The Only Happy Ending

Last week on my social media pages, I asked for readers to describe the summer breaks of their childhood.

It's a question I've asked adults in various forms over the course of the last couple decades, sometimes asking it as "What are your fondest memories of childhood? or "Describe a beautiful moment from your childhood." Sometimes I've even asked it as "What from your own childhood do you wish the children in your life could experience."

"We were feral children," replied one commenter, going on to describe summers during which she would ride her bike "much farther" than her mother allowed, going to shops, getting to know the neighbors, exploring a "haunted house," mucking about in drainage ditches, and generally getting up to mischief.

"Our only instructions were to stay out of trouble and be home before the street lights came on," wrote another. "We drank out of garden hoses and used library, park & rec bathrooms or even peed under a tree!"

And yet another wrote, "(I) spent my summers in the woods of Maine with a large group of cousins. We were allowed to be in the house when it rained and when we ate. The rest of the time we were outside."

Nearly every response involved being outside, unsupervised by adults, with other children, and sweeps of time during which to play. Bicycles featured prominently. Aside from that, the only toys that came up with any frequency were dolls and balls. And almost everyone who went into any detail mentioned doing things of which the adults would have disapproved, often involving risk . . . Outdoors, unsupervised, in the company of other children, with lots of time, few toys, and risk: this is the stuff of our beautiful childhood moments, our summers.

Yes, there were a number of broken bones and other injuries mentioned, even "crimes" (breaking into an abandoned -- "haunted" -- house). A few people said that they were expected to work during the summer months, either to supplement the family income or because their parents felt that summer jobs built character and fostered independence. Many described going elsewhere, spending weeks or months with relatives on farms, at the shore, in the woods, or other "wild places." Others fondly recall reading "lots of books" of their own choosing, making things with their own hands, and growing and eating vegetables and fruits that they then ate right from the garden.

Many responders took the opportunity to bemoan the plight of today's children who have virtually no opportunity for unsupervised play, let alone outdoors, who are heavily scheduled,  and who have never experienced going up and down the street knocking on doors to see who else could come out to play. We blame the economy. We blame screens. We blame fear -- of injury, liability, and crime. Several readers would let their children roam more freely, but are afraid that the authorities will crack down on them. More fear.

At the same time, there is a mountain of evidence that what children need more than anything else -- for their mental, physical, and intellectual health -- is exactly what our summer memories revealed: lots of unstructured time, outdoors, with other children, and yes, risk. These are not just "beautiful" experiences we are recalling, but rather formative ones. This is where we learned resilience and independence, where we developed confidence, and how we came to respect what parent educator and Teacher Tom's Podcast guest Maggie Dent calls "natural consequences." It is simply not an accident that today's children are facing, simultaneously, both a mental and physical health crisis. Childhood anxiety, depression, and obesity are the "natural consequences" of this accidental experiment we are performing on a whole generation. The lessons learned by these kinds of formative experiences are passivity, dependence, insecurity, and a general disconnect from the real world of cause-and-effect.

In a nutshell, we've gone from a world in which adults said, "You're driving me crazy, go outside," to one in which they say, "You're driving me crazy, go watch a show."

I'm encouraged by the number of responders who said they were doing everything they could to provide their own children with at least modicum of independence and risk. It's still possible, even if it isn't the same.

Next week, we will be opening registration for the 2024 cohort for my 6-week course, Teacher Tom's Risky Play, which could have just as easily been called Teacher Tom's Summer Play. In this course, we explore how to negotiate the modern world, its fears and challenges, and still provide the children in our lives with the kind of formative experiences they need for mind, body, and soul. This is for educators and parents. When we offered this course last year, several groups took it together as a way to spark conversations in their community (school, neighborhood) about why and how more risk and independence is good for kids, even if it does mean an uptick in mischief.

Author Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a writer of science fiction, but his book Dandelion Wine is one of the most realistic, even if fictionalized, memoirs I've ever read. It takes place during an idyllic, small town summer in the 1950's, centering around independent children living in their world. The adults are present, sometimes important, but mostly on the periphery. It's amber-ized, of course, nostalgic in the way memories become as we reach a certain age, but Bradbury parts the curtain to glimpses of danger, even horror, failure, disappointment, and sorrow, which are all part of the beautiful whole of childhood. It's an evocation of the kind of authentic childhood in which resilience, confidence, compassion, and heartbreak, not mere endless, joyful days, are the result.

As we Americans head into our Independence Day celebrations, I'll leave you with words from Bradbury's protagonist Douglas giving the advice of his experience to his younger brother: "You just won't admit you like crying too. You cry just so long and everything's fine. And there's your happy ending. And you're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again." This is the lesson of resilience that cannot be learned without the freedom to take risks, experience failure, then figuring out how to get back up to walk around with folks again. At the end of the day, that is the only happy ending.

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 In my 6-week course Teacher Tom's Risky Play, we will take a deep-dive into what means to trust children, to stand back, and explore what tools we need to keep children safe while also setting them free to become the kind of resilient people the world needs. This course is about us as adults as much as the children. We will begin registration for the 2024 cohort for this course in the coming days. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here.

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