There’s an interesting piece by Michael Chabon in the current New York Review of Books on childhood as a vanishing wilderness now fenced off by parents’ fears about safety. We’ve seen a whole series of similar articles and books in recent years that paint a nostalgic picture of childhood in the days before stranger danger, amber alerts and photos on milk cartons. As I read these praise songs to the suburban childhoods of the last century, I can’t help wondering, Is that really how they remember it? Or, put more bluntly, What planet of happy children did they grow up on?
Chabon’s vision of childhood is equal parts wonder and terror:
People read stories of adventure–and write them–because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map–marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle–that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.
It’s hard not to draw your own childhood map as you read these sentences, and the threats that seemed to loom so large at the time ??? that “mean kid with air rifle” — now look as small as the houses in which we grew up. Chabon’s point is that children who are allowed the freedom to explore their world instinctively understand narratives of terror and triumph, while children who live in the shadow of parental anxiety risk losing an important part of their creative imagination:
Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted–not taught–to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?
It’s a valid question, but I can’t escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty. Wordsworth, who mined memories of his childhood in England’s Lake District as the “fair seed-time” of his poetic imagination, laid the groundwork for our modern image of childhood, but even he acknowledged that he was “much favoured in my birthplace.” What a stroke of luck to be born among the lakes, where every walk inspired poetry in his soul. But what’s missing in Wordsworth’s memory of childhood is any reference to class: while young William was out rambling the dales, only a few miles away boys as young as eight were being set to work in the factories of the new industrial age.
Fears of a dangerous world are a privilege of secure, healthy families. (My daughter loved reading books about plucky orphans; sometimes we had to call her three times for dinner.) And even in America, this land of fortunate sons, the maps of childhood have their unmarked dangers. I called mine home. Sadly, for many children, that’s where the real tygers lie in wait: the neighborhood bully is the least of their worries. So what does that do to your map? Is that “sailing off into the unknown” exploration or escape?
Maybe the real wilderness here is memory. Can we, as adults, really see the maps that guided our wandering? Do we have any access to childhood except as an act of imagination, a self-validating narrative we’ve whispered to ourselves over the years? Lately, American publishers have realized that there’s money to be made in trauma memoirs, so we have no shortage of accounts of miserable childhoods. We’ve learned to question those memories in the past few years, as it’s become clear that some memoirists won’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. But that may not always be an act of cynical opportunism as much as the self-justifying nature of memory: we repress, we revise, we move the points of pain and danger on the map to affirm the adult selves we’ve built upon the ruins. Is the same true, I can’t help wondering, of happy childhoods?
One reason that we imagine our children in danger when we send them out alone is because our own childhoods are also acts of imagination. In this respect, the way Americans think about childhood is a bit like the way we travel. We want adventure, but safely, safely. When you go to New Orleans, where I grew up, the tourist hotels hand you a map, unfold it on the counter, and draw a box around the French Quarter in bright red pen to show you where it’s safe to walk. Beyond, there be dragons. That’s how we draw the maps of childhood now, and if those red boxes of safety have gotten smaller, it’s also become clear that they were fictions all along, with little real resemblance to the landscape we inhabit. (In New Orleans, the muggers know where the tourists are, and they don’t pay much attention to lines on a map.)
Children read about childhood, and the maps those stories draw for them get laid over their own in complex ways. When I first arrived in Devon, I was surprised at how familiar the landscape looked, with its quaint villages and thatched roofs, because it was the landscape of so many Victorian children’s stories. And yet, those stories bore no clear relationship to the real map of my childhood. That was a map of survival. I’m not really arguing with Chabon here: he may be right that all children are instinctively adventurers, and he’s certainly right that limiting their exploration of the world in the name of safety threatens their creative imagination. But let’s be clear: the maps we draw for our children are not the maps that guide their lives. They draw their own maps, but it’s a mistake to confuse them with the nostalgic ??? or anguished — images produced by adult memory. Childhood is a foreign country to us. We once knew its landmarks, but they’ve grown wild in our imaginations, so that the “adventures” we remember are now just stories we tell. Adventure is what we call it when we show the slides. The natives just call it life.