Adults are ruining kids' lives with organized play and other dumb activities

“Shhhh,” Jim Masciola whispered to me as we peeked our heads over the grassy ridge and planned our attack. “If they spot us we’re dead.”

In the wide valley below us was the object of our rescue mission, and nothing would stop us from succeeding.

“Ready?” Jim whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go!”

We got to our feet, scrambled over the ridge, pulled out our swords and rifles and ran down into the valley screaming “Chaaarrge!”

It was over in a minute or two, and the carnage was massive: Hundreds of dead enemies, bodies sliced in half and blood everywhere. We had succeeded in our mission of rescuing twenty naked women who were tied to stakes and were about to be burned alive by a gang of desperados.

“It’s a good thing they didn’t kill us,” I said triumphantly to Jim.

“Why’s that?”

“Because we would have missed supper, and I’m really hungry.”

“Yeah. Me too. Let’s go home.”

It was a good day’s work for two second graders who had a couple of hours to play each day after school before their dads got home and supper had to be eaten and homework done. Our grassy ridge and wide valley was just a railroad embankment a few blocks from our homes. Our swords and rifles were make-believe. The desperados and naked women all lived in our imaginations.

For two hours every day during the school year, and for ten or twelve every day during summer vacation, Jim, I and the other neighborhood kids lived the most incredible fantasies imaginable. We were soldiers, Indians, and the greatest baseball, football and hockey players. We won important battles single-handedly. We were astronauts and fighter pilots, cops and bank robbers, gangsters, thieves and bums. We roamed the neighborhood at will on foot and on our bikes, knew which adults were crazy, which houses were haunted, knew every bum and knew where the older kids stashed their cigarettes and Playboy magazines. We were everything and everybody, went everywhere, and had an absolute blast.

By the way, we did all those things by ourselves, without adult supervision, and always, always, without our parents’ knowledge. All they ever knew was that we were out playing, and they were always glad that we were out of the house.

What a difference a generation makes. A recent story in the Washington Post says that parents are now being reported for letting their kids play at parks by themselves. The nation is gripped with fear that every kid will be kidnapped or assaulted by a sex offender. City and suburban streets are empty of kids. Scheduled play dates set up by parents are now the norm. Kids who live two blocks from school ride a bus instead of walking. Organized sports leagues where kids are coached and screamed at by adults have replaced those after-school sandlot baseball and football games where anyone who was around could play and where kids made the rules and negotiated between themselves over things like where foul lines and end zones should be and what would constitute a double and a triple when there weren’t enough kids to make a full baseball team.

Where we once roamed for miles, even as early as the third grade, kids are now confined to their back yards or the back seats of their parents’ SUVs. Author Richard Louv says that in the past twenty years, the radius beyond which kids are allowed to wander has decreased by eighty-nine percent. Nowadays, some kids can’t even step outside the house without wearing a helmet and other protective gear. Sadly, kids’ lives are being programmed by adults.

Shrinks are now saying that this trend is wrong and dangerous. They say the harm to kids who aren’t allowed to explore, fantasize, improvise, negotiate, solve problems and just have fun is much greater than the risk of being kidnapped or stalked by a fiend. For once, they’re right. We should let kids enjoy the wonderment of childhood. We shouldn’t, out of paranoia, be imprisoning them or trying to turn them into sports superstars at age six.

The paranoia that keeps kids imprisoned in their parents’ SUVs and in one imagination-killing organized activity after another is unjustified. Most sexual assaults on kids are by relatives. And, of the 260,000 child kidnappings every year, only 115 are cases where kids are snatched by strangers.

Today’s paranoid parents would be horrified at how we grew up. We were walking the five blocks to school by ourselves in first grade. We played tackle football between two giant sycamore trees at the park without equipment—no helmets, shoulder pads, coaches or adults. By second grade we were hanging out at the railroad tracks and putting stones and pennies on the tracks so they could be crushed and flattened by trains. We walked more than a mile-and-a-half by ourselves to the library after school. We rode our bikes three miles—on the streets and without helmets—to Riis Park on Saturdays. In fourth grade we were taking the bus and subway to downtown Chicago by ourselves. We never had a radius beyond which we couldn’t go. Once we were out of the house, our parents never knew where we were. We just had to be home by supper time.

We played softball and football in the alleys and on the streets. Masciola and I roamed everywhere. We lit matches and started piles of leaves on fire. We smoked the seed pods from catalpa trees, believing them to be Indian cigars. We made our own cigars out of cottonwood leaves, maple tree seed pods and cough medicine. In second grade we planted oil wells and money trees, none of which grew. By seventh grade we were sneaking sips of homemade Italian wine in Masciola’s basement. My brother and his sixth-grade pals bought BB guns and shot birds and rats along the Chicago River. We made slingshots, bows-and-arrows, burned ants with magnifying glasses, dug tunnels through giant snow drifts, played hockey without equipment outside at the park in the winter until our toes got numb, played hide-and-seek, guns, had snowball fights, blew off fireworks on the Fourth, trick-or-treated by ourselves and fought each other. None of us was ever assaulted or kidnapped, although Masciola was traumatized once when a smiling politician tried to shake his hand.

For a long time, Masciola and I never knew what to do with all those naked women we were always rescuing. We eventually figured it out, though. And we didn’t need adults or play dates to help us.