I'm just going to interject some bitching here, scuse me...
Those in it look like adults but "haven't become fully adult yet—traditionally defined as finishing school, landing a job with benefits, marrying and parenting—because they are not ready or perhaps not permitted to do so."
Uh...finishing school, getting a job, even marriage, I'll give you all that, but parenting? Making a little sprog is not a measure of becoming an adult. I know plenty of "adults" who are psychologically children who have, unfortunately, reproduced. Popping out a kid isn't some magical doorway into adulthood. Just like marriage doesn't prevent rape, STDs, or stupidity.
Real quick, dude. Parenting and having kids are two different things. You know that, right? Having kids is just that. Someone's sperm hits someone's egg. All goes well and nine months later boom, a child is born. Parenting is what comes after. It's what happens when your whole world, your whole perspective, every priority, everything changes. And it's all willingly. Parenting is the midnight, 2am, and 4am feeding and making it to work on time. Parenting is being willing to break whatever moment or mood with your partner so you can again tonight take a flashlight and rid under the beds and closets of monsters. So to recap, having a kid doesn't make you an adult. but responsibly caring for zim does.
Anyways, I was born in '80. I had a little tiny bit of the cool times, of roaming about with my friends. We had a big grassy field at the end of my street. And there were enough of us so that there was always a ball to play with. Every day in the summer there was a game of Calvin Ball. There was always a mom sitting out on the porch to make sure we drank enough Kool Ade and we didn't kill each other. I remember all the neighborhood dads got together and bought a bunch of lumber and scrap metal and built a playground one day. There were a good 25 dads who all went out one Saturday and just made a playground with swings, slides, monkey bars, ladders and platforms, a Tarzan swing. It was great. They built it after a few kids broke their arms on the playground built over the asphalt parking lot.
I remember that changing when I was probably 8 or 9. It slowly stopped happening. There was no younger pack. No little brothers or sisters would mob around like we did. And one by one, when my friends started getting to the age where we start finding girls (and boys for the handful of tomboys we'd hang with) and kind of outgrew all playing together in a field, nobody took our place. It was about then that the adults stopped hanging out on porches after work. Maybe because the kids had stopped playing together, maybe just times changing, maybe it was one of those things that just happen.
I try to do as much as I can with my kids. They play outside with each other and anyone else who might be out. When they skin their knees, I wash it off, slap a band aid on it, and send them right back out, hopefully a little wiser. Get dirty, you can take a shower and I can wash the clothes. I've even been known to let the older three girls "fight it out" and learn for themselves how to deal with each other. To my mind, that is part of being a good parent. I know they'll eventually have to deal with the world without Daddy standing right there. And it's important to me that I do everything I can to help them do that.
And let me tell you, it's hard raising them like that in the suburbs today. I don't see as much of the helicopter parents here, but the khaki crowd is just as bad. For those who don't know what I mean, the show Suburgatory or just about any sitcom where they show a PTA will get you the general idea. Those people do not believe in unstructured playtime and that makes it hard for me to get other kids for mine to play with in the manner I feel they should be.
