This is an actual headline I just read on Facebook. When I clicked on it, out of astonishment, it turns out the “child” was a toddler and the parents are now MIA. So, definitely news!! But I wish they worded the headline differently. Something like: “Toddler abandoned at playground by depraved sociopaths.”

“Child playing alone at playground” is not news.

What ever happened to the 70s? Letting yours kids play outside? A spirit of adventure?

Now that I’m in my forties and a parent, I am fond of starting sentences with “When I was a kid…” When I was a kid, we spent most of our time outside, unsupervised. When I was a kid, we played in the woods, alone, all the time. When I was a kid, I wasn’t so much the playground type, but I would spend hours on end at the library five blocks from my dad’s house, reading, alone. He never had any idea I was there, but probably assumed I was out being cool at a playground somewhere. Or playing in the river behind his house—the one full of broken glass?—which is another thing my brother and I and our cousins and the rest of the neighborhood children spent hours doing, unsupervised, all the time. There were a lot of tetanus shots.

Raising kids in the new millennium is a whole nother scene.

I regularly write tech content for clients about things likeGPS bracelets you can adhere to your kids so that you always know exactly where they are, every moment of every day. In fact, as I was writing this, I stumbled across a new product called MyKid Pod, made right here in Utah (where people have so many kids that yeah, they kind of need a way to keep track of them). The company tagline:

The child tracker your mom wished she could’ve used on you. #freetheleashkids

Pretty sure my mom did not have any interest in tracking me when I was a kid.

Listen, I very much get the appeal. I am the first to panic if I don’t have my kids in sight at all times. In my defense, they are one. And they are nuts. I don’t scoff quite so snidely at child leashes anymore.

Still, I hope for them a vaguely 70s childhood. One in which, like my parents before me, I am oft quoted as saying: “There’s no such thing as being bored, only being boring,” thus shaming my kids into using their imaginations to find something to do.

I came across a great article on the web about how boredom is crucial for developing creativity. I so believe this. Quothe psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

Boredom is a chance to contemplate life, rather than rushing through it.

I can very much relate to this on a personal level as an adult, too. Boredom is the seed of creativity indeed. I hope for my children to spend lots of time being bored, outside.