© 2023
By Don Frost
It was late spring, but it felt more like one of those soft summer afternoons when there are only a few more hours of sunlight left to shed its warmth. My wife, Anne, and I were on our deck soaking it all in when a most remarkable event unfolded before our amazed eyes: A pickup baseball game in a neighbor’s yard.
It started innocuously enough with three girls of about 10 years of age. They had a bat and an oversized ball. One girl was the batter, another the pitcher, and the third was the outfielder. Our lots are large, about ¾-acres, so they were too far away for us to make out their words.
Then several boys of about the same age and younger appeared from an adjoining house. Soon the kids had organized themselves into a game, the rules of which they thrashed out among themselves. They were making them up as they went along, as is standard with a pickup game when you don’t have 18 players.
To the credit of the parents of the two households, no adult emerged to organize teams, the field of play, bases, or rules. The kids were on their own and they were loving it, no thanks to any grownup’s interference.
As they pitched, batted, fielded, and ran – with varying degrees of ineptitude – joyful shouts and laughter filled the air. I felt myself transported to a time long, long ago when I was 10 or so and such baseball games broke out spontaneously in my neighborhood. On a nearby empty lot first base could be a crushed coffee can, second base a flattened Cheerios box, third base a splintered two-by-four, and a patch of bare dirt as home plate.
We had a fantastic time and no adults told us how to go about it.
But something happened to the country between then and now. I’ll let syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson explain as she advised a mother concerned about her son’s upcoming summer vacation. She wrote:
“The parents’ job is to find stimulating activities to engage their [9-year-old] son over the gaping yaw that is summertime.”
She actually said parents are supposed to see to it that their children are entertained. In Dickinson’s view kids can’t be expected to have the wit or intelligence to amuse themselves; they require adult guidance.
And “the gaping yaw that is summertime”? Please. Summer is hardly the grim-sounding tedium between school terms that Dickinson envisions. On the contrary. To a kid it’s a time of liberation from the restraints of school. “No more homework, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks!” Yee ha!
Summer is when kids are free to play, to kick up their heels, to jump, to ride their bikes, to run around with their pals, to lie in the grass, to read, to do whatever they damn well please – within the obvious limits of common sense.
Maybe Dickinson is a casualty of our times, a victim of an unchallenged and unsupported hysteria that grips the nation, the fear that there is a pedophile lurking behind every bush and around every corner. It is this terror that spawns “helicopter parents,” moms and dads who feel the only way to keep their children safe is to organize and supervise their play; everything cleaned and sanitized for their protection. It manifests itself in such parental instructions as, “Okay, you can go outside, but play where I can see you.” And “Okay, you can go to the park as long as Jodie’s mother will be there.”
It is an anxiety born of overblown news reporting that fosters the gut-feeling that the ranks of pedophiles somehow tripled in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.
There is a park within easy walking distance of my neighbors’ homes, a place where their kids could play, but they would be unsupervised unless some parent volunteered to stand guard over them. I can only hope their parents did not allow them to play in that pickup game, unsupervised, only because it was in their own backyards; that they are not too terrified to let them walk to the park and play on their own.
As I so often do, I feel sorry for kids of today. They’re cursed because they don’t know what they’re missing. They’re blessed because they don’t know what they’re missing.
commonsense931 