I want you to recall a beautiful moment. A time when you were young. Go back as far as you can. Most people, they tell us, don’t have many memories from before they were six-years-old, but maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Spend a little time with that memory.
Where were you?
Who, if anyone, was with you?
What were you doing?
What were you feeling?
The memory that comes up for me was playing with my neighborhood friend Pheobe Azar. I was probably 5. It was summer time. Neither of us were wearing shoes.
We would meet up every morning after breakfast in John Sain’s front yard because it was halfway between our houses.
The adults were all indoors, busy, off to work, so it was just us kids outside. Sometimes other kids would join us. Her brother John. My brother Sam. The Beale kids, the Weible kids, the Cozart kids. Inside belonged to the adults. When we were inside, they were always telling us what to do, but outside . . . That was the place where we felt free.
I’ve done this exercise dozens of times with groups of adults, then asked them to share their beautiful moments.
Most of the time, those beautiful moments came while playing outdoors.
Usually, like in my memory, the adults were somewhere else. We were unsupervised, or at least not directly supervised.
Another common characteristic is the sense that we had all the time in the world. In a just-released conversation with "The Queen of Common Sense" Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast, she tells the story of how she recently rediscovered this feeling while killing time under a pine tree with her grandchild where they had ducked to escape a sudden rain storm.
People rarely mention toys, but they often talk about playing in nature, with sticks and rocks and hills and water.
Usually, these beautiful memories involve other children, of all ages.
And finally, a huge percentage of our beautiful moments involve us doing things that our parents would probably have forbidden. This is what we adults call risk, but as children it was just play.
Outdoors, unsupervised, lots of time, few toys, other children, and risk: that's the stuff of our beautiful memories. That's the stuff of an authentic childhood.
Being a parent today is much more difficult, I think, than it was when Maggie Dent and I were kids. We don't have the freedom to simply let our children roam our neighborhoods. Even the very nature of what it means to be a parent has changed.
In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, psychology professor, researcher Alison Gopnik discusses an academic literature search she performed using the key word “parenting." What she found was stunning. She says that the word barely appeared in the literature before about 1962, but since that time, the use of the word has exploded into the millions.
She sees this as significant. As she puts it, we’ve taken a relationship – being a parent – and turned it into a verb – parenting. She points out that this is the only foundational relationship we’ve done this to. We don’t do wifing. We don’t do husbanding. We don't do childing. We don’t do friending. No, we are a wife. We are a husband. We are a child. We are a friend.
The central metaphor in Gopnik's book is that we’ve made parenting into a job, like being a carpenter. And as carpenters, we will now be judged by the quality of our work. The table is too wobbly. It’s not level. It’s made from the wrong kind of wood. Except now, we’re being judged by the quality of our parenting, which fundamentally changes the relationship we have with our children. Now, we can’t just let them play, outside, unsupervised, with lots of time, few toys, and other children, even if we were allow to. Now, we have to manufacture our children, or else.
Gopnik agrees with Maggie Dent that play is central to early learning – it is foundational. She urges us to try to ignore the cultural push to make us carpenters and instead consider our role more along the lines of gardeners. We plant and water the seed. We protect it. We make sure it gets enough sun and other nutrients, but beyond that it’s the seed's job to do the growing, to become what is meant to be.
This is how most children throughout most of human history have grown up. It’s how evolution designed us to learn and thrive. It's what we re-discover when we step back and allow our children to engage the world through their own curiosity. We may not be able to, or even want to, recreate our own childhood's for today's children, but when we remember our own beautiful moments it reminds of what an authentic childhood feels like, and inspires us to set the children in our lives as free as we can, and then perhaps a little more, so that they will grow up to have their own beautiful moments upon which to reflect.
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Check out my full conversation with Maggie Dent on Teacher Tom's Podcast. In these first three episodes I talk with Maggie, as well as director of Defending the Early Years Dr. Den, and the founder of Free-Range Parenting Lenore Skenazy. You can find Teacher Tom's Podcast on the Mirasee FM Podcast Network or anywhere you find your podcasts. 
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