Took S to school today only to find it abandoned. Is this some well-executed practical joke? Haha, I'm laughing....now open up the doors! BOTH my kids are off again? Why on earth did we schedule our trip when they were IN school? Now, after the agony of the trip, we just move the party home?
God is laughing at me. I can tell. I know this, because it is also raining, so I can't kick them out of the house. Not that they would go. I asked them to play outside yesterday and E promptly replies, "I do not feel comfortable playing in the yard without a parent."
Was he in some scared straight program somewhere? Did school show him a safety video without my consent? What on earth could happen to him in the yard? His chances of being strangled are much lower outside of my reach, I can say that. Is he anticipating serial killers with candy? Crazy drunken drivers at 10AM on a cul-de-sac? Falling off of...what? We have no play equipment or trees. Remember when kids played outside?
My sister and I used to make up games and played outside even though our street was so steep that we couldn't have bikes or skates. I remember once we played spies and hid under a willow tree and wrote codes on the bark with Liquid Paper. Once, we pulled up the long grass on the embankment and tried to dry it into flax and straw. We also carved out a divot in a slope under an olive tree and made it our fort. We didn't have toys outside, we just played. I can attest to the fact that we didn't have balls or sporting goods--we lost a few soccer balls to the roses at the bottom of the hill, and then we stopped trying.
I don't know why kids can't play outside anymore. They don't seem to even want to. No sword fights with sticks, no climbing trees, no hide and seek. Who has scared this out of them? Have we tech-ed it out of them with all the inside stuff to do?
When it stops raining, they are going out. If it starts lightning, then they are going out with a kite and key.
Amen. I have had this conversation with M many days. That we used to make up stuff to do. Swim in the ditch, etc. My parents didn't know where I was most of the time. They would call us in at dark to eat and go to bed. Sometimes we were even out a night too playing hide and seek with flashlights. I have to force my kids to play outside too. They are getting better at it but we actually had to show them how to pretend the swingset was a pirate ship etc...Sad Sad Sad.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree we are "tech-ing" kids out too much at the expense of opportunities for imaginative play. When are kids ever permitted to be bored anymore? I also think couch potato-ism is exacerbated by fear-mongering about the dreaded sex offender living down the street (when in actuality, he'd be someone they already know and trust).
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