With students out of school for the summer, I’ve been reminiscing about summer time in my own childhood. To be honest, it was a time of intense boredom.
Now before you panic and run screaming to set up a playdate for me, let me tell you that boredom can be a positive thing in a child’s life. A child’s instinct is to occupy herself and left alone, she, or he, will do that with creativity and verve.
As I have explained in previous columns, both my parents worked, so I was in charge of myself most of the day through most of my summers. I had no one to arrange a playdate or haul me to a movie or a game arcade. I had no electronic toys that I only had to watch to be entertained.
So when I got up got with a long, eventless day stretched out in front of me, I got busy on activities of my own design. Child psychologists would faint over my schedule, believing that I was not stimulating my brain, developing my talents or getting proper exercise. I beg to differ. Out of necessity, I could always come up with my own stimulating entertainment.
If my Weekly Reader had come in the mail, I had a bonanza of activities to complete right there at home— reading articles written for kids, completing a maze or making up rhyming words.
If I had already devoured the Weekly Reader, I turned to the sample encyclopedia that the door-to-door salesman had given my mom hoping she’d order the whole set of World Books. She didn’t, but the dog-earred sample was enough for me. It was the wonderful “D” volume, or an abridged version of it, that covered my favorite topics — Dolls, Dress, and Dogs.
I could spend hours of any day reading the history of dolls and examining the paintings and photographs of beautiful porcelain dolls from Germany and France in gorgeous lace-trimmed clothes and the bright rag dolls I had learned to love from the Raggedy Ann stories.
In the Dress section, I saw the iconic costumes of every nation and culture and absorbed those cultural facts. “Dress” also gave me great ideas for pulling out towels and my mother’s fabrics and old clothes and dressing up like a little Cossack girl or an Indian princess.
But the best section was Dogs. I read the whole segment over and over and picked out the dogs I would have. I learned all the categories of dog breeds, like Working Dogs, Sporting Dogs, Companion Dogs, Performing Dogs. By the way, I was developing the cognitive skill of categorizing without realizing it.
When I tired of reading, I played school by myself, giving assignments to my make-believe students and grading their “papers.” I didn’t know then either that I was practicing for my future career as an English teacher.
Some days I cut out paper dolls, dressed them, and made up lives for them, which I told them out loud. Or I colored pictures, learning which colors did and did not work together. Nobody told me I was honing my fine motor skills, learning to create plots and developing a sense of my own style. I was just entertaining myself.
At noon I created my own lunches, which, okay, I did not base on a balance of the food groups. My taste leaned toward the sandwich group— baloney with mayo, banana with mayo, or on a lean day, mayo with mayo. Thus, early in life I developed my preference for any food that started and ended with mayo and required no cooking.
In the afternoons I could scrap up enough other kids for games of Cowboys and Indians, Jungle Adventures or War. We played by our own rules and lost ourselves totally in our imaginations, getting exercise in the bargain. There were no organized kids’ sports, and if there had been, they would have been only for boys. Girls’ sports were unheard of then.
Summer was great when I was a kid. The only pressure was to wipe the mayo off the counters before my parents got home from work.
Now, social change, the child psychologists and panicky parents have eliminated almost everything that was good about a summer off from school.
Kids’ time must be carefully orchestrated so that they are “improving” their abilities. They are scheduled into baseball tournaments, camps and cheerleading clinics run by adults because they are all going to have “careers” as cheerleaders and athletes and they have to get better than everyone else. No playing Cowboys and Indians— it isn’t politically correct. Jungle Adventures have to be environmentally friendly. And War is outlawed as “too violent,” though kids see adults engaged in it all over the world on TV. If they set up a lemonade stand for fun, the Health Department will shut them down.
The planned summer has produced too many whining kids who think others must entertain them constantly, and most have no idea how to do that for themselves.
I’m just wondering if that’s a reason so many kids are on Ritalin and depression meds.
Maybe the mayo prevented all that in me.
