American children once had three months a year that belonged entirely to them. We replaced that gift with a calendar, and we are raising the most anxious generation in our history.
Summer Used to Mean Bare Feet and Streetlights, Not Schedules. |
American children once had three months a year that belonged entirely to them. We replaced that gift with a calendar, and we are raising the most anxious generation in our history. |
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News for the America we remember |
The screen door slammed at eight in the morning and didn't slam again until the streetlights flickered on. In between was a country of our own. A vacant lot turned into a stadium. A creek turned into an ocean. A patch of woods behind the Hendersons' fence turned into the wildest frontier any child has ever crossed. |
No grown-up knew exactly where we were. No grown-up needed to. The rules were simple. Come home when you hear the streetlights buzz on. Don't bleed on anything important. Don't cross the highway. Everything else was negotiable, and most of what we learned about being a person we learned in those long unsupervised hours. |
We negotiated the rules of a game with no umpire. We worked out who got to be at bat first when there were eleven kids and one chipped bat. We patched up our own scraped knees with a leaf and kept playing. We met the new kid who had just moved into the rental on Maple, and we sized him up and decided whether to let him play right field. Nobody scheduled any of it. |
The Calendar That Ate Childhood
Walk through a neighborhood at noon on a Tuesday in July today and you will hear birds. You will not hear children. The children are in a camp paid for by their parents, or in a structured enrichment program, or at a travel sports tournament three counties over, or alone in a bedroom on a screen. The vacant lot is gone. The creek has a fence around it. The woods behind the Hendersons' fence have been sold and turned into a row of nearly identical houses with no children in them. |
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Better than buying the SpaceX IPO?sponsored |
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They've already shipped 5 billion critical components to SpaceX. And they are the cornerstone for Elon's new endeavor I call "Project Unlimited." |
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