A Generation Unscathed

My three daughters and I recently made our weekly pilgrimage to the video store, three miles round trip through our neighborhood. I watched my older girls, 11 and 9, ride their bikes, helmets fastened, cautious and watchful, stopping at each corner to look back at me as I walked with my 5-year-old. They know they can’t ride more than two blocks ahead.

Delphine, my middle child, had just told me, “Did you know we can’t play dodge ball at school now? Not unless a teacher is with us, and they aren’t with us at recess.� Parents had complained that someone could get hurt if the ball was thrown too hard. So now they don’t play dodge ball, and they wait in line for the few swings because school officials took several swings off with bolt-cutters to leave a wide, safe, state-mandated space between them. Rosette, my youngest, recently reported that yellow caution tape festooned the slides and jungle gym on the kindergarten playground; they were off-limits now due to new rules.

I looked at the sidewalks of this same four-lane avenue I’d cruised as a teenager with their father, and realized I would have ridden miles on my bike to here, alone, just my 10-speed and my thoughts and my Seventies yellow-sphere radio dangling by a chain from the handlebars. Back then, I’d have shared the road with pickup trucks--kids crowded into the truck bed--on their way to the local Dairy Queen.

Now a few kids walked past sedately with their parents, reflective safety patches on their sneakers blinking like odd modern fireflies. It struck me how far we’ve come since the days when my mother dropped off a station wagon full of us at the nearby theater and called, “I’ll be back at 5!� Or since my brothers and I broke wrists, ankles and countless other bones during our foothill explorations and bicycle motocross rides in empty swimming pools.

But questions of safety color the days and nights of anyone raising children now, and I can’t help but wonder if there are risks to the brain, the psyche, the muscles, when all risks are averted. What are we teaching children who can’t ride bikes and climb trees and play baseball in a vacant lot, who can’t slide and fall on the sand in school, or play dodge ball, who can’t learn to settle their own fights and negotiate the social territory of childhood and adolescence? What will they have as they enter adulthood? Has parenting really gone from benign neglect, as some parents my age recall what we experienced, to micro-management?

I am not foolish enough to think that I, or any other parent--or city, state or national government--can legislate safety or require perfection or inculcate happiness. But our generation of parents, the boomer kids grown to wary perfectionist adulthood, doesn’t want its children to fall, get hurt, become traumatized, blame us or someone else. No scars. A safe universe. Happiness mandatory. In our quest to bubble-wrap their childhoods, to protect their wrists and knees and souls, maybe we keep too many things from touching them, and them from touching much of anything.

*

I’M NOT AN IRRESPONSIBLE PARENT. MY kids do their homework. They have all their vaccinations, and they remind me to put on my seat belt. I am a mother who watches and prays and reprimands, trying to keep my children safe. I have argued with friends and relatives who don’t understand the danger of front-seat air bags, loose dogs and television shows that are not what they seem. When I sleep, I dream of danger.

Still, other parents who have watched my kids jump off a rock, skateboard with two riding, climb the mulberry tree and hang upside down from the bend in their knees sometimes say, “I can’t believe you let them do that. They could get hurt.� After Delphine got another huge scrape on her elbow, the bubbling-raw kind, another mother said, “I can’t believe someone doesn’t call CPS [Child Protective Services] on you, that kid has so many injuries.�

Delphine had been riding her new scooter, and she’d gone down hard on the sidewalk. She has 67 scars, proudly counted each week, such a comprehensive catalog of defiance and risk-taking that I am moved sometimes to show her the bump of my healed collarbone (tackle football) and the blue lead buried in my palm (sharp pencil, mean classmate). Then I say, “You make even a mom like me nervous.�

Believe me, when I watch my child monkeys on the lowest mulberry limb, a frisson of fear moves across my ribs. If she falls, she’ll break her neck, it whispers to my heart. But I remain resolute, standing at the door so the screen hides me, so I can run to the tree if I need to, relieved when they swing back up and land on their feet.

Beverly Johnson, a marriage and family therapist in Riverside, told me, “This overprotection, this parental supervision, is particular to your generation--post-’60s. The kids are under constant scrutiny. They’re never free from being the center of the universe, and do you know how hard that is for them? You have this irrational belief that if you do it right, they’ll be happy. And safe. You can’t leave them alone, because something might happen. You can’t let them cook, because something might happen. You can’t let them goof off--they can’t be bored, because that’s not good parenting.�

She sighs and says, “I feel so sorry for these kids sometimes.�

I feel sorry for them, too, since so many parents say they keep their kids inside because of heat or cold, pollen or smog, carelessness, sidewalk cracks, kidnappers and, often, their own children’s judgment. They tell me inside is better, supervised, busy enough with Nintendo, TV and the Net.

I understand their fears. My kids are allowed to ride down our street alone, but I don’t let them continue past the dead end down the steep dirt path into the arroyo and then the riverbed, where my brothers and I built fallen-branch forts, tunneled through wild grapevines, and searched for duck eggs--things that made growing up in Southern California different than, say, growing up in New York City. My girls stand at the edge of the arroyo and gaze over the wild tobacco, and murmur, “Somebody said homeless people are camping there. The boys from the next street built a fort, but the neighbors made them tear it down. It could start on fire. They could get kidnapped. It could fall on them and they’d get hurt.�

I walk my girls across our busy avenue to another street so they can play at a friend’s. The parents, Ray and Liz Arias, echo my regrets, but they add their own fears. Ray is 41 and grew up in Highgrove, a small community bordering Riverside, and owns a pool-cleaning service now. “We used to play basketball at the Methodist Church and walk home at 11 at night in summer,� he says. “And we’d go into the vacant lot across the street from our house and dig these tunnels, for days we’d just dig. We’d get wood and cardboard and cover the entrances and let grass grow on top, and we’d have sticks poking up so we’d be the only ones to know how to get in.�

“And no one was ever worried about the walls falling in, or you getting hurt?� I ask.

He grins and shrugs. “There were seven of us. My mom fed us breakfast, and we went out, and we came back in time for dinner. She didn’t ask us anything, and we didn’t tell her anything.�

His wife Liz laughs. “When I was in junior high in Santa Ana, my cousin and I walked several miles to South Coast Plaza. We’d hang out at the mall all afternoon, then go to the [nearby] Woolworth and look at the magazines and try on all the sample lipsticks, and then we’d walk home by 5. I’d call my mother and say, ‘I’m eating over here.’ She never asked me anything.�

Now 40, Liz was also one of seven kids. She works for Amtrak, and she keeps an extremely close eye on her own two girls, 15-year-old Chloe and 9-year-old Raven. “Why am I so paranoid?� she says, sitting down at the table while our five girls watch a video in the family room and Chloe naps. “She says she might as well sleep all afternoon because I never let her do anything,� Liz says. “She’s mad because a bunch of kids from her school ditched today and went to the beach. She says I’m torturing her.�

They’ve bought Chloe a car, but for now, Liz says, she wouldn’t even let her and a friend walk around unaccompanied at a recent street fair. There was alcohol for sale and too many strangers. Though Ray says he doesn’t mind Chloe’s walking around the local mall with her friends, Liz says no, especially since a highly publicized shooting in which two young men fought over hard stares and one ended up dead.

“Our kids can’t even go to the bathroom alone,� Ray says. “That’s just how it is, ever since Oceanside.�

*

OCEANSIDE HAS BECOME THE CODE WORD FOR OUR FEARS. I HAVEN’T let my daughters go to a public restroom alone since 1998, when a 9-year-old boy was killed in a bathroom in the San Diego County community. I know hundreds of other parents would cite that incident as a turning point. The boy’s aunt was waiting outside the door of that beachfront bathroom, and yet the child was not safe. I know mothers who accompany sons, and fathers who find women to take daughters into restrooms. A 7-year-old girl killed in a Las Vegas bathroom by a Long Beach teen. A boy was molested in a McDonald’s restroom while his family waited at the table.

“I heard on the news--� parents often say, underscoring how the omnipresent media report with frightening tone and speed. I rarely watch television news, partly because I can’t count how many times a breathless newscaster mentions a robbery, kidnapping, child-abuse case or murder and makes the event seem local, when in reality it occurred in another state. The threat seems to build. Did you see on the news about the salmonella poisoning in cookie dough? Did you hear about that baby in the carjacking? Did you see they were shooting at that park?

Let’s not forget about children injuring and killing each other. Bullies thrived when I was a child--they were male or female, they pulled hair and took lunch money and shoved people around. Now a first-grader shoots another in Michigan, a 12-year-old boy body slams a 6-year-old girl to death in Florida, and in the Bay Area, a boy critically injures a neighbor’s baby by hitting and kicking it. High schoolers simply go ballistic and shoot their classmates.

But in many ways, kids today are statistically safer than the kids I grew up with. In the early 1960s, most cars weren’t even equipped with seat belts. The first mandatory seat belt law was in New York in 1984, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It estimates that from 1975 to 1991, child restraints (seat belts, child car seats and infant seats) saved 2,076 lives. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s recent data on American children notes that in seven of 10 categories, the well-being of children improved between 1990 and 1997. These categories included the infant mortality rate, which dropped by 22%, the child death rate, which dropped by 19%, and the rate of teen deaths by accident, homicide and suicide, which dropped by 18%.

But if today’s children have fewer physical scars, their psyches seem marked in ways that ours never were. How can it be that my daughters are not allowed to slide on the playground, and yet they ask me fearfully, “Will somebody shoot me at school?� or “What about that bomb we heard somebody was bringing because they hate the girls on dance squad?�

One school morning in April, Gaila, my 11-year-old, looked nervously at me in the bathroom while I did her hair. “Did you know today was Hitler’s birthday?� she whispered on the anniversary of the Columbine school shootings. “What if something bad happens?�

*

BECAUSE WE ARE AFRAID FOR THEM, WE NEVER LEAVE THEM ALONE, to wander down the street, to race over to the park, to explore the arroyo or hills. Then we are afraid that they’re bored, so we schedule play dates and soccer and piano and art lessons. We are relentless, partly because so many of us work full time. When we are at home with them, we want quality time, which means constant togetherness. But even parents who stay at home feel pressured to have constant activity--crafts, reading aloud, Mommy-and-me exercise classes.

“They can’t just lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling,� says Johnson, the Riverside family therapist. “I have parents who bring in kids and say, ‘He’s depressed.’ And the kid says, ‘I was thinking .’ �

Instead of letting them skateboard down sidewalks or asphalt hills, we drive them to the skate park and stay to watch. Rather than let them climb granite boulders, we drive them to a rock-climbing walls with safety ropes and supervising staff. I know parents who’d never let their kids walk in a forest to watch birds, but who take them to Petco so they can see animals safely, behind metal and glass.

Johnson shows me a scar on the outside of her left knee. “I got this when I ran into a sharp twig--I never told anyone, because I was roller-skating where I wasn’t supposed to be. The thing took forever to heal, and I guarded that scab, worried it. And nobody ever noticed!�

“They didn’t see it when you took a bath?� I asked.

She laughed. “I took a bath by myself! I was 8! I was on my own. You parents have to watch the whole thing! You have to know everything!�

Pamela Kisor, director of the child care center at Cal State Los Angeles, considers her words when she speaks of her young charges. “The confidence you get from meeting physical challenges, on the monkey bar or slide or climbing a tree, becomes part of your identity. I think that we, as a society, are trying to make sure no child is ever injured again.�

Kisor, the mother of two grown children, pauses, then says, “You should see the kids from the center when we go on our annual hike-- they see the rocks in the path and they hesitate. They’ve never climbed a rock! Then they try it, and they feel great.�

She points out that the state now requires a playground safety audit by a certified playground inspector, following safety guidelines set by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. “Their new safety standards are the same whether this is a day care populated by 3- and 4-year-olds with a 1-to-6 teacher ratio, or a public park with no adult supervision. So anything higher than 12 inches off the ground has to be surrounded by the new soft, expensive composite material.

“What is our image of the child? Totally helpless? We need to envision children as capable people who can make their own decisions. If we see them as competent, we have to then let them have the consequences of their actions. We, as a society, are horrible at letting children have consequences.�

Sheilah Bellew has been teaching kindergarten for 20 years in Riverside. “The poor kids spend more and more time each year getting tested, and they’re already tense and worried, and now there’s even less physical activity for them on the playground,� she says, watching over her charges at Pachappa Elementary School. “Teachers are supposed to go out there during recess and teach them to play group games. That means we’re watching them, still. And they don’t get any free, independent play time.�

Another kindergarten teacher at Pachappa, Diane Kaufman, shakes her head. “The monkey bars. You know how when you’re a little girl, you always wear shorts under your dresses so you can twirl on the bars? My daughter was in second grade, wearing shorts, and she lifted up her friend’s dress to see what kind of shorts she had on. A playground supervisor wrote her up for sexual harassment. That’s something parents sue over now.�

Because if something bad happens, it must be somebody’s fault.

*

WHEN I WAS A KID, I DON’T REMEMBER ANYONE ACCUSING PARENTS of neglect because their children were in casts. My own mother’s car once ran over and broke my leg (failed brakes, steep mountain road, desperate jump) and no one ever blamed her, including me. When did broken bones and cuts and scrapes, the tattoos of childhood, become the scarlet letters of irresponsibility?

We have legislated safety as best we can, and I’m glad for all the children damaged by neglectful or abusive parents. Since my mother was a dedicated foster parent who took in five children during 10 years of my childhood--some of them hungry, one with a black eye and a broken arm--I understand better than most why many child-protection laws were enacted. But how did we get to the point where we can be accused of molestation if we kiss our children the wrong way in public or take pictures of them in the bathtub, or be accused of child abuse if they display a suspicious bruise?

This is not about the good old days, when children died from farm accidents and starvation, when they routinely succumbed to pneumonia and to scarlet fever. We have antibiotics now, and car seats and food. These are the good old days, to me.

But when the Ariases and I talk about our childhoods, we remember being footloose, roaming arroyos and climbing pepper trees and visiting beaches and sidewalks and markets. How fondly would we have remembered soccer fields surrounded by chain-link fence, or dance and music rooms with their close smell and watchful faces?

But our generation pushes kids into sports and music lessons and play dates and strictly regulated, adult-supervised recreation and education. More tests and less recess, more organized sports and less free play, more driving to theme parks and less walking to the neighborhood park with friends, scheming and dreaming and writing your names on the sidewalks with ice plant spears.

Maybe it’s because we have so many ambitions for them, for their unsullied beauty and fully engaged brains and carefully coached athletic muscles. We want them to be ready to compete in the world, so they can be happy in the end.

But they might never learn to climb ladders and land right at the end of a slide. They’ll never learn how it might smell underground in the dense shade of a drainpipe. They’ll never learn how to pump their legs and fly if they can’t swing, and it’s a lot harder to swing when only two swings are left and there are more kids than ever in a schoolyard.

Tom Podgorski, who has been teaching economics and history for 15 years at Rubidoux High School near Riverside, thinks today’s kids “lack interpersonal skills and conflict resolution, because their activities are so solitary--video games, television, the Internet. We were outside playing on the street, and lots of seemingly insignificant interactions, like a basketball game or just hanging out, had opportunities for teamwork or sportsmanship. Now you have kids who move around all the time, and you have insto-neighborhoods, with new tracts, and people who don’t know each other, and kids never play outside like that. They don’t know how to deal with each other.�

*

I SIT IN MY YARD, HEARING MY kids and others on the sidewalk, thinking about fault, responsibility, consequences and perfection.

Last summer, Delphine of the 67 scars broke her arm not skateboarding or scootering or climbing--she and her older sister had been ordered to wash the car, to ease their squabbling, and they played a vicious tug-of-war over a wet rag that ripped, sending Delphine sprawling backward on the sidewalk. Nasty compound fracture of the wrist, in two places, the arm dangling so awkwardly that urgent-care nurses winced. The first broken bone in our family. And whom would I sue? Her sister? Myself, for making them wash the car? Can you believe someone asked, “Why didn’t you just take the van to the carwash?�

Recently I watched a 13-year-old circus performer, Amy Yates, who does a trapeze act in Redlands’ Great Y Circus, which bills itself as the longest-running community circus in the world. Dwight Yates, her father, was manning one of the spotlights, not looking nervous at all, and his wife, Nancy Carrick, sat next to me and my daughters.

Nancy had told me beforehand, “In fifth grade, Amy did the splits on top of the swing set at the playground. I got a call from school for that one. She started training in the fall for the trapeze act, and there are no guide wires, no safety ropes. Spotters underneath, but somehow she fell during the one moment he was distracted, and she broke both heels. The doctor took the casts off after two weeks, put protective booties on and said, ‘Two more weeks in these.’ Amy cut them off the minute she got home and said, ‘Time for practice.’ �

She dangled from her trapeze bar 25 feet in the air, and I held my breath, more nervous than her mother. I was impressed by these parents’ confidence, their willingness to let love be quiet because this was a child who had to dangle.

When Rosette, my youngest, later tied a rope to a mulberry branch, stuck one foot in like Amy had done and gripped with one hand, letting her body swing free, I called out, “Be careful!� I closed the screen door, heart twitching, glad no one was watching to shout, “She can’t do that, it’s too dangerous,� not my neighbors or even my mother, because our present national obsession with safety has certainly leaped across the generations.

My mother recently moved to a new home in a development carved onto rolling hills that face the Box Springs Mountains, at the eastern edge of Riverside. My daughters know these as the mountains where I played as a child, where my days were spent quarrying rose quartz with hammers and chisels, where I learned to spit on filaree seeds so they’d unfurl themselves from their tight corkscrews.

One recent afternoon, they barreled up and down the new, raw bank in my mother’s backyard. “You shouldn’t let them run down the bank,� she kept saying. “Someone’s going to fall and get hurt.�

I looked up from the paper and saw the girls disappear over the steep rise leading to the next house, and I stood up to linger by the French door. Just in case. They looked like pioneer girls on the prairie, as much prairie as we could offer, the filaree and mustard weed to their knees. They were gone 10 minutes or so, while I glanced up frequently, unable to help myself.

Then they ran down the bank, and Rosette fell face first, scraping her elbow and eating a mouthful of decomposed granite.

“See?� my mother said, folding her arms. “I told you someone would get hurt. You shouldn’t let them--�

I ran outside, but Rosette was laughing. I said, “Don’t keep racing down Grandma’s bank like that.�

“But Mama, didn’t Grandma used to let you climb all over those mountains?� Delphine said.

She pointed to the boulder-covered Box Springs, and I stared. Yes, my mother was a school volunteer who took legions of elementary school kids on hikes up that mountain; once, someone broke an arm falling down a rock face. They lived, parents and children, and no one blamed anything but the slippery rock.

I remembered those long summer days of chipping away at granite to recover flakes of mica we thought was gold, of hearing rattlesnakes and running down the trails in fear, of catching lizards whose throats pulsed blue between our gentle fingers. We had no water bottles, and yet we lived. We had no fruit snacks, no backpacks, no kneepads, and no one watching us but hawks.

“Yes,� I told Delphine. “She did.�