exist to the same extent anymore. My kids and their friends certainly don't partake in it, and I don't see kids out on the street or in the park playing sports very often either, unless it's as part of a formal league. This might not be such a great thing. Rec leagues are cool and all, but they come with a lot of overhead and restrictions. You need to have time, transportation, money for dues, uniforms, etc., and then they are overly structured, in my opinion. There's too much of a focus on pedantry and not enough on fun. You have to teach the children "the fundamentals," when all they really want to do is run around. It's a lot of drills, taking turns, and standing around, not enough scrimmaging and playing.
As an example of the logistical problems, Lil' S2 asked me if he could play flag football. His friends happen to be playing in a league, so I went to sign him up, but it's at the same time as his soccer. So, then I looked at a different league, and it's at the same time as his karate. (It's especially annoying because they only overlap by a few weeks, but that's like a quarter of the season.) There's another league but it would be a 45-minute drive each way, and we've already devoted enough weekend time to our kids' activities. So, I passed on it.
That's the other thing: Scheduling too much burns out everybody, parents and kids alike. But, as a parent, you feel compelled to sign your kid up for so much stuff, because it's now seemingly the only way to expose them to a lot of different types of things. Like, if Lil' S2 played football in the street everyday like I did at his age, then I wouldn't feel bad about him not getting to play in the league. But he doesn't do that, because that's just not how things are done anymore.
It could be that sports are just less popular now, and kids are doing other things, and I don't doubt that that's part of it, but even non-sport play seems to be much more structured now than it was in the past. Lil' S1 doesn't really like team sports, but we still set up a lot of his "play dates" for him. He's almost 10, and at that age, I rarely had my parents set things up for me (though I needed their sign off, of course). I would just knock on people's doors, or I would call people and see if they could play. And maybe that's a big part of the explanation -- there's no such thing as a family phone anymore. Kids don't have phone numbers, so they have no choice but to have their parents facilitate.
Anyway, not to sound like "back in my day" guy --the kids will probably be alright -- but I do wonder if we're setting our children up for an increased likelihood of isolation and loneliness by structuring so many of their social interactions for them. Are they going to have the social skills needed to make and keep friends once their parents aren't around? Throw in a few formative years spent in the midst of a global pandemic and the rise of social media, e-commerce, and telecommuting, and it's definitely a recipe for a new social order that doesn't sound very appealing to me.
Well, there are a few heartening things. Lil' S2 actually does have some neighborhood friends whom he plays with just about every weekend. He can just go over there and see if they're home and they can do the same. (Although we often do text with the mom, just to save a trip.) This really has been a saving grace for us. It gives him something to do, and it gives us a break. He can only entertain himself for so long.
As for Lil' S1, he doesn't really have anybody like that in the neighborhood (sometimes he'll ride his bike to his friend E's house but not very often), but he does seem to have a lot of friends, or at least he's friendly with a lot of kids. He's pretty bold when it comes to interacting with others, and he seems to have no airs to him. He says "hi" to everybody. I sometimes worry that he's too naive -- I mean, not everybody is going to like him and be nice to him -- but he'll figure it out. It's tough to get through middle school without a reality check of how mean your peers can be.
Until next time...
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