I remember reading someone lamenting about childhoods that no longer exist, with kids playing outside as darkness fell and parents gathering in front yards as they played to to talk. Was it Bill Bryson? Anyway, I thought, come to my neighborhood. My kids had friends in the neighborhood and at school. They were in and out of friends’ houses, as were the parents. Those kids have gone their separate ways but the parents are still friendly. And I see the new little kids on the street are outside playing as the sun goes down and their parents are gathering to talk as the kids play.
We made deliberate decisions to parent differently than the stereotypical American family. Our kids have never done preschool activities. I wanted their younger yrs focused on imaginative play and learning to self-entertain. (I believe that self-entertainment is an undervalued lifeskill. Our kids never utter the words “I’m bored.” They are always busy building, creating, playing something, even as adults.) They were/are also the kids outside playing in trees, digging in the dirt, riding their bikes.
Our kids were/are allowed to pick one major outside individual activity and join in a group together. Even as they grew/grow older, having large amts of unregulated time for exploring interests was/is a high priority.
We don’t have the tech issues that most families have. Our kids don’t have any personal devices or tvs in their rooms. We have never allowed much screen time. We don’t own any gaming systems. The only one of our kids who games is our Aspie and he didn’t get his Xbox until he was an adult.
Lack of multiple regulated/formal activities has never hampered our kids, even during the college app season.
Have we every thought that it really doesn’t matter? Some of us raised our kids with very structured schedule and some were free range, they all turned out fine.
More kids you have, more you have to stretch yourself, your time, attention, finances, resources, space etc. There is a reason “third world” countries struggle more. Same rule applies to families and countries. There are exceptions but as in general it’s the same.
American society is more focused as average educated and affluent family has fewer kids and more resources. Often two income families have less time and more resources so they spend what they have more of.
Someone mentioned how great it is to have kids playing outside, have them hang out at each other’s home and adults also did the same, that would be my idea of hell. When kids were growing up, I had such little time to myself, the last thing I wanted was to have people (kids included) drop in on me unexpectedly. Back then I even avoid in picking up the phone.
I like it when other kids come to my house - the kids keep themselves busy, except for the occasional “can we bake something?” and I get to eavesdrop and figure out what kind of kid this is.
Also, I’ve had kids say things in my car or at my dinner table ranging from “my Dad has a girlfriend “ to “My mom isn’t really young, she just does botox” and my personal favorite, from a very small boy with an equally tiny, chipper mother, “My mom put me up against the wall by my neck”…that’s why I prefer the kids drive with ME. Who knows what MY kids would say?
Why I call parenting “relentless” is that it doesn’t end when the kid turns 18! Geez. Even my “well” kids seem to need a lot of guidance at 20 and 23. We sure didn’t coddle them growing up, so I’m not sure why.
As far as individual sports go, she took trampoline for awhile when she was 5, and was quickly flipping. One day while waiting for our session, she was doing handstands over and over and started pressing up instead of kicking up. The Russian coach came over and took her off to hang her from walls with her legs at 90 degrees, have her do pull-ups and other strength maneuvers. She came back and announced “Yer Dough-ter is Veeeery athLEETic. I can’t her to join the team.” 3 hours, 3 times a week.
When we were done that day, maybe daughter wiped her forehead and said “Don’t tell Ursula, but that was like punishment “ and we
never went back again.
She quit rock climbing when her sister joined the team. She even “quit “ OT, because she just could not handle a standing appointment after a long school day.
So she likes “individual sports” if you count climbing the woodwork in the two story foyer, rollerblading, skateboarding, doing gymnastics at sleepovers, riding her bike, balancing things on her nose, and turning her basement swing into an aerial silk contraption. And trail hiking and bouldering with the family. But don’t suggest that it is a sport, or that there might be a “team”, or she’s done.
I agree with Fallgirl about the rose-colored glasses regarding our childhoods. Yes, kids had more freedom but there was a lot of doing literally nothing and not “following interests” because we had no money for instruments or dance or anything much. Yes we played outside sometimes, but also sat around a lot. Yes, I started writing stories, but would not get very far in the plot. I read a lot and I lament that my kids are not as much readers as I was, but even that gets old after a while. There was also a lot of what would now be considered bullying and dangerous activities by kids that were just plain bored. My only real activity was scouts, which I loved.
When I was little, there was a pack of kids on our street. But when we moved to a house, there were less and my friends were not on my block so we went over each other’s homes, like playdates today. My kids did lots of that and the older ones had friends on the street that they played with. However, my kids had much richer childhoods because they got to participate in activities that they enjoyed - from music to theater and yes, travel sports. While it took up some of their time, they still had ample time to hang out with friends, be bored and do whatever. And they have been many more places then I ever was.
I see kids that had no TV or gaming growing up become obsessed in college. I also see kids that had a lot of access to screen time, give it up when they got older.
Limits are important, but on balance I think my kids had it better than I did.
I agree with @mom2and …there were 9 in my family, and although all of us are doing well now, a few of the younger ones really got lost in the whole “unsupervised time” thing. One brother used to hatch duck and chicken eggs in an incubator in his room, then movethem to a small shed where his rabbits were housed…this is the kind of thing that someone (parent) could have picked up on and channeled into 4-H…but instead, his chickens pecked the baby bunnies to death, the dogs jumped the fence and chased the chickens out into the woods, and my brother ended up growing pot under a table in his bedroom instead. He and the youngest brother built a “fort” out of scrap wood, and although it was close enough to the house to run a thick extension cord for electric, my parents were never curious enough to go take a look. The place was full of stolen neon signs from bars, bongs and ashtrays, and the walls were filled with written “records” like “youngest person to puke in the club” -littlest brother, age 12, 3 beers and two shots of JD…I stopped in when I was around 26 or so, told my older brother, and he went out there and tore the whole thing down. My brothers were pissed and mymparents just shrugged and kept out of it. They didn’t want to know.
I loved exploring the fields behind my parents’ house. There was a horse stable, dry creek, abandoned dairy barn, cactus, etc. It was such fun. Then my dad built us a treehouse and I loved it.
Flash forward to 1994 when we bought land in Maine. I was SO excited because it was a beautiful wooded lot on a river. I could picture our two-year-old and his future siblings spending hours playing outside. Ha! Even after their dad built them a really cool treehouse, I can literally count on two hands the number of times they spend more than a few minutes outside.
One time at our cabin, we were having dinner with friends. Their kids and ours were outside. We were congratulating ourselves on the fact that they were enjoying nature when somebody said, “You know, it’s a little too quiet…” So we went outside and they were in our friends’ SUV, watching a movie on a tablet. Oh, well…
Oh geez, is this one of those threads where people come to brag about what great parents they were (are)? I know not everyone here is doing that, but in skimming through these couple of pages, I’m seeing that’s a distinct possibility.
@Oldfort said:
Yep.
And BTW, there is nothing inherently “bad” about TV. In fact, there have been some pretty good TV shows throughout the years for children. It just requires a little bit of common sense and parental oversight for goodness sake.
My kids are both teens and I wouldn’t change a thing about their upbringing. Neither did organized sports. Both are into music. The younger one art. My boys are 2 years apart and always hang out together. Family dinners almost every night. Weekends spent together hiking, the beach, playing board games. Our focus has always been on being respectful, empathetic and happy. Cliche, but being your best self.
As they’ve gotten older screen time has increased, but I’m ok with it. No phones in the bedrooms, no televisions either. No phones at dinner.
My childhood was latch key style. I was making my own breakfast and lunch in elementary school. I didn’t see it as a character builder. We were not an affectionate family. I tell my kids I love them every day.
I had a fairly free range childhood and I’m very envious of my son that he has all the clubs, sports and other opportunities available to him that I didn’t. In HS he chose all his activities himself and had a very busy schedule, my only condition was any kind of sport at least once a week. Building a robot seems a very fun way to hang out with friends to me, certainly beats wandering the neighborhood or watching TV together.
I didn’t have that much to do after school, so I did hang out at friend’s house without parents, sometimes we drank and smoked pot. I think I would have been happier if my parents could have afforded more ECs for me.
In the late 70’s or early 80’s, I remember seeing increasing news or magazine articles covering the “Model Asians.” One article popped up one day, then a slew of coverage followed in frequency. Remember seeing these? I read every one of these articles whenever they appear with a great deal of interest as an Asian-American. Back then, I also remember no high school students being involved in what I’d call “systematic EC” activities that we now see everywhere, i.e., 3-4 tennis, 4:30-5:30 violin lesson, 6-7 Taekwondo, etc. with weekends filled with more of these prescribed activities and community service involvements all designed to improve one’s college admissions chances. Back then, things seemed more leisurely as in the 1974 movie, “American Graffiti,” and the popular TV series, “Happy Days.” Kids played sports because they wanted to rather than to look good on their college applications. They got into martial arts because of Bruce Lee (I sure did!), not because having the black belt on college application would make them stand out and be noted by the adcoms (not anymore, as everyone seems to have earned the black belt nowadays).
Then, ever gradually, I started seeing the rise of a similar pattern of child rearing behavior in this country that as a Korean-American I’m all so familiar with back in my native country: the phenomenon of 학원 (Hagwon), after-school for-profit private institute that young students go to right after school. These can be anything from art school, piano or violin lessons, English language, Taekwondo, PSAT, math to whatever, you name it. Kids back in South Korea typically wake up at 6 a.m., go to school, then they hit a series of these Hagwon immediately after school until late at night and go to sleep around midnight. While not entirely the same, I see remarkable similarities in today’s American families in the way children are growing up. From the NYT article: “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.” I confess, too, I did everything with my own children the same way. No parents would have said these things just a few decades ago. Today, that’s the norm.
Is it far-fetched to theorize that the challenge posed by the Model Asians was met by the adoption of the same methods of raising children? After all, success in every field is always emulated to enjoy the duplicated results. Just as back in my native country where the phenomenon of Hagwon is self-explanatory with so many people in such a small land with everyone vying for limited opportunities to get ahead, I also see in today’s “relentless parenting” as an American phenomenon in collective reaction “amid a sense that opportunity has grown more elusive.” Of course, the sense that the opportunity has grown more elusive is accentuated further with the ever decreasing selectivity rates at top colleges and even further compounded by the fact that more than half of incoming class at any of these top colleges are going to be taken by URM’s, legacies, recruited athletes, development cases, FLI and other hooks and spikes even before you have your chance at it.
@TiggerDad It’s quite obvious to me that lots of overachieving kids from Asian families raise the stakes for everyone who wants to get into the top schools. And then because these schools try to limit Asian enrollment, these kids feel the need to be even more accomplished to have a fighting chance. It’s a vicious circle.
I do feel that Asian-Americans definitely have had an impact – both positively and negatively – in the way we raise our children in today’s America. You’re right, it’s a vicious circle from which we don’t know how to get off of especially when getting off can be seen as failing our children. The feeling that I have when I think about this topic is the kind that I had upon reading “The Catcher in the Rye”…a sort of existential angst…
@tiggerdad I have always been surrounded by family members and most friends with similar lifestyles. (Just high-achieving American families, not Asian Americans.)
My post in this thread was not a commentary on other parents’ choices but that it took very deliberate decisions to not follow the same path. I have listened to my family’s criticisms and doomsday predictions about our kids’ futures for the past 25 yrs. All of our lifestyle decisions–from family size to homeschooling to not scheduling our kid’s days with activities----drive most of our extended family crazy and they used to get extremely angry “for our kids’ sake.”
Glad the decisions are individual families to make.
I’m with Nrdsb4. As a parent, I did nothing remarkable except combine DNA with an emotionally stable, fairly smart, and physically capable partner, then keep them alive and marginally on task.
Those were all traits in my life so I felt attraction to similar. The results were to launch 3 kids more like us than not. At this point, they seem to be attracted to similar so should be dropping the third generation of mini-me kids within the next ten years or so.