Magine Watches Dad Steve Ride Her Hovercraft

“I want to build a hovercraft,” my neighbor Ginger’s eleven-year-old daughter Magine announced to her mother recently. “For the science fair.”

Ginger, an artist/Girl Scout mother/soccer mom/mega-school-volunteer, thought of the myriad other tasks on her over-filled plate and deployed the most common deflect used by mothers today. “Go ask your father.”

Not a week later, Ginger called, very excited, and invited my husband and I to ride Magine’s new hovercraft. We raced up the block. I’ve never been more impressed. Magine’s father Steve reported that all he did was cut the wood, Magine and her classmate did all the rest of the work: planning, measuring and building the plastic air cushion along with securing it to the base. The damn thing actually held the weight of my 280-pound husband. And the contraption was hella fun to ride.

Not only was I impressed that an eleven-year-old had made a working hovercraft, I was struck by the parental support that enabled her to build it. Since I moved to San Mateo, I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of Magine and her parents. And I am continually amazed by the differences between how they raise their children and the way I was raised.

I can see my Mother’s weary face now if I had announced at eleven that I wanted to build a hovercraft. First, a withering stare. But no words. If her icy reception didn’t diminish my eagerness, then she would have said something to the effect, “Are you insane?” If that didn’t work, she’d use the ultimate, “No, and don’t bring it up again.” While we were properly cared for—read to, bathed, clothed, fed, given braces and piano lessons—parents in those days lived separate lives from their children.

When I grew up in the sixties, there was the Kid World and the Adult World and they didn’t mix. Most parties hosted by adults in the sixties did not include their children. When Mom and Dad had their cocktail parties, we were not seen nor heard. We were banished to the den to eat our TV dinners, which were manufactured back then using aluminum trays that made the meal taste like metal. Nowadays, parties mainly include both children and parents. The parents drink around the barbecue and the kids jump in the rented bouncy house.

Most of my friends today spend lots of time with their kids, doing activities. During my childhood, the relationship between parents and children was much more formal. When Dad came home, he and Mom had cocktails and we were not allowed to bother them. Dinner was a serious affair. You sat in your chair, you didn’t put your elbows on the table and you couldn’t talk out of turn. You didn’t reach across the table for the salt, you politely asked for it to be passed to you. And you had to ask to be excused from the table.

After school and during summer vacation, Mom would say, “Go play outside and don’t come back until dinner.” I spent most of my time as a child in the company of other children with little to no adult supervision. Our parents didn’t know what we did and didn’t want to know as long as it didn’t involve the police. Or blood.

While I would have liked a bit more attention, the benign neglect I experienced as a kid enabled me to explore the world of my imagination. We didn’t have video games or computers or cell phones. TV was limited to five channels. Besides, parents in those days didn’t let you laze around the house. Your life was spent outdoors with other children, creating your own entertainment.

My favorite game from childhood? Crawling Hands and Tarantulas. The lawn was infested with the horrid creatures. If you walked down the front stairs and stupidly hung around on the bottom step, the severed, bloody crawling hands would grab you and drag you screaming onto the lawn where the tarantulas would try to eat you. The cement walkway next to the lawn was unfortunately made of quicksand. So if you managed to escape the crawling hands, you could die in the quicksand if your friend didn’t save you. Kool-aid served as “super sauce” that enabled us to recover our strength and fight the evil monsters.

I credit my days of free play for giving me the ability to write novels. I was able to immerse myself entirely in another reality for hours on end, a vital skill for a successful writer. Most helpful was the make-believe world I created for my troll dolls. My trolls endured many tragedies. They lived through floods (the backyard hose) and savage tiger attacks (courtesy of Cabbage, our cat). Dad Troll fell off the roof (read: was thrown in the air as far as I could) and had to be rushed to the hospital for an operation (this is when I learned if you chop off parts of a troll, they don’t grow back.) When people ask me today how I write my stories, I tell them I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I just don’t use the trolls anymore.

When I think about the differences between now and then, I see positives with each. Magine’s parents are amazing, supportive, interactive and inspiring. Magine will grow up to be an incredible person with no limits on what she can accomplish. Yet without any guidance from my parents—living an almost feral life as a child—I have managed to perform in over fifty plays, achieved two college degrees and have written over thirty novels.

Was it the hours of free play that helped shape who I am? Are novelists born of benign neglect? Or did I need to retreat to a world of make-believe to soothe myself because I was left alone so much?

I don’t have the answers. All I know is that I’m fine. But deep in my heart, I can’t help wishing that Magine’s parents had been mine.

©2011, Janet Periat

The new American zeitgeist is all about being a child. We want services, but we don’t want to pay for them. We want others to take care of us, but we don’t want to care for anybody. Accountability is out. Most people don’t want to work. People want to be famous for doing nothing, look young forever, wear the latest fashions, drive the latest cars, go on fabulous vacations, have trophy houses and amazing jobs where they get paid to do nothing. The biggest dream of all? Winning the lottery and spending the rest of their lives on a beach. Basically, everyone’s greatest desire is to be a spoiled brat.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to grow up. My parents had cool cocktail parties and everything was about being fifty because that was the power age. Now it’s old age. No one wants to be fifty. No one wants to be an adult. The ideal age in our current culture is twenty-four. If you are any of the other seventy-nine ages of your life, you are flawed. Taking on responsibility is selling out. Being a child for life is the goal.

I reject this paradigm. I want to be more of a grown up. I want to rise to challenges, ride the waves of life and take care of myself. I want to pay my bills, live within my means, fix my house and do all the adult things required of me without complaint. I want to feel grateful for what I have, not upset with what I don’t. And I want to accept my changing features gracefully.

Yet as I look for role models in society to help me on my quest for true adulthood, I find none. All I see around me is a mass of spoiled children crying because life is happening to them. Oh, poor me, I had a birthday. Oh, poor me, I had to go to work today. Oh, poor me, I’m underwater on my mortgage. Oh, poor me, I have a crappy job because when I had the opportunity to go to college, I turned it down. Oh, poor me, I quit high school and now I can’t even get a job. Oh, poor me, I want a new plasma TV, but I had to get tires instead. Oh, poor me, I have to take care of my children.

Certainly, things are changing rapidly. Certainly, living on this planet is difficult work. Certainly for baby boomers—even if you followed all the rules and did everything you were told to do—you’ve still lost your retirement and your job. Granted, it sucks. But so what? Living on this planet has always been difficult. It was much harder for our forefathers and mothers. They didn’t have washing machines. Or unemployment. Or Social Security or Medicare. But what they did have was a work ethic and an acute sense of survival. They concentrated on planting seeds today for fruition tomorrow. They spent within their means. They learned to reinvent themselves no matter what was thrown at them.

My great-grandmother, Josephine Periat, left her abusive husband in Switzerland and came to America through Ellis Island when she was 26. With my six-year-old grandfather in tow, Grandma took a ship around Cape Horn to San Francisco, got a job as a cook for a rich couple, saved money, bought a bakery, started an auto body shop, started a car dealership, grew most of her own food, embroidered a million chairs, cooked Thanksgiving dinner until she was 80 and never complained. Most people I know bitch about every single thing they’ve ever had to do.

What Grandma knew was this: life is about uncertainty. Life is about challenges. Life is about hard work. There are no guarantees and the only thing you can count on is change. Your only job is to feed, clothe and house yourself until you die. And you don’t expect others to do it for you.

But somehow we’ve lost touch with these basic principles of survival. 75% of young people today are unfit for military duty because they either didn’t graduate from high school or they’re obese or have criminal records. Only 25% of Americans have a college degree. What the HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING? What do they think their futures will hold? Unless they attend a trade school, they are SCREWED. Yet kids are dropping out by the hundreds of thousands. They don’t want to go to school and they don’t want to work, but they want to be rich and famous and drive fancy cars. HUH? How did these kids get so delusional?

Our collective dream says it all: being famous for doing nothing and living on a beach being waited on hand and foot. This dream is the perfect model of infancy. You sit in your high chair and Mommy coos over you and takes complete care of you. Babies for life. Ick.

What I want to know is how did we get this out of touch? Over the last forty years, adulthood has become equated with loss of freedom and therefore, loss of joy. When the exact opposite is true. Children are not free. They are dependent. The only people with power over themselves and their environments are self-sufficient adults. The only way for an adult to be happy is to be an adult.

Yet our youth-obsessed culture ignores this simple fact. “Adultolescence” now extends to most people under thirty. A third of all 30-year-old single men are still living with their parents. One third. My folks and ancestors owned homes and businesses and had most of their kids by that age. Not only did they care for themselves, they cared for others.

If our current trend continues, the future of America looks like this: a giant playpen full of crying babies with nuclear capabilities and no adult supervision.

©2011, Janet Periat