yup

http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/

This article is quite good at

This article is quite good at explaining the problem. Now it is up to us to find a solution. So what do we do now?
Perhaps make sure the kids have lots of chores to do. Perhaps give them goals but let them figure out for themselves how to accomplish them (such as "get that bag of rabbit pellets from the back of the car to the garage"). Perhaps go camping a lot, or fishing, or hiking... Maybe don't watch every one of their ballet classes or soccer games. Maybe let them decorate and arrange their own rooms. Give them fewer gifts and indulgences. Make them work for anything they want. Help them set goals and save money. Let them know (respectfully) when something they've done isn't quite good enough, and praise exceptional effort. Expose them to causes where they can contribute or even organize, and to careers that will challenge. Inspire them and then get out of their way.
Well, it is all easy to SAY, but DOING all this is the challenge, isn't it?

Farm Girl

I've always been fascinated with city life. my parents tell me that whenever we drove into the city from the farm, I would pester them to get me to "the Toronto buildings" faster. I've now lived in one city or another for over 20 years, since I was 16, and can't imagine living anywhere but downtown. still, whenever I contemplate what I would do if I found myself pregnant, my first impulse is to get back out into farm country, because I don't see how a child could possibly learn to be proficient anywhere else.

sure, you can learn in summer camp how to paddle a canoe, light a fire, observe nature, challenge yourself physically, but it's not the same as perfecting skills year after year because they are your livelihood. I haven't chopped wood, harvested a crop, mucked out a stall or driven a tractor in decades, and didn't think much of those chores while I was doing them, but without those experiences, I would feel like I'm floating through my current concrete and steel life. I wouldn't feel like part of the world, but rather a consumer of it.

kids need to root their feet in the earth. it's really sad that so few will get the chance, be they urban poor or privileged suburbanites. not sure what the solution is...

Where the Wild Things Aren't

Maybe we should start with freeing the spoiled parents...

I live in a wilderness area where my memories are of families who could actually 'do' things. Many of them built their own homes and did a lot of the finishing work themselves. Their children could build a good fire, and learned how to chop wood to make a good fire. They could handle a boat safely. They could build a raft. Both parent and child knew how to plant a decent garden, make meals themselves, and clean up afterwards. They learned how to improvise - in both practical and artistic ways.

Now that Big Spoiled Money has sadly discovered the appeal of wilderness - they come in droves in big SUV's. Money buys everything for these neo-colonialists...everything but independence and freedom...and the simple pleasures derived from that. Their code: Never touch a hammer, nail or shovel if you can pay someone else to do it for you.

They have their dream citified homes built replete with two-car garages. They hire landscapers to landscape their property and gardeners to garden for them. Driveways are paved. Anything that reminds them remotely of the messy earth is pebbled over and cemented into regimented tidiness. They put in the obligatory lawn even though they already live in a forest. Inevitably they get bored.... with winter....with the usual rainy June, with a lack of things 'to do'...and they become bored, too with the social cliques they feed on in lieu of naturally developed friendships.

It's the British in Calcutta all over again.

The domestication of kids is the result of tamed, domesticated parents, who think they can buy life in gift-sized, risk-free, packages.

The only problem I have with the lauding of "the wilderness experience" is that that, too has become packaged and priced for consumption.

"Contemporary American kids

"Contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world" says Kolbert.

It's not just American kids. I had a (not American) student ask me how he would go about finding a part time job- keep in mind he is 18- and I gave him some ideas but a couple weeks later he said he wasn't going to bother since he and his family were returning to their home country for a couple months. Then he mentioned a parking ticket he got, showed it to me (wasn't sure how/where to pay it) and I noted the make of the car was a Mercedes Benz. I asked if his mum was angry he got a ticket while borrowing her car.
He looked at me and said "It's my car." bahahahaha- oh right, silly me. Because in the world I grew up in an 18 yr old gets a brand spanking new upscale car as soon as he gets his license.
It became suddenly clear why he really had no use for a part time job. He already owns a car I'll never see in my lifetime. Indulged indeed.
UNreal!

@miguel "But being poor was

@miguel
"But being poor was what saved me. I had to be able to care for myself at an early age."

That's a good short story that rings true. Thanks for that.

There's a fine book called Mediated: How the Media Shapes Our World and the Way We Live in It, by Thomas de Zengotita.
In a passage in the book, he talks about the difference between the natural world and the one most of us inhabit. He challenges the reader to imagine being stuck in the wilderness with no phone access and having to sit and wait for help. He suggests that it can be a trying experience because unlike the hyper-mediated environment we're immersed in on a daily basis, nature does not exist *for us*. Taken a bit further, he makes a pretty convincing argument that all our toys vindicate and encourage a narcissistic attitude because we know, for example, that all media is meant for *someone* - and it might as well be us. Contrast this to a large boulder sitting in the middle of a large alpine stream - well that's not there for you. It exists regardless of whether we're there or not. It doesn't "care" about you. Neither does that stand of birch trees or that mountain range. It's the sheer indifference of nature to our existence that makes it so different from how the majority of us live. That difference is often rendered as either terrifying because of our ignorance of it, or as a quaint, convenient accoutrement to our civilized existence, since it's chock full of nice photos for our laptops.
Media on the other hand, has a purpose that's immediately recognizable as an effort by one party to communicate to another. Zengotita makes the point that surrounding ourselves in an environment like the one we do can't do anything less then make us more self-absorbed and self-centred, because everything is meant for us.
We live and have acquiesced to a relentless world of marketing that never sleeps. What's ironic to me is that so many of the people I know who have media jobs - whether positioned on the left or right politically - don't see their production of media as problematic. "We're trying to educate people" can be used at either end of the political spectrum. And before someone pulls me up short for commenting on an article that discusses media - I *get* the paradox, okay?

Everything in modern society has been configured to an on-demand life that wants to talk to *you* and in that light, I don't see how we could expect young minds to forego much. After all, who wants to be the office "nut" who doesn't give a s**t about TomKat, can't be bothered to blather on endlessly about Game of Thrones or hasn't heard the latest trade rumours on Luongo? It's all for you to know.

I missed this...

"That big missing piece is summed up beautifully by author and scientist E.O. Wilson, the granddaddy of biophilia, who states in an interview with NOVA: "Soccer moms are the enemy of natural history and the full development of a child."

This is why I read you Ms. Woodend. When you can pull in an E.O. Wilson quote in a review of Brave, you is just the fricking cat's meow.

Don't overfocus on rural, farm life

It's not realistic that one should expect children should know well skills of farm life. After all, a good part of population lives in cities worldwide.

A better more inclusive angle on this is simply teaching certain skills of do-it-yourself activities that lead to something fixed/cleaned or a new object: a sewn garmet (or duvet cover), jewellery-making, small container garden, cooking from scratch (several times a wk.), grocery shopping for parents (how many older teens do this for their parents???! and how often?), raking leaves (not leaf-blowing), etc.

I would agree that sometimes childhood poverty does instill necessity of do-it-yourself activities --as long as the parents don't make it a huge deal / lesson. It simply needs to be done..without much fanfare..because daily living includes alot of chores and activities that no one else aknowledges but does result in a healthy living home environment/neighbourhood.

Also the experience if one is an immigrant or has immigrant parents, most definitely is a major life teacher for children on how to cope for life the hard way in a new country. This alone can be a great leveller for any "spoiled" child --as long as the parents approach things to be learned with child in a lighthanded way.

Part of giving a child "rootedness", is developing in them, a slow understanding of their family roots and celebrating the positive parts. Child begins to understand the universe does not revolve aroundt them, that instead they are a tiny grain of sand in a much bigger tree/universe.

And by the way, movies that

And by the way, movies that banish parents: Honest, fairytales and popular children's books in the lst half of the 20th century, don't feature parents much either while the kids are having a great adventure in another world.