Parenting, Old School Style

I've engaged in some reckless parenting. Recently, I introduced my son to Guy Smiley, "The Ladybug Picnic", and Mr. Hooper. What do they all have in common?  They're from the early (and might I add, awesome) days of Sesame Street.

How is this reckless, you ask?

A few weeks ago, after reading the book, Free-Range Kids (more on that in a moment), I was inspired to rent (how I love Netflix!) Sesame Street: Old School for my son.  Just as the author, Lenore Skenazy, mentioned in her book, before the first episode (as in, the very first episode in 1969), there's a warning from an animated character: "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for adults and may not meet the needs of today's preschooler." 

Really. It says that. Early Sesame Street is for adults only.

I couldn't help thinking how my mom's needs (granted, she wasn't technically a preschooler when Sesame Street debuted, but she did watch it as a kid) and my needs as a child (since many of the same clips from the old episodes were aired when I was a kid during the 1980s) were that much different than my four-year-old's. Was I a dumber preschooler than Max? Are his intellectual and developmental needs greater than mine were?  Has the alphabet changed in the last thirty years?

Why the disclaimer, then? I think Skenazy put it best in her book:

"Because our view of what children can do and figure out and survive is at its utter nadir. We can't imagine them not hurting themselves in a vacant laot, much less finding their way around the neighborhood without a trusted adult...We don't want them to climb to the top of a jungle gym because we don't trust them to get back down without breaking something. Crawl through a pipe? That's for Indiana Jones. Our belief in our kids is so below-sea-level that when the New York Times asked Sesame Street executive producer Carol Lynn Parente (you cannot make these names up), Why doesn't the DVD include that classic skit where Cookie Monster plays pipe-smoking Alistair Cookie -- and ends up gobbling his pipe? Ms. Parente replied that this was because the skit 'modeled the wrong behavior.'

"Like three-year-olds are really going to start smoking pipes? Or eating them? They're not! Pipes taste bad and are too big to cram into your mouth, and there's only about seven of them left in America anyway. To think of kids as that endangered is to forget a great truth: Children are built to survive."

She nailed it. Our society has little to no confidence that kids can think for themselves or that parents can teach them anything. We have to depend on "experts" to do anything right.

Now, I'll admit something right away:  when I found out I was expecting Max almost five years ago, I bought into the idea that I had to do everything a certain way. I read book after book after book after book from parenting experts. I learned a lot. A little bit of what I read helped, but the majority mostly just stressed me out. There were developmental milestones to be met, rare diseases to be aware of, menus to follow, and exacting solutions to sleep problems.  I read Parents magazine religiously, freaking myself out on a monthly basis with articles about the lead-laden toys from China, how to properly baby-proof my family room, and the newest symptoms to look out for.  I figured being prepared was the only way to parent and I thought I had all the answers.

Nope. Not even close.

It took a while for me to relinquish the parenting books -- I've since gotten rid of most of them -- and just trust my gut. Eventually, I figured out my own way to get Max to sleep in his bed. Potty training? I ended up creating my own method, mostly a hodge-podge of the advice I'd gotten from other moms. I'll be honest: I'm still learning how to do this, trusting my own mothering without double-checking with a book.

I know I'm an overprotective mother, but I'm learning that my son isn't as fragile as I think he is. I don't want to be a "helicopter parent", hovering over his every move. I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that boys are accident-prone. In my family of three brothers, there were broken bones from snowboarding injuries, a busted palate from a run-in on a skateboard, stitches for a half-removed ear from four-wheeling, and even a BB shot into the top of one of my brothers' head. I'm happy to report that all three of my brothers are still alive, though I'm not exactly sure how my mom stayed sane. I know I have to let go -- for my own good and the good of my son (soon to be, sons). The way I've come to terms with it is that I do this letting go gradually. I won't be sending Max off to climb trees alone anytime soon. And he'll always wear a helmet when he rides his bike.

What I loved about Free-Range Kids (seriously, if you have kids, read it) is that it was like a parenting sigh of relief (very similar to when I discovered my favorite, but now defunct, magazine, Wondertime). I could go on and on about the things Skenazy brings up in the book. Like how crime rates, against children in particular, have steadily decreased in the last 15-20 years -- I always thought things were safer when I was a kid, but the crime rate against children was actually higher back then. Or that Ernie Allen, the head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, wants to "debunk the myth of stranger danger" and that telling kids to not talk to strangers is bad advice (Skenazy and Allen both advocate teaching kids not to go off with strangers, recognizing that sometimes kids may, at one time or another, need the help of adults they don't know).  I love her argument in favor of eating raw cookie dough (about 0.003% of raw eggs carry salmonella, 1 in 30,000 eggs).  I especially reveled in the chapter about trick-or-treating safety concerns, as you can imagine.  And that's just skimming the surface - Skenazy, a journalist, researched and interviewed in hopes of debunking all the baseless fears that have been practically programmed into our brains. It's refreshing, to say the least. {To get a taste of what the book is like, check out her blog, FreeRangeKids.}

Kevin and I gave Max Sesame Street: Old School, Volume 1 for Christmas because he absolutely loved  the ones we got off Netflix. He sings the songs, laughs his head off at certain parts of the show, and, honestly, seems to get more out of the old episodes than the new ones. The old episodes have Kermit (I always loved the news reporter Kermit), tons of Bert and Ernie skits, plus plenty of Oscar, Cookie Monster, Count, and Grover. For me, it's been a trip down memory lane, for sure (I flipped out a little when I saw this clip when I watched with Max. I clearly remember pining away for a dollhouse just like the one in the clip). Sesame Street was a staple when I was growing up. I love that Max gets to watch what I did when I was his age.

Sure, Prince Charming tells the squawking Rapunzel to "shut up" in one skit (this clip actually edits out the shut up - just as it is fading out, you can see him yelling at her). In another part, Ernie tells Bert that he "hates" Bert's favorite show. Certainly, you wouldn't hear something like that in the new episodes and it isn't particularly nice, but it isn't as damaging as people think. Plus, that's where I come in: if Max starts telling people to shut up, I'll be ready to teach him that it's not nice to say. Disaster averted.

So, yeah, Max watches the old episodes of Sesame Street. Unsupervised, too. Talk about reckless.