The Joy of Being Underparented
In a funny coincidence, a week after visiting my one-year-old grandniece, I read Darby Saxbe’s article “People Should Ignore Their Children More Often” in the New York Times.
I had spent the weekend watching my niece attend to her daughter’s every whimper. My niece was exhausted and stretched thin. I gently encouraged her to let the baby be for a bit—she’s perfectly safe in the 10-foot-by-10-foot playpen! But my niece wasn’t having any of that.
Saxbe’s article talks about how overwhelmed and stressed today’s parents are and makes the point that children in hunter-gatherer societies were probably often unsupervised, and when they were with their parents it was often when their parents were doing adult things—chores and such. Children in these communities got the gift of being bored, as well as the opportunity to observe adults doing grown-up tasks.
Saxbe suggests trying to approximate this approach to parenting and calls it “mindful underparenting.”
When I was a kid in the 1960s and ‘70s, my family took a trip each Memorial Day weekend to the Broadwater Beach hotel in Biloxi, MS. The weekend was hosted by a professional society my father belonged to, and the same families gathered each year. My brother and I loved this trip to the Gulf Coast, primarily because we hardly saw our parents the whole weekend. While they were playing golf and enjoying many, many martinis, we ran with a pack of kids, enjoying the hotel’s swimming pools, stopping at the snack bar when hungry, and gathering for movies at night. I think we saw our parents at breakfast and at bedtime. It was a wonderful weekend of being underparented.
When I was 12, the neighborhood kids built a fantastic three-level treehouse in the empty lot next to my house. We took lumber from scrap heaps at home construction sites down the street and rummaged in our parents’ garages for hammers and nails. No parents supervised the construction, no parents asked where we got the lumber from, no parents did a safety check on the structure.
I loved climbing to the top level of the treehouse on a windy day, book in hand, feeling the floor move as the trees swayed in the wind. I felt a delightful mix of fear and happiness. We had so much room to tackle projects on our own and figure it all out by ourselves.
When my sons were elementary-school age in the aughts, I couldn’t imagine giving them free rein like I had as a child. The world just did not (does not) seem as safe as it did back then. While they were young, I often lamented to myself that they were not getting nearly the amount of unsupervised time outside as I did as a kid. Even though they had friends in the neighborhood, kids just didn’t seem to play outside.
My grandniece lives two blocks from a lovely little park with a playground. I wonder if she and other neighborhood kids will be able to walk there on their own and play when they get older. Sadly, I think it’s not likely.