Mom, What Can I Do?

"What are we going to do tonight?" I’d been away for the weekend, to find that my husband had done an amazing job keeping the kids happy, healthy, and fed.  However, they needed showers before school and the water heater -- as well as our furnace -- was not working.

The kids looked at me expectantly, wondering if we could read books, play games, or watch a movie.

"Tonight," I said, "We're taking baths."

Usually, you can shower and do something else.  Long gone are the days shown on the old show Little House on the Prairie, where bathing and other mundane chores take up the entire evening.   But since our water heater failed us, that's all we had time to do.  I put four huge pots on the stove, waited for the water to boil, and the kids drew pictures on the mirror as the hot water steamed it up.  It took forever, and was oddly fun in spite of its inconvenience.

It dawned on me that our technology is what makes our embarrassing amount of leisure time possible.  On one hand, our kids come home from school and are sometimes sitting around idle, without chores or any real way to help run the household. In fact, our households practically run themselves.  (My friend built what he calls a "smart house," with programmable appliances, a voice-activated music system, and a security system that can call the police in case of trouble, a coffee machine that makes him coffee in the morning, and heated tiles that turn on when he's in the shower.)  Since there's nothing left for the kids to do -- no real work needed -- they have idle hands, which people have historically acknowledged can lead to trouble. (Chaucer, as you’ve heard, in the twelfth century called idle hands the devil's tools.)

But modern childhood is a strange combination of idleness and hyper-activity, as this unprecedented amount of free time is immediately filled with activities like soccer, ballet, second language, and swim team. The irony is that today’s children now live in such a blur of after-school and weekend activity that boredom – and its accompanying opportunities for introspection – is vanishing. Craig Lambert, as he wrote about this phenomenon in Harvard Magazine, pointed out that the French film director Jean Renoir once declared, “The foundation of all civilization is loitering,” pointing out that unstructured time frequently is what gives rise to creative ideas.  But loitering, as every parent knows, is a lost art. According to a University of Michigan study, children have essentially lost twelve hours a week worth of free time since when I was a kid. In the late 70's, kids spent a lot of time doing nothing.  I remember spinning endlessly on our tire swing, waiting for dusk so we could play flashlight tag with the neighbors.  Now, kids might only recognize their neighbors as they pass them on the way to soccer practice.

Lambert continues :

Home life has changed in ways that would seem to undercut children’s development of autonomy. There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely “help” them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. Youngsters formerly played sports and games with other children on a sandlot or pickup basis, not in leagues organized, coached, and officiated by adults; kids had to learn to settle disputes over rules and calls among themselves, not by referring them to grownup zebras.

Some of this behavior is probably overcompensation due to parental guilt.  Now that an unprecedented number of families having both parents working, we try to make sure that all opportunities are available for their kids, to make sure they "receive what's owed them."  We sometimes fail to realize that perpetually clearing the path for their kids –  add “snowplowing parents” to the other annoying term “helicopter parents” -- actually handicaps their kids who no longer feel they can do anything alone.  

Additionally, kids aren’t getting enough rest and are going through life in a haze of activity, fearful of missing out on the latest educational or extra curricular advantage.  When they do finally get home, after a day of activity, they frequently feel compelled to check Facebook or watch the latest show to keep up with tomorrow’s conversation.  Children – and even parents -- seem to suffer from a horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces... be it an unexpected unscheduled day or a night dedicated solely to taking baths.

Getting it right – finding that balance – is one of modern parenting’s biggest challenges as we try to go down the middle of two extremes: overscheduled lives and idleness.  That's what I was thinking about, during my twelfth trip to the bathtub, with a boiling pot of water in my hands as the kids giggled.

"Get out of the way, guys! I’m coming through the middle!"

Which, I hope, is true.

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