Childhood is a thing of the past.  Parents may be helicoptering, but they aren’t allowing their offspring to take anywhere near as long to grow up as we got back in the seventies.  Being a mom in this environment is tough.  When does letting a very young child be a very young child turn into being an over-protective or hovering parent?

My son is five years old.  He is not “street smart”.  His verbal repertoire doesn’t include curse words or cool slang.  When asked his opinion of X Men, Spider Man 3, Transformers or the Dark Knight, he doesn’t have one, because we don’t allow him to watch PG or R rated movies yet.  He doesn’t yet play organized sports; his dad and I think there’s going to be plenty of time for him to be “organized” in his life.  Why start now?  We’re not ready for an endless round of practice and games, and honestly, we don’t think he is either.  What all this means is that, compared to most of his peers, our son is a really “immature” five-year-old. 

Kindergarten has started, and sure enough, he’s getting picked on.  Going into his school each morning involves getting out of our car while I park idling in a circular drive, crossing a parking lot, going up a flight of stairs by the congregating junior high kids and making his way on his own to the cafeteria where he gets breakfast.  Prior to the start of school, he’d never walked across a parking lot without an adult, had no contact with junior high age people and really never went anywhere on his own.  Needless to say, he didn’t take too kindly to being thrown out of the car into the parking lot.  He wanted Mom to walk with him up the stairs; I did it for a couple of weeks.  So sue me.  Sure it probably made the teasing worse, but at least he didn’t feel abandoned by me as well as terrified.

When I was in kindergarten, eons ago, I remember my Mom taking me all the way into the classroom every day, all year; all the other moms did the same.  Sure, we lived with the constant danger of no car seats, lead in our toys and lack of anti-bacterial products of any kind, but we also got a lot longer to be little kids.  My friends were into Winnie the Pooh and Captain Kangaroo in Kindergarten.  (An affinity for Winnie the Pooh would get you picked on mercilessly today.)  None of us had gone to preschool; none of us had seen a “grown-up” movie.  A couple of us knew some naughty words, but we didn’t know what they meant.  Coloring, digging in the dirt, playing on the monkey bars and using play doh were still fun for us.  We hadn’t yet learned what “bored” meant.  We didn’t yet realize that people played games on teams, and that there was such a thing as winning and losing.

I don’t get the huge hurry for kids to grow up these days.  Most of the kids in three year old preschool seems savvier and more world-weary to me than I remember being in first or second grade.  It’s not a question of academics; I’m not suggesting reading, math or science be dumbed back down to match where we were in the almost-everyone-stayed-home-until-Kindergarten days.  It’s a simple question of allowing kids to be little kids when they’re not yet even six.

We had a foster son over the summer who is 14 months younger than our natural son.  He came to us miles more cynical, knowledgeable and sophisticated than our son.  He’d seen all the above-named movies plus Chuckie, Final Destination and the Incredible Hulk.  He’d been getting his own food out of the fridge and his own cereal out of the pantry since about age two, I’d guess.  When we first got him, he thought it was super weird that we wanted him hold our hands in the busy Target parking lot.  By the time he left us last month, he was reaching for my hand on his own as soon as he got out of the car.  His little hand felt nice in mine – and I could tell he loved the contact too.  Why shouldn’t he get to have that for a few more years?  What’s the big rush?