Some of the Me-Generation (or whatever cheesy phrase you want to use for "kids these days") attitude comes, I think, from a lack of neighborhood interaction. I've got some experience in this arena now, and where I used to hang out with every kid on my street, kids aren't wandering around the neighborhoods like they used to. Parents are expected to police their own kids in ways that used to be done by the neighborhood as well, and it takes a much larger commitment to have someone visit down the street. That is, if the parent doesn't feel like visiting, the kids are stuck at home. Often they're stuck in the home.

This lack breadth in social interaction has to have some influence on kids' self-concept. It skews interactions to specific, specialized activities -- school (thank heavens; the school lunchroom & playground seem the last bastions of open social interaction for young'uns), soccer (where everyone plays soccer), dance (where, well, everyone dances), etc) -- each one excepting school with its own clear register of success and hierarchy. Without truly free play, where the players are selected not by shared interest but simple geography (though, admittedly, everything geography still tends to include: race, class, etc), kids lack the chance to see many people excel according to registers of their own, on the fly making. People are allowed to shine in ways that nobody could anticipate.

I'm reminded here a little, perhaps non-intuitively, of a This American Life show I heard recently called Notes on Camp. I don't quite worship TAL like some do, but despite it's rather limited geographic and cultural range of viewpoints [sic], it's a well done show largely because of its comfort with dealing with stories where people lose or, when they win, they win in ways that are more poetic and cerebral than they are absolute, conventional "wins." In Notes on Camp, you hear of a place where kids still lose and lose mightily and, if you buy into the argument presented, really enjoy losing whether they admit it in so many words or not. It's not just endearing to lose, but losing builds community and character.

Why would camp, a place seemingly full of rules, work like this when dance and soccer don't? Simple enough: Camp provides more kid to kid interactions with less supervision than those other arenas. And if you've worked at camp, you know the supervision tends to be looser than at home. It's closer to, well, closer to parenting in those years when camp was formed. TAL talks a good deal about the genesis of the camp movement in that show, linked above. Some of the values shared by people who revered a certain stereotyped native American also included looser child governance or, better put, shared child governance. And it's at the center of a camp's profitability to play up tradition, which, like a downtown Charleston frozen in time by money-starvation lucked into its "quaint" feel today, codifies those older values in its system.

I'm not saying that in neighborhood free play that everyone wins, but, rather, without the trophy-for-all structure from the "adults" of pay-to-play activities, everyone loses. Without the fake rules enforced by companies looking to support Me Generation, kids feel loss. They learn that they can't always get what they want, and that, at times, other kids -- more charismatic kids, stronger kids -- do.

Still, in my traditional suburban neighborhood, though I occasionally see a few packs on bikes, you're really not likely to bump into a wandering kid the way you could not thirty years previous. Combined with the new expectations (for better or worse) of parents to carefully monitor their own kids at all times (again, not necessarily a bad idea), there are simply fewer opportunities for kids to learn how the world structured directly by human nature tends to work.

Note: I updated a tag on this, and blogger promptly changed the publication date. I'm not sure when it was originally posted, so this date is purely a guess. Dang it, Blogger. Why can't I search up my own posts on Google's cache?

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