Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood (2009)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/

by taylorbuley • 10 years ago

72 52 10 years ago

An even more relevant and striking article 7 years later. I truly worry for the kind of world my children may grow up in, filled with manufactured fears and helicopter parents buzzing about trying to prevent the world from getting in.

At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".

Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and more knowledgable from it.

HiroshiSan• 10 years ago

Oh man, I used to love running around outside, finding a good stick and carving it into a spear.

wonder_er2• 10 years ago

I built "forts" throughout what felt like miles and miles of empty woods. Leave the house in the morning, get back sometime later that day.

I'd want the same for my future children, but my greatest fear is a nosy neighbor calling CPS due to my seemingly negligent parenting style. (As inferred from my children having copious amounts of free time, bereft of adult supervision.)

justinator3• 10 years ago

I've architected my life so that adventure in the woods is still a quick bike ride to the trailhead.If I have more time acailable, There's the National Forest, Wilderness and a National Park, all a few hours by bike. I can bring along a sleeping back and stay out indefinetly.

Without this access, yeah I'd feel a little dead inside.

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - E. Abbey

AnimalMuppet• 10 years ago

"The wilderness once offered a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a psychological refuge. Soon there will be no more wilderness. Then the madness becomes universal. And the universe goes mad." - E. Abbey

j1vms• 10 years ago

At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. (...) I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good

Perhaps whenever something is lost, something else has been gained. And this even when we not able to spot it from each of our unique, and no less important, vantage points.

slv77• 10 years ago

When my grandfather was a child (age 11) he took his 10 year old brother to the state fair by train a distance of about 40 miles. They spent their remaining funds on ice cream and then hitchhiked back home.

The trains were gone by the time my father was a child and he wandered as far as a bike could take him and back in a day. He would play at Army Dumps that dotted the landscape in the 50's.

When I was a kid the freeways and major thoroughfares created islands that couldn't be crossed by a kid on a bike. The farmland and riparian areas around creeks created walking corridors and I would spend time watching tadpoles and building forts.

For my kids the farmland was developed and the creeks tightly fenced off by an interlocking thicket of HOAs. They wandered virtual worlds.

yarou• 10 years ago

And hopefully their children will roam the stars.

theoh• 10 years ago

Yeah, the cold, distant stars. Super!

Seriously, can we get over the idea that life in space is going to be better? The stars are too distant to visit. Elon Musk doesn't have the nous to fix our political problems, just to competently execute engineering tasks.

If freedom and self-determination are the goals, it's surely best to conserve the liberties and territories that already exist or have only recently been lost. Keep the space travel agenda to mining asteroids.

noonespecial• 10 years ago

They wandered virtual worlds.

That's fairly insightful right there. I'm juust old enough that my childhood contained some of the last years of "the woods" and juust young enough that when I started WOW, I recognized the feeling. Logging on in those early days had the same essential flavor as grabbing the bike and heading out.

curtfoo• 10 years ago

Seconded. A very insightful comment. Your comment rings true as well. I spent quite a bit of time in "the woods" as a boy but also plenty of time in front of computer screens. You're right - the feeling is the same whether it's outdoors, a virtual world, or even the inner world of my thoughts when I would read a book with a fully realized world.

Joof3• 10 years ago

Remember when the internet allowed you to have multiple identities on message boards and so on? It was a really unique time.

echion• 10 years ago

I love virtual worlds and don't fetishize nature, but there seems something essentially different between a world created by physics and a world created by humans. It would be a shame to miss out on either.

monkmartinez• 10 years ago

Awesome way to put things into perspective. Nothing is "lost"... it is only changing. Everything will change. Embrace fate, control what you can control, and live.

I did things my kids will not do, as it is simply not possible to take a train from Nogales to Puerto Vallarta anymore, for example. They will do things that are not possible for their kids to do... and so on. Don't harken back to days gone by as if they (kids) are somehow going to be deficient due to these perceived losses. They are not.

Joof3• 10 years ago

I ran a Minecraft server with myself and friends about two years ago. They were most interested in exploring (and finding neat treasures), so I added mods for new lands, spontaneous adventures, rarer treasures and other places to go.

OTOH, I enjoyed building factories and ever more complicated toys and one friend created art pieces everywhere (we gave him creative mode and some other tools and sent him off).

One girl loved to farm almost exclusively for whatever reason; maybe I should have done something to make it more engaging somehow?

And now I've forgotten my point, but I'm reminded just how different everybody is!

carsongross• 10 years ago

It's also worth mentioning the unmentionable[1]: the authors childhood was in a much more culturally homogenous environment.

[1] https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id...

throwanem2• 10 years ago

It sounds like you've got a point to make. Why quail at the thought of making it?

Torgo• 10 years ago

The author of that paper studied the breakdown of community and found (to his dismay, and among other findings) that social trust diminished with increased ethnic diversity.

wonder_er2• 10 years ago

why is this unmentionable? I don't understand what you're implying. Could you sketch it out?

wyager3• 10 years ago

Not OP, but the current sociopolitical environment puts strong proscriptions on believing that cultural or ethnic homogeneity can be beneficial.

sauldcosta• 10 years ago

At 24, kids are a long way off for me. But when they do come to pass, my hope is that I can give them a childhood like the one I had: full of rocks, sticks, mud, and band-aids. Thank you for the reminder of how important that is to strive for.

thisone2• 10 years ago

just teach them safety, and figure out when you can trust them to keep safe.

Even 25 years ago, weirdos existed. As a ~10 year old, walking home one day, a stranger stopped his car, leaned out, and asked me to go get coffee with him.

Rotonde• 10 years ago

Bizarre, what 10 year old drinks coffee?

panglott• 10 years ago

The essential question at the end, for parents caught in the bind: "Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?"

Free-range children are just rare these days.

api• 10 years ago

In many places you can be charged with a crime and possibly get social services called on you for letting kids just run around. These are often not high crime areas. The irony is that kids were allowed to run around back when crime rates were far higher.

honkhonkpants• 10 years ago

My kids are like the Census Bureau: they go down the street knocking on doors, asking if there are any kids there. But, as much as I encourage them to do it, there's never anyone home even at the places where we know the kids live. Their schedules are structured and they spend all their time somewhere else.

My kids don't have any real friends except each other which I find a little sad.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 10 years ago

There has been a lot of commentary about us being more paranoid about children's safety.

I think there are couple of factors that are responsible for this.

1) Couples in general have fewer children than we had in the past. If you have 1 child - a loss leaves you completely childless. If you have 5 children - a loss leaves with with 4 children.

2) There has been a remarkable drop in childhood disease mortality. In the past, when it was very likely that one or more of your children would die with a childhood disease, the 1 in a million chance of abduction is not that big of a deal. Now, we generally don't expect any of our children to die of infection or disease in childhood, and so the chance of abduction (while still the same or smaller than before) becomes comparatively larger.

wyager3• 10 years ago

It's not just children's safety. Even as crime rates and violence rates have decreased monotonically since at least the 1980s, people grow more and more clamorous about "safety" from essentially negligible causes of death like terrorism or assault rifles. We've spent billions of dollars on the TSA, which by all indicators doesn't even do much to prevent (the negligible amount of) terrorist activity. Similarly, in 2015, only 248 people were killed with rifles (no idea which percentage of those were homicides, and which percentage of those were assault rifles). Yet how much legislative time was wasted arguing about trying to ban them?

"Safety" has become somewhat of a "semantic stopsign" in political discourse.

paulddraper2• 10 years ago

I'm curious, where did you get the gun data? Most places I look at don't differentiate by gun type. (Which is strange, considering how much regulations differ by gun type.)

Anyway, usually it's roughly 60% suicide, 10% defense, 25% homicide, 5% accidental.

louprado• 10 years ago

Is it that today's children don't value outside activities because it is too enjoyable to be indoors ? Which leads to obesity that makes outdoor play less fun and more dangerous. The danger coming from weight variance (e.g., it's risky for a 60lb 12 year old to play with a 200lb 12 year old).

The streets throughout NYC were depressing and violent when I was growing up. But those working class homes were even more depressing and there were only a handful of TV channels. So we had to go outside to keep our sanity. Even if I wanted to play a video game, I'd have to ride my bike to get a pirated copy or to commute to a friend's house. So you'd see kids outside at the very least because they had somewhere to go. Even having a job was common.

Now all those homes have been comfortably remodeled with air-conditioning, high-speed internet, and countless TV channels.

Coincidentally, the first household to get cable television and a video game console on my block also had the first notably obese child.

WalterBright• 10 years ago

It's true that life indoors in the 60s was hopelessly boring. TV was 3 channels with bad reception showing soap operas or Jack Lalane exercise shows.

For something to do, you had to go outside and meet up with the other kids outside, then go looking for trouble (!).

tonyedgecombe2• 10 years ago

Yes, I remember when being sent to your bedroom was a punishment, now you can't get your children out of their rooms.

Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood (2009)

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