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Rachael and Emily, like Bonnie, I am of the better-safe-than-sorry school of parenting.
First, I should say, Rachael has two-plus young children, Emily has two, Bonnie's are grown (correct me if I am mistaken), and I am childless by choice.
I am a bit older than Rachael and remember well the freedom of my childhood. I grew up in a semi-rural suburb of Boston, where we used to take off in the morning, go play on the catwalks (yes, the ones that led to the power lines!), go tramping through tick-infested ponds and swamps, trolling for frogs and salamanders, climb sap-covered trees, and come home right before dark with our white socks soaking wet with swamp muck and our hair matted.
We played baseball and softball in the streets until our parents rang bells out their front doors to call us home for dinner. We sought out an adult only when something went wrong: Kevin is stuck in a tree and is too scared to climb down! Kay has a giant bloody tick on her head! Paul smacked Ellen in the leg with a Whiffleball bat and now she's crying!
It was awesome.
But it was only awesome because no one was seriously maimed, abducted, or otherwise traumatized. And this was pure luck.
I do wonder and worry about these poor kids today, who have to be so constantly supervised: strapped into car seats, unable to wander or take off for an afternoon walk to find someone to play with. No more can they just stroll up to a neighbor's house, ring the bell, and say, "Can Kay come out and play?" It's all prescheduled, prearranged, and it's even called a date!
While Rachael says the kid in the story knew where he was going, had a cell phone, and his mom would be at the soccer field a few minutes after him so would know if he had arrived safely, what would she have done if he hadn't arrived safely? What could she have done?
Since I don't have children, maybe I have an unrealistic idea of what could happen, fueled by too many news stories, movies, and my own parents' paranoia (yes, even they who let me run wild as a child were terrified of crazy things). I have no doubt that the kid was capable, self-reliant, knew where he was going, etc., but his abilities are not at issue. Could not someone have driven up and pulled him into a car and driven off? Or is that just my imagination running wild?
I agree with Bonnie: Better safe than sorry.
The only thing I can compare it to is my dog. I now live in the city, in a neighborhood where the park is in one direction and the street on which you can do all your errands is in another. And so it is a constant dilemma for dog owners: walk the dog and then do errands or take the dog on errands even though it will mean having to tie her up outside? (Is it true or an urban legend that people steal dogs and sell them for science experiments?)
I try to never tie her up outside. If I have to, it will only be at stores that I need to run into for less than a minute with glass fronts so I can see her the whole time. Once I did have to run into the bank to get some quarters for laundry and parking, and I tied her up. I had to wait in a slow-moving line and I was a nervous wreck. Why was I doing this? Would $10 worth of quarters be worth losing her over? How would I explain it to my husband if someone took her? And would I ever forgive myself?
Granted, a dog is not a child: She is not my flesh and blood, not human, and I don't have to worry about guiding her toward independence so I can send her off to college and to become a self-sufficient adult.
But if she were taken, if that kid were taken, wouldn't the parent do anything to get back that moment and make a different decision? I know I would.
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Rachael, you are the same age as my daughter, making me among the lead-paint-exposing, tummy-down-crib-placing cohort of child neglectors whose Gen X children narrowly survived. In fact, I was probably among the worst of the loosey-goosey caretakers of the era, taking risks with my first-grade child that, in retrospect, should have brought the police. The cop who scolded the Mississippi soccer mom for letting her 10-year-old walk a few blocks to the playing field may have over-reacted, but, belatedly embracing my geezer curmudgeon, I say, better safe than sorry. When I was a young single mother in 1978, we lived in the unrenovated Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. My little girl's public school was about nine blocks west on Calvert Street from the city bus stop nearest our rented row house. Where a park would form a few years later, my 6-year-old cut daily through a vacant lot strewn with old tires to get to the 40 line stop. I walked with her to the bus stop the first few days of the school year, but after she knew the way, I let my self-sufficient grade-school child set out alone every a.m. with a bus token and a peanut butter sandwich. My daughter survived my cavalier and inexperienced parenting and took her independence with her when she moved to Manhattan for college. As so many of you Generation X achievement goddesses, she grew up fearless at facing her professional and personal challenges. The self-reliance forged in childhood has served her well. That said, I was a nitwit who acted as if the innocent were immune. My neighbors should have blown the whistle on me. That spring, another child the same age as my daughter, destined perhaps for a similar happy future, wasn't as lucky. A set of well-intentioned but naive New York City parents heard a wakeup bell that reverberates today in Mississippi; Washington; New Haven, Conn.; and Ohio. The boy's parents, Julie and Stan Patz, were loving caretakers who, like me, failed to estimate the risk of allowing their 6-year-old to walk two blocks from his apartment door to his school bus. I've just finished reading a new release, After Etan, by my former ABC News colleague Lisa Cohen (who now teaches journalism at Columbia). Lisa's book is a disturbing and harrowing dissection of the unsolved Etan Patz missing child case that "held America captive" for days, weeks, and years after his disappearance. I'm certain that National Missing Children's Day, observed every year on the anniversary of their son's kidnapping, offers little comfort to his parents.
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Yesterday's "Well" column in the New York Times links to a quiz to determine what kind of cook you are. The story explores the idea that the family's healthfulness is determined not by the food preferences of family members but by the "nutritional gatekeeper"—mother, father, nanny, grandparent—whoever does the shopping and cooking. Although the piece praises healthy cooks, they come out in the quiz as the ones you'd least like to have dinner with: They use fresh ingredients but don't care about taste. (Reminds me of something Julia Child once said about vegetarians: "Do they ever enjoy a meal?") The "methodical" and "competitive" don't seem all that fun either. I rated "innovative" (translation: erratic). I can live with that.
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Disney's newest animated film won't be released for another nine months, but The Princess and the Frog—Disney's first to feature an African-American princess—is already being scrutinized. First it got knocked because the heroine was a black chambermaid working for a rich white woman, then because one of the animal sidekicks was a toothless, seemingly redneck Cajun firefly. Plus there were plenty of people who were peeved that it took Disney so long to feature an African-American princess in the first place. (Dodai at Jezebel has been tracking the fracas; scroll down to see more links.)
Now, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail, bloggers are up in arms because Princess Tiana— reimagined as a young woman living in Jazz Age New Orleans—falls in love with a guy who isn't black. Prince Naveen (an Indian name, I'll note) is heir to the throne of "Maldonia," and is voiced by a Brazilian actor. I'm not quite sure he's white, let alone "the whitest frat boy dickhead you can find," as one commenter put it, but he's definitely much lighter-skinned than Tiana. I think he looks sort of Mediterranean, myself.
I'm not surprised that people are pre-emptively monitoring this film's sensitivity levels, but I honestly can't tell if this tweaks my sensors. On one hand, it sucks that little African-American boys won't get to see a black prince, and I don't like the equation of lighter skin with desirability, either. But on the other hand, I'm all for seeing more mixed-race couples in the popular media—how annoying is it that, in most movies and TV shows, minorities are always getting paired with partners of the same race? I've been watching old episodes of Firefly lately, and the Gina Torres/Alan Tudyk pairing still seems really fresh to me. I'm going to try to reserve judgment till I actually see the film, but what do you ladies think?
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Rachael, I'm also thoroughly depressed over the story of the cops getting called on the mom who let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice alone. Not just because of my own childhood walk to school, over several blocks in Philadelphia that added up to more than a mile (woo hoo). But also because kids need to be able to go places alone for their own sanity. In the New Haven neighborhood I live in now, there's a beloved Italian grocer down the street. My parent friends and I have debated when our kids can go there by themselves, and then lo and behold, one of the dads went ahead and sent his 8-year-old over. Bless him. The next hurdle is the park three blocks away. You have to cross two busy streets to get there, and a couple of years ago a babysitter was raped in the woods that border it. So it's not an easy call—we don't live in a big city, but it's still a city. But I really hope that as my kids turn 10 and then 11 and 12, they can have some sense of the power of their own mobility. When you walk alone, you get to think your own thoughts and make your own choices. Even if it's just when to jump over a crack in the sidewalk or watch a cat curl up on a porch, it matters.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson:
I was perusing the Simon & Schuster children’s book catalog to see what the kids are reading these days, and I came across a picture book written by none other than Meghan McCain, whose recent cat-fighting Dahlia rightfully skewered in her great piece in Slate today. That’s right, folks, your favorite daddy’s-girl blogopundit and mine is an author, too. My Dad, John McCain, came out last September, midcampaign, and features lots of lovely, nostalgia-inducing illustrations of father and daughter by the guy who drew Felicity and Samantha for the American Girl books. And to think, all Cate Edwards wrote about her dad’s campaign was her Princeton thesis.
Here’s the blurb from the catalog:
Born with a commitment to serve his country, Senator John McCain was destined to run for president one day. In this picture book, written by his daughter Meghan, young readers will learn all of the fascinating and sometimes dangerous events that helped shape the senator and prepared him for the race for the White House. From perilous wartime service to a twenty-year plus career in the Senate, this book will give readers an inside look at a man who has devoted his life to his country. The publisher shall donate one percent of its net proceeds from the sale of this book through regular U.S. trade channels to Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. (Net proceeds are the gross amounts received by the publisher less shipping, mailing, and insurance costs or charges and taxes.) Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund is an organization that aids military personnel and veterans who have suffered severe traumatic brain injuries while serving our nation.
Has the Candidate’s Daughter become a stock character in our political narratives, and if so, what’s that about? And does anyone think 1 percent is a pretty pathetic donation to brain-damaged veterans, especially for a book by a woman who brags in its pages that her “ancestors have fought for their country in every American war since the Revolution”?
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The Fairfield Weekly has an interesting piece on the public's enduring fascination with Sarah Palin: "The Porn Identity." It opens in a strip club where adult film star Lisa Ann, who played Palin in Hustler's XXX-homage to the once aspiring VP, "Who's Nailin' Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF," takes the stage dressed as Palin to perform a striptease. Acccording to Hustler Video, "Who's Nailin' Paylin" is one of their all-time best-sellers, proving so popular they're producing a follow-up this spring, "Hollywood's Nailin' Paylin," which "will parody Palin's imagined new career as book author and talk-show host and, of course, put her in bed with a bunch of spoofed celebrities." Hustler says there's just something about Sarah:
"There aren't many franchises in the adult world. It's a one-trick pony," [Hustler Director of Operations Jeff] Thill says. "It's really different with her. She's not really in the news right now and yet we can't keep the title in stock. Assuming the second one goes well, we'll continue on forever if we can get away with it."
In an interview, the Weekly asked her impersonator about Palin's sexual mystique. The woman who's walked a mile in stripper shoes as Palin responded: "It's a distraction from politics. I hope people wouldn't be swayed either way by sex appeal. People vote for all the wrong reasons anyway, but if we throw sex appeal into the mix we'll have [a disaster]." But is she right? Months after Palin's disastrous run, we're still intrigued. She's the anti-Hillary who won't go away, and judging by her stickiness, I can't help but wonder if Palin has some strange hope in her rumored possible run for the presidency in 2012. Maybe Palin's sublimated-yet-paraded brand of sexuality is the key to her success—and the farthest thing from a disaster.
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In today's installment of "Wow, I feel like a geezer" ... I'm feeling like the stereotypical old man who grouses to his grandkids that when he was a kid, "We had to walk five miles to school, uphill each way, in three feet of snow."
BoingBoing picked up this post from a blog called Free-Range Kids. Turns out a mom let her 10-year-old walk one-third of a mile to soccer practice ... wait for it ... by himself. Kind of. He had a cell phone, and anyhow Mom had to be at the soccer field a few minutes after he got there, so she would find out quickly if he arrived safely. Alas, the poor kid got only three blocks before a cop stopped him. When the cop found the mom at the soccer field, he explained that they'd received "hundreds" of calls to 911 and said she could be charged with child endangerment. (I somehow doubt that this small town in Mississippi has the population density to lead to "hundreds of calls.")
I know that my generation (X, if you must know) likes to joke about how it's amazing we survived childhood, without five-point-harness car seats and cribs that had lead paint and parents who let us sleep on our tummies. Of course we can joke about it, because we survived. There's no doubt that improved safety guidelines for children's products and better advice from pediatricians have indeed made us safer. But when I was a kid, I walked to kindergarten by myself. Sure, there were other kids in the neighborhood and we'd walk together when we saw one another, but I knew where I was going and how to stop at the stop signs and look for cars and not talk to strangers. At the pool we swam at every summer, every kid looked forward to turning 10 because that's when you could start going without your parents. (Yes, there were lifeguards.)
I don't know if neighborhoods are safer or more dangerous today than when I was growing up. As with most things, it probably depends on where you live. And no doubt, people are influenced by a 24-hour news cycle filled with accounts of missing Caylees and Elizabeths. But parents need to be able to take reasonable steps to foster independence in their children, free from the meddling of nosy neighbors.
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I've never been a huge fan of Ellen Degeneres. I always thought she was funny enough, but maybe I was just a little resentful because she made the name famous before I ever could.
Yet somehow, even though I have a day job, I've managed to become a fan of The Ellen Degeneres Show. I watched it once when I was home sick and started TiVo-ing it after that. I certainly don't watch every show from cover to cover. I just dip in now and again (now that I have time after getting sick of Oprah).
The show is good enough. It's got a light, fun feeling to it—particularly helpful in these dire economic times. Degeneres remains funny even though she has had to bring it down to a PG level for her daytime, mainstream network audience.
But what I am most impressed by is how forthright she is about her sexual orientation, despite the fact that she has a large, broad, national, daytime network audience that certainly must include more than just a few homophobes. And Ellen's likability must do much to thaw their hearts.
She routinely mentions her wife, Portia de Rossi, who appeared on the show on Monday, their recent marriage, and regularly sprinkles the details of their lives together into her jokes.
Maybe I am naive, but I think this is how our country will finally change: When people who are anti-gay finally learn that someone they already know and love is gay, and they want every happiness for their loved one that they are entitled to. Or even better, when they are willing to let someone who they know is gay into their lives, despite their homosexuality.
And I admire Degeneres and de Rossi for being so public about their sexual orientation and relationship, even though it is a huge risk for both of their careers.
(I'd also like to thank Degeneres for all the "Ellen" merchandise, which has already been personalized just for me.)
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After reading Dayo's disheartening post on Friday about teenagers' reactions to Rihanna and to domestic abuse in general, I was wondering why female adolescents were so quick to blame the victim. I haven't come up with a particularly good answer but did hear something positive that complicates the matter. I was talking to a social worker friend who works with urban fourth and fifth graders, and she said that Chris Brown and Rihanna came up in class. "They were unanimous in thinking that Rihanna should not have gone back to Chris Brown," my friend said. She asked them if they would think differently had Rihanna hit Brown first, and they said no, because you should never hit a girl. "They all think that men have an obligation not to hit women," she said.
My friend conceded that there might have been a bit of group think going on—that the loudest kids came out against Chris Brown and the quieter ones followed—and that it's possible that they were just parroting what their teachers and moms had told them. But still, being "very very dismayed" at the idea that Rihanna would get back with Brown after he hit her, as the middle schoolers were, is a huge difference from saying "I would have punched her around too," as some high schoolers have been. Do puberty-related hormones make your thinking that fuzzy? Does all self-esteem go out the window between the ages of 10 and 14? At the risk of sounding like an old codger, what is going on with teens today?!
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Josh Schwartz, the guy responsible for The OC, Gossip Girl, and Chuck, has a new Web-series, Rockville, streaming over at theWB.com. Each episode is five minutes long (Schwartz told New York magazine that amount of time "is perfect for my attention span," which explains a whole lot about the recent plotting of Gossip Girl) and takes place in a music venue that is populated by Schwartz archetypes: the nervous talker guy, the chick he banters with, and the surprisingly cool authority figure.
Like Marshall "My So-Called Life" Herskovitz and Ed "thirtysomething" Zwick's Quarterlife, the only other serious "Web drama" made by people with experience making great television, Rockville is not any good (if this showed up on your set, you would groan, loudly, and flip away, which is exactly what happened when Quarterlife aired on NBC), but it is still perversely enjoyable. Schwartz deploys all of his typically charming tricks to ill-effect: Why doesn't his self aware, nerdy banter work on the Internet? Is it the acting? (Yes, it's mostly the acting.) The pacing? The way everyone gets too earnest too fast because they need to provide an emotional payoff in less than 300 seconds? But then before I can get well and truly annoyed, it's over. And I'll probably watch the next episode, because getting a smidge worked up about what's happening on-screen is one of the particular pleasures of TV watching. Plus, this could be the future of television; it's intriguing to watch it work out the kinks.