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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Kids and the outdoors

      Let me preface this by saying, we live in a small village.  There is very little car traffic, except maybe when church gets out on Sunday mornings.  We do have a lot of foot traffic, which I view as a good thing, as it's all neighborhood people. I have a fenced yard. We have a dog, who is great with the kids but does a good job of barking if anyone else comes near the yard.       
        As the weather warms, my kids are outside more and more.  And then they are in, and then out and in again.  The 3 of them never all seem to be in the same location at the same time.  Plus, they tend to want me to play for them.  I end up pushing swings, steering bikes, blowing bubbles, while they are little more than by-standards.  I'd love to just sit on a lawn chair with a book but this almost never happens.
     I've been reading a bit on free range parenting, and it was a revelation. I could let my kids go out to play ALL BY THEMSELVES?! Here I was feeling guilty that I couldn't be in 3 places at once.  Suddenly I was able to grant myself permission to let them be.  Don't get me wrong, I hover in the kitchen and watch through the window.  My kitchen has never been so clean.
     The village I live in is a lot like where I grew up, and I love my little village for that.  When Alicia and I were kids, we were outside constantly, with very little direct adult supervision, and we didn't want any. "Mom, can you come out and play with us?"  was not something we would have ever said.  We played for hours pretending that the grove of trees that bordered the neighbor's garage was a play house.  Now I can barely get my kids to use their actual playhouse. Maybe imaginary playhouses are superior?
     One winter had 60" of snow in one week.  That didn't deter us.  In fact, I remember it as the best week ever.  We spent hours designing an elaborate system of tunnels and igloos in the snow.  We asked if we could take my youngest sister out to play.  My mother's response was we had to make sure all our tunnels were well packed down so we wouldn't lose the baby in the snow.
     In the summers, my mother sent us to a babysitter during the day.  I use the term babysitter loosely.  The sitter was there to feed us occasionally and for emergencies. Believe me band aids were quite regularly doled out. She had a farm and we took full advantage of all the great things a farm has to offer young kids.  We rode horses, went exploring her acres of land, and jumped into hay stacks from the second floor.   We loved it there,  it was better than any day camp you can imagine.
     I want my kids to have some fun childhood experiences like I had growing up. Somehow I think me sitting on a lawn chair might put a damper on their fun. So if you see my kids outside alone, I'm not ignoring them.  I'm giving them the freedom to be kids on their own term. I'm thinking there is a great grove of trees by our own garage that would make a wonderful play house.  
   
   

2 comments:

  1. Do you read Lenore Skenazy's blog and/or have you read her book, Free Range Kids?

    She's braver than I'll ever be, but I refer to it whenever fear mongering and paranoia get the best of me. It helps give me some much needed perspective. There was recently a post about how subtle things like web browsing taint our view of the world. If you read one article about a missing child, it will suggest more and more to you leading you to believe that it's much more common than it is.

    Anyway... I'm right there with you.

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  2. I have read her blog, but not her book. I keep thinking back to my childhood and how it all has changed so drastically in just one generation.

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