DADVENTURE: Please Service Soon -- Community and Kids

A wedding and an Easter egg hunt this weekend had me thinking about kids and community. 

Saying that we want our kids to have a healthy sense of community is easy because "community" is one of those elastic words that can mean almost anything.  What does community really mean to you as a parent? What community is most significant to our kids? What set of people provides the mix of support and obligation that gives shape to community?

A city or town? A neighborhood?  School?  Church?  All of the above? 

I sometimes worry that community is in decline in the lives of our children.  Why?  Screen time for kids in its myriad modern forms is on the increase.  The number of kids walking or riding bikes to school in on the decrease.  Houses are getting bigger, and yards are getting smaller.  I see whole families padded up and on a bicycle trek together, but where are the roving bands of kids anymore?

Do your kids play in the neighborhood more often or less often than you did?

Maybe it's because we're a little smarter and more safety conscious as a society that we keep our kids a little closer to ourselves.  A little better padded.  A little better insulated.  But, in the end, what lesson about community does a giant SUV teach our kids?

One of the greatest threats to community in the lives of our children is over-scheduling.  Leagues instead of pickup games.  Classes instead of clubhouses.  Lessons instead of lazy afternoons.  Scheduled activities are tough on community because they sort kids rather than throwing them into the kind of dynamic variation that you find in any neighborhood. Sports teams and extracurricular classes separate kids by age and gender, and may even re-sort them further by ability.  So our children spend more and more time with other kids that are just like them.

Another problem is that participating in community is a bit of a pain in the ass.  It takes effort.  It means volunteering some time as well as getting benefits.  It means piling the kids into the car or throwing a party even though it is clearly the crappiest weather of the year, and it would be much easier to just throw in a DVD and a microwave pizza.  Which brings me back to the wedding and the egg hunt.

The weather was atrocious here in Central Texas this weekend, as it was in much of the country.  Maybe the worst winter day of the year, in early April.  Not fair.  My wife and I stared out the window and contemplated declaring a washout.  It would have been easier. 

Instead, we drive through the rain and sleet to a dance hall in the Hill Country where the kids boogied to steel guitar and bowled in an alley where boys in feed hats hand reset the pins as we celebrated the wedding of a colleague.  The next day, we went ahead and had 30 kids and their parents out to scour our yard for plastic eggs.  They found a few.  Found a few laughs, too.  And we came so close to calling it all off for the sake of convenience.

It seems odd to think about needing to participate in a community for the benefit of our kids, but maybe it has come to that. It may be the greatest challenge we bequeath to our children -- having to make decisions as a part of a global community – to share goals with the whole world in order to thrive, or even survive.  How can they participate in the global community as adults if they don't start sharing the eggs as little kids?  

Clay Nichols, Health Correspondent:
Clay’s column, Dadventure, published twice monthly to Gather Essentials: Health, is a sure-fire guide to raising flawless, perfectly behaved, and always obedient children.  Yeah, right.
 
Clay is the co-author of Filmmaking for Teens: Pulling Off Your Shorts, an award-winning playwright, and the Chief Creative Officer at DadLabs.com, a fatherhood website.

You can find all of Clay’s Dadventure articles at http://gather.com/dadventure

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