My Goal

I want my kids to play outside with other neighborhood kids every day. 
I want them to create their own games and rules. 
I want them to play big, complex games with large groups of kids, and simpler games one-on-one with a best friend. 
I want them to decide for themselves what to play, where, and with whom. 
I want them to settle their own disputes with their friends. 
I want them to create their own private clubs with secret rules. 
I want them to make lasting physical artifacts that show the world that this is their place. 
I want them to laugh and run and think. 
Every day.

That’s what I had.  It’s my standard for a good childhood.  It’s my goal for my kids.

• by Mike Lanza
• 10 Comments

Self-Reliance as a Core Value of Parenting

Whatever happened to “self-reliance?” It seems that parents don’t value this quality in their children anymore.  When I was a kid, parents bragged about their kids’ ability to do things on their own, and they were embarrassed if their kids seemed helpless.

My parents made my sister and me walk with friends to and from school - over a mile each way - starting in first grade.  My dad had us work at his pharmacy from the age of 9 or 10, not because we were poor, but because he saw work and saving money as fundamental virtues.  In addition, we always did our own homework by ourselves. 

I feel like a weirdo these days because I still value self-reliance as much as my parents did, while most parents have largely abandoned the whole idea. 

In her study of parenting advice in the 20th Century,* Markella Rutherford finds that parents have come to consider schoolwork and, more generally, preparation for college, as their children’s “work,” and they have severely limited their children’s freedom outside the home.

Thus, we have a generation of teenagers entering adulthood with very little idea how to get anything done for themselves.

• by Mike Lanza
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A Trampoline!!!

We just installed a trampoline at our house, and it’s been a great success.  Every day, at least one group of neighborhood kids visits to play with my kids on it.  One day, we had four different groups come to play on it, and it’s the middle of the winter!  I think the trampoline has finally enabled us to reach a goal I’ve been aiming at for the last year:  to make my yard into a neighborhood hangout for kids. 

In short, a trampoline is the best kid-magnet feature you can install in your yard.  I should know - besides a trampoline, I’ve installed a huge playhouse, a swing set, a huge whiteboard, a sandbox, a fountain, and a basketball hoop in my yard.

In this article, I’ve compiled a few lessons I’ve learned for purchasing, installing, and managing a trampoline:

• by Mike Lanza
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Totalitarianism Makes a Comeback in Politics and in Parenting

In 1987, US President Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later, indeed, the wall was torn down, and the era of totalitarian communism ended with it.  For those of us old enough to remember this historic event, it was a dramatic repudiation of the idea that human behavior should be tightly controlled. 

Today, though, it’s easy to find widespread acceptance of governmental repression.  In its prosecution of the War on Terror, the George W. Bush administration inflicted torture on “enemy combatants” and extensive surveillance over American citizens.  Then, he won re-election. 

On the other end of the political spectrum, thought leaders like New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas Friedman regularly heap praise on China’s government, despite its extensive record of repression and brutality.  In addition, many of America’s elite universities, bastions of liberal thinking, have limited speech that doesn’t agree with their dominant points of view.

Parenting has similarly reverted back to more totalitarian practices in recent years.  On the one hand, in her study of parenting advice,* Markella Rutherford finds that the “discipline of earlier decades [was] discarded, and parents were advised instead to recognize the individuality of each child and to follow the child’s lead, responding to her developmental readiness.”

However, Rutherford finds that parents’ newfound permissiveness is limited to their children’s lives inside the home.  Thus, children have channeled their quest for independence into their activities on the Internet, rather than explorations outside the home.  Rutherford writes, “While it may be true that today’s parents tolerate more in-home rebellion and sullen attitudes than past generations, they are also facing parenting demands that require near-constant surveillance of their children.”

In other words, parents are controlling and restricting their children’s lives outside the home like never before. 

• by Mike Lanza
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Connections Between Generations

Reading the New York Times obituary of J. D. Salinger yesterday brought me right back to my profound feelings of adolescent alienation and angst.  No work of art touched me more deeply in those years than his classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

What’s intriguing now, looking back at my deep connection with Salinger’s timeless protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is how a semi-autobiographical story from the 1930s, published in the early 1950s in a dominant medium of that age (i.e. a paperback novel), could touch an adolescent of the 1970s so deeply. 

Will our little kids, adolescents of the 2010s, connect deeply with a story from four decades before - i.e. the 1970s?  Will they consume it in a medium of the early 1990s, before the Internet explosion?

• by Mike Lanza
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The Limits of Electronic Media Consumption

Back in 2004, Kaiser Family Foundation researchers found that children between 8 and 18 consumed electronic media* for pleasure (i.e. outside of school and schoolwork) 6 hours a day, on average.

They thought that children must have reached their limit.

They were wrong, as it turns out. 

The 2009 survey found that children spend 7 hours a day consuming electronic media.  What’s more, they’re consuming almost 11 hours per day of total electronic media, but since they’re multitasking so often, they cram this into 7 hours of time.  The researchers didn’t even include 1-1/2 hours of cell phone talking and texting.  So, if we add this on to the 7 hours of electronic media time, kids are consuming electronic media for 8-1/2 hours a day. 

This is breathtaking.  Think about this.  Sleep takes, say, 8 hours.  School takes about 7 hours.  That’s 15 hours.  15 + 8-1/2 = 23-1/2 hours.  So, kids have 30 minutes a day of time when they’re awake, not in school, and not consuming electronic media?

• by Mike Lanza
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“Free-Range” is Not a Viable Parenting Style. We Need One.

Dr. Phil recently ran a program entitled “New Parenting Styles.” The show sets up a dichotomy between the current dominant “overparenting” approach and “free-range parenting.”

Yikes - do folks out there really think that Free-Range is a parenting style? 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m in huge agreement with the Free-Range movement.  Parents have wayyy too much control over their children these days.  Lack of autonomy is the root of my critique of childhood in America today.

I thoroughly applaud the Free-Range Kids movement, but it’s important to understand what it is and what it isn’t.  It does an excellent job of telling parents what they shouldn’t do, but it doesn’t tell them what they should do instead.  It is absolutely not a viable parenting style.  As we rebels against overparenting gain the strength to swim against the tide, we need to start defining our parenting by what we do.

• by Mike Lanza
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Children’s Work and Play

Children hardly do household chores anymore.  They hardly work at part-time jobs, either.

Instead, increasingly, their schoolwork is their “work.” Interested only in what matters to college admissions departments, parents would rather their children do homework or participate in extracurricular activities than do chores or work part-time.

The cost of this choice is high for today’s youth in many ways.  When they finally do enter the work force as young adults, they do so with little or no experience doing “unskilled” work.  Most parents like to think of their children as high-level managerial material, but young people can learn many valuable lessons cleaning floors, cutting lawns, flipping burgers, or delivering newspapers.

• by Mike Lanza
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Parents Spend More Time With Their Kids Today: The Good News and Bad News

Studies show that parents, both mothers and fathers, are spending more time with their children than they did back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, when we parents were children.  They also show a big shift in how parents spend time with children.  (A comprehensive review of all this research can be found in ”The Rug Rat Race” by Gary Ramey and Valerie Ramey.)

There’s good news and bad news in these numbers. 

• by Mike Lanza
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Psychological Bullying in Our Neighborhood

My 5-year-old son Marco was psychologically bullied by two older boys in our neighborhood yesterday.  It was the latest and most serious in a series of episodes like this. 

However, in this situation, we found another very strong reason to advocate neighborhood play for our kids. 

• by Mike Lanza
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The Moments of Our Lives Should be at Our Homes

More and more parents are throwing children’s birthdays at a jumpy house place or a kids’ gym or a public park miles away from their homes.

Most family photo sessions with professional photographers take place at a photographer’s studio or at a park miles from home.

Practically all people get married at a special wedding venue that they hardly, if ever, have visited, or will visit after the big event.

Families often have large family dinners at restaurants.

What’s wrong with our homes?  Our Yards?  Our neighborhoods?

Does it matter that we’re passing the most significant moments of our lives at places we don’t care about?  Places we have no emotional connection to?

I believe it does. Big time.

• by Mike Lanza
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My Favorite Children’s Book About Neighborhoods

Every parent of young children who reads this blog should buy a copy of The Big Orange Splot, by children’s book author and NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater.  It’s a delightful story of independent thinking and creativity in a neighborhood.  Ultimately, it’s also about finding happiness in life, too.

• by Mike Lanza
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Social Isolation and Digital Technology: The Pew Study

Does the widespread use of digital technology contribute to social isolation in America?  Many contemporary social critics think so, but a study published last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project asserts that this is not the case.

Who’s right?

• by Mike Lanza
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Kids’ Lives & Microsoft Windows:  An Analogy

The vast majority of kids don’t play outside in their neighborhoods.  The vast majority of adults use Microsoft Windows on their computers.

Furthermore, if given a choice, most parents would like their kids to play outside in their neighborhoods.  Also, about half of Windows users are not happy using Windows, while the vast majority of Mac users are happy.

In both cases, people are trapped into doing something that doesn’t make them happy.

• by Mike Lanza
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Trick-or-Treater Index?  What’s Yours?

[Note: This article was originally published in October 2008.]

In order to rate the child friendliness of a neighborhood, Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City? and The Rise of the Creative Class, has coined an intriguing concept:  the “Trick-or-Treater Index.”

The idea is simple:  just count the number of trick-or-treaters at your door on Halloween night and you’ll get a measure of how child friendly your neighborhood is the whole year.  Certainly, it’s quite simplistic, but I would agree that neighborhoods with lots of trick-or-treaters tend to have lots of children who are comfortable being outside in their neighborhood.

What’s your trick-or-treater index?  Where do you live?  What do you think of this as a measure of the child friendliness?

• by Mike Lanza
• 7 Comments