“There were a lot of discussions about it,” said a friend of mine who works at Sesame Workshop. Discussions, he admitted sheepishly, about whether they really had to slap a “For adults” warning on the DVD. The bigshots there must have known how ridiculous it would seem: putting a warning for kids on a show for kids. But their target market seems to have been the nostalgia crowd alone, so the warning says, “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for adults and may not meet the needs of today’s preschoolers.”
As if today’s preschoolers are genetically different from yesterday’s preschoolers. (Us!) As if Sesame Street hadn’t been vetted by a million educational specialists, even back then, who wanted to show only the most wholesome, safe, sunny-day vision of childhood that public television could possibly put together. So why is it adults-only viewing today?
Because our view of what children can do and figure out and survive is at its utter nadir. We can’t imagine them not hurting themselves in a vacant lot, much less finding their way around the neighborhood without a trusted adult. (Not a stranger! Especially one promising cookies.) We don’t want them to climb to the top of a jungle gym because we don’t trust them to get back down without breaking something. Crawl through a pipe? That’s for Indiana Jones. Our belief in our kids is so below-sea-level low that when the New York Times asked Sesame Street’s executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente (you cannot make these names up), Why doesn’t the DVD include that classic skit where the Cookie Monster plays pipe-smoking Alistair Cookie—and ends up gobbling his pipe? Ms. Parente replied that this was because the skit “modeled the wrong behavior.”
Like three-year-olds are really going to start smoking pipes? Or eating them? They’re not! Pipes taste bad and are too big to cram into your mouth, and there’s only about seven of them left in America anyway. To think of kids as that endangered is to forget a great truth:
Children are built to survive. And until very, very recently, adult survival depended on them, too.
That’s because throughout most of human history, kids and adults worked side by side. There wasn’t an age cutoff, like there is for kindergarten. All that mattered was competence, and because everyone could use an extra pair of hands, competence was greatly encouraged. As soon as young folks were able to, they fed animals, planted seeds, fetched water. They even managed to pick corn without turning the cobs into pipes they’d eat and choke to death on.
In other words, childhood was golden—to adults. Pampering was as far off as Pampers. Parents who could find their children apprenticeships with craftsmen were thrilled to pack them off for the next decade or so. Would they be treated well? Fed well? Given a blanket? There were no guarantees. But then again, the idea of treating children as cherished cherubs wasn’t out there yet. Starvation was. Everyone, no matter how young, had to earn his keep. And, sometimes, his sheep.
“I used to be a slave. We were all slaves at one time or another.” So said Abraham Lincoln, by which I think he meant that all young people were expected to do brutally hard work with very little say about it. And they were expected to start doing it at a very young age.
“In colonial America, especially in colonial New England, it was not uncommon to send off children who were very young—six, seven, eight, nine—to live with other families as servants,” says Steven Mintz, a professor of history and author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Six-year-olds might not have been in charge of something really dangerous, like cleaning out the chimney (although in England, it wasn’t uncommon for kids to start that particular job at age four). But young colonists were certainly able to help cook and clean and run household errands. And if they weren’t, an older person showed them how to do it so that they’d rise to the task in the future.
Now compare this idea—children expected to help out adults—with the Lou and Lou Safety Patrol mini-videos you can watch on the Playhouse Disney Web site.
Lou and Lou are cartoon characters whose voices are more annoying than any other characters in cartoon history, including Scrappy-Doo, Scooby’s nephew (who makes Scooby sound like Winston Churchill). The Lous are a brother and sister of maybe three or four years old who call themselves the “Safety Patrol.” They spring into action when their six- or sevenish sister actually wants to make their dad breakfast for his birthday.
“Not so fast!” squeak the safety-loving sibs as their sister tries to cook some eggs. “Never touch a pot or pan on the stove. Let a grown-up.” They plunk an orange safety cone in front of the stove to keep her away.
Undaunted, the sister drifts down the counter and reaches for a knife. “You have a safety violation!” chime her bad cop-bad cop siblings. “You should always stay away from sharp knives and let a grown-up help if you need to slice something.”
Now, I’m not saying that six-year-olds make the ideal short-order chefs and let’s let ’em loose near the french-fry vat. But the constant refrain of “Get a grown-up! Let a grown-up!” reinforces the whole idea that, rather than trying to learn any kind of real-world skill, kids should sit back and leave it all up to the adults.
And by the way, what age are we talking about when we use that term? A survey by polling expert Tom Smith at the University of Chicago asked fourteen hundred people that very question: At what age do you think adulthood begins in the United States? The answer: twenty-six.
That’s a long time to wait before you touch a sharp knife.
When parents (or children’s TV producers) worry that kids can’t possibly play safely on their own or make scrambled eggs or even, when they’re in their tweens, ride their bikes to baseball, I always wonder what their own ancestors were doing at that age. Probably it was something a tad more demanding.
“Let’s take Mark Twain for example,” says Mintz. “Mark Twain’s father dies when he’s eleven or twelve and then he has to go to work and his childhood is over. He works as an apprentice printer in New York and Washington, D.C., and St. Louis and Keokuk, Iowa. So by the time he’s eighteen he has lived by himself in New York and Washington.” Not to mention the wild Midwest.
“Or let’s take Herman Melville,” the professor continues, enthused by the subject. “His father also dies when he’s around twelve and temporarily he’s put to work in a store. But eventually, around the age of sixteen, he’s put on a whaling ship and goes out to the South Pacific. He abandons ship and he’s captured by cannibals! So by the time he’s eighteen or twenty, he’s seen Hawaii.” And almost been eaten.
Which is to say, maybe our own teenagers can manage to make their beds.
Last historic figure here: Ben Franklin. “At around twelve, he needed a career, so he and his father walked around Boston to see what jobs looked good,” says Mintz. Some of the craftsmen charged a fee for their apprenticeships, “So it was cheaper to send him off to his much older brother.” That brother, you may recall from American history class, was a printer who ran a newspaper where Ben began his writing career. When he absolutely couldn’t get along with the brother anymore, Ben ran off to Philadelphia, dirt poor, but with something very valuable up his ruffled sleeve: a trade.
(And a key. But that’s another story.)
Until the Industrial Revolution came along and turned children into cheap labor, children were the opposite: valuable labor. Either they helped out on the farm, as Honest Abe did, or they helped their masters, and in turn their masters taught them a skill by which they could eventually make a living. (Often after years and years of scut work.) Adults and children worked together, and there wasn’t such a huge gulf between them. Not that children were considered mini-adults, unloved and exploited. Just that children were expected to rise to the adulthood all around them, not stew in adorable incompetence.
Fast-forward to our own generation, when we were kids. The generation that could watch uncensored Sesame Street. In just that short span of time between our own youth and our offsprings’, two of the only jobs that had been left for kids have totally changed: paper delivery and baby-sitt
ing.
It is now almost impossible to become a paperboy unless you are an adult. Calls to eight newspapers in North Carolina found exactly zero that would take anyone under age eighteen. Part of the reason is that the suburbs have spread out more, so they may require a car for the farthest reaches. And part of the reason is that hard-pressed adults became willing to take this job. But a big chunk is also that newspapers, eager to avoid any kind of legal hassles, now hire only licensed drivers with their own liability insurance. In other words, not a twelve-year-old with a Schwinn. So good-bye, for the most part, to paper routes and the idea that anyone under voting age could have that classic chance to demonstrate his—or her—fortitude, dependability, and throwing arm.
OK, so what about baby-sitters? That news, happily, is a little less dire. Plenty of kids, still mostly girls, continue to ply this ancient trade with refrigerator benefits. But they seem to start a little older, with generally less expected of them.
“I started baby-sitting at twelve, mostly babies and toddlers, some school-aged kids,” says Sylke Finnegan, a mom in Portland, Oregon. Sometimes she baby-sat in the afternoon, but there were evening hours, too, sometimes past midnight.
Now she is a mother of a thirteen-year-old, but for her daughter—a year older than when Finnegan started baby-sitting—that job is not in the cards. “I will not leave her home alone for more than one hour. And never after dark.”
Marti Lindsey, a forty-five-year-old mom in San Diego, wouldn’t hire a thirteen-year-old anyway—even though she remembers when she started baby-sitting at age nine or ten. “I was very responsible for my age,” says Lindsey. “Here’s what blows me away today. When I was a kid, we had neighbors with small children, about ages two and three. When the husband was out of town, the wife needed to work—she was a nurse, working graveyard—I would stay overnight with the kids. I was like twelve or thirteen. But I would never dream of leaving my son, Max, with someone that young, even for a few hours.”
These moms aren’t outliers: they’re right in step with today’s society that assumes tweens are twits or, at least, irresponsible. What they forget is not only how responsible they were at that age but also that, until the recent advent of small families, it was often the older sisters who took care of the kids who came along. More about that in the next chapter.
Of course, by the time our ancestors were of baby-sitting age, the baby they were sitting was often their own—another fact grown conveniently foggy. I know that my great-grandma was married at age fifteen and had my grandmother shortly thereafter. She wasn’t “fast.” It wasn’t a shotgun marriage. (Jews? Shotguns? Maybe someone lobbed a matzoh ball through the window.) That’s just the age things were done back then. And if that seems unreasonable, imagine what our great-grandmothers would think if they saw our fifteen-year-olds hanging out at the mall with nothing to do but try on lip gloss and buy giant pretzels that always smell better than they taste.
Most of our great, great-grandparents—and theirs and theirs, all the way back—began having babies as soon as their hormones were up for it (so to speak), same as all other animals still do today. The deal was: reach puberty, create progeny. Obviously, our teenage ancestors must have been capable of raising children and keeping them safe and gathering enough food and passing along all their teenage wisdom, or we humans would have stopped dead in our tracks. We’d be dodo birds with opposable thumbs. The fact that our species is still here just proves how capable teens are: they got us to this point on the time line.
Of course, if adolescents are ready to take on the world—and make babies and sustain the species—it’s no surprise they’re surly and awful to be around when we treat them like little children today. The disconnect between “I’m grown up!” and “You’re grounded” is just too great. One study found that the peak year for depression among American women is eighteen. They’re ready to start out but can’t get started. That’s why, whether you want your child to become a printer’s apprentice or smithy or tanner—or not—it would still be nice to have apprenticeships around.
Mintz found one for his son, “and it turned out to be the greatest experience,” he says. “He was twelve and he worked as a computer techie at the university I was working at. So he was with all these ‘bad influences’—guys who were in their early twenties—and he so admired them. He just thought these were the greatest guys on earth and it was really a good growing-up experience.” At the time, the mini-Mintz hated school, but here was a chance for him to succeed someplace else: the “real world.” Lucky kid! (And smart dad.)
Problem is, it’s hard to find those experiences, even if you want your kid to work. It’s even hard for under-eighteens to volunteer. Most organizations, just like those North Carolina newspapers, don’t want to be bothered training youngsters or insuring them. That’s why the closest our family has come to a work experience is for us to start—finally—requiring our kids to do some chores beyond picking up their socks. (Which itself requires near-constant prodding. And the occasional lobbed matzoh ball.)
Now when Izzy, ten, has to do the dishes, he may complain, but he ends up feeling proud. Morry, our twelve-year-old, complains too. They are both just fine complainers. (“Why me?” “Again?” “I did it last night!”) But when we do get that older one dishwashing or—as we did one memorable afternoon—vacuuming, we hear him singing to himself. A burden, in a way, has lifted. He has something to do that makes a little difference in the world (and a huge difference to our carpet). He is just like those thousands of generations before him who got to skin deer.
We want our children to become fine, upstanding adults, but in some ways we treat them as long as possible as sweet, silly babies. If it’s impossible to have them help out on the farm or apprentice in a forge (no matter how cool that would look on college applications), the alternative is to have them help out in the family business of running the home. Or help out in someone else’s home, by baby-sitting.
Have them smuggle in a DVD of Sesame Street: Old School, and you just might start a revolution.
REAL WORLD
The Old Man Beat Me Because
I Didn’t Like to Steal
In the early 1900s, the New York Independent gathered oral histories of ordinary folks. What was life like for young people back then? Here, edited, is the story of Rocco Corresca:When I was a very small boy, I lived in Italy in a large house with many other small boys who were all dressed alike and were taken care of by some nuns. It was a good place, on the side of the mountain, where grapes were growing and melons and oranges and plums.
The nuns taught us our letters and how to pray, and we worked in the fields during the middle of the day. We always had enough to eat and sometimes there were feast days, when we marched about wearing flowers.
Those were good times and they lasted till I was nearly eight. Then an old man came and said he was my grandfather. He showed some papers and cried over me and said he would take me to his beautiful home. But when we got there it was a dark cellar that he lived in and I did not like it at all. Very rich people were on the first floor. They had servants and plenty of good things to eat, but we were down below and had nothing. There were four other boys and the old man said they were all my brothers. All were larger than I and they beat me till one day Francisco said that they should not, and then Paulo, who was the largest of all, fought him till Francisco drew a knife and gave him a cut. Then the old man knocked them both down with a stick and gave them beatings.
Each morning we boys all went out to beg, running to the carriages and getting in the way of the people so that they had to give us money or walk over us. The old man often watched us and at night he took all the money.
Begging was not bad in the summer because we went all over the streets and there was plenty to see, and if we got much money we could spend some buying things to eat. The old man knew we did that. He used to smell us to see if we had eaten anything, and he often beat us for eating when we had not eaten.
I was
with the old man for three years. He beat me, too, because I didn’t like to steal. Then one day he said to me: “If you don’t want to be a thief you can be a cripple. That is an easy life and they make a great deal of money.”
That night I heard him talking to one of the men that came to see him. He asked how much he would charge to make me a good cripple, like those that crawl. They had a dispute, but at last they agreed and the man said that I should be made so that people would shudder and give me plenty of money.
I was much frightened, but I did not make a sound and in the morning I went out to beg with Francisco. I said to him: “I am going to run away. I don’t want to be a cripple, no matter how much money the people may give.”
“Where will you go?” Francisco asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “somewhere.”
He thought awhile and then he said, “I will go, too.”
The boys ended up in a seaside village where a fisherman named Ciguciano took them in. He had them work on his boat, but treated them most decently. It sounds like Rocco fell in love with Ciguciano’s daughter, Teresa. But five years later the boys—now sixteen and eighteen—left for America after a young man promised them untold riches.
Actually, he had sold them into the servitude of a rag dealer in Brooklyn. After a year of that, the boys escaped again, this time to a crew of sewer diggers in New Jersey. The Irish boss there taught them English. When there was no more digging to be done, they worked in a saloon where a bootblack showed them how to shine shoes. With the money they saved, the boys opened their own shoeshine parlor. And then another. Here’s Rocco, finishing his story:I am 19 years of age now and have $700 saved. Francisco is 21 and has about $900. We shall open some more parlors soon.
Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) Page 9
