Julie and the kids have been down in my hometown for the past 10 days or so, staying in the countryside with my parents. I drove them down and caught a plane back. She needed to relax and recover from shingles, and it gave the kids a chance to spend a long time with their grandparents, aunt and cousins. They were going to be there for another week and a half, but Nora came down with chicken pox, and Julie was feeling well enough to drive back, so they rolled in today. Glad to have the family back home; I hated the empty house.
Besides which, my home was assaulted by demons while she was away -- no kidding, do you know that I'd get home from work to find that my clothes were right where I had left them on the floor when I left that morning! I kid you not! Eerie. The dirty coffee cup was too. Creeped me out; I'm not used to that happening, and I can't explain it. Oh, that, and finally 10 days worth of phone messages can get checked. I see the stupid blinking light, but I can never remember how to check them, and I kept forgetting to ask her when I'd speak with her.
Basically, I'm a domestic clod. When Julie came to visit my apartment the first time when we were dating, she asked what that gross puddle on the bottom shelf of the fridge was. "Um, hoisin sauce," I said. I can't say that I'd noticed it before. Basically, except for being able to cook, I'm a walking cliche of male domestic ineptitude.
But I digress.
One thing Julie told me about the trip stays with me. Last Friday, she and the kids went with my sister Ruthie and her girls to a cancer society walkathon fundraiser at the town ballpark. Matthew quickly made new friends there, and ran off playing with them. Julie said it was an unexpected and wonderful feeling to be able to let him go off and play with kids and get out of her sight, and not have to worry about him. That just doesn't happen in the city. Matthew got a kick out of being able to ride a bike up and down the little gravel road that runs by my parents' house, with nobody paying attention to him. He was free.
We don't know anybody who lets their kids do that in the city. You rarely if ever see kids Matthew's age riding their bikes around (and we live in a mixed-race, mixed-income neighborhood, so it's not a Fraidy-Cat Middle-Class White People thing). Maybe it's different elsewhere in Dallas -- I'd be cheered to discover I'm wrong -- but I doubt it. It's hard to know whether city and suburban parents these days are overprotective. It's easy to say yes, and probably we are ... but who's willing to take that chance with their kids nowadays? Not me. I couldn't live with myself if something went wrong. We see gang tags around the neighborhood from time to time. This gentrifying neighborhood is still home to a concentration of registered sex offenders living in halfway houses left over from the bad old days, when this part of Dallas was run-down. So you really would be stupid to let your eight-year-old run around unsupervised here -- but I'm not sure I would be willing to let my kids do that if we lived in a much more conventionally suburban part of the DFW sprawl.
I grant you that this is no way to live.
John Podhoretz told me once that growing up in NYC in the big bad Seventies, he used to take the subway around by himself when he was not much older than Matthew is now. And that that wasn't unusual. Nowadays, though, you'd be out of your mind to let your kid do that in NYC, which is vastly safer than it used to be. Or if not out of your mind, at least that kind of behavior would be extremely unusual.
Anyway, Julie grew up in a suburb of Dallas in the Eighties, and the idea of being able to run around on your own as an eight-year-old without a parent watching was alien to her. Imagine, though, finding what people in the small town where I'm from take as completely normal -- the liberty to let little kids run around being little kids without helicopter parents hovering overhead -- being a rare luxury to city people like us. Then again, you can open your windows at night there too and let in the breeze without worrying about some thug climbing through it and stealing your stereo. A few years ago, I was talking to someone there I'd gone to school with back in the day, and she expressed astonishment that I couldn't believe she didn't lock her car doors when she went to the supermarket. It just never occurred to her that she would need to do that.
I don't mean to suggest that my hometown is Mayberry. It most certainly isn't. But there is still a degree of social trust and cohesion there that you just don't have in many places anymore. But see, what happens is people like me pick up and move to places like this to get away from family lives of isolation and anxiety in the big city, and pretty soon we've replicated the thing we tried to escape. Haven't we?
Thoughts?
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I build fences and such in the country outside of Dallas and Ft Worth.
What is it with Texans and fences? When I lived in Texas(Plano) there was an ordinance that you had to have a fence.
Honestly, it could simply be a matter of crowding. People need space, and if they can't get it one way, physically, they generate their space another way, with emotional or mental distance.
Or.. people in the country are bored and have nothing better to do than to be nosy. *chuckle*
I agree with fbc that "the problem ain't the cities." If I recall my Jane Jacobs correctly from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she pointed out that many of the most desperate ethnic ghettoes of 1930s Boston were remarkably crime-free. In fact, Jacobs' description of these neighborhoods reads an awful lot like Rod's depiction of his hometown. To rework Slick Willie's slogan, "it's the culture, stupid."
I know quite a few traditional-minded families who moved out to the middle of nowhere in search of a good place to raise their kids. Did the kids escape the grasp of the world? Not necessarily. These families were self-made islands. Once the children floated out to the sea of normal society, some weren't ready for the encounter and ended up succumbing to the influence of bad companions.
What's the lesson in this? I think it's imperative that parents raise their children to be engaged with the world, not to be afraid of it. It doesn't matter whether you live in a farmhouse in western Nebraska, suburban Dallas, or in a Baltimore rowhouse, the principle is the same. If parents take care to inculcate decency and respect for tradition in their children, they'll probably turn out OK.
I remember Rod talking about Robert Putnam's findings that diversity lessens social capital in neighborhoods. I would argue that it's not a racial thing, but a cultural thing. We need a sustained effort to create neighborhoods where culture, not income or race, is the primary bond. Please don't take this as an argument for prejudice against outsiders. I'm just saying it's imperative that people reach out and try to create these bonds rather than hunker down in their homes after work. I wish I myself could live up to that ideal...
Postscript to the Fritzl angle: "victims 'face eight years' intensive therapy"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3857973.ece
Deo gratias, either his mother or the TV let him know that he was not utterly abandoned in that manmade Hell...
Erin Manning: And there's a corollary to it, too, which is that the disappearance of SAHMs has made things really, really hard for the SAHMs who are still out there.
This is a significant point, often overlooked. Neighborhoods need a "critical mass" of SAHMs (and other interested adults) in order to provide a congenial environment.
Many people in many neighborhoods are not home, not just during the day, but into the evening as well. People in America are expected to work ridiculous hours, and have virtually no home/neighborhood / family time.
As a corollary, many kids with parents working until 7, 8, 9 PM *are* at home - they're just virtually locked up inside their homes with the TV and video games, not permitted either to go out or to have friends over. I have seen young adults that I *knew* were raised like that (because I knew their families), and as young adults they have serious problems.
Many neighborhoods are extremely economically segregated (the housing bubble bust might break that down a bit.) Wealthier families (in my experience, anyway) do not want their children "running around the streets," not just for safety, but because unconstructed play is seen as a "waste of time." Kids should be at tutors, music lessons, playing on sports teams, all to "get into a good college," because everyone knows being in the band and on a sports team make you a "desirable" applicant. This "ambitionism" has become the sine qua non of many families' lives. The children of poorer people, meanwhile, still play in the streets and around the neighborhoods.
Finally, my experience at least, is that even though we might laugh at Hillary Clinton's "It takes a village" remark, in a sense it *is* true. SAHMs really do need each other, and not just 20 miles away by car, in the other suburb, but on the same block, in the house next door. We're not chimpanzees; child-rearing is *not* a solitary venture in the human animal. Commercial substitutes like pre-schools, kiddie gyms, programs offered by institutions (schools, etc.) are NOT a substitute for a wide network of SAHMs in close proximity to each other.
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