The ubiquitous parental smothering in evidence in recent years can be
traced to the 1980s intermingling of reasserted militarism and family values,
and the beginnings of economic dislocation. The response to the evil foreign
menace utilized a domestic component which alarmed yuppie parents with bogus
reports of thousands of child abductions. And upscale cutthroat avarice
and consumerism spawned a generation of hovering first-time parents diligently
funnelling their kids into joyless success mode. One thing to be said for
Lisa Hathaway, Jessica's mother, is that unlike her contemporaries she was
not in retreat from her Sixties' upbringing and the much-maligned influence
of Benjamin Spock. She raised an inquisitive and self-reliant child, one
who lived her too-brief years unhectored and with enthusiasm.
That distinction in parenting is significant. Neither I nor my playmates
on the New York playgrounds and streets of the 1940s and early 1950s were
supervised. We hung upside down from those venerable jungle gyms, and then
graduated to games of stickball, roller hockey and ring-a-levio, which required
us to become proficient at dodging cars and scrambling around building fire
escapes, basements, stairwells and rooftops. We learned to trust our instincts,
became aware of the resiliency of our young bones, and tested our common
sense against the inevitable daily dare. Some years later, as a high school
student in the middle-class suburbs of Washington D.C., no one I knew was
ever driven to and from events by their parents; and it was commonplace
for parents to ask permission of their children to attend the latter's athletic
events, to avoid making the kids nervous or self-conscious.
Like all kids, I was lucky to avoid injury on many occasions . As fundamental
as the aptitude for language, there's some sixth sense unique to children
which enabled us to remain relatively unscathed. And the close calls we
had instructed us in ways no amount of parental forewarning could equal.
Self-chastened, we became more receptive to parental advice and also better
able to evaluate what parts of that counsel we could comfortably discard.
In the cabin on my return flight from New York, a boy of about 3 in the
seat in front of me has removed his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants.
He straddles the aisle by planting his feet on the seat armrests. He shifts
his weight and balances on one leg, then the other, and then manages to
turn his body and face in the other direction. He is intense and self-contained
and talks quietly to himself. When he braces his wrists on the armrests
and swings his body up and back he yells to his mother to look at him.
Throughout the flight he is indulged by the other passengers, approaches
other children a few rows up, walks the length of the plane beaming and
lays prone and pushes his truck up and down the aisle. He speculates with
his sister about why the plane shakes and buries his face in the window
as we fly over the stark New Mexico landscape. When his ears begin bothering
him during descent, he proudly discovers that the chewing technique the
flight attendant demonstrated to him really works.
The boy runs on ahead of his mother as we disembark, anxious to get on with
what comes next after this grand adventure of soaring across a vast continent
he could probably not even have imagined. At my neighborhood corner grocery
the newspaper headline reveals that the captivating little girl crumpled
on a Cheyenne street would never physically traverse that same terrain.
On Jessica's flight cap were embroidered the words "Sea to Shining
Sea." The reach of children should always appear to exceed their grasp.
It's how they -- and we -- endure.