Lamenting the Vanishing of Childhood in Today’s World

Hannah More Park playground (Photo by Scott Kiewe, Jmore)

On the final day of my last full year at the University ofMaryland, my roommates and I reached back for a last taste of childhood.

We spotted baseball cards for sale. We bought a bunch of them.We ate some of the bubble gum inside, which tasted sweet as 1956. We pitchedthe cards against a wall, hoping for leaners, wondering if we still had theskills of our previous 11-year-old selves.

The moment was a kick and, in retrospect, kind of poignant.Here was our closing moment before society handed us our official adulthood certificates— and we were reaching back for a last fling at vanished youth.

I think of this now because of some new studies about youngpeople, mentioned the other day in the NewYork Times by Kim Brooks, author of “Small Animals: Parenthood in the Ageof Fear.” Her Times piece is headlined‘We Have Ruined Childhood.”

Brooks notes one study that declares children today are moredepressed than they were during the Great Depression and more anxious than theywere at the height of the Cold War. And another study that says the rate ofdepression among teenagers rose 60 percent over the last decade.

Many in earlier generations, ever nostalgic over lostchildhood, recall days carefree as the flip of a baseball card. Thisgeneration, Brooks says, will look back at regimentation. 

She points out “the lack of free time, the rise of theoverscheduled, overprotected child, the overarching culture of anxiety and fear.… School days are longer and more regimented. Kindergarten, which used to befocused on play, is now an academic training ground for the first grade.

“For many children, when the school day is over, it hardlymatters. The hours outside school are more like school than ever, [with]aftercare and camp while their parents work. Unsupervised play [is] now oftenoff limits.

“Those who can afford it drive their children from onestructured activity to another. Those who can’t keep them inside. Free play andchildhood independence have become relics, insurance risks, at times criminaloffenses.”

We had organized activities in the old days, which sometimesfelt like regimentation. We had Little League, Pony League, Cub Scouts, Browniesand Girl Scouts. We had summer camp. All were handed to us with the best ofintentions.

But nothing in the world was better than heading out thefront door, where your friends were waiting. Maybe you rode bikes, and maybeyou played ball. The choices were yours. Maybe you just hung out on the corneror the schoolyard and shot the breeze, listened to somebody’s transistor radio,sang along for a few falsetto lyrics that signaled the onset of adolescence.

You were forming a tribe, a community and a generation. Youwere comparing notes in the same fragmented language, figuring out you weren’talone and learning you could laugh at the new, confusing elements betweenchildhood and adulthood.

You weren’t waiting for your parents to drive you to the next organized activity. And you weren’t alone in the house watching video games. You didn’t have a computer. You wouldn’t trade one now for a single pack of baseball cards.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, most recently “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).

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