OK, after school TV didn't quite rise to the level of a biological parent. It was more like the rock-solid neighbor who looks in on you from time to time or the spinster aunt who dotes and indulgences. It's unfair to the parents that those are the ones we remember and esteem as oases of guidance and sense because they were able to influence without the complication of discipline or the basic hard-wired competition for identity parents and children are obliged to engage in. Plus they tended not to mind if you swore in front of them or, later, talked about the fumbling experimentations of social maturation, all without the parental weight of reprimand or correction hanging over everything, harshing everyone's mellow. Yes, He-Man always had a lesson for me, but it wasn't about me. It was for a general audience. Hey, try to be nicer to people, He-Man would say. I could elect to tell He-Man thanks very much but fuck off, and come away without a puffy red handprint across my face. How was mom supposed to compete with that?
This is just part of the reality of a generation, raised alone behind locked doors while parents struggled and earned, in a pre-internet age where the infotainment superhighway arrived via a latticework antenna on the roof, with a maximum of eight input options if you counted the UHF station in Korean.
It held our attention for a while, but school got out early, man, and stayed out entirely between June and September. When the early local news broadcasts started, the underdeveloped attention spans started to wander and you were left with invented fun-time games like "Let's Make That Interesting Smell With the Stove Burners" or "Race You To the Median!"
I'm not sure what mom imagined we were getting up to, but seeing as I do remember the astounding absence of good judgement my sisters and I would regularly exercise, I was a total wreck when my kids starting outgrowing daycare and I was forced to have them stay home unsupervised either after school or on vacation days.
As the father of three boys in the late Aughts and current 2010s, though, I have to say the best thing that ever happened to us was the ruthless development of video games as horrifically efficient dopamine extractors on par with heroin. People complain about how much kids these days play video games, but you know what? Every second I'm out of the house, I know exactly where my kids are and what they're doing. And all of the scenarios involve sitting very still in an ergonomically correct chair clicking buttons that have no chance of catching on fire or running them over. Well, except virtually.
My goal when I get home is to keep them just healthy enough that problems like diabetes or early onset heart disease caused by a sedentary life hold out until the boys have their own medical insurance.
Which, if this Obamacare thing works out, could be way sooner than I thought!
We've come so far as a people.
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2 comments:
I sometimes feel badly about how I made my daughte stay in the yard to play when she was little.
What was I thinking of, depriving her of vying with her friends to see who could be the last to dart across the train tracks before the train arrived?
Herds of children darting across train tracks sounds like not only a character builder, but a proactive will-to-action of the most basic of Darwinian principles. Not only will the slowest ones get weeded out, but think of the survival advantages of the ones who have the cognitive presence to abstain.
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