On Many Subjects

Watching my granddaughter grow up is fascinating, to say the least. More than that, I am enjoying watching my child be a parent.

The rules are different now. Children are taught things now that were never taught when I was a child. Things I never taught my children. Children were not considered the center of my world. We didn't have play dates for the children because we assumed they would learn social skills in school. There were no entrance exams for kindergraten. We just enrolled the kids and they started. We assumed the teachers would teach them things like math and fair play. No one had ADD or ADHD.

I raised my children in the old way. That meant the men were out hunting or foraging while we women produced the children in a sterile environment. Child birth was neat and clean. The men saw the baby after the nurses had a go at it and cleaned it up, polished it and made it all neat and shiny. Most men thought babies were born with either a pink blanket or a blue one. That was how to tell if you had a boy or a girl. Once the men saw the child, they ignored them until they did something horrific, such as wrecking the family car. From the first glance at the tiny baby until the child had a driver's license, the men were too busy working to pay much attention. That was the old way. The mothers raised the children and the fathers went to work.

Men never said, "We are pregnant." It was always, "My wife is pregnant," as if they had nothing to do with the event in any way. The women endured pregnancy and child birth without the husband. That was the old way of doing it.

Back then, the children went to school, without a parent advocate. We knew if something happened, it was our fault. Not the teacher's. Not society's. We couldn't blame anybody if we got in trouble at school. The parents took the teacher's side and wouldn't even listen to what the children had to say about it... because it was all our fault. Children had no rights other than those granted by the parent and those were few and far between. The old way.

Now, things are different and parents are completely invovled in the lives of their children. Parents know what their children are doing, thinking, saying. Children have rights. They are watched every minute by the parents.

I was worried that this constant scrutiny would ruin imagination. You know, the imagination that can turn a large cardboard box into a palace, a space ship, a fort. The imagination that can allow a child to be cop one day and a robber the next. It allows a child to be Dracula, Batman, or Barbie.

I watched the Divine Miss M on Sunday pretend to cook some food in her Tyke's kitchen and then serve it to her dad, who then pretended to eat the food she brought to him. Already she understand the difference between real food and toys. She pretended to eat, too.

Now, I don't know what I was worried about.