Words are good for kids

[fgoodwin]

Words are good for kids

 

http://www.rep-am.com/story.php?id=10444

 

Sunday, July 30, 2006

 

The other night I was telling my son a story about my tree fort.

 

I hadn't thought about the place in years. But every time I give my son P.J. a bath, I'm flooded with the memory of the place. The scent of Johnson & Johnson shampoo sends me back to my childhood, when my mother used to bathe us in Tide.

 

Yes, Tide, the abrasive laundry detergent with the little aqua grains. It sounds punishing, but the truth is, my mother had little choice. By the time my brothers and I dragged ourselves out of the woods and back into our home at twilight, we were embedded with dirt. Muck clung to us. We were studded with burrs. We reeked of skunk cabbage. The Tide was astringent. But it worked. It was handy. And my mother was anything if not resourceful.

 

My mother certainly worried about filth, but what's peculiar to me now in retrospect, is that she never worried about us. She certainly didn't worry about us in the woods, which had a kind of halo effect for her. The woods, that tangle of poison ivy, skunk cabbage, streams, tadpoles, birch and burrs, was our babysitter.

 

Not any more.

 

In "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature -- Deficit Disorder," Richard Louv claims today's children are spending less time in the woods, instead risking depression, attention deficit disorder and a host of other disorders by being plugged into entertainment media.

 

It's a tough claim to make. Few rigorous studies have examined the amount of time kids spend outdoors. But it seems anecdotally true. Our kids are no longer "The Little Rascals." They're "The Jetsons."

 

The woods were where my brothers and I spent most of our time. The woods had the advantage of (we thought) belonging to no one, and therefore were unfettered by niggling parental rules. The nearby park, with its swing sets, ball fields and aluminum slide, was attractive enough. But its classic attractions were, by comparison, stultifying. You knew what you were supposed to do in a park. In the woods, you were left to your imagination and nature's caprice. There was always the possibility that you would tumble into a stream, be impaled by a thorn bush or (my fear) bitten by a snake. All of this and more happened to me, of course, but none of it proved fatal.

 

What was particularly attractive about the woods, though, was the certainty that my mother would never venture into it. She would shout our names madly and with spine-tingling inflection out the back door, but there was simply no way my mother was going to machete her way through the thicket to find our secret hideout. My mother was tough. But she did not like bugs.

 

And so, in the feudal society that was the suburban forest, my playmates and I carved up dominions and claimed them for ourselves. We trawled through the local landfill and slunk around Dumpsters looking for scrap wood from which to construct our tree forts. We used pieces of bureaus. Highway signs. The ends of crates. Little by little, the mosaic form came into place and we had our own tree fort, complete with lookout tower and scheming room.

 

I told my son all of this, but I left out the part about the air rifles. The slingshots, too. I didn't mention them. Or the saplings whose ends we would whittle into a needle-sharp point and use for sword fights. Oh, and the time I fell out of the tree fort and on to my head. I left that out, too.

 

The more I told my son about the tree house, the more dangerous it seemed. The more interested he became in building a tree house, the more resolute I grew that I would never let him have one. The more animated he turned about wandering through the woods, the more of an idiot I felt for ever bringing this up in the first place.

 

Who knows what kind of sociopath could be out skulking around out there? And the woods are choked with poison ivy. To say nothing of the ticks. Lyme disease festers in the woods. Then there are the mosquitos. They might have been infected with West Nile. And what kind of a mother would let her child run around unsupervised in such a perilous pit?

 

Ah, but P.J. What wonders you will miss. Let's grab a hammer. I'll come, too.

 

Reach Tracey O'Shaughnessy at Toshrep-am.com

[packsaddle]

I often encounter tree forts around these woods. They seasonally have camo-clothed snipers in them with high-powered semi-automatic weapons, looking for deer...occasionally bagging a civilian.

But I agree with the article as I was also a child of the forest. I hit the back door every afternoon as soon as I could drop my books someplace and I'd stay out until night made it hard to run through the trees or until I heard the call for supper (but if we had caught, killed, and were cooking some wildlife...and nothing was off-limits...we'd develop temporary deafness). My reading was about Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Dan Beard, Daniel Boone, etc., and I wanted to be them. And for a little while each evening, I was.

[fgoodwin]

FYI: I think the headline writer meant to say Woods are good for kids but I didn't want to change it based on an assumption.

[packsaddle]

Whew! And here I was worried that it was YOUR mistake.

[campcrafter]

 

Why do we feel this way about letting our kids run free like we did? I believe the "safety" we experienced was that we lived in in neighborhoods where people new each other and were friends, there were lots of kids who played together, neighbors watched out for each others kids and moms were at home.

 

If someone did get hurt, 1 or 2 kids would stay with the hurt kid, and someone else would run off to get a mom. And for that to happen the injury required stitches or a bone set. Otherwise you sucked it up or went home by yourself to get cared for.

 

 

Today we move to much to bigger better houses, neighborhoods, we don't know ourneighbors, many neghborhoods the families are at diffrents stages as opposed to the neghborhood I grew up in were young couples moved in about the same time, stayed and raised their families together.

 

The instant media of today that tells of all the bad in the world also has contributed to the paranoia. The bad people have always been out there, we just didn't hear about all of them.

 

That world of yesterday just does not exist anymore unfourtunately.

Our program though, IF we do it right, can provide some of this for boys today.

 

CampCrafter, who worked on bulding a tree house for his son this past weekend

 

[Lynda J]

My dad worked for a furniture store and he brought home stove, dryer, and refig boxes. You can do a lot with those boxes. We also had a farm and hay forts are the greatest. I can remember mother standing us in the back yard and hosing us off with the hose before she would even consider letting us in her bathtub. I can remember getting up at daylight and getting on my horse and leaving with the dog and a sack lunch. I would get back at dark. One summer dad complained about having to put shoes on the horse every month. But we sure did have a lot of fun. Now there is no way I would let a kid ride out on a horse alone.

 

But I agree KIDS NEED THE OUT OF DOORS.