Organized Playdate Society

When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s, we lived in a typical Long Island middle class neighborhood.  Starting around age 6 or 7, on a weekend or after school, we would leave the house yelling back to our parents, “going out, be back by dinner!”  We were gone for the day on our bikes, finding the other kids in the neighborhood and playing.  We had an open field through a patch of woods (which is now a housing development) that was our ball field, the woods were for building tree forts and playing hide-and-go-seek.  We went home when the streetlights came on. 

As a mom in the 21st Century, my two boys, ages 6 and 10, are in a constant state of surveillance.  They are never out of sight of a grown up and every activity is planned and monitored.  We have minimal busing in our school district and even though we are two blocks away from the school, each street has a crossing guard and we know most of the people between our house and the school, it took a while for us to allow them to walk to school.  My older boy has started to ask to ride his bike to his baseball games – the fields are right next to the school, two blocks away - and I do say yes sometimes, but I am never truly comfortable with this.  I also feel that if my children are seen unsupervised, I will be viewed as a bad parent. 

So, what happened?  When did we go from a society where children ran free, discovered things on their own and used their imaginations to a culture of hermits, only getting outside when the grown ups can watch them and having completely structured playdates?  Somewhere in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s there was some form of a societal shift in suburbia that caused this change. 

Until recently I could never really put my finger on it.  Initially, I worked with my theory that the information age was to blame.  In the 70’s and 80’s we had three main news channels that covered the entire tri-state area.  If a little boy in Babylon was hurt by a stranger or a child in Stony Brook was followed home by a van, it wasn’t news.  Newsday was a better source of this information, but these were the days before cell phones and iPod cameras, and a lot of these stories were based on hearsay.  Would a newspaper reporter back then believe an 8-year-old’s story about a stranger talking to her?  Probably not. 

Into the next decade, we now had the birth of the internet, the cell phone and the start of near instant access to news from around the world.  And that news was frightening.  Children were being kidnapped, abused, molested.  Statistically, crimes against children were not increasing; they were, and still are, on the decline.  But that’s not what parents heard and they didn’t want any of these things happening to their child. 

Recently, the case of Etan Patz was back in the news.  In 1979, the 6-year-old asked his mother to walk to his Brooklyn School alone for the first time.  She said yes, and he disappeared.  He became the first child to appear on a milk carton, maybe the first missing child to make national news.  Two years later, Adam Walsh disappeared from a mall in Florida.  Again, this made national news.  Stemming from these incidents were TV shows like America’s Most Wanted and suddenly everyone was a suspect, every neighbor, handyman and local panhandler was viewed as a potential child abductor.  After reading again about these two cases, I began to wonder if in fact these events were the turning point to the “organized playdate society” we now live in.  Historically it makes sense; it falls directly in that time line when the shift began. 

The data shows that the number of crimes against children has continued to drop over the last 20 years.  However, that needs to be balanced with the fact that prior to the 1980’s many of these crimes were not reported.  The facts are blurry and can be spun in different ways depending on how you want to see them – does it seem like there are more crimes against children because there are more or because they are being reported and broadcast more than before?

This can also be seen as the beginning of the childhood obesity epidemic in the US.  The rates have been rising since that period, since the start of this “organized playdate” culture.  We are afraid to allow our kids to just go out in the neighborhood and play, therefore sitting in the house until it is time for their playdate, or dance class, or soccer game.  As a parent, I am torn on which of these philosophies I support.  While I would love to have my children experience the kind of childhood I had, the freedom I had, I know how much trouble we got into (and how much more trouble we could have gotten into).  I do try to rationalize that the chances of something happening to my child riding his bike to the baseball field or walking to school are very, very low.  But, that nagging thought is always in the back of my mind – maybe the same thought that Leiby Kletzky’s mother had when she let her 7-year-old walk to his Brooklyn school for the first time in 2010 - what if something does happen?