By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

Minor miracles do occur.

Last Sunday, while scrolling through the daily papers and weekly magazines online, a chore I usually try to dispatch as quickly as possible, several articles actually held my interest. 

The New York Times, surprisingly, kept me occupied longer than an episode of grandma Paula Deen’s cooking show on Food Network. I ignored the redundant, and gleeful, Jack Abramoff stories, scanned the paper’s 19th anti-Alito editorial and instead focused on Peter Applebome’s “Our Towns” piece titled, “How We Took the Child Out of Childhood.” The crux of the columnist’s befuddlement, shared by myself, is why kids today, at least those under 15, live in vastly different universes from those of a generation or two ago.

Applebome’s not the first writer to express at least mild annoyance with today’s “play date” culture, but his take was the best I’ve read. He writes: “How come long, long ago I got to play football in the street every day after school with Sammy Brett and Howie Kavaler and the rest of the neighborhood kids on Long Island, or to ride my bike as far out along the service road of the Long Island Expressway as I cared to, but children now live in permanent lockdown, their every moment planned, organized, monitored and measured? How did this happen?”

He goes on to hawk a book by University of Houston history professor Steven Mintz (Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood), who cites three changes over the years: media invasive and sensationalized media coverage of child abductions and pervs lurking around every corner; class status, and the guilt of parents who work “so hard and such long hours that they figure they owe their kids a designer childhood every bit as up-to-date as that plasma TV in the living room.”

I don’t buy Mintz’s theories completely, but it is weird to see our north Baltimore neighborhood—in the city but residential, with lots of families in suburban-like houses—almost empty even in the summer, when you’d expect pick-up ballgames to continue until dinner is served. My son Booker, 11, is a prime example. Although not crazy about homework, he generally has a lot of fun at school (which is just half a mile from our house), whether it’s involvement in student government, hacking around with buddies at recess or planning the next issue of the “underground” paper, The Daily Oops, he started with four other fifth-graders. But on weekends, even though a lot of his friends are within walking distance, he prefers to hang out with his older brother Nicky or go on excursions with my wife and I.

“What are we doing today, Dad?” he’ll say at 6 a.m. on a weekend or summer day, and when I tell him to scram and go read a book and then later play football or baseball with nearby friends, he looks at me like I’m some sort of nut. Sure, I greatly enjoy spending time with the boys, whether it’s attending a movie or Orioles game, scouring through the CD racks at our local indie music outlet or just taking walks around the city; but this isn’t the way I grew up.

Like Applebome, I also grew up on Long Island and after school my friends and I would drop off our books at home and organize any kind of game in the neighborhood. We’d play touch football on the street, go sledding when it snowed, sneak cigarettes in the woods behind the housing developments, look for turtles and frogs, ride bicycles to the stationery store, and, later on, drink smuggled beer atop the hill that overlooked the Southdown Shopping Center. 

There was no jazz back then about parents feeling guilty about working so hard that they had to overcompensate by purchasing every new toy or gadget for their kids. My father toiled six and a half days at his car wash on Sunrise Highway, so he was mostly out of the picture for random frolics (and also was lucky to escape church on Sunday mornings), although when he arrived home in the evening we’d all go to Crescent or Brown’s Beach for a “dip.”

My mother had five kids to occupy her time, whether it was cooking, driving us to little league games, cleaning the house or enduring PTA meetings. She also spent hours writing jingles for contests (over 1100 prizes in some 20 years) and yakking on the trunk line with Lori Howard and Bernice Reilly. I think it’s a myth of the cultural elite that parents today are so much busier in this current era, obsessed by career paths and attempting to make sure their own progeny have a better lifestyle than their own. It’s commonly a natural instinct for parents to desire an easier life for their kids, no matter what decade. 

I admit there’s a different perception about the danger that lurks for younger kids and adolescents, even though the crime rate has steadily declined in the past 10 years. A couple of weeks ago my 13-year-old son Nicky announced he was going to see the band Deerhoof at a club about a mile from our house.

Sounds good, I replied, what time is the concert? He informed me that my presence wasn’t required, or desired—except to buy the tickets, of course—since his 16-year-old friend from a film workshop was going to drive. I aged about a year after that remark and calmly told him that there was no way he was going to a rock venue unsupervised and if he’d like I’d gladly sit at the bar and read a book so as not to embarrass him in front of his crowd. I flashed back to the year 1971, when my own peers started receiving driving privileges; “cruising” was a ton of fun, but remembering when one station wagon pilot pretended to fall asleep while hurtling down a steep hill toward a river gave me a chill.

Nicky accepted this, but not without first putting me on the witness stand. “But Dad, when you were my age or a little older you’d take the train into the city and hang out in the Village and Central Park, so why can’t I do the same sort of thing?” Because, Dumbo, I would say under the influence of truth serum, I don’t want you looking for nickel bags of grass or getting into fights at Shea or Yankee Stadium because you’re a Red Sox fan. The sanitized version, naturally, was that it was a different time, a distant era when you never thought twice about hitch-hiking or walking home alone at midnight.

I guess it’s the desire to forestall as long as possible his, and Booker’s, feeling of invulnerability that belongs to teenagers, as well as the fear that he’ll behave as I did. Oh sure, I encourage them to read books and newspapers, study hard, all the positives from my teen years, but none of the potentially dangerous stuff that parents from previous generations were largely oblivious to.

Times columnist David Brooks is usually tough to stomach—although not a patch on the op-ed page’s far worse offenders, excepting John Tierney, who gets better every month—whether he’s composing another mash note to John McCain, predicting a populist reformer who’ll roar to the nation’s rescue or just generally pontificating in a Lincoln Chafee kind of way. But when Brooks dabbles in his preferred milieu, pop sociology, he’s at his nadir.

Last Sunday, Brooks wrote about three online “community” sites that kids of all ages frequent—MySpace.com, Facebook and Xanga—and while he hardly issues a blanket condemnation, his investigation has revealed “something to make parents [like Brooks, presumably] cringe.” 

I’m familiar with these destinations as well, since a week doesn’t pass when either a newspaper article or notice from school fails to warn parents about the content so readily available. This relatively new craze is not to my liking, but you can’t really stop it without denying your kid a computer.

This is vintage Brooks: “Every social environment has its own lingua franca, and the one on these sites has been shaped by ‘American Pie,’ spring break and ‘Girls Gone Wild.’ The sites are smutty. [Hustler and Screw, many years ago, weren’t?] Facebook, which is restricted to students and alumni of colleges, is rollicking but respectable. But there is a huge class distinction between the people on Facebook and the much larger and less educated population that uses MySpace. The atmosphere on MySpace is much raunchier.”

What bullshit. Sure, there’s plenty of “raunch” on MySpace.com, but most kids—at least those of my acquaintance—frequent the site because it allows instant messaging regardless of what Internet connection a kid uses. How Brooks arrives at the conclusion that MySpace compulsives are “less educated” is an example of his own prejudices. One can only hope that it doesn’t lead to another one of his dreadful books like Bobos in Paradise.