Child's Play

 

 

I’m worried about the kids of today. They are radically different from the child I was and much different from all the children I was around when I was growing up. What is the difference? They don’t seem to do anything. They watch television. They listen to music on tapes and CDs. They eat. They drink vast amounts of soft drinks. And sometimes when they are a little older they are herded into automobiles and taken to an organized sports activity and then driven back home to watch more TV and listen to more music.

Let me tell you how it was to be a kid of, say, seven to twelve years of age in the 1934 to 1941 timeframe. During this time I spent the summers on a farm with my grandparents and the winters at home in a multitude of small towns that were almost rural in their nature.

There was no TV. There was no radio. The only music we ever heard was at church on Sundays or when an uncle came and played the guitar while everybody sang. Or often in the towns we would sing a cappella sitting on the front porch in the early evening and a crowd would soon gather and then some one would bring a guitar or an accordion or a harmonica to accompany us. So music that is such a big thing with kids these days was much more incidental in my childhood life.

Work

Kids had chores that were not optional and were unpaid. At home it was my job to wash dishes, dry them and put them away on weekends only. To carry out the garbage or burn it as the need arose. To run errands and to keep my room clean. On the farm my chores multiplied mightily. From the age of eight or nine I milked one or two cows every morning and every evening. I separated the milk into cream and skim milk. I fed the hogs a mixture of skim milk and wheat shorts. I gathered eggs twice a day and I fed the dogs. I kept the kerosene stove tank full of fuel. All of those things I did every day. Seasonally, I chopped cotton or other row crops, headed maize, shucked corn , or harnessed a team and plowed with a go-devil slide. At hay baling time I ran the pick-up rake gathering up tufts of hay that fell off the buck rake and carried them to the baler. In emergencies I held pigs or calves while they were castrated and stabbed alfalfa-bloated cattle with a butcher knife to prevent their death from bloat. I doctored harness sores on horses or mules that I worked. I gathered fruit from the orchards, vegetables from the garden and whitewashed peach tree trunks and hoed weeds from the garden. I walked the “bar ditches” by the roads pulling special weeds that the hogs liked until I got a great mass of them to throw over to the hogs for a feast. When my Grandfather irrigated and started up the huge diesel pump it was my job to check the “tattle-tales” every thirty minutes to assure that they were dripping oil on the bearings.

I did not feel persecuted, overworked or exploited. A modern Child Protective Services worker would have screamed to see me stand beside the six-foot diameter flywheel of the diesel pump, or walking under a gimpy mule to reach a belly strap. I had been told the dangers of the jobs I did, and I took them seriously and never once in my whole life have I ever been injured doing work. Nor has a horse or mule in harness or a cow ever injured me. The work I did made me feel grown up and made me feel that I was contributing to the family. My cousins on a nearby farm worked much harder than I did and then hired out for miniscule wages to help other farmers.

I think today’s children should learn the dignity and value of work.

Play

There was plenty of time for play. From the age of seven to twelve, generally speaking, we preferred to play in segregated groups of boys and girls. The boys played mumblety-peg (every boy had a knife), alley-oop (which involved throwing a ball over the roof of a house to a boy on the other side), we spun tops competitively. We played hulley-gulley with pecans (too complex to explain), we played a dozen variations of marbles, we rolled old tires, we did acrobatics on the windmill pipe, we played a dozen variations of hide and seek and argued vociferously over the rules, we rode horses and did foolish things like swinging up into trees at a gallop (if we could find a tree), we had many, many games. We “slept out” under the stars on a blanket or quilt and told ghost stories until the littlest ones cried and went back in the house. We had lots of play.

Boredom

Both my parents and my grandparents felt that it was almost sinful to be bored. It was never acceptable as an excuse for ill humor. Really though I ascribe to that general theory that just a touch of boredom is productive in childhood. Under the right conditions it is productive of innovation. When I got bored I would go out in the alfalfa fields and hunt until I found a rabbit’s nest and steal a little rabbit and try to eyedropper feed it to maturity. It never worked. I finally realized it was not fair to the rabbit. I would make bows and arrows. I would make guns to shoot rubber bands. My grandmother would show me how to make a kite with silk cloth lightly coated with shellac, and I would fly kites for hours. I never bought a kite in my life. The kid should make the kite. I could spend hours on the barn roof staring at the clouds and making figures from the puffy Gulf clouds. I made stilts and became a giant. My grandmother took a five gallon bucket and put me in the horse trough and demonstrated the principle of the diving bell and taught me a bit about atmospheric pressure by making a crude barometer of plastic tubing. My mother and grandmother made an anatomy lesson out of cutting up a chicken for the pan.

Kids need just enough boredom to make them curious.

Transport

Except for the first day of school for the first three grades, my parents never went to school with me or took me to school. Getting to school was my problem. Most of the twenty-six schools I attended did not have school buses. In the last three years of my school life I rode a city bus to school and walked home (so I could walk behind Margaret McKean half of the way). Before that I walked to and from school, and the distances I had to walk varied greatly from a few hundred yards to a mile or more. I don’t remember ever being carried to school in a car. Once I lived about four miles from a small one room school and rode a horse everyday — several other kids there did likewise. By the time I was seven or eight I usually had the “freedom of the town” in daylight hours. It was a rule in my family that breakfast and supper were family meals and to miss one was not acceptable, but I could go where I wished within the town from breakfast to supper and regale my parents at the table with where I had been all day and all that I had seen. I somehow doubt that children today have that freedom and that learning experience.

Reading

My parents taught me to read and read well before I ever entered school. Books have been one of the greatest loves of my life. From the age of seven onward I have always had a library card everywhere we lived. Different towns have different rules about who can have a library card. I became very adept at convincing librarians that I fit the model of library card owner. My parents didn’t do it. I did it. I read everything all the time. I don’t see children seven to twelve doing a lot of reading these days.

I think that I had a wonderful childhood, but it was not an unusual childhood. The children that I have been able to observe around me in my dotage seem to me to have something missing in their lives. Maybe I am just not hanging out with the right bunch of kids. I don’t see them doing any work just to contribute to the family welfare, I don’t see them doing play except as spectators rather than participators. And somehow it seems that they do not have the feelings of responsibility that my cousins have.