Home Alone

So, I am home alone today, sick, and in bed. I’ve got the popping-ears, sore-throat, persistent-cough, cranky-pants kind-of-sickness that is probably best endured alone.

So, I’m in bed and have gathered some distractions: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet; Kevin Sessums’s Mississippi Sissy; Cynthia Enloe’s The Curious Feminist; and, of course, my journal. I have also watched a few minutes of game motherfucking seven between the Celtics and the Cavaliers, though I have decided to DVR it because I am so grouchy and impatient that I cannot bear the commercials. While I was setting up the DVR, I noticed that I had not yet deleted Where Do the Children Play?, a documentary PBS showed a few weeks back. I’ve already watched it, and I thought it was really fascinating.

So, I’m watching it again.

And damn, it is fascinating.

It examines the decline of outdoor, unstructured play in the United States and compares the play-styles of urban, suburban, and rural kids. As the film opens, the camera follows two young kids--probably between 10 and 12-years-old--as they walk through a woods and comment on the flora and the fauna. As the girl shows the boy some flower or insect or something, the boy responds, "Oh, wow. Isn't that just beautiful?" And he says it all filled with wonder and delight. He then takes out his journal and draws, on the right side of the page, a picture of what he's seen; he next writes about the discovery on the left side of the page. While this is going on, a narrator shares some facts about children and their worlds; we learn that playspaces are on the decline in the United States and that the use of prescription meds in children is rising. The narrator also talks about how children are increasingly separated from nature, though the two kids we've been watching have obviously escaped that fate.

The narrator also provides a very quick, very brief history lesson about how the United States has morphed from a mostly rural nation to an almost entirely urban/suburban nation; I think I recall from my own history education that it was in 1920 that the urban population in the US first exceeded its rural population. Yes, yes, I know--history and history majors are devastatingly cool.

So, anyway, this documentary says a lot of stuff that we've all heard before about how electronic media saps kids' imaginations. The film doesn't play it quite that simplistically, though, and notes, for example, that kids who spend a lot of time using computers and playing video games tend to have better vocabularies and more knowledge about the world than do their less "tuned-in" counterparts. Still, the finer point about how kids no longer seem to have a "private relationship" with nature is certainly the heart of the film, and the filmmakers use a lot of interesting data and vignettes to illustrate this notion. The film focuses on several Michigan cities/communities, which is also pretty sweet. They include Beaver Island, Flint, Southwest Detroit, and Ann Arbor.

Penny Wilson, who is some sort of expert on play (an awesome gig!), makes forts with some Flint kids who have their little minds blown by the fact that they're actually being allowed some unstructured time in the classroom. Wilson talks about a lot of cool stuff, including the concept of "deep play," which is apparently the kind of play that helps children learn to take risks and contemplate their own mortality--like hanging upside down from monkey bars and trees and jumping off swings and stuff.

The piece about southwest Detroit was really cool--it focused on Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary School and its surrounding neighborhood. The narrator compares this school, where 85% of the students walk to school each day, with Ann Arbor public schools, where a $200,000 grant was still not enough to get little Ann Arborites to walk to school ... Some of the reasons? The parents didn't think the kids would like it; one mom actually said that she feared walking to school would be boring for her daughter (I am not fucking kidding). Sara Aeschbach, Director of Community Education and Recreation in Ann Arbor, is interviewed, and you can see that she is just in utter dismay and disbelief as she talks about how they were only able to get one kid at Mitchell Elementary to walk to school and four or five kids from Bach.

The filmmakers make the point that urban settings, when poverty is not a factor, are actually "better for kids" than are suburbs. And in the piece on southwest Detroit, we see kids playing in parks and on sidewalks and porches, walking to corner stores, and, yes, walking to school. There is some talk of how suburban kids are probably shuttled to more structured activities--sports teams, music lessons, and civic/community participation events--than are urban kids, and there is this truly fascinating segment on an experiment carried out at Carnegie Melon, where suburban and urban kids were asked to construct, from cardboard and such, a replica of their neighborhoods and environments.

The kids were all given the same materials and instructions, yet the differences in method and outcome were starkly different. For example, the suburban kids worked alone, while the urban kids negotiated with each other and worked together. And the suburban kids buildings didn't have doors, interiors, or occupants, while the urban kids added doors that opened, windows, interiors, occupants, flower pots ... And their models featured schools and hospitals and public transportation. The suburban kids' models had no public spaces, except for a mall, and no pedestrians.

Author Richard Louv blames journalism and news media for helping to condition people to live in a constant state of fear and anxiety, which probably contributes to parents not letting their kids play outside and also to their efforts to structure every moment of their kid's lives. There seems to exist in the United States this unquestioned belief in an increasingly violent, dangerous outside world populated by bloodthirsty stangers. Louv challenges this notion by noting that, at least according to FBI statistics, stranger danger is, for the most part, a fucking myth. He notes that kidnapping and sex offences against children are ten-times more likely to be carried out by a relative or an acquaintance than by a stranger and also points out that children are at the highest risk for physical violence while at home. So, not only are children actually safer outside their homes than in them, but crimes against children of all ages have plunged in the last fifteen years.

Geez, suddenly I feel like I'm ranting. Just in time, I look up to see 15-year-old Ted Eyster, at home in Chelsea, Michigan, sitting cross-legged under a tree, near a pond, serene, still. Ted has been home-schooled up until now and has just recently entered public school. He talks about being dumbfounded by his classmates' shock at his ability to recognize an oak tree, and he is just so sweetly bewildered by their ignorance. He then talks about the spot where he's sitting, and he says, "... it’s one of those trees that you just see and fall in love with…"

And so, the documentary ends with this rather sweet, kind of hokey image of our young Ted, knower and lover of trees, and I am now off to choose between kung pao tofu or sesame tofu, because my girl is bringing me home nummies.

Awesome.