The Feeling Of Freedom

I must have been four or five when I started playing with my first "best friend" Pheobe. She lived several houses down the street from us, on the other side of the street. Nearly every morning of that summer of 1966 or '67, I would  cross the street, then cut across several neighbors' lawns to meet her in her own front yard. I know it was summer because I would wear nothing but a pair of shorts. She would great me as Tarzan, then we would spend the morning, or the day, playing together. The only time we went indoors was to use a bathroom. Occasionally, our younger brothers joined us.

There was a military base nearby which inspired us to play soldier. We contrived sports based on our collective sketchy knowledge of actual sports. We created or found forts in shrubbery or amongst pine branches that neighbors had pruned, then piled along the curb for the city truck that removed large yard waste every few weeks. Sometimes we would cut through the Mitchell's yard to explore Christopher Street, a virtually identical cul-de-sac to our own Wembley Street, but with the savor of a foreign land complete with foreign children who were sometimes our friends and sometimes our rivals. There was an undeveloped suburban lot on Christopher that contained the vestiges of the pine forest that had recently grown from the land on which we played. This was a setting for games in which we became explorers, cowboys, settlers, and animals of all kinds. 

I'm 62 years old now. Casting my gaze back over my life, this period of time stands out, which is why I've so often written about it here on the blog over the past 24 years. It doesn't live with me as a continuous memory, but rather as a series of moments tied together by a feeling that I've come to recognize as freedom. I didn't think about it as freedom as I lived it, of course. I didn't know that my future held so much school and work. I didn't know that my time and space were soon to become less mine, less ours. As children of that time and place, we were simply living life itself.

I tend to reflect on that freedom in terms of play, which suggests for most of us a sense of joy, fun, and abandon, but that's a trick of unreliable memory and the slippery meaning of words. There was joy and fun, but I also know that this freedom, this play, taught me that life is unfair, that there is pain and heartbreak, that conflict threatens whenever people come together. Likewise, childhood freedom taught me to value fairness, that wounds heal although they often leave scars, and that most of that treasured thing called friendship is an ongoing process of coming to agreements. Ultimately, freedom taught me that I am capable, a lesson learned through the trial and error that stands at the heart of play. Through both success and failure, I learned that I could do things for myself, that I could solve my own problems, and that I could make my own decisions as well as inherit the consequences of those decisions. In short, freedom taught me to be confident in my own ability to engage, on my own terms, with life itself.

Most of us who were children in the 1960's and 70's, or before, have memories of this sort of freedom.

Over the course of the past decade or so, psychologists have noted an alarming increase in mental illness like anxiety and depression in children, even very young children, compared to past generations. Writing in the Journal of Pediatrics, Drs. Peter Gray, David Lancy, and David Bjorklund point out that this is actually just the continuation of a trend that covers the last half century. 

Their thesis, which they support with a comprehensive survey of the available data and research, is that the rise in childhood mental disorders is primarily caused by "a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities . . . promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life." 

As children have lost their freedom, they have likewise lost out on the lessons that freedom teaches, leaving them increasingly in a world without the skills, habits, and experience that humans need to thrive. No wonder so many of our youngest citizens are plagued with depression and anxiety.

I've held the position of "teacher." The children with whom I've spent the bulk of my adult life have called me Teacher Tom. But that title is really nothing but an honorific because I've spent very, very little of my decades actually instructing children. Instead, I've simply tried to give very young children, 2-5 year olds, the opportunity to know what it means to be free, even if I know that most of them will spend their entire childhoods under adult supervision. I'm not under the illusion that they will, as adults, remember the specifics of their time with me, but I pray that the feeling of freedom and confidence will be something they grow up to recognize in themselves. 

Over the past half century adults have come to increasingly seen our role as ever-present teachers and protectors, which means that we are charged with constantly "doing" things to and for the kids in one way or another. What children need, however, are adults who allow them to feel what it means to be free. To do things to and for themselves. This is how we most effectively empower (i.e., give power to) and encourage (i.e., give courage to) them. It's only when we do this, that we can hope to reverse this decades long deterioration in childhood mental well-being.

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"Teacher Tom, our caped hero of all things righteous in the early childhood world, inspires us to be heroic in our own work with young children, and reminds us that it is the children who are the heroes of the story as they embark on adventures of discovery, wonder, democracy, and play." ~Rusty Keeler

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