I recently read a fascinating book about childhood that captured a sentiment that I think is common to parents today.  In the book, titled, Where did you go?  OUT.  What did you do?  NOTHING, Robert Paul Smith laments the loss of a child’s world of games, play and imagination, a private world, wholly separate from that of their parents.  Smith recalls his own childhood freedoms and time spent doing things that never involved his parents, things like playing marbles and kick-the-can, exploring construction sites, and making up games with arcane rules that passed from kid to kid without any sort of adult instruction.

Smith writes, “My world, as a kid, was full of things that grownups didn’t care about.  My fear now is that all of us grownups have become so childish that we don’t leave the kids much room to move around in, that we foolishly believe that we understand them so well because we share things with them.”

He’s right that parents and other caregivers sometimes dictate a child’s actions from dawn to dusk, with most play being directed, supervised, and otherwise shaped by grownups.  But I’m not sure that parents do this because they themselves are childish.  To me it feels more like parents no longer trust childhood as a means to an end, as if too much (or sometimes, any) undirected free time with friends or on their own will surely lead the children to grow up un-enriched blobs barely able to tie their own shoes, much less appreciate art or win a chess match.

But here is what I found most interesting about Smith’s book:  It was written in 1957.  Smith was comparing his own childhood to that of his son’s, lamenting how child psychologists and Dr. Spock had taken over what, in his day, was a mostly hands-off process. Yet, I had just the sort of free-range childhood in the 1970s that Smith thought was dead and gone in the 1950s. Perhaps these two different parenting styles have always co-existed, with one or the other simply getting more attention or becoming more in vogue as the pendulum swings from generation to generation.  According to Smith, we’re not the first helicopter parent generation, and it appears that we won’t be the last.

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