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Created: October 31, 2003
Latest Update: October 31, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Kids, You gotta love 'em

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This week's e-mail brought a poignant topic of the week: Letting our kids go. That's not an easy one. We want so much for them to be OK. To be happy. Most parents suffer for every disappointment the little one receives. And that's certainly an answerable world. One where we seek responses, we try to know how the little one feels.

This week Susan was coping with school bus schedules. That's agency kinds of stuff. Things go wrong. And off we go driving the little ones somewhere when it's going to throw our schedule off with immeasureable consequences. So I wrote her a flip little note: "Pray for 16." 16 is the magic age at which our children can drive, and they gain much greater freedom in our local urban and rural areas. Except in very few metropolitan areas, we are a car-dependent people.

I hadn't really given it much thought, except to commiserate with what the bus foul up must have done to her already impossible schedule. So I was surprised when she ansered: "well, that's a mixed blessing."

That's the dialog that led into this week's topic. We're all feeling it in every single interrealtionship that deals with dependency for mobility. That means not just our kids, but our parents, too.

Discussion Questions

1. Our Interrelationships around cars. I just jotted down a few questions floating around in my apperceptive mass from the days when I had both a non-driving daughter and a non-driving mother-in-law. Heard anything like this before? Can you add to my list? It seems trivial, but you know what, it's not. Remember the cautions I've printed about sleep deprivation. This is one of the ways sleep deprivation comes about.

   • Will you take me where I need to go? How else can I get there? You're my mother. That's your job.
   • Do you have any idea of what this will do to my schedule?
   • Do you have to go to all these events? Do I?
   • When do I get five free minutes to breathe?
   • What do you mean we're out of bread (or milk)? Can't it wait till tomorrow? No, you can't walk to the store. It's dangerous.
   • Just because I love you doesn't mean I have to drive you to every place you can think of when you think of it. Read a book. I don't have a book. I wanted to go to the library.
   • No, you don't need to come with me, I just need to get some bread. You want to pick up a few things? There goes that hour I was going to just put my feet up and read tonight for the midterm.

2. Why do you reckon this is such an important cause of tension?

   Consider that most of the dependency needs are real. People, including kids need to get places because there are not enough neighborhoods anymore to contain all their needs in one walkable space, with security. Consider also that those meeting the dependency needs are overwhelmed by external work or school as well as home and family responsibilities. All this makes deniability harder. Even when you say, "Go read a book," and mean it, you still know that the structural context sucks. that tension is suppressed, but it does stay with us.

3. Where did all the safety nets go?

   Problem is: we need places within convenient distance for people to pick up staples, to see other people, to get out of the house, yet not go beyond an area that is secure for them.

   How could we solve that problem: By providing some basic needs within a limited area for each neighborhood and by providing protection and minor supervision within that locale.

   Who's job it it: In a society that makes homes for families available to workers in only distant areas (suburbs)or local relatively less safe neighborhoods, it would seem to be a cost of doing business to provide workers with safe conditions for their families while they work. No, not a government safety net: a business or corporate safety net. A safety net provided by whoever is raking in the profit from those workers efforts at production and service. Gee, that raises lots of important social issues, doesn't it? Would you consider that allowing business to deny that safety net we are providing welfare for business to aid it in gaining its profit?