Giving Freedom Incrementally

“How is it that you feel so comfortable letting Marco (6) be in your front yard without your watching?”

A mom asked me this question recently.  It really froze me.  I mean, I hadn’t really thought about how we had become comfortable giving him so much freedom.

Marco regularly roams our front yard and neighbors’ front yards on his own.  I wrote an article recently about Marco’s “home range” - i.e. the range he regularly and comfortably inhabits every day.  For most kids, this range is limited to the walls of their house, but Marco and my middle son, Nico, regularly hang out beyond those walls as if they were home.

Still, this mom’s query got me to really think about how we could let him do that, while so many reasonable parents of kids Marco’s age couldn’t bear the thought that their kids are outside alone.

How did we get here?

• by Mike Lanza
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Do Your Jobs, Parents!!!

A large proportion of twenty-somethings of today aren’t fully responsible adults yet.  They often live with their parents because they don’t have sufficient finances or life skills (e.g. cooking, maintaining a home, etc.).  They have a difficult time focusing on their careers, changing jobs more rapidly than ever.  They avoid long-term romantic relationships and all that goes along with them, most notably children. 

In addition, depression among twenty-somethings has reached epidemic levels.  In one study, over 11% of young adults aged 18-24 in 2001-2002 were found to have had depressive disorders.  What’s more, almost all experts say these problems are increasing.  The 2008 “National Survey of Counseling Center Directors” reports that 95.7% of Directors agree that serious psychological problems have been increasing in recent years at their school.

Why are they depressed?  Of course, reasons vary, but psychologists agree that one major reason for depression and anxiety is an inability to feel in control of events in one’s life.  So, twenty-somethings feel far less in competent in the world than their cohorts did did decades ago, and they’re getting depressed at record levels because of this.

A recent New York Times Magazine article describes how widespread this problem is.  In fact, a movement in developmental psychology aims to define a new stage of life between adolescence and young adulthood called “emerging adulthood.”

• by Mike Lanza
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Camp Yale Epilogue

Camp Yale was quite a success.  On days 4 and 5 we continued the positive momentum of the first three days with trampoline lessons, Roxaboxen house building in our creek bed, and more mosaic making, plus lots and lots of wild free play.

So, what’s the lasting legacy of Camp Yale 2010?  I’ve identified two:

• by Mike Lanza
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Camp Yale, Day 3

For the first half of today, the kids engaged in wild free play once again.  They just can’t get enough of that.  They have settled on three main centers of play:  the Slotwood house in our driveway, the trampoline in our back yard, and the playhouse in our back yard.  Also, kids frequently come to the picnic table in the front yard to grab snacks or a cup of water.

Then, my artist friend Jaying Wang helped our kids make mosaics - one big one to put on our fence, and a “stepping stone” for each kid to take home.  The big one is a design inspired by the book Roxaboxen depicting the play village that kids have been building in the creek by our house.  Below is a photo of the mosaic we made at Camp Yale last year.  That one features a quote from another favorite children’s book of mine, The Big Orange Splot.

• by Mike Lanza
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Camp Yale, Day 2

We started our day by walking to the San Francisquito Creek bed close to our house, which is totally dry this time of year.  Paul Heiple of Acterra led a lively discussion of the creek.  He taught us things like where the creek water comes from, what affects the erosion of the creek bank, what happens when the creek floods, what kinds of rocks we find there, and what kinds of plants we find there.

After Paul’s talk, the kids foraged and climbed the banks a bit, then they collected rocks for painting, and we went back to my yard (Camp Yale headquarters).  There, some kids painted rocks, while others played in our back yard or built a Slotwood house in the front.

It was a fun day that flowed very well.  The kids who didn’t know any others at the camp yesterday, when we started, got much more comfortable today.  Three hours passed very quickly.  The kids could really get used to this (in a good way...).  Perhaps we could switch off between multiple parents and do this for most of the summer.  Hmmm…

• by Mike Lanza
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Camp Yale, Day 1

[Note:  For the second consecutive year, I’m running a neighborhood summer camp at my house on Yale Road in Menlo Park, CA.  Below are notes from our first day.]

Fellow Yale Roader and magician Hugh McDonald mesmerized us with his magic tricks, and he taught the kids a few, too.  I got a great testimonial from a mom this evening:  “My kids had a great time at Camp Yale today.  Donny in particular is just raving about it.  He loved Hugh.  He is practicing his magic act with the coin to show his dad tonight ( I already saw it!!).”

Before and after Hugh’s show, the 12 attendees, ages 2-1/2 to 8, engaged in some wild free play.  They built a Slotwood house, played street hockey, jumped on the trampoline, played a chase game, and played some sort of family-based role-playing game.

Many of the kids knew our yard and each other very well before coming today, so they hit the ground running.  A couple of others didn’t know the other kids very well at first, so they started tentatively, but by the end of the day, they were feeling a lot more comfortable.

• by Mike Lanza

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Quality Time With Kids

Children and parents differ sharply as to what is quality time spent between them, according to The National KidsDay Meaningful Time Survey, conducted by Boys & Girls Clubs of America in 2002.

In essence, the survey shows that, while parents think that instructive time spent with children is quality time (the survey calls this “meaningful time"), children strongly prefer fun time.  Children prefer fun time to instructive time by a margin of 49% to 35%, while parents prefer instructive time by a margin of 62% to 35%.  Parents tend to want to enrich their parenting experience, while children desire to feel wanted and supported. 

• by Mike Lanza
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It Takes a Street to Raise Jacob

Jacob rolled on his scooter alongside Andrew.  He climbed on to a chair to watch other kids play a board game.  He grabbed a cup of water and drank it.  He walked over to a woman and got a hug.  He hopped on his scooter again.

This went on for a couple of hours.

“Is anyone watching Jacob?” I asked Hetty Fox, matriarch of the Lyman Place play street.

“Uh,” she scanned around for a moment.  “No, not right now.  But his cousin Andrew is right there, and everyone else here knows him, too.  Besides, he has lots of aunts and uncles and cousins who live right here on the street, as well as his grandmother and grandfather.  In fact, his great-grandmother lives here, too.”

How old would you guess Jacob is from hearing about this situation?  I’ll give you a hint:  parents often refer to his age as the “terrible” age.

Yes, Jacob is two - just barely two.  His second birthday was just a few days ago.

• by Mike Lanza
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A Player’s High

Have you ever run a long distance and felt a “runner’s high?” For me, it’s always kicked in at about five miles or forty minutes.  At that point, I get a feeling of euphoria, and the feeling of any little aches and pains goes away.  If I run less, I don’t get that feeling.  It’s not as if, if I run two-and-a-half miles instead of five, I get 50% of a runner’s high.  I get 0%.  Nothing.

I’ve come to realize that children at play can achieve something like a runner’s high when they play, which I’ll call a “player’s high.” Kids achieve a sort of euphoria, but the most noticeable thing to us parents is that they start to generate new things to do seemlessly, from one activity to the next.  Their play becomes self-sustaining, almost totally serendipitous.  Anything they do is fun merely because they’re doing it.  Boredom, or any traces of it, vanishes.  It’s similar to a “flow” state for children that I speculated on previously. 

When our kids get in this state, our lives get better, too.  They’re happy, they’re managing their own activities, and they’re not sitting in front of a screen.  What’s more, I would argue that they learn a great deal when they’re in this state, too.  These days, my two older boys are achieving this “player’s high” state regularly at their hangout in a creek bed. 

• by Mike Lanza
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Children, Nature, and Neighborhoods

Much has been written about the deep, positive impact that exposure to nature can have on children.  I agree.  Recently, I’ve seen with my own eyes how vital a relationship with nature can be for children.

However, through this experience I’ve come to realize that the discussions of children and nature have largely failed to address how to best include nature into children’s lives. 

I’ve come to realize that two factors are crucial to the magical experience my two older boys (6 and 2-1/2) have had:

• by Mike Lanza
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A Society of Kids in the Woods

I’ve been looking forward to this moment for six years, ever since my first son was born, when I vowed that I would not give my children a childhood full of screen time inside the house and packed schedules outside.

Just in the last week, I’ve helped a group of five neighbor kids (ages 8, 6-1/2, 6, 4-1/2, and 2-1/2), including two of my own, create a new society of their own.  They’ve created their own hangout - a stylized tree fort - and their own culture in a creek bed by our house.  They go there for hours at a time and are totally autonomous, with an adult watching passively from a distance.  They plan.  They build.  They negotiate.  They cooperate.  They explore.  They play.  Occasionally, they disagree, but they always work things out on their own.

To me, this is the epitome of what childhood should be.  The kids play and work and learn all at once.  They constantly come up with new things to do.  Their activity flows from one activity to another endlessly.

They don’t need TV or video games or scheduled activities, and they don’t need parents.  And they’re never, ever bored.

They’ve been there every afternoon since we started on Monday, and they show no signs of getting tired of it.  It’s been the highlight of their summer, hands down.  I hope they do it the rest of the summer, and for years in the future.

So, how did I make this happen? 

• by Mike Lanza
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Do Stressed-Out Childhoods = Bright Futures?

Numerous studies show that being a parent makes people unhappy.  Their kids are unhappy, too - youth and teenage depression has increased significantly in recent decades.  In addition, parents are spending more time than ever with their kids, even though they’re also working more than ever.

What the heck is going on?  How is all this connected?  The root, many experts believe, is the highly stressful, busy lifestyle that parents are forcing on their children.  In their paper, The Rug Rat Race, Garey and Valerie Ramey claim that the increase is largely due to parents’ quest to get their children into good colleges.

You know.  Scheduled to the max with activities.  Lots of homework.  Parents bearing down on their kids to work as hard as they can toward getting into a good college.  Lots of yelling.  Not much sleep. 

• by Mike Lanza
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Investing in Kids’ Play

I just made a $3,000 investment in a solution to the kids’ neighborhood play problem last week.  I couldn’t be more pleased.

The recipient is The New York Kids Foundation, which runs a one-block long “play street” on Lyman Place in the South Bronx, one of the poorest places in the United States.  The head of the Foundation, Hetty Fox, was born and raised on that street.  She left there to teach at a university in Southern California in the 1960s, but she came back to her family home on Lyman Place in 1970. 

She returned exactly when her neighborhood needed her most.  In the decade of the seventies, the South Bronx suffered from a huge rash of arsons which depleted about 40% of all housing stock, and population dipped by 57%.  Even today, its U. S. Congressional District is the poorest in the United States.

For forty years now, Fox has been working very hard for kids on Lyman Place.  This summer will mark the 34th consecutive year that she will run a “play street” for neighborhood kids.  Most New York City play streets are run by the police, via its “Police Athletic League,” but the law also allows streets that conform to certain rules and get over 50% of neighbors to sign a petition to run their own.

• by Mike Lanza
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Streets are for Kids, Too!

“Car! Car! C-A-R!  Stick your head in a jelly jar!”

“Hey! Whattya think?  This is a road?”

When I was a kid, we used to chant these sayings at cars when they drove through our sports field, which also served as a road for cars.  When a car would first appear, someone would yell “CAR!”, but all of us didn’t always run off the road quickly.  The older among us would often stand there and glare at the car for a few seconds before walking off, as if to say, “OK, I’ll let you pass through my sports field.”

One day, we set up a series of chairs with hockey sticks laying across them and a sign saying, “Toll, 25 cents.” Most cars didn’t pay, but a few did.  Nonetheless, they all stopped.  In retrospect, the money didn’t matter much.  It just felt good to stop all those cars.

That stretch of Orchard Spring Road between my house and the Weisses was our hangout.  It was absolutely our play space.  We spray painted bases on the pavement for our softball games.  I remember the spot on the curb where I fell on my face and got a black eye playing two-hand-tab football.  Even though it was cut down decades ago, I can still clearly see the Granny Smith apple tree in my yard, next to the street, where we had many refreshment breaks.

Kids today hardly ever think of the street outside their house as their play space.  Often, when they do, it’s because the street has been temporarily closed to car traffic.  I’m currently working with two “play streets” in New York City where this is happening during the summer (here and here), and I recently helped out at a neighborhood summer camp in Palo Alto, CA at which the street was closed for a week.

• by Mike Lanza
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Children’s Wild Fun: Do You Crave it or Avoid it?

I discovered something very important today.

You see, I absolutely crave the sights and sounds of children having wild fun.  You know - lots of screaming and laughing and running.  Spontaneous.  No authority, on the verge of getting out of control.  Teetering on the edge between total joy and danger.

In fact, I’ve done a lot to insure that children around me, including my three boys, get to experience this regularly.  Last year, I renovated my front and back yards to make them into a neighborhood hangout, and earlier this year I added a trampoline to the back yard.  In addition, I go outside with my boys almost every day to play and get other kids playing with us.

All this has been working quite well.  We regularly have kids over here having wild fun - at least a couple times a week.  Knock on wood, no one’s gotten hurt yet.  Thus far, it’s been unmitigated joy here.

What I’ve discovered is that most parents don’t have the same craving that I do.  Sure, at some level, they like hearing and seeing kids having wild fun, but it’s not like a drug for them as it is for me.  They can live without it. 

• by Mike Lanza
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