Getting Lost

 

Sunday afternoons often meant meandering.

My family would eat lunch after church - perhaps at home or down at Grandma’s, sometimes at Long John Silvers in Vandalia and in later years, Pizza Hut - and then if the weather was nice I would try to get lost. I would hop on dad’s Big Red ATV three-wheeler and go. I would zip down to the gravel pit, snake across dry creek beds, wrestle through overgrown trails in the woods. I would need to keep an eye on the sky, of course -  where the sun was, where the clouds were - and I would need to be home in time for supper and then youth group.

I was fourteen, perhaps, and the freedom they gifted me with back then boggles my mind today.

Because nowadays, I require my own adolescent children to get permission to ride their bikes even a mile down to the TREC trail, and they need to ride together, never by themselves, lest they get abducted by one of the dozens of crime syndicates roaming through my imagination. According to Johnathon Haidt, however, the author of “The Anxious Generation,” these good intentions may have unintended consequences.

 In summary, Haidt suggests that the current mental health crisis plaguing many of our young people is influenced by a set of closely related and relatively new phenomena: way too much screen time at a way too young age, and the lack of unstructured outdoor activities that this screen time has replaced. For some kids, childhood itself - which used to be punctuated with playing outdoors with other children - is being rewired in an effort to keep them safe. The sad irony is that in an effort to shield our kids from supposed dangers (the vast majority of America is as safe now as it’s ever been) we’ve exacerbated the very real dangers of anxiety and depression. As his book suggests, many parents overprotect their kids in the real world while under-protecting them in the virtual one.

Decades before this virtual world existed, however, and even before my parents allowed me to ride the ATV by myself,  I played in the woods with my brother, cousins, and friends. We would build forts and climb trees, practice karate and throw rocks. Sometimes I would explore just by myself, and although the chances of getting mauled by an animal or starving to death was almost zero, occasionally I would get so far away from familiar territory that I felt lost, if only momentarily.

Strangely enough, these brief episodes of panic turned victorious once I found my way back home. Solving such an existential problem was thrilling, and although it clearly didn’t segue into a career as a trail guide, it did add to the self reliance I would need to someday function as a reasonably coherent adult. One of Haidt's main points is that many of our young people no longer get those opportunities to “get lost” and find their way back home, whether figuratively or in real life. He suggests that our kids’ mental health is directly influenced by how self-reliant they are (or at least how self-reliant they see themselves as.)

Not all kids have woods to walk in, though, and Honda hasn’t made a Big Red three-wheeler since 1987. The world really is different - at least for most of us - and who's to blame is not important.

What is important is that we stop blaming the kids.

Because kids aren’t different. Kids are kids. If they don’t have the gadget they’ll play with toys; if they don’t have toys they’ll go make them out of toilet paper. Many parents - and I often include myself in this statement - have decided that boredom itself is a disease to avoid, and thus we’ve gone to incredibly great and perhaps disastrous lengths to keep our kids “occupied.” The gadget becomes the pacifier, and we call their silence parenting.

A few years after becoming a parent myself, I asked my dad how he was OK with me heading out in the woods, often alone - walking, exploring, getting lost. His answer was typically straightforward:

“I figured if you got lost you’d find your way back; you’d have to eventually.”

He was right. I did.

Learning self-reliance doesn’t require walking into the woods and coming back three hours later, though. For little kids, it might be as simple as walking to the mailbox to deliver a letter. For older children, it might mean walking into the grocery store with the debit card and a list, making supper, cleaning up, and then enjoying the satisfaction that comes from feeding your family.

Less appealing, though, it also might mean allowing our kids to struggle in school, to sit on the bench, and to get their hearts broken without swooping in to save the day. It’s hard to stomach, but they’ll have to figure it out eventually.

Sometimes, it’s just our job to be there when they get home.