I grew up in a world where almost all kids were feral once school let out for summer.
This was about the time that folks realized that working-class folks realized that if they were going to make ends meet, mom was going to have to get a job.
That meant the kids were left to their own devices for large swaths of the day. We roused in the morning, gulped down our Frosted Flakes, then piled out into the neighborhood with no plan, no agenda, no idea of how the day would unfold or where it would take us. It was like Lord of the Flies with a drawl.
There were just enough nosy grandmas sprinkled through the neighborhood, dispersed at proper intervals necessary to form an effective surveillance network that kept us from truly malicious mischief and serious injury.
The worst accident I can remember was when a bunch of us decided to see if we could knock a hornet’s nest out of a tree by throwing rocks. We discovered a hornet’s nest is better anchored than we imagined, so we needed to be in closer range to do the trick. We inched forward, watching the rocks bounce off the nest, as hornets hovered around in angry confusion. Finally, in a fit of frustration, Jimmy Hester grabbed his baseball bat, walked right up to the tree containing the hornets nest and, standing on his tiptoes, he gave the nest a good smack and ran.
Jimmy was not nearly as fast as he needed to be. He got stung several times and went howling down the street until a grandma gathered him up, took him inside and tended his hornet stings.
It was a memorable day.
But for the most part, we did things that didn’t produce any harm.
We flopped around in Town Creek, which in the summer ran no deeper than 18 inches. We played baseball in an empty lot between our house and the Harbins, hunted birds and mice with BB guns in the pasture that ran parallel to Simpson Street and its 14 modest houses that defined our neighborhood.
There were swing sets and basketball goals to entertain us. We dug in dirt, caught frogs and, near dusk, captured lightning bugs in a fruit jar. The arrival of the Bookmobile or the mosquito spray truck were occasional diversions. We rode our bicycles just behind the truck, swallowing the noxious poison used to beat back the mosquito outbreak that always emerged with summer. Somehow, we never got sick.
It’s pretty obvious that things are different now.
The greatest disadvantage kids have today is they can’t gather spontaneously to play. Kids can’t simply wander off into the neighborhood and be gone all day. A kid missing from home for an hour triggers an Amber Alert, five hours and folks are handing out flyers with the kid’s picture and vital information. A kid arriving home at dusk would be greeted by TV trucks parked on their curb.
A kid’s life today is planned, scheduled, structured and choreographed in ways our generation could not have imagined. The days of the summer street urchins are long gone.
There are no free-range kids anymore.
That means kids need something to do to keep them active.
Parents magazine put together a list of 100 Fun Summer Activities for Kids and Parents, but I judged about two-thirds of them to be fairly lame on the basis that they were indoor activities. I suppose that’s OK in the event of rain, but I still believe a kid’s native habitat in summer is the outdoors.
Fortunately, even if a child’s world is confined to his own yard there are still some fun diversions. Kids can plan and cultivate their own backyard vegetable or butterfly gardens. They can bird-watch, build and fly paper airplanes, decorate driveways and sidewalks with colored chalks. They can play in sprinklers and build backyard forts with bedsheets.
The primary objective is to get kids away from their phones/tablets and outdoors and moving.
Today, there are a variety of summer camps and programs for kids, too.
If you talk to the old folks about their best memories of childhood, you’ll quickly discover that almost all of them occurred outside and during the summer.
It should not be any different for our kids and grandkids. Even with the necessary precautions that modern times dictate, summer should be a time of adventure and exploration. Our kids probably can’t be Huck Finns, but I still believe there’s a bit of room for them to be Tom Sawyers.
Otherwise, what’s a summer for?
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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