To My Fellow Survivors of a 70’s Childhood

I used to get a little nostalgic for the summers of my childhood when this time of year rolled around. I remembered long hours of daydreaming, baking in the sun (slathered in baby oil, of course–sunblock was the opposite of what we wanted), or riding our bikes around the neighborhood in search of adventure. We spent our afternoons at the public pool, not in enrichment classes and day camps. My own children had a much more scheduled and supervised childhood all year round. Sometimes, I felt a little sad about that.

Then I read Maureen O’Leary’s We Weren’t That Resilient, and I remembered some other things. I remembered that, as she writes, “it got pretty Lord of the Flies out there in the neighborhoods and schoolyards before the streetlights came on and no adults were watching.”

I remembered a school friend knocking herself unconscious when someone dared her to dive into the shallow water of a local pond. Luckily, other kids were there to pull her out before she drowned.

I remembered my brother’s skull being split open by an aluminum baseball bat during a pickup game of softball. He got stitches across his eyebrow but suffered no permanent damage to his vision, fortunately.

I remembered the cousin of a neighbor, an older boy who was visiting from California. He pulled me around the side of a house while the other kids played in the front yard and stuck a hand down the front of his shorts. Lift up your shirt, he said. I won’t touch anything. My neighbor came around the side of the house in the nick of time, wondering where we’d gone.

See the pattern here? Luckily. Fortunately. In the nick of time. We benefited from fortuitous  circumstances, and then we called ourselves better prepared for the world.

I’ve always hated the narrative that begins “Kids today . . .” You know the one I’m talking about. It goes something like this: “Kids today are so entitled. They’re so supervised and sheltered, they have no idea how to survive. Everybody gets a trophy just for showing up.”

Looking back on just my own experiences, that narrative suggests kids today would be better off if they survived near-drowning, serious head injury, and lewd conduct.

Well, I don’t buy it.  I’m done being nostalgic about my 70’s childhood.

It’s true, I spent unsupervised hours roaming the neighborhood on my bike. It’s also true, as O’Leary points out, that I spent hours ingesting sexist messages via television. The fact that no one called Gilligan’s Island sexist doesn’t mean it wasn’t; it still taught me that being a Ginger was better than being a Mary Ann. I was in my 20’s before I started to unlearn that lesson–though I was also shamed for trying to be a Ginger. Damned if you do, dateless on prom night if you don’t.

And it’s true that our parents weren’t hovering over our shoulders every minute, but lots of adults took this to mean they didn’t need to pay attention at all. That led to situations like the one I faced with Lena, a girl who terrorized me for weeks in junior high. She tracked me down at least once a day so she could trip me (in the hallway, on the stairs), pinch me, yank my hair, or just growl in my ear I’m coming after you, bitch. That behavior seems almost quaint now, given the fact that today’s bullies have access to social media and guns. But it became terrifying when it went on and on. (My crime? I’d given her a “dirty look” in choir. I couldn’t remember looking at her ever.)

Not a single teacher came to my aid. They saw things happening, but mostly they rolled their eyes. When they said anything at all, they told Lena to knock it off. The situation resolved itself only when Lena became the target of another girl, the most notorious bully at school, and grew preoccupied with her own safety.

 

Did I learn anything useful from this? Did it make me a stronger adult? No. It taught me how it feels to be terrorized, but I could have lived a long and happy life without that knowledge. And it taught me not to bother asking for help–another lesson I’ve had to unlearn, over and over again.

Lots of kids learned that lesson in the 70’s: kids with eating disorders, learning disabilities, mental illnesses, and traumatic experiences they struggled through without the aid of counseling. (Or didn’t. Let’s not forget, some kids didn’t survive their 70’s childhood.) Most of us didn’t even get the chance to ask for help before we were told Stop trying to get attention or Screw your head on straight or something equally helpful.

We were expected to take care of ourselves, whether or not we were equipped to do so. We were taught that, even as a kid, you’re on your own.

So yes, I was glad my kids got trophies for participation. It showed them that the grownups were paying attention. Somebody was watching. Somebody cared.

And believe it or not, they still knew who the fastest swimmer on the swim team was. Trophies don’t fool anyone into believing all kids are created equal. Did every boy who lettered in football during high school think he was the star of the team? We all knew the names of the stars, but even the benchwarmers lettered. Not much different from a participation trophy, when you think about it.

O’Leary notes that children raised in the world today do feel entitled–and they should. “They feel entitled to the sanctity and good health of their own bodies, entitled to a viable planet, entitled to be treated with respect, and entitled to gain something useful for the seven hours a day they sit in classrooms,” she writes. “They are entitled to all of that. And guess what? So were we.”

The fact that we didn’t get what we deserved shouldn’t make any of us feel superior. It certainly shouldn’t make us nostalgic. At most, it should make us feel lucky that we survived.

A slightly different version of this post appeared on The Huffington Post.

 

 

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