A Fortress Mentality

Melodee Martin Helms writes about the suburban fortress:

My three boys sprawl on the couch, fingering their Game Boys. I wish I could shoo them outside until dusk. I wish they could tromp to the marsh to search for polliwogs. I wish we didn't have to live in a fortress.

But we don't let our children play in the front yard, because a sex offender lives two doors down. Instead, like other families in this neighborhood, we've built private playgrounds in the back.

From my kitchen window, I see two wooden play structures, three trampolines, and four basketball hoops, including our own. The kids on our street don't play unsupervised on common ground. They have play dates now, arranged by protective parents.

The unsupervised outings of my 1970s childhood are over. When Mom told us, "Be back before dark," we'd check in sooner only if our stomachs insisted.

wonder if homes have grown bigger because our outer world is shrinking. According to the US Census Bureau, households today have fewer people, yet houses have expanded from an average of 1,645 square feet in 1975 to an average of 2,434 square feet in 2005. Families used to occupy smaller indoor spaces, but inhabit larger outdoor spaces. Today, I walk along desolate suburban streets.

That's because children don't play where passersby can see – or snatch – them. They're hidden away in backyards, climbing on pricey, customized play structures, jumping on trampolines, or swimming in pools. They shuffle from soccer to judo to piano lessons. But you don't find them out and about.

I wish I didn't have to barricade my family behind an invisible barbed-wire fence. I wish our kids could explore the world alone. But we just can't take the chance. All we need is a moat, and our fortress will be complete.

It's funny though how Helms talks about a suburban fortress. My wife and I have this battle regularly.

We have kids in our neighborhood who run around unsupervised and aside from the times they have damaged my yard or left their toys and bikes laying around, I generally don't have a problem with it. My wife finds it offensive that these kids parents aren't watching them. Now, admittedly, some of the kids are a little young to be outside without an adult watching, but for kids who are 8, 9 or 12 or so, I find nothing wrong with it.

But we have gotten a little nuts as a society when we can't let kids play outside. We have become too protective, too worried about the least little thing. As a child, I had a very large neighborhood to play in, spanning a circle roughtly a mile in radius. My friends and I reguarly met at the school playgrounds, soccer fields and each other's houses. Knowing that if we were hurt or needed to get to a protected place, any home in the neighborhood would take us in and call our parents. That is not to say we knew everyone, but everyone looked out for each other and each other's kids. All this in a age when we didn't have cell phones and PDAs.

Today, even when we have kids as young as 9 with cell phones to call Mom and Dad to pick them up from soccer or piano or ballet, we rarely let kids out of sight unless it is with an adult with either pay or know to take care of our kids. I don't know all my neighbors in the court we live in, which includes a good mix of people, including two cops and several families. Not only don't we let our kids play outside, we don't even know our neighbors and we certainly wouldn't tell our kids, "if you need help, you can go to any house around here and the adults will help." I am not even sure my wife would counsel my daughters to go the the cops' houses in an emergency, although I suspect she would I am not positive. Those days are gone, because we don't trust other people--our suspicions and fears have become to great to overcome.