Some Thoughts about Childhood

This morning I was sitting on a rock in Penn Treaty Park at the foot of our neighborhood, watching a cormorant in the Delaware River diving for food. A young family came nearby and I heard the clear voice of their four or five year old daughter,
" Look at the duck! His head is sticking out of the water!" The bird disappeared under water and she cried,"Where is it? Where did it go?"

I couldn't resist and I answered,"It's diving down for fish. It's a special kind of duck called a cormorant. It'll come back up."
The parents and their two girls moved closer and watched for a while, the older child exclaiming all the while. When they moved on , and I got up and passed near them, the daughter had found a small weeping willow tree, and she was excitedly pulling her sister under the canopy and calling it a house. "And here's the door!"

I have worried that all of the overly attentive parenting and scheduling of this generation of children might be squelching their essential imagination. But I could hear a familiar note of discovery in her voice. I remember feeling bad that my own daughters didn't have the same freedom that I had. When I was a child, summer was a pure open field and sky of possibilities. By the time I was nine I could run across the street to the park on my own and climb trees, explore the "Indian" trails, or ride my bike out into the country. Friends were nearby, and we made our own games. We would have been surprised and annoyed to have our parents trying to play with us. They watched our plays, Mother baked cookies with us, Dad took us hiking as a family and gave us a garden plot for zinnias, proper parent kinds of things, but we had plenty of dream time of our own.My girls couldn't safely go alone to the park in our bigger city, and friends were scattered. Still, they found plenty of creative space in their minds.When I heard them one day making a clubhouse under the forsythia in our yard in Richmond, I knew their childhood was intact.

I hope that young parents will feel okay about letting their children goof around, daydream and explore their physical world on their own rhythms. Such pure freedom will never come again.