The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized and finally absorbed by the neighbors.
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This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are luck, we send them out o play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine year old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine year old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.
The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations - Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked STAFF ONLY. When children roller skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.
- Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
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